Barcelona bullanguera

Most Barcelonans intuit that our city is a cocktail that mixes tranquil existence and a combative spirit or (to avoid the two most overused concepts about Catalan identity and embrace somewhat corny vocabulary from poets), that all of us live the schizophrenia between the Gran Encisera and the Rosa de Foc. As for the second condition, the spirit of revelry and a certain tendency towards violent revolution with a transformative spirit, this is not a matter of pride. A certain Friedrich Engels already wrote (read The Bakuninists at Work from 1874, written on the occasion of the previous year's insurrections against Spain's scarce federalizing spirit) that Barcelona had the honor of hosting "more barricade fights than any other city in the world." Illiterate in history, I had always been interested in knowing how this warlike tendency of my former fellow citizens was cooked up. Now I am a little less ignorant thanks to a fantastic seminar that historian Jordi Roca Vernet has organized at the MUHBA: Liberal Barcelona of the Nineteenth Century: Between Revolutions and Transformations (1820-1874).

First and foremost, it must be recorded that our Barcelona History Museum ---without much fanfare or fuss--- has one of the most interesting exhibition and heritage activity programs in the entire country, for which we offer a big barretada to its highly competent director, Carles García Hermosilla. This is evident in initiatives like this one, which filled the Martí l'Humà room of the museum for two afternoons with many people eager to learn more about our city. Dr. Roca explained very well how, starting in 1820, Barcelona already excelled in the creation of Revolutionary Juntas arising directly from civil society with the aim of modernizing the entire state. From there, a great city is cemented that always lives the liberal fever with more eagerness than in Madrit, overflowing with athenaeums but also with armed groups, a Barcelona that inspires feminist guerrillas like Émilie du Guermeur or the founder of the Icarian fever, Étienne Cabet, who in 1843 already wrote a book about the obsession Spanish generals have with bombing our beautiful narrow streets.

I will not bore the reader with an immense rant about each of the conferences in question (you can see them all, in hindsight, on the museum's website), but I would like to specifically mention, due to professional deformation, the master class that musicologist Anna Costal gave on the popular sound practices of Barcelona residents starting in 1833. It was a real pleasure to hear Anna relate popular songs, militia bands (a very important space for political but also musical training, which gave us illustrious lives like that of clarinetist and director Josep Jurch, of whom I had no idea whatsoever) and, in turn, how the emergence of popular dances and the choral work of the great Josep Anselm Clavé gave us high-quality music with an egalitarian spirit. I would recommend our music programmers to watch the talk, as they might learn something about how to ignite Barcelona's concert life a bit and who knows if they would also have a bit more historical foundation to reinforce the adjective "public" of their respective establishments.

As colleague Edgar Strahele explained, our riotous memory involves revolutionizing the past (in the specific case of 19th-century Barcelona, this means soaking up the most French things... without excessively idolizing Robespierre's Stalinist violence), and precisely for this reason I would say that it is worth studying this period of Barcelona's liberal struggles much more, especially because it can inspire the citizenry again towards a certain awakening of the entire tribe. Perhaps all this are conclusions of a mental acrobat like myself, but studying this period of our city is good for better grounding the very concept of "bullanga" (riot) which, contrary to the cliché I referred to at the beginning, does not come from an unreflective spirit of Mediterranean outburst, but from the thoughtful awareness of a free society that is not afraid to earn rights by getting the squares a little dirty. Leaving the seminar in question, I thought it was funny that a guy like me has more historical notions of London or New York than of my own city and the real battles that underpin it.

I must go to the MUHBA more often (soon I will write something about the museum's new space in Fabra i Coats that chronicles the city's industrial work), because guiding myself by intuitions rather than historical substance makes me a little ashamed. Also because, within my singular paranoia, I believe that before we start setting fire to garbage containers for almost lost causes or falling into an overly patriotic-barretinaire re-reading of the past, perhaps we should better understand the behavior of the militiamen who had the audacity to precede us, some Barcelonans with a highly pragmatic sense of violence. My things, my things...