The archive of a city is like its hippocampus, the key structure that consolidates its short, medium, and long-term memories. Without the work of storing, studying, interpreting, classifying, and decoding its documents, its historical and administrative archives, a city would wander amnesic in time. Without a framework capable of placing, at every moment and place, and in an organized way, those memories, those past events that define it as a unique living entity. It would be an empty, lobotomized city, that would ignore almost all of its whys, its whens, and its hows.
Since 1249, the Barcelona Municipal Archive has watched over, through the dedication of generations of archivists, and in the most disparate historical, social, and cultural contexts, to keep the city's identity alive through its documentary memory. Professionals who have succeeded one another in the task of treasuring and processing tons of documents, in a profession that, over the centuries, with special force in the last two decades, has evolved to change completely.
All this history is now collected in the volume Fem Arxiu, construïm ciutat (Barcelona City Council) which reviews the almost 800 years of the Archive's journey by the hand of Ramon Alberch i Fugueras, a true eminence on the subject. Trained in History, this native of Girona who quickly fell in love with "this profession in which the day you take office you have 500 years of backlogged work" has been –among many other positions– director of the Girona Municipal Archive between 1978 and 1989, of the Barcelona Municipal Archive between 1990 and 2004, and of the Catalan archive system, between 2004 and 2010.
A turbulent history
The Barcelona of 1249 was a dynamic city experiencing a moment of blossoming as an important urban center of the Crown of Aragon. While the old feudal lords declined, the city experienced a rise in officialdom that responded to the growth of legal, sociological, and bureaucratic structures. "Barcelona already had its territorial management structures like the Consell de Cent, but, little by little, Jaume I gave it more power until, in 1249, he laid the foundations of municipal government through a privilege, from which several figures of citizen management would derive," explains Alberch. "In fact, if you look at the lists of public officials in that Barcelona, you realize the importance it had as a Mediterranean port and as a pole of attraction. It had enormous economic power!" he adds.At first, the history of the Arxiu is intimately related to religious orders. "When it was created, the City Council realized that it did not have a physical space where it could store documents, so it deposited them in religious convents. The first was that of the Dominicans of Santa Caterina, although after just over a century, as a result of a dispute between municipal power and the Inquisition, the documents were transferred to the Franciscan convent."
Despite several changes of location, the worst moment in the history of the Arxiu came in 1714, with the Nueva Planta Decree of the Bourbons. "At that time, when the Enlightenment valued the importance of archives, the Bourbons wanted to punish Barcelona for having sided with the Hapsburgs, and one of the fronts they attacked was its municipal archive. It was another way to strip power from that very powerful city, which also fit perfectly into their centralist scheme. Thus, in 1718 they abolished the position of chief archivist and decided that the city's councilors – in reality, all belonging to the Catalan nobility – would periodically take turns maintaining the archive. And of course, the nobles could charge for this service, but for the most part, they didn't even show up," laments Alberch.
That abandonment, which would last until the next century, would have disastrous consequences for the conservation of the documentary heritage. "Today, of the books of the Consell de Cent, only 29 volumes from the period between 1301 and 1433 are preserved, when at least 130 should be preserved, since they were annual. And of the register of deliberations, which collects the minutes of the Consell meetings where the most important decisions and agreements were recorded, 223 volumes from the period from 1433 to 1714 are preserved, when there should be about 280."
Saving the remains of the shipwreck
The 18th century was the debacle for the Arxiu. "Antoni de Capmany crossed himself, when he explained the conditions in which the documents that helped him write his Historical memoirs on the navy, commerce and arts of the ancient city of Barcelona. That was abandoned by God until, in 1821, in the middle of the liberal triennium, political and administrative reforms took place, such as provincial organization. Thus, the archivist Joan Maymó received the commission, from the syndic Francesc Tomàs, of refloating the Archive and saving the proverbial remains of the shipwreck," recounts the author of Fem Arxiu, we build city.In this way, between 1821 and 1848, the Arxiu experienced a period of recovery and consolidation through various reforms and reorganizations, and underwent a significant boom between the late 19th century and 1910. "It is the time of the Reinaxença and, later, of Noucentisme, and in this context, the concept of the archive as a research center linked to romanticism and nationalism, to the recovery of Catalan glories, of the splendid past of our country, is consolidated. And already in 1917, in the midst of the effervescence of a bourgeoisie enriching itself greatly thanks to the country's neutrality during the First World War, the Historical Archive of Barcelona was founded."
Surviving the Civil War
Ramon Alberch's book narrates the vicissitudes of the Arxiu during the Civil War and explains how many of its documents were saved from the bombings. "The key figure is Agustí Duran i Sanpere, a moderate Catalanist, noucentista from the heart, that during the war he took the documents to isolated places, like Viladrau, to keep them safe. At the end of the conflict, he was subjected to a purge trial, but many people went to testify in his favor. People he had helped, chaplains, bourgeois... To this was added the recognition for having saved so many historical, administrative, but also religious documents. And in the end, he was readmitted to his position as archivist and directed the Municipal Institute of History of Barcelona until 1957, the year in which he became president of the Institut de les Lletres Catalanes. As was customary at the time, and until 1975, the year of his death, Duran lived in the same archive, in the Ardiaca house, together with his family." Alberch sighs. "That was more than his job, it was his life!" he adds.After surviving the harsh onslaught of the Civil War, the Arxiu faced a 20th century in which, between the 80s and the beginning of this century, it would experience exciting changes. "As of 1987, the management criteria of the different archives that existed and that, until then, functioned, although they were disconnected from each other, were unified. In fact, the directors of the municipal and historical archives did not even know each other."
In this time, the work of an archivist has changed a lot. "That of the individual who works in solitude and silence, without speaking to anyone, isolated, is now just a rhetorical figure," clarifies Alberch. For him, good professionals now "must be able to function in contact with many other professionals, from jurists to historians, and must, therefore, be people with a lot of empathy and capacity to work transversally with other profiles. At the same time, they must be persevering and patient people and be very methodical and organized. On the other hand, it is true that with AI there are some jobs within this professional field that are disappearing or are already extinct, and that represents an enormous paradigm shift for us, and at many levels."
Destination: Can Batlló
From the mid-80s until now, the Arxiu has been a functional unit, working with a unified criterion, although with headquarters spread across thirteen buildings: The Arxiu Històric de la Casa Ardiaca, which holds documents from the 13th century to the mid-19th century, the Arxiu Contemporani on Bisbe Caçador street, the Arxiu Fotogràfic on Comerç street, and the archives of each of the city's ten districts."But, even if its documentation is spread across different locations, the City Council has an impressive, very important heritage, on par with other great European cities. With the idea of being able to compare ourselves with them, with Paris, with Amsterdam, with Marseille or with Vienna, which have their metropolitan archives grouped in large facilities, the project was born to do the same in Barcelona to give strength, identity and visibility to all this heritage that we manage," explains Alberch.
Thus, the ambitious plan to group all the documentary collection that is now distributed in thirteen locations into a single building, Can Batlló, an old factory in the Sants neighborhood with 21,000 square meters that will house, in the future, the more than 30 kilometers that all the documents of the Archive would add up to if placed in a row, is underway.
In fact, the book Fem Arxiu, contruïm ciutat (We Make Archive, We Build City) is a derivative of this project. "It started as a report that the previous director of the Archive, Joaquim Borràs, commissioned me to convince the City Council of the importance of uniting the entire archive in a single facility." With the celebration, a few weeks ago, of the International Congress of Archives in Barcelona, the current director, Ana Pazos, had the idea of converting that report into a book that would explain and highlight its eight centuries of vicissitudes.
Its author smiles with satisfaction. "In the book I have concentrated only the most relevant aspects, but boxes and boxes of information have been left out." Data, stories, characters and anecdotes that, fortunately, have not been lost in the darkness, have not remained suspended in the limbo of oblivion, irrevocably erased from collective memory, but are there, within everyone's reach. Waiting to be rediscovered by the curious who have the pleasure of looking into the Municipal Archive of Barcelona.
To the memory of our city.