Barcelona 19 July 1936

The Civil War in Catalonia began in the early morning of 19 July 1936 when some 5,000 troops of the Barcelona garrison under the command of Álvaro Fernández Burriel y Justo Legorburu Domínguez-Matamoros rebelled. They were joined, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and even some doubts, by the garrisons in Girona, Tarragona, Lleida, La Seu d’Urgell and Mataró. Whether successful, as the last two cities, or a failure, as in Tarragona, all the troops lay down their arms once the rebellion in Barcelona had been defeated.  There, the rebels headed for the city centre and managed to take control of Catalonia Square, but the reaction of the authorities and the populace, who had knowledge of the plans for the revolt, was immediate and largely coordinated.

The Generalitat mobilized the 2,000-man Security and Assault Guard police forc3, who were the first to confront the rebels, as well as the region’s own police, the Mossos d’Esquadra. Later, they were joined by the Barcelona detachment of the Civil Guard, some 1,500 men. For their part, armed citizens, mostly belonging to the main political and union organizations: the powerful CNT, socialists, orthodox and heterodox communists, and liberal republican nationalists – some of whom were separatists -   began to occupy streets in the working-class districts of the city. At first, they had few weapons but they played an important role in supporting the police.

The Assault Guard played a deciding role in the fighting on 19 July, as this little-known photograph by Pau Lluís Torrents illustrates. The fighting, which involved many neighborhoods, was fierce. As time passed, the participation of civilians grew exponentially. And following the assault on the Sant Andreu barracks, where there were 30,00 guns, and the Bruc barracks, so did the number of weapons available to them. The fighting continued until 21 July, although the uprising was substantially weaker the previous day.

The rebellion’s main leaders, including General Manuel Goded, who had flown  from  Palma de Mallorca to Barcelona to take command in Catalonia, were arrested. The Generalitat found itself overwhelmed by the mobilization of the populace, but found a way to deal with this new reality: the creation of municipal Antifascist Militia Committees which acted as the embodiment of this mobilization at the local level. The Committees and the Generalitat co-operated on some matters, such as internal security, but when it came to managing the new, revolutionary reality produced by the failure of the military uprising, they went their own way on many others.