List of Spaniards evacuated from Barcelona by the Consulate of France

Barely forty-eight hours after the attempted coup in Barcelona, the European consulates in the city requested that their governments immediately dispatch warships there. The French, British and Italian navies sent vessels from their bases in the Mediterranean, as well as to the Cantabria Sea and to Valencia. The consuls of the three countries: Giorgi (Italy), King (U.K.), and Trémoulet (France) co-ordinated their efforts to evacuate the foreign residents, who were especially numerouscosmopolitan and industrialized in the Catalan capital. With the crucial assistance of the Catalan authorities, especially Josep Maria Espanya y Ventura Gassol, who were both members of the ERC party, the port of Barcelona filled with ships flying foreign flags which evacuated thousands of foreigners of various nationalities under the defiant gaze of CNT-FAI militiamen.

But it was not only foreigners who sought the help of the Generalitat and the consulates to escape. Thousands of Catalans persecuted in the revolutionary wave led by the anarchists desperately sought refuge in the ships leaving for Marseille and Genoa. The included conservative Catalan nationalists, members of the clergy, including Cardinal Francisco Vidal i Barraquer, aristocrats, and members of centre-left parties like Catalan Republican Action (ACR) and even members of the governing ERC who refused to accept the sharing of power with the extreme left.

The document shown here is only one of the many lists of Catalan refugees who succeeded in being evacuated by the French navy or by civilian ships sent for the same purpose. Should Spaniards be evacuated or not? It was an important question. The French and Italians answered yes, in contrast to the British who took a much more restrictive position. Since Spanish Passport holders should not have been able to leave, actually getting our of the country was not easy. It was also potentially dangerous. People used any number of ploys, including bribing the anarchist militiamen who were guarding the port. There were controversies about payments made to some consulates and about the crews of some merchant vessels trafficking jewellry.

Between foreigners and Catalans, many of them nuns and monks in danger of being murdered, some 28,000 people were evacuated by ship to France and Italy between 1936 and 1938. Thousands crossed the Pyrenees illegally. By collaborating in the evacuation efforts, the government of Catalonia privileged the humnitarian reponse of saving lives over the possibility of holding posible allies of the rebels, even though in the rebel zone, Franco’s government refused to act in a similar manner.