Born to blossom, bloom, then perish? The rise and fall of the Pomells de Joventut de Catalunya (1920–1923)

ABSTRACT

The activities, outputs, and histories of youth organisations across a range of contexts can give us a privileged understanding of later political movements that find their roots with those youth movements. Scholars have already paid a great deal of attention to youth movements as part of totalitarian regimes, revolutionary and rebellious factions, as well as weird and wonderful cults. However, our understanding of the realities and impact of youth groups tied to minoritised language movements in Iberia remains underdeveloped and fails to reflect on the agency of youth. In the case of Catalonia – the focus of this article – a number of youth groups emerged in the delicate, and politically fraught period between Spain’s disastrous defeat at hands of the United States in 1898 and the sudden rise of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923–1930). Nearing the end of this timeline, the Pomells de Joventut de Catalunya (1920–1923) were one such organisation that sprung up to serve both God and Catalonia, a combination which would garner interest from the Catalan elite but also single them out for annihilation at hands of Spanish nationalism. This article seeks to disclose the history of the Pomells, their wider networks and relations to the power structures of the day, how young people made the organisation their own through small actions, and, finally, the demise and afterlives of the organisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth movements
• Catalonia
• Catholicism
• Primo de Rivera
• Interwar Youth

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr Ríona Nic Congáil and Dr Hannah Sams for reading through an earlier draft of this article, as well as the journal’s anonymous peer reviewers for their time and helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Lliga Espiritual, as well as being a Catholic organisation, had a strong Catalanist association, with members from various sectors across Catalan society, including Enric Prat de la Riba i Sarrà (politician), Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (architect), Joan Alzina i Melis (psychiatrist), and Josep Llimona i Bruguera (sculptor).

2. Tapis de Guarro was a champion of the Catalan language and participated in the “First International Conference on the Catalan Language,” held in Barcelona in October, 1906. Camarasa i Serra was J. M. Folch i Torres’ wife, and by the time of the Pomells, the couple had lost two of their sons in infancy (one in 1915, the other in 1919 – both named after their father). They would later lose a daughter in 1928, and another son at the Battle of the Ebro in 1938.

3. Managed and edited by Folch i Torres, Àmfora: Butlletí dels Pomells de Joventut de Catalunya would be the Pomells’ main publication from 1920 to 1923.

4. The interest in targeting Francesc Fàbrega i Amat could well have been triggered by the decision of another clergy member, Joan M. Viñas, in that same year, to ban the creation of any branches of the Pomells within his Escola Pia schools in Catalonia.

5. The Jocs Florals, or “Floral Games,” were a series of medieval artistic competitions, celebrating poetry mainly, in the Occitan and Catalan literary traditions. They were revived in 1859, as part of the Renaixença, Catalonia’s cultural renaissance.

6. The Lliga Regionalista (1901–1936, “Regionalist League of Catalonia”) was a conservative Catalan political party that dominated Catalan politics from 1901 to 1923. The party managed to bring about the creation of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya (“Commonwealth of Catalonia”) in 1914.

7. As noted by Romero Salvadó (2008, 94), Barcelona became a troublesome tinderbox as it was an industrial powerhouse that mixed together a bourgeoisie and a working class that were “alienated from the distant centre of state power.”

8. However, despite these initial signs of acceptance, scholars (Adagio 2004; Quiroga 2022) have also emphasised that the dictator’s later relationship with the Church would turn stale, particularly following the introduction of the texto único, in 1927, which would be imposed on all primary and secondary schools. The Catholic response to this change was, as noted by Boyd (1997, 176), “mixed” given that the text stifled conflict between educators and granted students in religious schools a greater chance of success in exams.

9. Whilst the afterlives of the Pomells are very apparent within contemporary Catalonia, as I have alluded to earlier in this article, it is my suspicion that Latin America, particularly the cases of Argentina and Brazil, could well offer a postlude of sorts to the history of the Pomells, enabling remaining groups to continue on beyond the reach of a Spanish dictatorship, but this hypothesis requires further investigation and analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 802695).