The strange misshapen houses of which Barcelona is so proud were close shuttered and dark last week. No lights twinkled in the sloping Plaza Catalonia. Under the plane trees the boulevards were silent except for the clop-clop of cavalry patrols making their rounds and the sudden roar of an armored car. <\/p>\n
The Syndicalists, bane of the young republic, were out on a general strike. No milk was delivered, no garbage collected. Electric light and gas lines were cut. No trolleys ran. Violence started when Civil Governor Anguero visited the jail to plead with 51 hunger-striking Syndicalists to eat. The prisoners, who in some way had obtained guns, replied by firing a few wild shots, collecting all the furniture in the jail and making a bonfire of it. Riot squads rushed in to quiet them. <\/p>\n
Disgusted, Governor Anguera refused to put police patrols on the street cars. <\/p>\n
\u00abWhile so-called respectable citizens merrily uphold Syndicalist assassins they can walk, so far as I am concerned,\u00bb said Governor Anguera. <\/p>\n
Stinking heaps of refuse piled up in the streets. Rioters in the suburbs uprooted tracks and dug deep trenches across the roads. For many hours Barcelona was completely out of touch with Madrid. A noisy, long-drawn battle was waged between police and Syndicalists in front of the latter’s headquarters. They gave up when mountain guns were unlimbered across the street. Sailors rushed a hundred of them on board warships in the harbor. A volley of shots rang out from doorways facing the tree-lined Rambla Flores, sloping down to the harbor. A Civil Guard whirled on his heel and fell, seriously wounded, among the flower pots and twittering bird cages of the market. <\/p>\n
In two days at least 20 people were shot dead, 40 wounded. Borrowing an idea from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, hundreds of frightened strikers’ wives paraded through the streets behind a banner \u00abChildren Before Politics\u00bb and declared a wives’ strike of their own, swearing that their husbands should have neither food nor affection until they went back to work. <\/p>\n
Other Syndicalist ladies were not so soft. While hundreds of frightened Barcelonians gathered for safety in the ancient Gothic cathedral, a gang of wild-eyed Amazons broke in, climbed high in the lantern over the West Front and began sniping at soldiers and police from the roof while Barcelona’s sacred geese squawked horribly in the cloister. <\/p>\n
All this time Catalonia’s \u00abPresident\u00bb Macia, who owes his election largely to Syndicalist votes, did nothing. But as the bloodshed continued even he became affected. <\/p>\n
\u00abI am not disposed to tolerate the situation another day,\u00bb said Col. Macia.<\/p>\n
[TIME dated 1931\/09\/14. Actual date uncertain]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The strange misshapen houses of which Barcelona is so proud were close shuttered and dark last week. No lights twinkled in the sloping Plaza Catalonia. Under the plane trees the boulevards were silent except for the clop-clop of cavalry patrols making their rounds and the sudden roar of an armored car. The Syndicalists, bane of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[671],"tags":[872,971,1103,1419,1903,2150,2362,2766,2940,3019,3735,3889,4152],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-time-magazine","tag-anarcosindicalismo","tag-aristofanes","tag-barcelona","tag-catedral-de-santa-eulalia-de-barcelona","tag-energia-electrica","tag-francesc-macia","tag-guardia-civil","tag-jose-oriol-anguera-de-sojo","tag-la-rambla","tag-lisistrata","tag-plaza-de-cataluna","tag-rambla-de-las-flores","tag-segunda-republica-espanola"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oreneta.com\/libro-verde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oreneta.com\/libro-verde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oreneta.com\/libro-verde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oreneta.com\/libro-verde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oreneta.com\/libro-verde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oreneta.com\/libro-verde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oreneta.com\/libro-verde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oreneta.com\/libro-verde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oreneta.com\/libro-verde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}