Journal of Catalan Intellectual History Online ISSN 2014-1564 DOI: 10.1515/jocih-2016-0002 https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jocih Received 03/01/2017 / Accepted 05/03/2017 Did Catalonia endure a (cultural) genocide? Francesc Vilanova* (UAB-CEFID, Centre d’Estudis sobre el Franquisme i la Democràcia)
[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3245-0877 Abstract. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Spanish fascism developed its own repressive tools and resources against their enemies (Republicans, Socialists, Communists and Anarchists among others) in the same way other European fascisms did. The depth of the Spanish nationalism brought Franco’s repression against the Catalan society to the height of the processes of cultural and linguistic persecution in the same way that Nazism or Italian fascism had done in the territories they occupied during the years of World War II. Keywords: Fascism, Francoism, genocide, Raphael Lemkin, Catalanism « By shaping the term “genocide” Lemkin was posing a challenge to Historians »1 Y. Ternon 1 What Paul Preston reminded us of: genocide as a form of Francoist repression. In 2011, Paul Preston’s book The Spanish Holocaust. Hate and extermination during the Spanish Civil war and afterwards (published also in Catalan and in Spanish)2 awoke the old ghosts of the nominal debates, full-blown qualifications (or disqualifications), and the quantitative and qualitative hierarchies of the repressive processes of the Franco regime. Could terms like "holocaust" be used without taking any harm? Was it not a grueling * Francesc Vilanova i Vila-Abadal is Professor and Head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.