Finding Shelley in Barcelona, 2018
A guest post by Thomas D. Cocks
August 2018, almost 200 years since Shelley’s famous poem decried the Peterloo massacre in Manchester - my wife Adriana and I strolled on La Rambla in Barcelona en route to Parc Güell for more of Gaudi’s Catalan Modernisme that abounds in that city. Cultural sights streamed, from players of petanca (Catalan for the French game of boules), statues in the traffic rotundas, and the balconies draped with the Estelada Blava (“Starry Blue”), a flag of the Catalan independence movement.
The flags looked like this:
A 2017referendum had called for sovereignty in the region of Catalan. News onBarcelonan TV and headlines in the papers told of the simmering popularity forCatalan autonomy, including a debate over the Spanish monarchs’ planned visitto the City during its Festa de Gràcia, celebratedin August. The Festa has been a major street festival from the time of theRomantic revolution whereby Barcelona annexed the rural area Gràcia.
Madrid nullified the 2017 vote, and many were still bitter. Protestors had been arrested. Slogans calling for freeing political prisoners resonated in the banners and graffiti in many parts of Barcelona.
However, one battle cry scratched in chalk on the pavement amazed me, a literature major in college -
The language ofBarcelona is Catalan, but this was in English from an English Romantic poet. TheBarcelonan context indicates the desire of independence supporters for themasses to rear up and break the shackles of Madrid’s hegemony. The writer credited Shelley and one canforgive him or her the transposition of integers in the year—perhaps the Guàrdia Urbana (Barcelona police) or the Mossosd’Esquadra (Catalonian police) bore down on the vandal who had to hurry andflee. Note that the characters wereneatly formed in the meantime.
I wondered from what work the passage came and about its relevance to the Catalan freedom struggle. Thanks to the scrawler’s citation, it proved easy to track down: The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester. The subtitle referenced the clash on August 16, 1819 in Manchester, England at a public plaza called St. Peter’s Field; hence, the name Peterloo Massacre given with reference to Waterloo, or the end of an emperor’s rule. A crowd of a reported 5,000 persons gathered to support Parliamentary reform and denounce corruption. A government regiment of cavalry soldiers charged the demonstration with sabers and killed sixteen men and women, as well as a baby.[1]
A month later, the Shelleys, living in Italy, learned of the story through the newspapers. Percy Shelley turned furious and composed an ardent ninety-one stanzas. According to John Mullan of The Guardian,[2] the paper founded in response to the very tragedy, Shelley planned for a wide audience, but the poem did not get published until 1830, seven years after his fatality. Indeed, the lines from the sidewalk are repeated in The Mask, once from the voice of Hope exhorting the victims of tyranny and then from the poet’s voice, in a peroration:
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many -- they are few.
Romantic & Catalonian Independence Movements
After Franco died, Spain transitioned to a democracy. In 1978, anew constitution gave powers to the autonomous region of Catalonia. By 2006, areferendum defining self-government passed but in 2010 the National Courtdisapproved and modified it. Amillion-person protest proclaimed in Barcelona, the largest city in Spain andcapital of Catalonia, “Somuna nació. Nosaltres decidim.” ("Weare a nation. We decide.”)
The drive for Catalonian sovereignty began in theyears leading up to the Spanish Civil War. Franco officially abolished it in 1938, but patriotic identity has persisted. Several years after the government ruled a2006 referendum unconstitutional and illegal, the recent vote in 2017 overwhelminglyresulted in favor of independence over autonomy. Madrid nullified the result, causingdemonstrations of considerable numbers again to turn out on both sides.
Although the referendum showed over 90% in support of independence,partisan observers note that the outcome came from a 43% turnout. Several parties, from far left to moderate,comprise the general backing.
However, as one can observe in various global localities today,feelings of nationalism are on the rise. Countries seek isolation from the refugee populations displaced by armedconflicts and/or economic plight. Nations’patriotic pride runs deep and emerges especially when faced with externalthreat.
Applying this theory to Catalonian circumstances, one notices elements of the Romantic anti-tyranny vision. After the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) Spain centralized power under King Phillip, holding authority over regions each with their own national history. One such Principality of Catalonia over the years lost several conflicts, including an invasion by Napoleon. Just before Shelley’s Mask, the French left in 1814 and a period of Catalonian cultural Renaixença took place reviving a passionate nationalism.
Spain itself is a proud nation still emerging from the Francodictatorship and stretching its theretofore latent progressive and democraticwings. Their national hero is FranciscoGoya, whose painting of French military barbarism on the 3rd of May 1808is a prime example of Romantic passion. Shelley’s own disgust and hatred of thePeterloo tragedy is a similar passionate reaction in poetry.
Did passions and historical precedent move our independentista who chalked the rousing lions quoting Shelley? Or did the phrase occur to him or her as a slogan for the use of moving the masses to action as it had Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau, or the activists in the 1989 Tiananmen Square rebellion in China? Each of them made a unique allusion to Shelley’s poem. Gandhi espoused passive nonviolent resistance, which is exampled in The Mask, albeit ambiguously, as some have written.[3] Thoreau is known to have admired the poem before writing Civil Disobedience. And the verses inspired the Beijing youth who stood in front of that line of tanks about to crush him to death - and they would have if other demonstrators had not pulled him to safety.
Howard Zinn[4] and Aldous Huxley[5] mentioned their admiration for Shelley’s themes in The Mask. But what did Shelley understand of Spanish culture and past?
In an article in PMLA from 1923, a Mr. Herman Hespelt examinedletters of Percy, Mary and others to determine that Spanish language and culturesignificantly interested Shelley.[6] The Shelleys had read Don Quixote,probably in English. Though he mixed up Italian with it, Shelley authored a minoramount of Spanish and read Calderón. He spent evenings learning the language withMrs. Maria Gisborne, a friend of Mary Shelley’s father. Occasionally Mary joined them. He knew of current events through accuratereports as well as rumors, exalting it was said from word of the liberals’revolt against Ferdinand VII, the “Felon King,” fighting to put theConstitution of 1812 into effect. In 1820, they took Ferdinand prisoner(Shelley had heard he had been “massacred.”) though the king was freed 1823, ayear and a month after Shelley’s drowning in a sailing accident. Catalonia rankednotably among the regions in fiercest opposition to Ferdinand’s absolutism.
The Spain of Shelley’s time was an example of what he wishedEngland to be, and he remarked in “Ode to Liberty” (1820) that “England yetsleeps…Spain calls her now.” Thissentiment, and the fact that the lion stands for England complicate the characterof our lions in Catalonia. Are theyEngland, or the general force of liberty? Certainly, our Barcelonan scrawler would have thought the latter, asfreedom is the object of the independence movement. Nevertheless, Shelley chose the lion assymbol of what he hoped England to be, i.e., a rough beast that will rouse andestablish a liberal national order.
Thus, it is apt to adopt the awakening lion from The Mask to enhance the charge to battle against tyranny. To credit him for it in street drawing in Barcelona is also to know Shelley wrote in the end that he was spending his days at Pisa in idyllicism on a “divine” bay, reading Spanish dramas, sailing (on his boat named Don Juan), and listening to music.
While my wife and I visited, we saw television news, read thepapers, took pictures of the Catalonian Estelada Blava. We did not find a Barcelonan forindependence, but a couple did profess to have an opinion. One shopkeeper said he preferred autonomybecause otherwise prices would go up. Another man, a member of a food coop,discussed national legal reform but did not support cutting off from Madrid.This beautiful city enchanted us all the same, including the experience ofseeing Shelley’s Romantic presence overtly cited. Going south on La Rambla, we came across themosaic art of Joan Miró embedded in the pavement. Going north, we saw Shelley.
[1] Peterloo, a film by Oscar-nominated Mike Leigh (of Vera Drake fame), comes out in the U.S. this April 2019.
[2] Mullan, John. “Anarchy in Peterloo: Shelley's Poem Unmasked.” The Guardian, Mon 8 Jul 2013.
[3] Ifound two articles from the K-SAA journal addressing the poem’s non-violence 1)Borushko, Matthew C. “Violence andNonviolence in Shelley's ‘Mask of Anarchy.’” Keats-Shelley Journal,vol. 59, 2010, pp. 96–113; and 2) Reno, Seth T. “The Violence of Form inShelley's ‘Mask of Anarchy.’” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 62, 2013,pp. 80–98.
[4] Zinn,Howard. The People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper& Row, 1980.
[5] Huxley, Aldous. AnEncyclopaedia Of Pacifism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1937.
[6] Hespelt, E. Herman. “Shelley and Spain.” PMLA,vol. 38, no. 4, 1923, pp. 887–905. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/457311.