The TSJC and Catalan
It had not been long since the Constitutional Court's ruling on the new Statute, when Professor Marc Carrillo, a professor of constitutional law at the UPF and a great expert in the contemporary legal history of Spain, warned us, in a work meeting of the Research Group on the Francoist and Democratic Eras (GREFD-UAB; currently, Research Group on Dictatorships and Democracies, GReDD-UAB), that everything that referred to the Catalan language in the public sphere had come out profoundly affected. In non-legal terms, in this area of the TC ruling, the most radical and retrograde Spanish nationalism had prevailed, the kind that has always maintained, since imperial times (returned to the present and for which King Felipe VI does not have to apologize because, as a very beloved novelist in Spain wrote, his predecessors brought them urban planning, sewers, and something else) until our days (more than 500 years!), that the nation is founded on language and religion; that is, the Spanish language and the most rancid Catholicism. With Catholicism fallen into disgrace, the language remained (and remains). The final result was a foregone conclusion.
On January 26, 1939, General Eliseo Álvarez Arenas reminded all Barcelonians (and, incidentally, the citizens of the already conquered and subdued country, and those who had not yet suffered the arrival of Francoist troops) that the country's own and majority language at that time, Catalan, would not be persecuted in the private sphere; another matter, naturally, was the social use of the language in the public sphere. We know a notable part of this history; but knowing it does not mean considering it over. It is always worth returning to 1939 (and the subsequent decades) and reflecting with the experience of the present from a certain perspective. With many difficulties, in April of that year, a semblance of a Book Festival (what we now know as Sant Jordi) was celebrated. Apart from the fact that there were practically no new editorial releases (the war had ended fifteen days earlier, with the fall of Madrid), if they were not books from the so-called "Francoist zone", produced during the war years, the big news came from elsewhere: there was not a single book in the Catalan language; they had disappeared from the social map, from the public sphere, from the Francoist newspapers circulating those days. The zero degree of the written, spoken, disseminated, consumed, and used language by Catalan society in a majority way until then.
Perhaps it would be worth considering it every time the TSJC, following the doctrine established by the TC in the ruling against (not about, against) the Statute, punishes us a little more with restrictions on the Catalan language in education. Perhaps all the political leaders who fight among themselves to see who has the biggest sword to kill the judicial dragon should consider it; or the bureaucrats of the "education workers" unions, who yesterday were calling for a strike against the political leaders and today are demanding that they save the furniture from the fire, could also consider it. They have not clarified to us what they, the La vaca cega from memory and will the students be asked to explain its meaning and who the author was? Probably not. Catalan will be defended in the trenches of projects and competences, where the most important thing is to "understand the world", not to know the geography of the country.
But our "education workers" cannot be the only ones responsible for trying to limit the damage of these rulings. We must all be; just as in 1939 the thousands of Catalans who continued to speak Catalan (in the private sphere, of course, but not always), who rebuilt minimal networks of sociability, especially in the cultural and civic sphere, outside and despite Francoism, while at school they sang Cara al sol, the dictator presided over them from the wall and they listened to their lifelong teacher (if they had been lucky enough to survive the purge) explain in Spanish everything that, a year earlier, he had explained to them in Catalan.
How did we survive, in 1939, with everything, absolutely everything, against us? We survived because what is called civil society resisted, survived, assumed its responsibility, collective and individual; and because Francoism failed in this area (that is another story, more complicated).
Perhaps, almost ninety years after the disaster of 1939, it would be worth thinking about it again and not unloading all responsibilities onto rulers who, whether from Junts, ERC or socialists, have their hands tied by jurisprudence that works against us. Less crying and more fighting, all of us.