According to Kenneth McRoberts, Despite the best efforts of the Franco regime, Catalonia was still intact when Franco finally died on 20 November 1975. This essay will analyze the impact of Francoism on Catalonia in the light of this

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Since the end of the Spanish Civil war in 1939, the Catalans suffered a systematic and thorough repression at the hands of Franco (Hansen 1977: 1). He had a special hatred for Catalonia, believing that Catalan nationalism and separatism were one and the same (McRoberts 2001: 46). The regime lasted over thirty years and it perpetrated the serious attempt to culturally and linguistically homogenize the peoples of Spain. It implemented a strong ‘nationalization’, employing all the resources available - both physical and psychological repression, control of media, education, the elites and the bureaucracy - to  create a ‘surveillance state’ (Guibernau 2004: 35, 49). According to Kenneth McRoberts, ‘“Despite the best efforts of the Franco regime, Catalonia was still intact when Franco finally died on 20 November 1975”. This essay will analyze the impact of Francoism on Catalonia in the light of this statement.

        Not only did the regime aim to destroy the political structure, but also Catalonia’s spirit, its culture, its very strength and life. Repression was felt at all levels of everyday life, because the intention was to establish a ‘New Plan’ regime to annihilate any vestige of a Republican and independent past and to block any possibility of resistance. It was a white terror, official and relentless, without anyone to intervene for the victims or to try to save them. First of all, the use of Catalan was prohibited given its status as a second language (Segura 2006: 1-9). Even in the workplace Catalan was banned as a spoken language. In the University of Barcelona, all subjects dealing with Catalan culture were abolished, and The Institut d’Estudis Catalans was replaced with an Institutio Español de Estudios Mediterráneos. Punishment for the offenders ranged from simple fines to dismissal from the workplace, exile and prison. In the first years of dictatorship, many

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people were accused of ‘separatism’ merely for ‘daring’ to speak in Catalan (Conversi 1997: 111-113). Moreover, between 1938-1939 more than 108,000 prisoners were taken to concentration camps and others were executed after sentencing by the Catalan War Commission (Segura 2006: 8).  As a consequence, around 500,000 people fled into exile, 200,000 of whom came from Catalan-speaking areas. The scope of all these measures was not simply to suffocate Catalanism, but to eradicate Catalan culture and any sign of a separate identity at its very roots. Their result was devastating:

        “Barcelona, the city of revolutionary anarchists and experimental artists, of ...

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