Joseph, are you in the grace of God? He thinks that wherever we go there may be fighting and even worse things. Do you want to come with me?”. On the afternoon of April 14, 1931, Ignasi Vidal Guitart is with Josep Gassiot Llorens in Plaça Universitat de Barcelona. Both study Chemical Sciences, are members of the nationalist youth organization Palestra and are twenty years old.
Shortly after noon, Francesc Macià proclaimed the Catalan republic from the Palau de la Diputació. The city goes into a boil. “I told him I thought so and we headed to Carrer del Bisbe. Ignasi punched a secondary access door to Palau and a voice asked, who are you? He answered: Catalan State. They immediately opened up to us. There were a lot of people inside.”
That of Josep Gassiot is one of the few surviving testimonies of members of the Republican Civic Guard that operated during the three days that the Catalan republic lasted before it mutated into the autonomous power of the Generalitat de Catalunya. In 1990, Miquel Gassiot, ex-rector of Ramon Llull University, recorded his father’s memories and made the video available to La Vanguardia.
Indeed, with numbers 130 and 131, Gassiot and Vidal appear among the 450 people authorized to enter Palau in the list drawn up by Josep Tarradellas, Francesc Macià’s private secretary. The document is kept in the Montserrat Tarradellas i Macià Archive. Once inside, Gassiot identified Ventura Gassol, Avi’s right-hand man, and Palestra’s promoter, the ethnologist Josep M. Batista i Roca. “The mission of all was to make the officials of the former Mancomunitat de Catalunya, dissolved in 1925 and now transformed into a Provincial Council, leave. All those officials and employees left, without presenting any resistance to the intervention of the Catalan State. The Mossos d’Esquadra remained in place, supervising everything with great tranquility.”
Josep called home to warn that he would stay “to help or defend us if necessary.” At seven in the afternoon “they called us, one by one, and gave us a document authorizing us to be in that place: and they armed us. They gave me a revolver with five bullets; by the way, that revolver was quite old. Then we realized that we were in a position to offer resistance”.
The idea of ??a body to defend the Catalan republic arose from the separatist segment embodied by the veterinarian Pere Màrtir Rossell i Vilar, Daniel Cardona, the pharmacist Miquel Arcàngel Baltà and his brother-in-law Batista i Roca. Macià accepted the de facto formation of the Guard and let them do it on the ground floor of the Palau. In the meantime, the leader of ERC was doing politics in an office on the top floor, where “members of various political institutions, obviously Catalanists, and other colleagues from Palestra with a higher degree than me came in and out.”
Joseph’s brother went to look for him. “The parents were very worried, due to the news that the radio gave and that we ignored. I told Joan that I was staying there.” Palau was not given food. “There was no problem with the water, between the toilets and the fountain in the courtyard”. When it was dark they were allowed to go out for something to eat. “I went to a bar with my colleagues and after about twenty minutes we went back to work, eating a sandwich.”
Then a detachment of soldiers arrived in Plaça de Sant Jaume. “The officer read the proclamation of the Catalan republic in Catalan, with some effort, because he speaks Castilian.” He was surprised that later the band of the detachment played La Marseillaise. “I, surprised and excited, stood firm and saluted by raising my arm and right hand, a gesture that had nothing to do with a fascist salute.”
Gassiot and the rest of his comrades, also armed, lined up inside Palau, on the left side of the main door. The soldiers formed to the right. “From that moment on, we could not conceal a general and personal expression of tranquility.” Then he called home again “to tell them I was staying there until morning. With the rest, we settled in as best we could, to spend the night on the Palau’s stairs, the ones that go up to the Tarongers courtyard. I managed to sleep for a few hours.”
“We were like a non-police order service. We acted as moderators, everyone wanted to talk to Macià and we avoided crowds in front of the offices. We had to prevent all those people from making a fool of themselves. I remember that some Mossos d’Esquadra appeared, carrying a arrested man with wounds and blows to his face: I was very sorry to see that he had been mistreated, they said he was a member of the Single Union. After consulting with those in command, they let him go.”
Early the next day, Gassiot returned home. When Macià replaced the republic with the Generalitat on April 17, he put an end to the Civic Guard and the most radical separatists got angry with the president.
Gassiot, born in 1910 in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, had moved to Barcelona as a child following the work of his father, an Olotí lawyer, friend of the poet Josep Carner and brother-in-law of the socialist politician Manuel Serra i Moret. Coming from a very religious family, as a young man he joined Scouting and the Federation of Young Christians of Catalonia. After graduating from the Chemical Institute of Sarrià, he obtained a degree in Chemical Sciences from the University of Barcelona. In 1930 he worked as secretary of the science section of the Institute of Catalan Studies.
During the Second Republic he was a teacher at the Seu d’Urgell and Badalona high schools. He also signed a manifesto of the university section of the separatist party Nostalre Sols that called for education to be entirely in Catalan. Josep kept the pistol he received from the Generalitat “and he constantly carried it when he went to classes, because it could be useful to me at some point”.
In May 1936, however, he got married and his wife, librarian Carme Matas, told him she didn’t want guns in the house. Gassiot left her at her parents’ house. The maid saw her and, after the start of the Civil War, the FAI went there to look for her, thinking there would be more. Since they couldn’t find any more, they imprisoned the father and brother for a few months.
Josep had not done military service because he was short-sighted and, anticipating problems, he went to work as a teacher in Almeria. However, with the pregnant wife and a summons from the army of the republic to enlist in the auxiliary services, the couple returned to Barcelona. At the end of October 1937, however, his connection with the Catholic youth was heavy.
Warned not to return home, he presented himself to the Military Government of Barcelona. A plainclothes man gave him instructions to run away. He went by coach to Puig-reig and hid in the forest. For two thousand pesetas, a hitchhiker took him to Andorra with about fifteen people. Then he went to the area controlled by the rebels. A priest vouched for him and, because of his knowledge of chemistry, the rebel army sent him as a soldier in the weapons factory in the artillery park in Burgos.
The two friends who had been part of the Republican Civic Guard in 1931 had different destinies. Ignasi Vidal, in 1934, perhaps following the events of October, emigrated to Colombia, where he became a renowned botanist and university professor. He returned to Catalonia to fight with the Republican side during the war and, in the end, went into exile in Ecuador, where he progressed as an industrialist and professor of thermodynamics at the Catholic University of Santiago de Guayaquil, where he died in 1981.
For his part, Josep Gassiot returned to Barcelona in February 1939. Then, finally, he met his firstborn, Miquel, born a few weeks after his escape. He had five more children (Mercè, Josep, Lluís, Matilde and Xavier) and worked as a teacher at the Químic de Sarrià and as an inspector of secondary education. He died in 1994, four years after recording his valuable testimony.
