Josep, are you in God’s grace? Think that where 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 meets Josep Gassiot Llorens in the Plaza Universitat de Barcelona. Both study Chemical Sciences, are active in the nationalist youth organization Palestra and are twenty years old.
Shortly after noon, Francesc Macià proclaimed the Catalan Republic from the Palau de la Diputación. The city bustles. “I told him that I thought so and we headed to Obispo Street. Ignasi knocked with his fist on a secondary access door to the Palau and a voice asked, who are you? He answered: Estat Català. They immediately opened for 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 the numbers 130 and 131, Gassiot and Vidal appear among the 450 people authorized to enter the Palace in the list made 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.
“Everyone’s mission was to make the officials of the previous Mancomunitat of Catalonia leave, dissolved in 1925 and now transformed into a Provincial Council. All those officials and employees left, without presenting any resistance to the intervention of those from Estat Català. The Mossos d’Esquadra were still in place, supervising everything with great calm.”
Josep called home to say that he would stay “to help or defend us if necessary.” At seven in the afternoon, “they shouted at us, one by one, and gave us a document that authorized 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 that defended the Catalan Republic emerged 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.
Meanwhile, the ERC leader was doing politics in an office on the upper floor, where “members of various political institutions came and went, obviously Catalanists and other Palestra colleagues of higher rank than me.”
Josep’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.” At the Palau they didn’t give him anything to eat.
“There was no problem with the water, between the sinks and the patio fountain.” When it got dark they went out to have a drink. “I went to a bar with my colleagues and after about twenty minutes we returned to work, eating a sandwich.”
Then a detachment of soldiers arrived in the Plaza de Sant Jaume. “The officer read the proclamation of the Catalan Republic in Catalan, with some effort, as he speaks Spanish.”
He was surprised that afterwards, the detachment band played the Marseillaise. “I, surprised and excited, stood at attention and saluted by raising my right arm and hand, a gesture that had no relation to a fascist salute.”
Gassiot and the rest of his companions, also armed, lined up inside Palau, on the left side of the main door. The soldiers formed to the right. “From this moment on, we could not hide a general and personal expression of tranquility.”
He then called home again “to tell them that I was staying there until morning. With the rest we settled in as best we could, to spend the night on the stairs of the Palau, the ones that go up to the Pati dels Tarongers. I managed to sleep for a few hours.”
“We were like a non-police law enforcement 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 bothering us. I remember that the Mossos d’Esquadra appeared and were taking a man into custody with wounds and blows to his face: I was very sad to see that they had mistreated him, they said that he was a member of the Sindicat Únic. After consulting with those in charge, they let him go.”
Early the next day, Gassiot returned home. When on April 17, Macià changed the Republic for the Generalitat, he put an end to the Guàrdia Cívica and the most radical separatists became 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, a lawyer from Olot, 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 science secretary at the Institute of Catalan Studies.
During the Second Republic he taught at the institutes of La Seu d’Urgell and Badalona. He also signed a manifesto from the university section of the separatist party Nosaltres Sols calling for teaching entirely in Catalan. Josep kept the pistol that he received in the Generalitat “and carried it constantly when I went to teach, because it could be useful to me at some point.”
In May 1936, however, he married and his wife, librarian Carme Matas, told him that she did not want weapons in the house. Gassiot left her at her parents’ house. Her servant saw her and, when the Civil War began, the FAI came looking for her, thinking that there would be more of her. When they did not find them, they imprisoned her father and brother for a few months.
Josep had not done military service because he was short-sighted and foreseeing problems he went to work as a teacher in Almería. However, with his wife pregnant 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.
Alerted not to return home, he appeared at the military government. A man in civilian clothes gave him instructions to flee. He went by bus to Puig-reig. He hid in the forest. For 2,000 pesetas, a broker took him to Andorra with about fifteen other people, before jumping to the rebels’ area.
A monk endorsed him and, due to his knowledge of chemistry, the rebel army assigned him as a soldier to the Burgos weapons factory.
The two friends who had been part of the Guàrdia Cívica Republicana in 1931 had different fates. Ignasi Vidal, in 1934, perhaps as a result of 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. He went into exile in Ecuador, where he progressed as an industrialist and university professor in Guayaquil, where he died in 1981.
For his part, 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 i Xavier) and served as a teacher at the Químic de Sarrià and as a secondary school inspector. He died in 1994, four years after recording his valuable testimony.
