This book has the ingredients to make a movie script. A cultural enterprise undertaken by a minority and minority culture within the framework of a dictatorial regime. A project linked to Edicions 62 that out of three volumes, the Enciclopèdia Catalana, ended up being fifteen, the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana. A visionary with no desire for prominence, the geographer and deputy director of the Planeta publishing house, Enric Lluch, who in 1964 proposed the idea to a humanist willing to lose the family heritage to make it possible, Max Cahner.
Terrible personnel and economic management, which did not publish the first issue until 1968. A template to make the entries of more than a hundred names from various disciplines, some of which would become the country’s intelligentsia (Isidre Molas, Ernest Lluch, Manuel Sacristán, Josep Benet, Josep Fontana, Josep Termes, Joaquim Molas, Antoni M. Badia i Margarit, Marta Mata…). Many of them with a left bias and who transfer their fight against capitalism to the company that occupies them.
An entity, Banca Catalana, and a man, Jordi Pujol, reluctant from the beginning to the project, but in 1971 he threw it behind his back. An intellectual, Joan Fuster, who advises and ensures that the project survives. And a director, the philologist Jordi Carbonell, who does everything possible so that the censorship does not ban the maps of the Catalan Countries.
The green volumes of the work illustrated many Catalans and provided one more element to place Catalan culture on the path of the great European cultures. The author of Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana. A country work, Josep LluÃs MartÃn Berbois (Sabadell, 1978), explains the chain of nonsense that made it possible from a respectful perspective. Anecdotes like that of Josep M. Benet i Jornet soaking his feet in cold water to demand fans and angry with Montserrat Roig because she, from the PSUC, has a good understanding with the bourgeois leadership, are hilarious. Without the handbrake, the result would have been irreverent.
From MartÃn Berbois we have reviewed the biography of Josep Maria Porcioles (October 16, 2021). His production covers about twenty works, some from the Republican stage. His texts are entertaining. He is part of a generation of historians who understand that the essay must also be read outside of academic circles. He has covered facets of the history of Catalonia such as the celebrated Ignorades però desitjades. The political donation during the elections of the Second Republic to Catalonia (2013). In his latest works he has entered fully into Francoism. Following this line would give coherence to his trajectory and would help to explain continuities with the most recent past.
One, for example, that is not made explicit in the book but that flies over it. Pujol was suspicious of the leftism of the squad that he fired en masse for this issue and, above all, because the numbers did not come out, in such a way that he left only a small team for the final phase of the project. He also vetoed the collaboration of Jordi Solé Tura, then a black beast of Catalan nationalism for having written that he was bourgeois and conservative.
In his memoirs (2007), Pujol has been annoyed because the writers of the gauche divine branded him at that time as a banker and bourgeois. An aspect that in recent conversations that we have had has still been put on the table. It is not unreasonable to think that the anti-Pujolist boil of a part of the left-wing intelligentsia was cooked in those layoffs and that precariousness. The history of the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana is irrefutable proof that the image of a good final product does not always correspond to that of its production process. If you have had your volumes at home, do not miss this book. They will not look at them again or remember the same.
