Barcelona's 'Maragall Affair'

...Only two persons are being held for trial...

...The other detainees were released within a few hours...

...The night of the performance young Catalans distributed the full text of the song, but at the concert, the entire song was dropped from the program on order of higher authority...

...Instead, he dispatched a message to the Minister of Justice in Madrid protesting the arrest and rough handling of Catalan Catholics by the police...

...He issued a communique "so that the public may be correctly informed...

...So the audience stood up and sang it anyway...

...On June 13, the two detainees in the "Maragall affair" were tried in Barcelona before a military court, charged with incitement to military rebellion and insulting the chief of state...

...Pujol admitted being the author of the tract which Pizon had printed in his shop...

...That's all...

...It said that "about a hundred persons, mostly youths" had demonstrated outside the Bishop's residence against the detentions "and mythical reports of torture by the police...

...The communique was published in the local press, but no word of the incidents appeared anywhere else in Spain...

...This looked like unprecedented leniency on the part of the Franco regime, for the song...

...The attorney for the defense pleaded for acquittal, or alternatively a sentence of six-months-and-a-day...

...The Abbot of Montserrat, Mon-signor Aurelio Escarra, who had been Franco's host when the Caudillo visited his monastery, refused to participate in the official leave-taking ceremonies for Franco at the end of the Generalissimo's stay in Catalonia...

...The communique went on to say that the arrests led to the discovery of a printing press where seditious and subversive leaflets had been printed...

...Oh flag of Catalonia, our hearts are true to thee...

...The two were tried on the basis of an anti-Franco leaflet printed and circulated in April, although both men had been arrested in connection with the incidents resulting from the song ban on May 19...

...He said that persons present at the concert shouted, demanding that the forbidden song be returned to the program, while others in the audience began to sing it, whereupon "the police did its duty...

...But the seven- and three-year sentences were imposed...

...A significant aspect of the affair is that the people arrested are devout, practicing Roman Catholics and that some prelates (not all) have protested to the authorities...

...In rough translation, it goes like this: Raise the flag, comrades, in sign of fraternity...

...To please Catalan opinion and as part of celebrations honoring the birth 100 years ago of the Catalan poet, Juan Maragall, a patriotic song with words written by him was included in a concert program...

...Raise to the breeze our symbol of liberty, That we may see it wave in sweet majesty...

...But then word got around that the second stanza of the song would be omitted...

...As part of a policy to suppress separatist sentiments the regime also prohibits printing newspapers in Catalan, teaching the Catalan language and literature in the schools and naming streets and boats in the regional tongue...

...A chain reaction set in: • On successive nights crowds gathered outside the residence of the Bishop of Barcelona, Gregorio Modrego Casuas, to protest the beatings said to have been inflicted on the detainees by the police and to ask the Bishop to intervene...

...Police interved, there were scuffles, blows with truncheons and arrests...

...These are the facts," the communique concluded...

...In it he said that El Canto de la Senyera had been withdrawn from the concert program because it was discovered that "certain groups" intended to exploit the occasion for political purposes...

...The trouble started in a Barcelona concert hall toward the end of General Francisco Franco's hitherto triumphal good-will tour of Catalonia in May...

...By Richard Scott Mowrer Barcelona's 'Maragall Affair' Catalan nationalists and clergy clash with Franco Madrid Because of a song written more than half a century ago, Barcelona has become the scene of police roughhouse tactics, arrests, ecclesiastical protests and a hurried-up political trial in which the attorney for the defense requested a six months jail sentence for his clients...

...El Cant de la Senyera, is a hymn to the flag of Catalonia—the ancient and revered provincial banner of four red bars, vertical, on a yellow field— which it is against the law to display...

...They are Jorge Pujol Soley, 31, member of the Catholic Institute for Social Studies and a reserve officer in the Army, and Francisco Pizon Malet, 66, a printer...

...After nearly two weeks and with the populace angry, Barcelona's civil governor, General Felipe Acedo Colunga, felt constrained to do some explaining...

...The state prosecutor demanded seven years imprisonment for Pujol and for the printer three years and confiscation of his printing shop...