The July 1936 revolution transformed the face of Barcelona. Streets, buildings and monuments were filled with workers’ and anti-fascist symbols that erased the bourgeois city of the past.

The failure of the rebel military uprising against the Republic in Barcelona, on 19 July 1936, triggered a proletarian revolution, which in turn led to a radical transformation of the city’s urban landscape. The face of Barcelona, a city torn between euphoria and fear, was changed by the emergence of the working class in public spaces and the symbols of trade unions and working-class, republican parties. Beyond the physical changes in the cityscape, this period also saw the establishment of a new collective vision that broke away from the bourgeois city that had preceded it.

The subject of this book is the city itself, proletarian and revolutionary Barcelona. It is the story of a swift, radical transformation as experienced in city streets and squares, but also the story of the revolution as reflected in name changes, in the iconoclastic drive to destroy symbols considered bourgeois, religious or inappropriate, in the new public monuments for propaganda and the glorification of the new political and social reality, and above all in the appropriations of urban bourgeoisie properties.

The July 1936 revolution transformed the face of Barcelona. Streets, buildings and monuments were filled with workers’ and anti-fascist symbols that erased the bourgeois city of the past.

The failure of the rebel military uprising against the Republic in Barcelona, on 19 July 1936, triggered a proletarian revolution, which in turn led to a radical transformation of the city’s urban landscape. The face of Barcelona, a city torn between euphoria and fear, was changed by the emergence of the working class in public spaces and the symbols of trade unions and working-class, republican parties. Beyond the physical changes in the cityscape, this period also saw the establishment of a new collective vision that broke away from the bourgeois city that had preceded it.

The subject of this book is the city itself, proletarian and revolutionary Barcelona. It is the story of a swift, radical transformation as experienced in city streets and squares, but also the story of the revolution as reflected in name changes, in the iconoclastic drive to destroy symbols considered bourgeois, religious or inappropriate, in the new public monuments for propaganda and the glorification of the new political and social reality, and above all in the appropriations of urban bourgeoisie properties.

This exhaustive observation of the changes that took place in the city’s skin, so to speak, is one of the contributions of this research. It also identifies the specific individuals who seized property and those who lost property during the appropriations carried out by the revolutionary forces. This research shows us that there are still aspects of the Barcelona rearguard during the Civil War that remain unexplored, despite extensive historical studies of the period.