The Festival of the Virgin of Mercy

Between September 23 and October 5, 1902, the city of Barcelona celebrated Virgin of Mercy Day as a carnival with fireworks,

parades, bullfights, and an art exhibit of Romanesque and Gothic religious art. One hundred sixty-five thousand people from Barcelona and outlying districts attended the five-day celebration, apparently quite happily. Some social critics of both the left and right, however, were dismayed by the festivities. One outraged republican journalist compared Barcelona to a prostitute who, unconscious of her degradation and slavery, "runs into the street to sing, perform, and undress for anyone who'll look."^[23]

The church, accepting the fact that for years the celebration had owed more to popular holidays like carnival than to the more solemn 1888 crowning of the Virgin of Mercy as patron of Barcelona, nevertheless held a mass in her honor. In the Basilica of the Virgin of Mercy, Cardinal Casañas delivered the benediction. Apparently delighted by the way a religious celebration had seeped into the cultural life of the city as a whole, the cardinal reminded his audience of the 1888 celebration and claimed that only "republicans and Carlists" (reactionaries critical of the modern church and the crown as too lenient and unorthodox) opposed making the Virgin of Mercy Barcelona's patron.^[24]

The church was also quite content to have ancient religious paintings and statues removed from churches and abbeys and shown in a museum at the fair. From churches in Vic and Girona, as well as the province of Barcelona, religious art was brought to the Palace of Fine Arts, newly renovated and reopened as the Museum of Decorative Arts. The exhibit, the most ample display of Romanesque and Gothic art in Barcelona, regaled the public with religious paintings, crosses, and murals presented as art. The one high cultural event on the festival program, it reached a larger audience and included more artifacts than the gallery at the 1888 Universal Exposition had done.

Although the church made no official pronouncement on the exhibition, it implied by its silence that it did not object to the way the art was presented. In fact, leading prelates had begun to promote religious art, and individual ecclesiastics had already emerged as patrons of the arts. Barcelona's one-time bishop Josep Morgades, now the bishop of Vic, had founded that city's Episcopal Museum, bringing to light many treasures of medieval Catalan religious art. To the consternation of not a few republican secularists, Morgades was widely praised by Santiago Russinyol, who was ecumenical in his enjoyment of art and, beneath all his cosmopolitanism, strongly Catalan nationalist.^[25]

The one view the church seems to have shared with such secularists

was that by introducing religious imagery into secular rituals, the church promoted religion and ecclesiastical power in civic affairs. The church, therefore, was perfectly happy to have religious figures and celebrations become identified with civic pride, even though that meant the clergy relinquished some control over the uses to which religious symbolism would be put. The danger of the imagery becoming too secularized, of its being used in irreverent ways, was never great in any case. Indeed, the religious architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, one of the guiding lights of the Catalan nationalist Scholars' Center, assisted in organizing the exhibition of Romanesque and Gothic art.^[26]

Still, the exhibit served two diametrically opposed purposes. On the one hand, it permitted religious symbols to saturate the secular realm of art, thus pleasing the clergy. On the other, by emphasizing the formal, artistic attributes of religious works and not their subjects, it granted secularists dominion over art previously revered for its sacred meanings rather than for aesthetic—or regional—significance. Many republicans and secularists might rail against the infiltration of civic life by church art; but for secular artists such as Santiago Russinyol, Miquel Utrillo, and the young Picasso, Romanesque art was a refreshing antidote to traditional post-Renaissance European art.

The fine arts, however, played a relatively minor role for the majority of people attending the 1902 fair. Folk art, in contrast, played a very important role indeed. That year's festival of the Virgin of Mercy was primarily a costly but successful public relations event organized by the Barcelona civic government.^[27] Everywhere there were street fairs sponsored by the city. Each street was decorated according to a theme, ranging from Polynesian, which one street in the Parallel selected, to Gothic, adopted on New Street of the Rambla.^[28] Even though the mood was festive, few inhabitants would have forgotten that eight months earlier a barricade had stood at the latter spot. Some people opposed spending so lavishly on public display, but the editors of the Catalan nationalist paper Veu de Catalunya (Voice of Catalunya) justified the costs by claiming that such festivals, in creating a sense of "union and solidarity," assured that "other victories [would] follow."^[29] Creating civic pride and overcoming political antagonisms following a year of turmoil had to be part of what the Veu and the city government sought to achieve. But a citywide celebration in Barcelona always presented the threat of insurgency. Undoubtedly, many of the 165,000 people who attended the festival had been among the approximately 100,000 who, only eight months before, had participated in the general strike. Festivals had been

sabotaged before, and the civil governor, if not the city government, must have feared further attacks on this pageant. If so, their fears proved unmerited.

So many engaging events were held that the city could easily bury its anxieties in balls, theatrical performances, gymnastics, bicycle races, bullfights, fireworks, and performances of the sardana , the traditional Catalan circle dance performed to the wistful sound of bassoons, clarinets, and flutes. From all over Catalunya, assemblies of xiquets de valls arrived; these groups of men made human pyramids, an acrobatic feat customarily performed at festivals of all kinds, including Corpus Christi. Artisans set up their wares throughout the city, giving the entire urban landscape the air of a country fair.

The central event, however, was to be a parade of gegants brought in from all over Catalunya and of floats honoring blacksmiths', bakers', and confectioners' societies.^[30] Among the historical floats was one of Hannibal and his elephant (figure 4). Gegants coming from outside the city, meanwhile, marched toward Citadel Park, the site of the 1888 exposition, like a jocular invading army: the dragon from La Bisbal; "La Patum," a big bird, from Berga (figure 5); and a whole assortment of other gegants dressed as traditional Catalan peasants and royalty. At the park the visiting creatures found shelter until the day of the parade.^[31]

In the meantime, local gegants were being prepared. Those of Saint Mary of the Sea, for example, were completely redone for the festival. Following the design of Josep Puig i Cadafalch and under the direction of Dr. Diones Renat, an army of seamstresses revamped their clothing, hair, and makeup; one gegant ended up dressed as a fifteenth-century Barcelona city councilman (figure 6).^[32]

The parade, whose route covered the old city and the Extension, was scheduled to set off from Citadel Park at 4:00 P.M. on September 25 and travel up Saint John's Pass toward Tetuan Plaza, across Main Street to Gracia Pass and the Plaza of Catalunya, and then down the Rambla, across Columbus Pass, and back into the park (see map 2). An added celebration was to be held as a children's day on September 26, when the floats and monsters were to circle the park.^[33] Because of rain, however (another tradition of the Virgin of Mercy celebrations), the parade on September 25 had to be canceled.

When the cavalcade finally took place on Monday, September 29, it was well worth the wait. The judges who awarded prizes for the best gegant and nan costumes included Miquel Utrillo and Josep Puig i Cadafalch. Honorable mention went to gegants of the parish of Our Lady

Image not available.

Fig. 4.
Float of Hannibal and elephant from
the 1902 Virgin of Mercy parade.
Drawing from Veude Catalunya .
Courtesy of the Institut Municipal
d'Història, Casa de l'Ardiaca, Barcelona.

Image not available.

Fig. 5.
"La Patum": Folk figure from
the 1902 Virgin of Mercy Parade.
Drawing from Veu de Catalunya .
Courtesy of the Institut Municipal
d'Història, Casa de l'Ardiaca, Barcelona.

Image not available.

Fig. 6.
Gegants  in 1902 dressed as a queen and a fifteenth-century
Barcelona city councilman.
Courtesy of the Arxiu Mas, Barcelona.

of Bonanova and of Saint Mary of the Sea, though the grand prize winners were outsiders: the "Wolf's Head" of Vic and the "Lliga Moscas" of Olot.^[34]

While no violence occurred during the Virgin of Mercy celebrations, no festival or any other public rite in Barcelona could remain free of politics, and this one proved no exception. Even children's events raised political issues. Spanish imperialism in Latin America, which ended only with the loss of Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898, and support for expeditions in Spanish Morocco had been popular causes with all classes in Barcelona—until, that is, colonialism entailed the loss of the lives of numerous Catalans. In 1902, as the struggles among France, Spain, Germany, and Great Britain were heating up in Africa, imperialism still seemed like a heroic enterprise to some Catalans. For children's day during the festival, on September 26, boys were dressed up as African Volunteers to recall the original Spanish conquest of Morocco in the mid–nineteenth century. Under the command of a lilliputian version of the real General Prim, the children's army, wearing blue uniforms, leather boots, and yellow hats, restaged the battle right on Columbus Pass, where they could salute the military forces housed near the governor's palace. They then marched to the Plaza of Saint James to pay their respects to the city and provincial officials, and then on down Ferdinand Street, across the Rambla, and down New Street to the tune of trumpets and the "Royal March" (chosen by the city government).^[35] Playing a monarchist tune was a gesture almost certainly designed to free the festival of any Catalan nationalist or republican political coloration. The festival as a whole, of course, celebrated the status quo and created the fantasy of a community in which class and regional differences held no importance.

However, because labor insurgency outside Barcelona soon afterward aroused fears that local workers might use the festival to revive their own struggles, a children's day scheduled for Citadel Park on October 5 was canceled. It is worth noting that the strikes that had swept Barcelona in late 1901 and early 1902 were in part responses to worsening economic conditions and intensifying unrest all over Spain. Now, in the autumn of 1902, in Cádiz Province, in the towns of La Linea, Cádiz, and Jerez de la Frontera, agricultural and wine workers were attempting to win improved working conditions.^[36] Teresa Claramunt, on a speaking campaign in the south, was arrested in Cádiz in early October 1902, and the government feared that workers in Barcelona might rise to her defense by attacking the government.^[37] Not trusting even the

children, the captain general of Catalunya forbade their October 5 parade, claiming that such a large assembly now posed a threat to public order.^[38] With this decision, he asserted his will over both the city government of Barcelona and the church. Once again, representatives of the Spanish monarchy took precedence over even conservative leaders in Barcelona.