Boycott in Barcelona

Bulwarked by the Pyrenees, claiming blood descent from Caesar's conquering legions, culturally close to Southern France, the inhabitants of the province of Catalonia are a proud people who have long been a thorn to the enforced togetherness of Franco Spain. Against Catalan pride, Premier Franco has banned the use of Catalan dialect in newspapers, suppressed Catalan courses in schools. The failure of his efforts was dramatized last week in a threat to the very existence of the biggest and best newspaper in Spain, Barcelona's La Vanguardia Espanola.

La Vanguardia's strange trouble began one Sunday last June during 10 o'clock Mass at Barcelona's San Ildefonso Church. Enraged that the sermon was being delivered in Catalan instead of Castilian, a plump, balding little man protested to a curate, left his card, and stormed out of the church shouting: "Catalan--lleno de mierda! The name on the card was that of Luis de Galinsoga, a Galician who has been La Vanguardia's Franco-appointed publisher since 1939.

After the incident, San Ildefonso's Father Narciso Seguer wrote to Galinsoga, tactfully suggested that the culprit must have been an impostor using Galinsoga's card. Replied Galinsoga: "The card is mine. To go to church in a Spanish city where one hears, apart from Latin, a language that a Spaniard has no obligation to understand appears absurd to me."

Because government censorship kept the case out of the press, news of Galinsoga's insult traveled only by word of mouth. As it did, Catalan pride began popping. Thousands of copies of La Vanguardia were torn to shreds and scattered over Barcelona's streets. Signs appeared on walls, proclaiming (in Catalan): "Down with Galinsoga." As of last week, La Vanguardia's circulation had plummeted 30,000 to 120,000; advertising losses had forced the paper to cut back from an average of 55 to 28 pages a day. Driven to desperation, Publisher Galinsoga backed down, denied that he had ever uttered any sort of insult to Catalonia. But in its continuing boycott, proud Catalonia posed an ultimatum: either Galinsoga would go or else Spain's top newspaper would have to struggle for survival.

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