Barcelona (8 page)

One strand in the Catalan left, however, was inherently peaceful and wished only to secede from capitalism and form its own ideal society, inside Spain if possible, outside if necessary. Its spiritual godfather was a Frenchman, Étienne Cabet (1785-1856). Prosecuted for publishing a socialist sheet, he fled to England in 1834, and there came in contact with the benignly utopian manufacturer and social theorist Robert Owen. He labored in that hatchery of a million schemes, the British Museum Reading Room, devouring texts on republican brotherhood: François-Emile Babeuf, Charles Fourier, Owen himself. Cabet was not a mad visionary like Fourier. His eccentricity took the mild form of seeing Christ's Sermon on the Mount for what it clearly was: an early socialist tract. It was based on “gentleness and charity.” “We find in it the source of all the modern systems that now shake the world … there is no gulf between the social teachings of the Gospels and those of socialism.”

The result of this belief was Cabet's text
A Voyage to Icaria,
1839, in which he laid out a plan for an ideal society (Icaria) in the form of imagined dialogues between an English aristocrat (based on Owen) and a young, exiled artist (Cabet). To most people today, Cabet's Icaria would be a hellish place, a dystopia without free will, where everything from diet to publishing is controlled by the state, and no irritants, especially no byproducts of the competitive instinct, are allowed. Cabet's vision of intellectual life in Icaria is like an even more sinister version of the toxic vogue for political correctness on American campuses, or the witless loathing of elitism in Australian journalism in the late twentieth century.

Cabet's ideas were ignored in France. But a small number of Catalan intellectuals were excited by them, and his chief disciple among these Catalans in the late 1840s and '50s was an attractive figure—Narcis Monturiol, socialist, editor, mechanical inventor, and pioneer of the submarine, who hailed from the fishing port of Figueres and is still regarded there as its favorite son.

In 1847 he and a few other earnest progressives formed an Icarian group in Barcelona. Its anthem ran:

 

Desde hoy todos los hombres son hermanos

ni siervo se conoce, ni seño.

Marchemos, O marchemos Icarianos,

tendiendo el estandarte del Amor!

 

From today, all men are brothers,

there will be no slave or master

Let us march, O march onward, Icarians,

holding up the banner of Love!

 

“The Universal Era,” declared the group's news sheet, “begins with the foundation of Icaria. January 20, 1848, is the moment fixed for the regeneration of the World.”

This was the date on which Étienne Cabet sailed for America to found an Icarian community on land purchased sight unseen from a real estate shark, northwest of New Orleans, near Shreveport, Louisiana. It was sand and swamp, and only mosquitoes and venomous snakes flourished there. Monturiol did not go with the first group, believing that twenty thousand people would join it. Only sixty-nine did. Some, guessing what lay before them, committed suicide. The remainder trekked north to Nauvoo, Illinois, and founded a new settlement there, which lasted a few more years. Monturiol never got to join them. Harried by his resentful disciples, Cabet died of heartbreak in Nauvoo in 1856.

That was the end of Icaria, which survived only as the name given to an industrial slum in Barcelona. Around 1900 the city fathers renamed it Poblenou (“New Town”). One broad street, which not inappropriately stops dead at the gates of the Old Cemetery, retained the name of Avinguda d'Icaria. Then in 1992 the Olympic Village, built for the games in Barcelona, was named Nova Icaria—an extraordinarily silly notion, since Olympic contests are about nothing
but
competition, which the original Icarians had sworn to eliminate from their future world.

So the image of invention and industrial newness floated over Catalunya like a liberating angel. Inventing the submarine belonged to such an order of things, whether the submarine really worked or not. Monturiol was not a bit discouraged by the evaporation of Icaria. It just put the emphasis back where his talents required it to be: in exploration through technology. “The poles of the Earth,” he declared, “the depths of the oceans, the upper regions of the air: these three conquests are undoubtedly reserved for the near future … such is the task I have taken on.”

Europeans had dreamed of probing the depths of the sea in controlled underwater voyages since antiquity. Early on, experiments bore some fruit: In 1801, for instance, the American inventor Robert Fulton made a five-hour descent to 160 feet off Brest in France, in a craft named the
Nautilus
(whose name Jules Verne appropriated), driven by a hand-cranked propeller.

But subs with engines for underwater running did not exist until Monturiol produced the second model of his
Ictíneo,
a name made up of the Greek words for “fish” and “ship.” The first version was only twenty-three feet long and displaced eight tonnes. She was driven by four crank-turning aquanauts, and one of Monturiol's colleagues, perhaps his devoted wife who had been his constant companion in triumph and ill luck, made a flag: a gold star shedding light on a branch of red coral, with the Latin motto “
Plus intra, plus extra
,” meaning (roughly) “Far down! Far out!”
Ictíneo I
cost 100,000 pesetas, burdening Monturiol with a debt from which he never escaped.

It did not deter him. The trials of
Ictíneo I
in Barcelona harbor had been watched by many enthusiastic Catalans. Her dives were short, because she could only carry the air that was in her small hull at normal pressure. But the spectacle was enough to make her inventor a local celebrity, a Catalan Leonardo. Officials promised to bring the sovereign, Isabel II, to watch and witness. Discouraged by the pooh-bahs of her own Admiralty, she never came, but over the next few years Monturiol took his ship down again some fifty times. Meanwhile he was busy planning and building
Ictíneo II,
at fifty-six feet more than twice as long as the first model, and powered for undersea running by an ingenious chemical-reaction engine that did not require air to raise steam and actually created free, breathable oxygen. She was designed to dive to a hundred feet and stay down for seven and a half hours. Her design was brilliantly innovative but the research cost Monturiol and his socialist comrades a fortune—and, by their standards, not a small one.

They made more than a dozen demonstration dives in
Ictíneo II
over the next few years. She worked perfectly, the most advanced undersea craft ever devised. Further developed, she would have been a huge strategic gift to the Spanish navy. (What could a small fleet of
Ictíneos
, suitably armed, have done to Admiral Dewey's battle squadron at that fateful engagement off Manila, which sealed the doom of the Spanish Empire?) As it was, all she got was a lot of press, with illustrations of
Ictíneo
hunting for precious red coral and engaging in combat with other subs. The torpid naval ministry in Madrid merely sent its compliments, not contracts or money. The mill owners and iron magnates of Barcelona only eyed the big fish with curiosity. In 1868 Monturiol's creditors foreclosed on him and seized
Ictíneo II.
Having no commercial value as a ship, she was broken up and sold as scrap.

The failure of his dream broke Monturiol's heart. Bankrupt and depressed, he eventually died in 1885, in his son-in-law's house at Sant Martí de Provençals.

By then he was a forgotten man in Catalunya, but it may be that his old fame had spread to France. In the 1860s Jules Verne was plowing through his research for
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Was Captain Nemo, commander of the supersub
Nautilus,
inspired by Narcis Monturiol? It seems unlikely that Verne would
not
have heard of Monturiol, or admired the man's noble single-mindedness in adversity. Granted, Captain Nemo (whose name is the same in Latin as Ulysses' chosen Greek name of
Outis,
“no one”) is unlike the mild Catalan. He is hugely rich, Monturiol desperately poor; Monturiol bent on brotherhood, Nemo on cosmic vengeance.

And yet there are similarities, too. Both men are utopians. When the narrator suggests that Nemo might be too rich to transcend his own capitalist interests, the captain fiercely turns on him: “Who told you that I do not make good use of it? Do you think I do not know that there are suffering races and oppressed beings on this earth…? Do you not
understand?
” From which Professor Aronnax concludes that “whatever the motive that had forced him to seek independence under the sea … his heart still beat for the sufferings of humanity.” The
Nautilus,
ranging free beyond the reach of land governments, is of course a country in itself and may be seen as a parallel to self-sustaining utopian states like Icaria.

 

T
HE SECOND MAIN PHASE OF
B
ARCELONA'S SELF-CREATION,
after the Old City had filled up, was the Eixample, which in Catalan means “enlargement”—the Cerdà plan, as it was called after its designer, a Catalan planner named Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer (1815-1876). It was one thing to demolish the muralles, those much hated emblems of Bourbon power over Barcelona. Getting rid of them was, as one observer noted, “the most ardent desire of every Barcelonan, the most popular and discussed idea in the country.” It was certainly not the sole property of the Left and its civic ambitions. But when the city burst out of its stone corset, what would be its controlling form? That was the big question facing Cerdà and everyone else who thought about Barcelona.

The first step was to destroy the walls. It took time. Whole sections of the Roman walls of the Old City have survived to this day. So have parts of the medieval walls. But of the Bourbon muralles, absolutely nothing remains, and the hated Citadel was transformed into a park whose best known occupant, for the last two decades, was a much loved albino gorilla named Floquet de Neu, or Snowflake, that recently died. I have never laid eyes on Snowflake. But Doris did, once.

Cerdà had studied civil engineering in Madrid. But his social convictions came out of his experience of working-class conditions in Barcelona: the overcrowding, the disease, the dreadful suffering. He was an indefatigable researcher, and his first book,
A Statistical Monograph on the Working Class of Barcelona in 1856
was the first systematic effort anyone had made to study the living and working space of the city. It was very detailed and deeply alarming. While the bards of the early Renaixenca were warbling nostalgically about the need to bring back the glories of the Catalan Middle Ages, it was clear that in terms of hygiene and social services the ordinary working folk of the city had never escaped them. The more abuses Cerdà found, the more indignantly radical he became. The future would be a race between the betterment of Barcelona's working and housing conditions, and the social implosion of the city. How to prevent the latter was the theme of Cerdà's next, and principal, book,
General Theory of Urbanization, and … the Reform and Expansion of Barcelona,
published (after many delays) in 1867. A new world was coming, Cerdà declared; “We lead a new life, functioning in a new way; old cities are no more than an obstacle.”

The Eixample or New City would be the apotheosis of reason, the triumph of the grid, a perfect undifferentiated fabric. Cerdà would hardly have thought of planning something like the New City without the prototype of Baron Haussmann's restructuring of Paris before his eyes. But there was a huge difference. Haussmann had to destroy the old Paris, whereas Cerdà had to destroy nothing. He was going to enlarge Barcelona by laying a uniform grid on what was, except for a few villages (Sarrià, Gràcia, and others), a blank slate. Nothing stood in the way of the grid. Thus, a utopian designer's dream.

That was perfect for Cerdà, a utopian socialist, deeply affected by French ideas of ideal community. The lost egalitarian fantasies of Étienne Cabet, summed up in the ideal city of equal cells, imagined as Icaria, underwrite Cerdà's grid. Cerdà thought of each of these blocks as a social cross section; there would be no “good” and no “bad” end of town. He envisioned an absolutely regular grid covering a land surface of nearly nine square kilometers. Actually, it could be expanded forever. Each district of four hundred blocks (twenty by twenty) would have its own hospital, park, and so forth, and would be further divided into hundred-block units and then into barris of twenty-five blocks, each with its own schools and daycare centers. Only about a third of each block (five thousand square meters) would be built on; the rest would be patio and green space, with at least a hundred trees.

But many such refinements went by the board, thanks to developers' greed and graft and laziness, particularly during the long Franco era. The Eixample today is far denser and higher, more chaotic in texture and generally more oppressive than Ildefons Cerdà could ever have imagined. Cerdà designed his standard block with 710,000 feet of built floor space and a maximum height of some fifty-seven feet, later increased to sixty-five. Over the next century developers managed to increase this fourfold, to three million square feet per block; an urbanistic disaster, a fraud on the public, and a travesty of Cerdà's plan.

Even so, the Eixample is one of the most interesting urban areas in Europe. It grew very slowly; not until the mid-1870s, when the Catalan economy entered the boom decade known as the
febre d'or
or gold fever, did the blocks begin in earnest to fill up. By 1872 there were about a thousand residential structures in the Eixample and some twenty thousand people were living in them. Its streets were mostly unpaved strips of dust. There was little storm-water drainage, so that after deluges the water collected in standing pools on its vacant lots, breeding swarms of
Anopheles
mosquitoes which presented Barcelona with epidemic malaria. In 1888 the report of a sanitary engineer named Pere Garcia Faria made it plain that the Eixample was, from the viewpoint of sanitation, just as bad as the Old City and possibly even worse. The ideal housing had failed through the greed of landlords, who had turned the houses into “veritable slums, in which the Barcelonan family is imprisoned.” Health had caused the demolition of the muralles. But thirty years later, the Eixample was still swept by epidemics of cholera, TB, and typhoid, against which the authorities seemed powerless. And strangely enough—or perhaps not so strangely—the design of the Eixample found only limited favor with those who might have been Cerdà's backers, the next generation of modernist architects. Some of them, notably Josep Puig i Cadafalch, loathed the New City and made no secret of it, though its buildings are now considered by many to be among its jewels. Puig derided its “sacred monotony”: “nothing equals it, except in the most vulgar cities of South America.” There was much, much more. Everything that would in the future be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's “radiant city” to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasília, was already said against their common ancestor the Eixample. All critics felt that leaving the planning of a city to Cerdà, a socialist, was a big mistake. And not all the criticisms of its monotony were without justice. What saves the Eixample are its star buildings, and the exhilarating processional quality of some of its streets, notably Passeig de Gràcia. But it is not really a place to walk in, as is the Old City: Its plan lacks the charm of surprise, of urban respiration through changes of angle and scale that the older and more organic cities of Europe provide.