The Bourgeois City

Barcelona is good if money clinks in the purse.

— Popular saying

* * *

Arriving in Barcelona by train in 1873, Edmundo De Amicis caught sight of an entrepreneurial city teeming with dynamism. Both what he saw and the way of seeing merit attention, for the object of his vision was a city in the throes of development; but the vista was itself a modern feat. Travel by train was a recent phenomenon, and the rolling views that it opened up for the first time decisively changed human perception. De Amicis's impressions are worth quoting as an early document of the transformation that only a decade and a half later would crystallize in Barcelona's coming of age as a self-conscious modern city.

After passing the station of Clot, which is the last before reaching Barcelona, one sees on every side large brick buildings, long boundary walls, piles of building materials, smoking towers, factories and workmen, and one hears, or seems to hear, a dull, diffused, increasing sound, which is like the labored breath of a great city that is moving and working. In fine, one takes in at a single glance all Barcelona, the port, the sea, a wreath of hills, and everything shows itself and disappears in an instant, and you find yourself under the roof of the railway station, with your blood in a ferment and your head in confusion [De Amicis 10].

As the train enters Barcelona, the city itself is moving. Barcelona is a huge locomotive pulling the region and the nation, with smoke streaming from its stacks. This remarkable proto-cinematic view, reminiscent of the city symphony films of the 1920s, anticipates the camera's ability to claim transparency where the organic eye encountered only opaqueness and illegibility. The unimpaired vision was possible because the motion that De Amicis saw as a conspicuous feature of Barcelona was related to his own moving location. He owed to mechanized locomotion the panning view that sent blood to his head and threw it into confusion. Barcelona owed its own ferment to the very same technology, which lies literally at the origin of its modern image.

Barcelona, the first Spanish city to introduce the railroad, was transformed by this innovation. After bursting asunder its medieval enclosure, the city began to expand toward the hills, engulfing the intervening villages. With distances shortened by the railroad, Catalonia was shriveling to the size of a large conurbation, the Catalonia-City, as Eugeni d'Ors would call it at the turn of the century. Such forward leaps in urbanization permanently changed Catalonia's territorial and economic structures, at the same time that mechanized locomotion replaced the traditional conception of time and space and affected human perception along the lines made evident in De Amicis's excited epiphany of a modern city.

But the enjoyment of a panorama animated by the steady motion of a window sliding on rails was not the only outcome of such changes, or the principal one. Certainly, the filmlike sequence of brick buildings, long walls, and smokestacks observed by De Amicis from his compartment was an effect of the train's motion. But the transformation of space under the impact of mechanized locomotion was neither illusory nor a matter of perspective. Increasing speed condensed space, and the resulting centers gradually detached themselves from the countryside. It was the time of the emergent metropolis.

CONNECTING BARCELONA TO WORLD TRAFFIC

In 1848, the Barcelona-Mataró line was inaugurated. It was the first in the Iberian Peninsula and the eleventh in the world. In four months, 187,000 passengers traveled on this train (Tasis). Between 1848 and 1863, four lines connected Barcelona to other Catalan municipalities: Mataró, Martorell, Granollers, and Sarrià. By 1862 the Granollers line reached Girona and in 1878 the border with France. A branch of this line had linked Barcelona with Saragossa through Sabadell, Terrassa, Manresa, and Lleida since 1861. In 1865, the Martorell line was extended to Tarragona and then to Valencia two years later. In 1875, the companies servicing the Barcelona–Port Bou and the Barcelona–Tarragona lines merged into the T.B.F., or Tarragona-Barcelona-France Railway Company, which dominated the Catalan railroad system.

This revolution in transportation had enduring consequences. Multiplying the relations among formerly scattered centers, the railway transformed Catalonia from an imagined community into a perceived one at the very moment when industry disenchanted the natural world. The Renaixença poets sang Catalonia's landscape while its rivers were being harnessed to industry. Although nostalgic, their "vision" was aided and probably stimulated by the ease with which they could now move through the land. In his memoirs, Gaziel has left us a snapshot of the poet Joan Maragall in 1907. Maragall is on the train, going back to Barcelona from Lleida, where he had won first prize in that year's Jocs Florals, a neomedieval poetry competition. As night began to fall, says Gaziel, Maragall straightened up in his seat and brought his face closer to the window of the train, looking out "like the bird that watches all around earth and sky" (226). This circular scrutiny of the horizon, which generates the illusion of an encompassing view, had been virtually unknown. But from midcentury on, the train ride made it possible to bring the nation's concrete totality into the visual field. The nation is not so much an imagined community, in Benedict Anderson's catchy turn of phrase, as the community contemplated from an inclusive horizon whose ultimate metaphor is the bird's-eye view. The moment is liminal. The previous year, Enric Prat de la Riba published La nacionalitat catalana, the first explicit theorization of Catalan nationalism. There was no coincidence; to the poets' sensory intuition the politician responded with visionary energy. Prat systematized and thus brought to a higher level of consciousness the vague effusions of political regionalism, just as Maragall represented the evolution from romantic jocfloralisme to modern urban poetry.

The train ride boosted the country's cohesion by lifting remote regions from their isolation and opening them up to outside influence and political control. Thus it contributed powerfully to structuring the national territory even as it changed the consciousness of place. In Doña Perfecta (1876), Benito Pérez Galdós describes the spatiotemporal leveling of territories that, not without violence, were being homogenized into a national geography. Far from being imagined, the nation could now be comfortably surveyed from a train...