Mens sana in corpore sano: Culture and Public Service in Catalonia in the Nineteen-Thirties

Abstract

The article offers an alternative view of the literary and journalistic world in Catalonia during the Second Republic. It is observed that many writers and artists worked as civil servants in regional or local government, because, of course, they could not survive financially merely on their intellectual or artistic work. Their official job was not their idea of an ideal life, but hard daily reality forced them to find a job which, despite being regarded as morally brutalizing, at least kept them away from the world of manual labour and the factory. However, these intellectual functionaries sought to dignify their work as public employees by combining it with writing, journalism or art. Many of them were members of the Association of Officials of the Government of Catalonia (AFGC), which was made up primarily of intellectuals and professionals who supported Catalan republicanism and socialism and heteredox communism which was in favour of a national Catalan proletarian revolution. This mixture of political sensitivities created within the AFGC a highly eclectic intellectual and professional discourse capable of combining football. Basically, the intellectual vision of the AFGC and its public employees was nothing other than a clear reflection of the eclectic cultural policy conducted the Republican Left of Catalonia from the Government, where there was room for recycled noucentisme, avant-gardism and all expressions of mass culture.