ABSTRACT
In 1978, the young Communist Federico Jiménez Losantos published an article that shocked the left-wing intelligentsia in Catalonia. In “La cultura española y el nacionalismo,” this well-known journalist and high school teacher accused the Left of ignoring the ideological baggage and cultural heritage of the Spanish Republicans who were forced into exile following the civil war.1 In the years immediately after the death of General Francisco Franco, Jiménez Losantos claimed, Communists and Socialists were incorporating many elements of the Catalan and Basque nationalists’ discourse into their own and devoting their time and efforts to “rediscovering” the national identities of different Spanish regions (Jiménez Losantos 1979, 16-17). In practice, he asserted, this ideological overlap between the Left and regional nationalism was a betrayal of those Republicans who had fought against the Franco dictatorship (Ibid. 18-19). The scandal was phenomenal. Dozens of articles for and against Jiménez Losantos’s thesis appeared in the Barcelona and Madrid press. “La cultura española y el nacionalismo” won the El Viejo Topo prize for best essay of the year. But, paradoxically, the magazine decided not to publish a book of essays on the topic that included the prizewinning article, for it considered the subject far too polemical. Failure to publish Jiménez Losantos’s work led to a “civil war” within El Viejo Topo and the eventual the resignation of the magazine’s art director. Moreover, over one hundred Catalan intellectuals launched a manifesto, “Against All Sorts of Censorship,” in solidarity with Jiménez Losantos. The book was fi nally published in 1979 by Ajoblanco, a rival magazine of El Viejo Topo, with the title Lo que queda de España. Again, a passionate debate about the Left’s links to regional nationalism, this time together with a public discussion about the rights of Castilian speakers in Catalonia, followed (Pecourt 2008, 208-214).
