On this day in 1939, Barcelona fell to the fascist forces of Francisco Franco, marking not just a military defeat, but the violent destruction of working-class power in Spain. What followed was class war from above enforced by Franco’s fascists.

Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 130,000–150,000 people were imprisoned in Catalonia. Barcelona was turned into a vast carceral zone: prisons, factories, schools, and bullrings were filled with workers, communists, trade unionists, and Republican fighters.

At least 3500 executions took place in Catalonia after the war. Across Spain, over 50,000 people were executed under Franco’s ‘peace’, many after summary military tribunals lasting minutes, in an episode of counter-revolutionary fascist terror.

More than 500,000 people fled into exile, disproportionately from working-class and left-wing strongholds like Barcelona. Those who remained faced forced labour battalions, confiscation of property, blacklisting, and political purges. Tens of thousands were stripped of their jobs and civil rights.

The Catalan language was banned from education, administration, courts, and public life. Workers’ institutions were dismantled. Unions were outlawed. Parties representing the working class were exterminated.

Barcelona, a vibrant, revolutionary city that had seen collectivised industry, workers’ militias, and popular power, was deliberately silenced so that landlords, generals and foreign capital could rule without resistance.

Catalan resistance had been heroic and legendary. In 1936, the working class of Barcelona resisted a fascist coup with grassroots organisation and fought valiantly, despite the Catalonia region being under constant bombing, and the scourge of hunger being ever-present. This resistance would hold out until 1939.

However, their fate was tragic. Anarchist militias, POUM forces, Republicans, and Communists often acted without unified command. Revolutionary enthusiasm replaced centralised military discipline, a key weakness against Franco’s fascist forces which were under a centralised command as a professional army.

Decentralised working class resistance could not fight effectively against this.

With revolutionary romanticism instead of revolutionary discipline, unity, and a state capable of crushing fascism, they were ultimately defeated by Franco’s fascists. What followed for the working classes of the revolutionary city was horrific repression, and domination by capital.

In Nazi-occupied France, an SS officer saw a photo of Picasso’s Guernica painting, which depicted the horrific devastation and death caused by the Nazi bombing of the Spanish town Guernica in 1937.

The officer asked Picasso, “Did you do that?”

Picasso replied, “No, you did.”