The position of Barcelona’sDestino group and other regime sympathizers with regard to the Second World War: the example of Britain

Abstract

Franco’s victory in 1939 abruptly dismantled the entire structure that had governed Catalan thought and its journalism right through the decade. To consolidate its advance, however, the regime also needed to fill the vacuum left by those thinkers who had been sent into exile. They did this by launching new politico-intellectual publications like the local Falange’s weekly SolidaridadNacional, the unashamedly pro-Franco broadsheet La Vanguardia Española and the Catalan catholic and nationalist paper Diario de Barcelona. But these were soon overshadowed by a far more original and ambitious publishing venture: Destino. Política de Unidad. A weekly magazine created in Burgos in 1937 by the Territorial Catalana de Falange (the Catalan cell of the Spanish Falange), Destino was privatized and moved to Barcelona in 1939, eventually becoming the regime’s most effective political and cultural platform in Catalonia and the linchpin of a pro-Franco movement which sought to promote anti-Catalan and anti-liberal sentiment, to offer a final solution to the Catalan problem in the so-called “new state”, LanuevaEspaña, and forge a new intellectual order.

key words: Destino, Franco’s regime, Ignacio Agustí, Santiago Nadal, Manuel Brunet, anti-Catalan sentiment, Catalonia, Second World War, Winston Churchill, pro-ally sentiment.