Second Spanish Republic

The Second Spanish Republic is a period of political and social transition remembered through its effects on Barcelona’s old families, institutions, and literary trade. Rather than appearing as a single narrated episode, it is reconstructed through later testimony and recollection: the Aldayas lose their former position, San Gabriel’s School declines as wealthy newcomers establish rival institutions, and the changing era becomes part of the history of the books by Julián Carax.

Social Change and the Old Elite

A caretaker’s account connects the Aldaya family’s decline to the Republic: they lost everything during that period, though he had heard that the eldest son, Jorge, went abroad to Argentina, where the family had factories. His report is second-hand, and he knows little beyond what he has heard from the Miravells, former friends of the Aldayas. The family’s apparent ability to recover abroad contrasts with its vanished standing in Barcelona.

The Republic also marks a shift in the social world represented by San Gabriel’s School. Once an exclusive institution for established families, it lost ground when newly wealthy industrialists and bankers created schools of their own, having previously been excluded because their surnames lacked the old families’ prestige. Julián Carax and Fernando Ramos belonged to a small group of pupils from less wealthy backgrounds, known as the Starving Gang. Fernando had a scholarship secured through his father’s long employment in the school kitchens; Julián’s admission had come through Don Ricardo Aldaya, a customer of the Fortuny hat shop owned by Julián’s father.

Barcelona as a Ruined Historical Landscape

Looking back on the city, Fernando describes Barcelona as a sum of ruins: its palaces, factories, and monuments survive as remnants of a vanished civilization. His reflection follows a broader account of the Republic’s social changes and the disappearance of a world in which power was concentrated in family dynasties. By the time he recalls it, the old order has given way to corporate names and impersonal consortiums.

That image of historical change is set against the novel’s recurring city of old streets, buildings, and shifting public life. Barcelona’s physical setting persists, but its meanings and inhabitants change; the Republic is one of the periods through which the narrative explains that transformation, without treating the city’s past as a simple story of progress.

The Republic and Carax’s Publishing History

The period also frames the fortunes of Carax’s fiction. Isaac recalls that the publisher Cabestany issued eight of Carax’s novels between 1928 and 1936, although they sold poorly: the best-selling title, The Red House, reached only about ninety copies. Cabestany earned money from catechisms and cheap sentimental novels instead, and Isaac can only speculate about why he continued publishing Carax. The novels’ persistence in print therefore depended on a publisher’s unexplained choice rather than demonstrated commercial success.

In 1936, as the publishing firm passed to Cabestany’s eldest son, a stranger offered three times the market value for the remaining Carax stock. The buyer was seeking the books in order to burn them. After the son demanded more money and the offer was withdrawn, the warehouse in Pueblo Nuevo burned down shortly after midnight, destroying nearly all the books. The surviving copies became scarce not simply because few readers had bought them, but because deliberate destruction compounded their already small print history.

Recollection and Aftermath

The Republic’s place in the novel is thus pieced together from different kinds of testimony: a caretaker’s limited report about the Aldayas, Fernando’s retrospective account of class and schooling, and Isaac’s history of the publisher and the threatened books. These accounts do not provide a comprehensive political chronicle. Instead, they show how a historical period enters private and cultural memory through specific losses: a family’s fortunes, an institution’s former exclusivity, and a publisher’s fragile backlist.

The later fate of the Carax novels sharpens that connection between upheaval and cultural survival. A secretary named Nuria had independently rescued one copy of each title before the warehouse fire, preserving books that would otherwise have been nearly erased. Much later, Gustavo Barceló reissued three recovered novels in one volume, which sold 342 copies—still far behind that year’s bestseller. The sequence links the Republic-era publishing history to a longer pattern in which Carax’s work moves from low sales and threatened destruction to scarcity, renewed attention, and limited republication.