Description
Exile is a subject that has not yet been sufficiently explored, but its study and recognition are fundamental to understanding the keys to historical development, in our case, in Catalonia. Certainly, the Civil War (1936-1939) and the subsequent Franco regime represented a real tragedy for the Catalan journalism profession, which lost more than 80 per cent of its professionals to death and exile.
At the Third Conference on Journalism and Exile, held in June 2025, the content of which we publish here, the Civil War and Franco's repression were analysed from different perspectives through various figures: Isidro Corbinos, presented by Josep M. Casasús; Irene Polo, presented by Glòria Santa-Maria; and Agustí Cabruja, studied by Josep M. Figueres; while Albert Balcells traces the memory of exiles and the media affected during the period 1936-1937.
The book opens with an introductory chapter by Lluís Costa, in which he defends the need to recover the memory of exile. The notion of exile is inevitably associated with nostalgia, fear, uprooting... and always leads us to evoke dramatic situations. Exile often represents the end of a world, the destruction of hopes and dreams. As Walter Benjamin reflected, ‘happiness always seems to remain in the past’.
