The creation of new, walled, cemeteries in many European cities in the first decade of the nineteenth-century was the result of the confluence of specific social and economic processes brought by industrialization. The new cemeteries are both public and private spaces of the new bourgeois city. Urban, modern cemeteries are said to be a critical symbolic adjunct to the city.

The lecture looks at some aspects of Barcelona's modernization (1819-1919) from the privileged point of view of the cemeteries the city built during those same years.

This seminar is jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University.