Frederic Pujulà i Vallès

Who was Frederic Pujulà i Vallès?

Frederic Pujulà i Vallès was a Catalan journalist, dramatist, and a passionate Esperantist and contributor to the field of Esperanto literature. Born in Palamós, Catalonia, he travelled through Europe and stayed for a long time in Paris. He was involved in Joventut, the best "modernisme" review of Catalonia. During World War I, he fought with the French army.

Vallès wrote "Homes Artificials" which is the first short science fiction novel in the canon of Catalan literature. It was originally published in 1912, by Biblioteca Joventut in Barcelona. In this novel, the protagonist Doctor Pericart wants to obtain a new society, unsocialized and perfect. Transformed into a demigod, he creates a group of individualized androids, which will be the seeds of the new society.

In 1914, he was in Paris with his first wife, where he was organizing en International Convention of Esperanto. When that very year the 1914-1918 war broke out, he enlisted as an infantry soldier and took part at the first battles against the German army. Later on, as he could read and write the Morse alphabet, he was transferred to Communications between detachments of the French Army. It was during this period that, as a war correspondent of the daily paper "El Diluvio" he wrote a series of articles in Spanish about how was life in the trenches. When he returned to Barcelona, he was appointed Staff editor of that newspaper, which was favourable to a federal system for Spain. When in 1941 the fascist armies entered into Barcelona, they closed "El Diluvio", because Franco considered Federalism to be an offense. Consequently, Frederic Pujulà Vallès was sent to prison, together with the owner of the paper and the owner's two sons. Frederic Pujulà received the death penalty, which was two weeks later conmuted to twenty years and one day. At the end, he was set free two years and two months since he was imprisoned.