I have slowly gone through the extensive biography of Francesc Cambó and I have looked exhaustively at the history of Catalonia and Spain in the first part of the last century. Borja de Riquer dedicates more than 900 pages to drawing a character with many lights and shadows, projected in the time in which he lived and of which he was a main character since he broke into Catalan and Spanish politics more than a hundred years ago. .
Ernest Lluch quoted Benedetto Croce when he referred to history as the past that does not pass and others expressed it by saying that the past never dies, it is not even the past. Borja de Riquer tells us that the past always speaks to us and we don’t always want to listen to it.
The author affirms that Cambó was one of the most prepared and intelligent right-wing politicians in Spain. He was the best informed and most documented government man in Spain at the time. Despite his political talent, his great personal wealth, his dominance in Catalan and Spanish politics, his invaluable cultural patronage and his seductive gifts, Cambó ended his days in Buenos Aires in 1947, isolated, without the cause of Franco to which he defended with money, influence and propaganda returned the services rendered. End of story for the great frustrated architect of the transformation of Spain from the Catalan perspective, of which he had been the most prepared man of his time.
He was Minister of Development and Finance in two presidencies of Antonio Maura and when Alfonso XIII offered him to form a government, when the monarchy was mortally wounded after the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, he asked him that he had to stop being a Catalanist to preside over the government from Spain. He categorically refused it. His prominence came to a halt with the arrival of the Republic, which caught him on the wrong foot and would no longer recover politically.
Borja de Riquer, apart from Cambó’s extensive biographical script, ends with a historical reflection on why the political projects that have been born from Catalonia to modify the place of Catalans within Spain have failed. He lists four initiatives that were configured as a reaction to the existing political system, notably centralist, and the predominance of the vision of Spain as the only nation.
The author refers to its four main promoters: Prat de la Riba-Cambó, Macià-Companys, Pujol and Maragall. None of these four processes has been the same. And none have had a happy ending for those who brought it about. The fifth, the most recent, has been a disaster for everyone, a new frustration that started with great collective emotions and is now in a phase of internal struggles within the independence movement, which is more fought than ever between those who promoted the process.
The responsibility of Spain in not wanting to seriously face the Catalan question in the last century and a half is not minor. From Catalonia the machine has been forced but from the hegemony based in Madrid it has been tried to standardize peoples that for centuries have not lost their personality or their culture. Ortega’s words cannot be valid: “Spain is something made by Castile, and there are reasons to suspect that, in general, only Castilian heads have adequate organs to perceive the great problem of integral Spain.” Start again.
