The urn that guarded the heart of President Francesc Macià opens the exhibition “The foundations of self-government. Montserrat Tarradellas i Macià Archive” which opens today in the Provincial Council of Barcelona. A tour of the immense documentary archive of President Josep Tarradellas, generated above all during his exile between 1939 and 1977, which wants to symbolize the guiding thread of Catalan self-government, a trajectory that has not been broken since 1932 until today. This is evidenced by more than 143,000 letters, two million documents, tens of thousands of photographs. And a heart
The historian Joan Esculies, curator of the exhibition, tells that after the death of President Macià, in 1933, his close nucleus decided to extract the heart and keep it in an urn with formaldehyde and galvanized. Neither this story nor his outcome is new, because Tarradellas explained it as a confidentiality to those who were going to visit him in Saint-Martin-le-Beau. Confidence after confidence, a good part of the political clandestinity learned about the incidents of the ballot box, which, without the heart becoming completely galvanized, remained during the Republic deposited in a safe in the Palau de Generalitat. Surely, they wanted to emulate the tradition of the monarchs of the house of Hasburg.
In 1939, together with the archives of the Generalitat, it was decided to evacuate the heart to prevent it from falling into enemy hands, and they followed the same path first on the Côte d’Azur and then in Saint-Martin-le-Beau when due to the Nazi occupation they moved to the house that Tarradellas’s parents had in this town. At the end of the Second World War, the minister in exile -he was not yet president- decided to deposit the ballot box in a safe deposit box at the Societé Génerale de Tours entity. In 1965, the president received a call warning him that a strange liquid was coming out of the urn.
Tarradellas took the urn home, guarding this guiding and symbolic thread of history, which returned to Catalonia in 1979 and the heart was deposited together with the mortal remains of its owner, Francesc Macià.
This retrospective journey through the Tarradellas archive begins with the urn, with a reproduction of the office where he wrote, dictated and read the thousands of letters that make up a political and cultural mosaic of decades of exile. And that he kept and preserved knowing its importance. The archive bears the name of his daughter Montserrat, the only one who could access his office, and is deposited in the Poblet Monastery. Among the many letters, there is correspondence with Jorge Negrín, Indalecio Prieto, Jesús María Leizaola, with the secretariat of Charles de Gaulle, Jordi Pujol, Adolfo Suárez or Alfonso Armada. He also took special care of the relationship with the cultural world.
Esculies recalls that Tarradellas did not want to sell his archive to a foundation close to Jordi Pujol and preferred to sell his last property in 1973 before parting with this legacy. The political discrepancies were already evident.
The 1932 electoral convocation decree can be seen in the exhibition, the appointment of Tarradellas as minister, the image of the gasoline drums where the files and the “heart” were kept and buried by Tarradellas’ father during the Nazi occupation of France . Objects and images that trace remnants of a history deposited in the Poblet monastery since the 1980s. A place chosen to preserve this historical thread due to its relationship with the Crown of Aragon -there are royal tombs of the Generalitat in the Middle Ages-, to also keep him away from consulted carried out more by curiosity than by analytical will. And because of the role of political neutrality, recalls Esculies, of the Cistercian community in front of the role that Montserrat had
