Josep Dencàs did not lie. In the months before the events of October 1934, the then Minister of Government had made the necessary contacts to obtain the weapons to prepare an independence insurrection in Catalonia. In the management he was helped by the head of Public Order services, Miquel Badia, the other main leader of the Joventuts d’Esquerra Republicana-Estat Català, the separatist branch of ERC, the governing party.
The armament, however, did not reach Catalonia. Lluís Companys did not make it easy for Dencàs to obtain the necessary money so that he could acquire it. The intention of the president of the Generalitat was, therefore, to proclaim the Catalan State within the Spanish Federal Republic and achieve the effect of April 14, 1931. A movement of citizen adherence to the political pronouncement, without going to a confrontation armed, as Dencàs and Badia were ready.
Based on unpublished documentation from the French National Archives, this is demonstrated in the article Armar la insurrección. The Swiss plot of Catalan separatism in the revolution of October 1934, published this week by those who sign these lines in the academic journal of contemporary history Ayer, in an online preview of the next issue. La Vanguardia publishes, exclusively, images from the report Trafic d’armes avec les révolutionnaires españols Français, which corroborates this.
At the end of the spring of 1934, in the context of the tug-of-war between the governments of the Generalitat and the Republic over the disagreement over the approval in the Parliament of Catalonia of the Law on Farming Contracts, Dencàs – who was councilor of Health and Social Assistance – took over the Governance department, which he so longed for, on an interim basis, following the sudden death of its head, Joan Selves. With the death of Manresà, Companys lost one of his most faithful and valuable men. (This newspaper explained it last March 27).
Dencàs was not a saint of the president’s devotion. On the one hand, by entrusting him with the Government he gave in to the pressure of the Jerecs to gain control of this portfolio and thus easily fit their young militants into police positions in Catalonia. But, on the other hand, by giving control of public order to the figure who represented a more extreme nationalism, he put pressure on Madrid, wanting to show that he was not playing catch. Dencàs himself was convinced that the president had appointed him to organize “the armed resistance of Catalonia” and in the summer of 1934 he proposed to arm 6,000 men.
At the end of August, the councilor met in Madrid with the Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo Durán. After praising the Republic and telling it that it needed arms to defend it from the anarcho-syndicalist threat, he presented it with an instance. He asked permission to acquire twenty long machine guns. The minister, suspecting that the purpose was not to confront the FAI, put it in the drawer as soon as the separatist left his office.
At the same time, Dencàs reorganized the Sometent and had arms collected from Barcelona. In this way he would have managed to collect 1,200 Winchester rifles, 800 Remington rifles, 400 Mauser rifles and about 15,000 pistols of all calibers. When the time came to start the insurrection, he also planned to obtain more weapons and explosives from the barracks of the Sant Andreu artillery park and from the Captaincy of Catalonia, headquarters of the IV Military Region.
He even commissioned, always with the excuse of anarcho-syndicalism, the director of the Hispano Suiza company, Manuel Lassaletta, to create “armored assault vehicles”. A request, however, that was made too late and could not be fulfilled.
Dencàs, however, went further. He established contacts, at least in Switzerland, to buy weapons. His lieutenant, Miquel Badia, and the lawyer of the Department of Justice, Josep Calveras, contacted a murky quintet made up of an ex-gendarme and ex-deputy of the National Council of Geneva, Joseph Morard, and the journalist Fernand Gigon, both owners of a typing office in Geneva, and the girl who ran it, Jeanne Pérolini. And two Swiss of German origin, David and Albert Grebler, traders in Geneva. The object was to obtain 30,000 Mauser rifles of the 1889 model.
Pérolini sent two copies to Calveras as a sample of the material. The price per rifle was 150 pesetas. Altogether, 4.5 million pesetas. As it would have seemed excessive to Dencàs, the smugglers kept the price, but added a hundred cartridges for each rifle purchased. These contacts were made between the end of August and the beginning of September 1934 in Geneva and Barcelona. The rifles should have come from the Swiss factory Oerlikon, based in Zurich, while the three million cartridges, according to the French police report, “belonged to the German firm Rheinmetall, with strong links to the German National Socialist Party” .
By mid-September, the factory was ready for the shipment of weapons, but the Greblers gave up on the transaction because the money was not forthcoming. Dencàs found the resistance of Companys to provide him with funds for this purpose. However, according to the French police, the separatist would have bought some weapons with his own money. Seeing that the purchase was interrupted, Morard and Pérolini went to Barcelona to find out the reason and try to arrange a direct delivery of the weapons.
It was too late. On October 4, the government of Alejandro Lerroux accepted the entry of three ministers from the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (CEDA) into the executive. The danger that the anti-republican right threatened the republican achievements of the first biennium or even the existence of the regime itself, ignited the fuse of several insurrectionary movements throughout Spain. Mainly in Asturias and Madrid with the participation of factions of the PSOE, the CNT and labor forces.
In Catalonia, while Morard tried to save the negotiations, everything was rushed. On the evening of October 6, 1934, Lluís Companys proclaimed the Catalan State. That night, clashes began between the separatist forces commanded by Dencàs and Badia from the Department of Governance with the army of the Republic. According to the minister, there were 3,400 armed men in Barcelona. Half of what I had originally planned.
The result is known. Early the next day, Domènec Batet controlled the insurrection, after even planning to bombard the Palace of the Generalitat. (La Vanguardia explained it on June 22). The captain general of Catalonia arrested the Companys government. Except for Dencàs, who fled to France, as did Badia. Morard had returned to Switzerland. Instead, at the end of October the Spanish police arrested Calveras and Pérolini. In November 1934 the Court of Constitutional Guarantees accused Dencàs of embezzling 37,000 pesetas from the Barcelona charity office and 8,000 more from the security services to divert them to the insurrection. A low amount to deal with the 4.5 million that the users were asking for.
In January 1935, Spain requested the extradition of Dencàs. The French Republic refused it. However, according to the French police, he would have allocated 117,000 pesetas to the purchase of weapons. In March, the Court of Barcelona tried Calveras and Pérolini for arms smuggling and preparation of the rebellion. The young woman accepted her role as an intermediary and added that Dencàs had also traveled to Belgium to acquire weapons. One end to confirm. In fact, seeing that the contact in Barcelona was cooling off, Pérolini had traveled to Marseille to try to sell the game to contacts in Morocco. After listening to them, not removing the entanglement of the plot and having no tangible proof of the facts, the court acquitted them and set them at liberty.
While this was being resolved, Morard, on behalf of the Oerlikon factory, went to Paris to sell 80,000 rifles and cartridges to the right-wing paramilitary Association des Croix-de-Feu of Colonel François de la Rocque. Informed of the operation, the French Sûreté aborted the operation. That the quintet contacted by Dencàs and Badia was no small matter is shown by the fact that French intelligence also linked the Swiss to the supply of weapons that had arrived in Asturias to supply the Octobrist insurgent leaders there, some of which, socialists
During 1935, while Companys was in prison and Dencàs in Paris, ERC propaganda loyal to the president manufactured the argument that the separatist councilor was an inept person who had pushed for the proclamation of the Catalan State without having prepared the military aspect of the insurrection. He defended himself by giving his version of the events in the play El 6 d’october des Palau de Governació. He explained that he sent “emissaries to different countries in Europe to contract the purchase of armaments”. Nothing more. Now we know that Josep Dencàs did not lie. And that, at the very least, he established contacts in Switzerland, although he could have done so in Belgium as well. And we also know that Lluís Companys was the one who aborted the entry of the arms party into Catalonia by denying funds to his advisor. The president was pursuing a theatrical move, not a bloodthirsty one.
