In 1925, during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the authorities prohibited Barça from using Catalan in official documents and forced the club to remove the Catalan flag from the Corts stadium. Naturally, this upset many supporters, who in a match between Barça and the British Royal Navy team gave a monumental whistle to the national anthem.
It’s a familiar scene. In retaliation, the authorities closed the Barça field for six months and forced the president, Hans Gamper, to resign. In his place they put the businessman Arcadi Balaguer, a personal friend of the dictator.
This is explained by the historian Alejandro Quiroga in Miguel Primo de Rivera: Dictadura, populismo y nación, an admirable work that is impossible to read without going back and forth mentally, once and again, from the Spain of a century ago to the current
It is also not easy to stop thinking about the present when reading El rey patriota, by Moreno Luzón, about the reign of Alfonso XIII. Moreno Luzón traces the trajectory of a monarch who, during the first years of his reign, was considered by many to be a potential factor in the much-needed regeneration of the worn-out political system of the Restoration.
He was a young, nice, popular king, who traveled tirelessly around the Peninsula, who came out unscathed, without losing his cool, from a few terrorist attacks – one of which was on his wedding day -, who mixed with the people and that he did not want to limit himself to being a constitutional monarch in the English style, because he believed that the dynastic turn system imposed by Cánovas del Castillo was no longer sufficient and demanded a thorough renovation and that it was up to him to promote -the.
Over the years, however, all those hopes evaporated and Alfonso XIII became an obstacle to the regeneration of the country. The excessive desire to intervene in politics, the fondness for murky business and, above all, the support for the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera made him lose all credibility. He ended up having to leave Spain due to the imminent proclamation of the Republic and died in exile, abandoned by everyone, including his own, who considered him a blunder.
It’s hard not to make comparisons. Alejandro Quiroga’s book about Primo de Rivera also boils with resonances that refer us to closer moments in time. Primo’s dictatorship was a general essay of Francoism. The dictator managed to project the image of a good and paternalistic, popular ruler, promoter of public works, but he had no qualms about applying the fugitive law and murdering anarchists, imprisoning political opponents, consenting to the torture of trade unionists and militants of left-wing parties, massacring the civilian population in the Moroccan protectorate with chemical weapons and flouting laws when it suited him.
Primo de Rivera matured the coup d’état plan while he was captain general of Catalonia. It is surprising to see the extent to which his bloodthirsty methods of combating trade unionism and anarchism, seconded by his friend and collaborator Martínez Anido, one of the most sinister figures of the Spanish 20th century, were supported by the Catalan ruling classes .
In 1923, the president of the Commonwealth –precursor of the current Generalitat–, Josep Puig i Cadafalch, supported the coup, innocently believing that the dictator would strengthen autonomy, as he had promised. Primo’s response was the suppression of the Commonwealth and the prohibition of the use of Catalan in education (in 1936, Cambó and many leaguers also supported Franco with the same hope and Franco paid them with a similar coin).
From different angles, both books describe political and economic oligarchies and military and ecclesiastical estates that acted as if the country belonged to them, as if no one else had the right to rule it, or even to have an opinion on how it should be done -ho, willing to do anything – literally – to retain exclusive power.
The Catalan issue pulsates on many pages and this can make you think that history is like the famous dinosaur of Monterroso, that we wake up and it continues in the same place. The difficulties of the royal visits to Barcelona, ??the demands of the Catalan parties, the will of the authorities to curb the public use of Catalan, are constantly reminiscent of more recent episodes.
But the lesson that emerges from reading, especially from Alejandro Quiroga’s book, is that the attempts to subject Catalonia to a suffocating centralism, to Spanishize it, always backfire and that, as a reaction, generate a contrary movement with a sovereignist tenor. The closing of the Barça camp in 1925 and the election of president-commissioner Balaguer, for example, resulted in a considerable increase in the number of club members, and not because of adherence to the dictator, but, on the contrary, because asking for the Barça card became an unequivocal and non-punishable way of expressing opposition to the military regime.
The perspective of these hundred years also shows that, however extraordinary the parallels between what happened then and recent history, the course of events is changing. The tension between Catalonia and the rest of Spain is still as alive as it was during the reign of Alfonso XIII, but now, fortunately, we are giving ourselves a new opportunity to put it back on track. In addition, now the defenders of nationalism that excludes Spain have no other choice but to cede power when the ballot boxes and parliamentary arithmetic decree it, even if it is as reluctantly as in recent months. Time runs slowly, but not in vain. Happy Holidays.
