Lluís Companys i Jover
Lluís Companys i Jover (born June 21, 1882 in El Tarròs , † October 15, 1940 in Barcelona ) was a Catalan lawyer , politician , party leader of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC, Catalan for "Republican Left of Catalonia") and from 1933 to 1940 the second modern Prime Minister of the Catalan government ( Generalitat de Catalunya ). He was deposed between 1934 and 1936, fled to France in 1939 and after his extradition by the German occupation forces to the Francoist regime in Spain, he was executed in a fast-track trial in Barcelona.
Life
Companys came from the Catalan Pyrenees . His parents Josep Companys i Fontanet and Maria Lluïsa de Jover were farmers .
Companys graduated from the University of Barcelona with a law degree and got involved in politics at an early age. From 1906, after the burning of Catalan magazines by the military and the entry into force of a new law on jurisdiction, he helped found several movements for the autonomy of Catalonia . He was arrested fifteen times in his life. After the Tragic Week (Setmana Tràgica) in the summer of 1909, he was classified in the police records as a "dangerous individual".
Together with the lawyer Francesc Layret (* 1880) Companys embodied the working class wing of the Partit Republicà Català ("Catalan Republican Party"). In 1917 Companys was elected to the city parliament of Barcelona. In November 1920 he was arrested along with other union leaders and deported to the Castell de la Mola prison in Maó , Menorca . When Layret tried to take over his defense, he was murdered. In the general election of December 1920 Companys was elected MP for Sabadell in the place of the murdered Layret and released from prison because of his immunity .
During the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera , he was editor-in-chief of La Terra magazine .
Because he was arrested again, he was unable to attend the 1931 conference at which the ERC was founded as a rallying party of the republican left. However, he was elected to the alliance's executive committee as a representative of the Republican Party. The Company's close links with the world of work and the trade union movement helped to raise the profile of the ERC as a left-wing party.
Second republic
In the local elections of April 12, 1931, he was elected mayor of Barcelona as a member of the ERC. On April 14th, he proclaimed the Spanish Republic for Catalonia from the balcony of the City Hall . In 1931 he moved into the Spanish Parliament as a member of Barcelona , where he stood up as leader of the ERC for the Statute of Autonomy and the greatest possible autonomy for Catalonia. From June to November 1933 he was Minister of the Navy. From the end of 1932 he also held the post of President of the Parliament of Catalonia. He also continued his journalistic work and was editor-in-chief of the magazine La Humanitat , the official body of the ERC , from 1931 to 1934 .
On June 12, 1933, he was appointed President of the Generalitat de Catalunya , succeeding Francesc Macià . In 1934 he proposed the controversial law on contracts for agricultural workers, which led to conflict with the large landowners and the right-wing conservative central government. As a reaction to the entry of the right-wing CEDA into the Spanish government, on October 6, 1934, he proclaimed the independent Republic of Catalonia within a (though nonexistent) “Federal Republic of Spain”. Then the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia from 1932 was repealed and the entire Catalan government was arrested by the commander of the 4th Division of the Spanish Army, Captain General Domingo Batet. Batet was himself a Catalan and had the uprising suppressed militarily within about ten hours on behalf of the central government under Prime Minister Niceto Alcalá Zamora , although Companys initially wanted to win him over to work with his government. Batet fought two years later in the civil war against the rebellious Spanish national forces under Francisco Franco and was shot by them after his capture.
When the Catalan Republic was crushed on October 7, 1934, a total of 80 people died. The events coincided with the revolutionary general strike throughout Spanish territory and the miners' uprising in Asturias . The relatively low death toll is due on the one hand to General Batet's actions and on the other hand to the fact that Companys had refused to arm anarchist militias that pursued political goals other than those of his Left Party. Companys was first imprisoned on the warship Uruguay in the port of Barcelona and later transferred to Madrid, where he was sentenced, along with the entire Catalan government, to 30 years of severe imprisonment, which he served in the province of Cádiz .
Civil war
In 1936, Companys was released from prison after the Popular Front won the elections . From Barcelona he organized the resistance in Catalonia against the uprising of the right-wing military on July 17, 1936. He appointed Captain Frederic Escofet as commissioner for public order in Catalonia and, as head of government of the Catalan government, tried to unite the Catalan parties and trade unions that supported him and to direct the defense against the advancing Spanish national forces. However, this proved very difficult because of the tensions between the communists and socialists united in the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC) on the one hand and the anarchists of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), on the other hand, who were supported by the left-wing socialist POUM . The disputes between the various left-wing groups in Barcelona, which at times escalated to a "civil war within a civil war", were described by eyewitness George Orwell in his famous contemporary witness report Mein Katalonien (1938).
Despite the tension in the situation marked by numerous murders in the days after the unsuccessful coup d'état, he allowed 5,000 people who were considered hostile to the republic to leave the port of Barcelona on foreign ships because he could not guarantee their safety. His intercession also saved the life of the Archbishop of Tarragona , Francisco de Asís Vidal . Vidal was one of the few Spanish church princes who did not support the rebellious national Spaniards, but was nevertheless to be shot by anarchist FAI militias.
From October 1937, Companys had a series of clashes with the Barcelona-based republican government under Juan Negrín . After the occupation of Lleida in April 1938, he complained to the Spanish Prime Minister about arbitrary measures taken by the Spanish government against Catalonia and the disregard of the Catalan government.
Exile and death
After the occupation of Barcelona by Spanish national troops on February 5, 1939, he fled across the French border to Perpignan and later moved to Paris to work in the Catalan government in exile. Despite the danger that threatened him from the German occupation , he remained in France and spent his last time in freedom in La Baule-les-Pins ( Loire-Atlantique ). He wanted to maintain contact with his son Lluís Companys i Micó (1911–1956), who suffered from a mental illness. In August 1940, Lluís Companys was arrested by the Gestapo near Nantes and extradited to French-speaking Spain. After imprisonment and torture in Madrid, he was brought to Barcelona at the beginning of October and sentenced to death by a special court on October 14, 1940 in a one-day express trial . He was executed on October 15th at 6:30 am on Montjuïc in Barcelona . He refused to wear a blindfold when he was brought before the firing squad . The last thing he said was: “Per Catalunya!” (“For Catalonia!”). At the cemetery Montjuïc Cemetery he was buried.
Honors
Selection:
- The Barcelona Olympic Stadium on Montjuïc, built in 1929, has been named after him since 2001.
- In several cities of Catalonia streets and squares are named after him, for example the Passeig de Lluís Companys in the old town of Barcelona , the Rambla President Lluís Companys in Tarragona or the Passeig de Lluis Companys in his birthplace El Tarròs .
literature
- Josep Benet: Lluis Companys, Presidente de Cataluña, fusilado . Ediciones Península, Barcelona 2005, ISBN 84-8307-707-8 (Spanish).
- Arnau Gonzàlez i Vilalta: Lluís Companys. Un home de Govern . Editorial Base, Barcelona 2009, ISBN 978-84-92437-26-9 (Catalan).
- Paul Preston : Great statesman or unscrupulous opportunist? Anglo-Saxon interpretations of Lluís Companys , in: Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 92 (2015). Pp. 493-509.
- Josep Sánchez Cervelló: Lluís Companys i Jover . In the S. (Ed.): En el combate por la Historia. La República, la guerra civil, el franquismo . Ediciones de Pasado y Presente, Barcelona 2012, ISBN 978-84-939143-9-4 . Pp. 759-772 (Spanish).
- Enric Vila: Lluís Companys. La veritat no necessita màrtirs. Crònica d'un drama personal i polític . La Esfera de los Libros, Barcelona 2006, ISBN 84-9734-528-2 (Catalan).
Web links
- Webpage for Lluís Companys i Jover
- Biography of Lluís Companys i Jover (Spanish)
- Newspaper article about Lluís Companys i Jover in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
- Moisés Prieto: Companys i Jover, Lluís , in: Kurt Groenewold , Alexander Ignor, Arnd Koch (Eds.): Lexicon of Political Criminal Trials , Online, as of December 2019.
Individual evidence
- ^ Jorge M. Reverte: Cuando Cataluña fue independiente poco más de diez horas. In: El País , October 7, 2017, accessed October 9, 2017.
- ↑ a b El PP blande el Código Penal y recuerda a Puigdemont que puede acabar como Companys. In: La Vanguardia , October 9, 2017, accessed the same day.
- ↑ Jimmy Burns: Barca: a people's passion . Bloomsbury, 2000, p. 126.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Companys i Jover, Lluís |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Companys, Lluís; Companys y Jever, Luis |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Catalan politician and chairman of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 21, 1882 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | El Tarròs |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 15, 1940 |
| Place of death | Barcelona |