Josep Dencàs did not lie. In the months prior to the events of October 1934, the then Minister of Government had made the necessary contacts to obtain weapons to prepare an independence insurrection in Catalonia. He was helped in the efforts by the head of Ordre Públic services, Miquel Badia, the other main leader of the Juventudes de Esquerra Republicana-Estat Català, the separatist branch of ERC, the government party.
The weapons, however, did not reach Catalonia. Lluís Companys did not make it easier for Dencàs to obtain the money necessary to purchase it. The intention of the president of the Generalitat was, therefore, to proclaim the Estat Català within the Spanish Federal Republic and achieve an effect similar to that of April 14, 1931. A movement of citizen adhesion to the political pronouncement, without going to a confrontation armed, as Dencàs and Badia were prepared.
Based on unpublished documentation from the French National Archives, this is demonstrated in the article Arming the insurrection. The Swiss plot of Catalan separatism in the revolution of October 1934, which is published this week by the author of these lines in the academic journal of contemporary history Ayer, in an online preview of the next issue. La Vanguardia publishes, exclusively, images of the French report Traffic d'armes avec les révolutionnaires espagnols that corroborates it.
At the end of the spring of 1934, in the context of friction between the governments of the Generalitat and the Republic due to the disagreement over the approval in the Parliament of Catalonia of the Cultivation Contracts law, Dencàs – who was Minister of Health i Assistència Social – took interim charge of the Department of Government, which it longed for, following the sudden death of its head, Joan Selves. With the death of the Manresan, 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 it, the Government gave in to the pressure of the Jerec to gain control of this portfolio and thus easily place its young militants in the police positions of 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 bluffing. 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 minister met in Madrid with the Minister of War, Diego Hidalgo Durán. After praising the Republic and telling him that he needed weapons to defend it from the anarcho-syndicalist threat, he presented him with a request. He asked for permission to acquire around twenty 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.
In parallel, Dencàs reorganized the somatén and had weapons collected in Barcelona. By this means he would have collected 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 Switzerland 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 shady quintet formed by a former gendarme and former 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, merchants 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 Dencàs would have found it excessive, 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 had 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.” ”.
In mid-September, the factory was ready to ship weapons, but the Greblers gave up on the transaction because the money did not arrive. Dencàs encountered Companys' resistance to providing him with funds for this purpose. Despite this, according to the French police, the separatist had bought some weapons with his own money. Seeing that the purchase was interrupted, Morard and Pérolini traveled to Barcelona to find out the reason and try to arrange a direct delivery of the weapons.
It was too late. On October 4, Alejandro Lerroux's government accepted the entry of three ministers from the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (CEDA) into the executive. The danger that the anti-republican right would threaten the republican achievements of the first biennium or even the existence of the regime itself, lit the fuse of several insurrectional movements in Spain, especially in Asturias and Madrid with the participation of factions of the PSOE, the CNT and worker forces.
In Catalonia, while Morard tried to save the negotiations, everything fell apart. On the night of October 6, 1934, Lluís Companys proclaimed the Estat Català. That night the clashes began between the separatist forces commanded by Dencàs and Badia from the Government Department with the army of the Republic. According to the councilor, there were 3,400 armed men in Barcelona. Half of what he had initially planned.
The result is known. The next day, early in the morning, Domènec Batet controlled the insurrection, after even planning to bomb the Palau de la Generalitat. (La Vanguardia explained it on June 22.) The Captain General of Catalonia arrested the Companys government. Except Dencàs, who fled to France, as well as 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 for the 4.5 million that they asked for the Mausers.
In January 1935, Spain requested the extradition of Dencàs. The French Republic denied it. However, according to the French police, he would have allocated 117,000 pesetas to the purchase of weapons. In March, the Barcelona Court tried Calveras and Pérolini for arms smuggling and preparing the rebellion. The young woman accepted the role of her intermediary and added that Dencàs had also gone to Belgium to acquire weapons. An extreme to be confirmed. In fact, seeing that the contact in Barcelona was cooling, Pérolini had traveled to Marseille to try to sell the game to contacts in Morocco. After listening to them, failing to get to the bottom of the plot and having no tangible proof of the facts, the court acquitted them and set them free.
While that was being resolved, Morard, on behalf of the Oerlikon factory, traveled to Paris to sell 80,000 rifles and cartridges to the right-wing paramilitary organization Association des Croix-de-Feu of Colonel François de la Rocque. Informed of the operation, the French Sûreté aborted the operation. That the quintet with whom Dencàs and Badia contacted were no small thing is demonstrated by the fact that French intelligence also linked the Swiss with the supply of weapons that had arrived in Asturias to supply the Octobrist insurgent leaders there, some of them socialists. .
In 1935, while Companys was in prison and Dencàs in Paris, ERC propaganda loyal to the president fabricated the argument that the separatist councilor was an inept man who had pushed for the proclamation of the Estat Català without having prepared the military aspect of the insurrection. He defended himself by giving his version of the events in the work El 6 d’octubre des del Palau de Governació. He explained that he sent “emissaries to different countries in Europe to contract the purchase of weapons.” Nothing else. 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 the person who aborted the entry of the arms group into Catalonia was Lluís Companys by denying funds to his minister. The president pursued a theatrical movement, not a bloodthirsty one.
