A large white teddy bear, a couple of Buddhas, a mother and a daughter in a painting that wants to be cubist, a porcelain nativity scene with kings adore baby Jesus, a paperweight in the shape of a horse's head, some cameras with many portraits on the back and the framed diploma of the French Legion of Honor of Josep Maria de Porcioles. When the Republic of the neighboring country awarded it to him more than sixty years ago, little did the then-Franco mayor of Barcelona imagine that the distinction would end up hanging on a wall of the permanent antiquarian market of Sant Cugat, the Mercantic.
In 1958, France had been bogged down in the Algerian war of independence for four years. After a succession of weak governments and an out-of-control army, in May Generals Jacques Massu and Raoul Salan led an attempted coup in Algiers. The mess opened the doors to an urgent solution. The French clamored for a man of providence and Charles de Gaulle returned to power to head a unity government and gain full power to usher in the Fifth Republic.
Spain was also living a particular moment. She had been fighting against Morocco for months to maintain the sovereignty of the Ifni enclave. And what's more, it had been a year since Franco's technocratic government, which would soon launch the national economic stabilization plan, had begun to function. In this context, both countries reconsidered their mutual relationship and began a policy of rapprochement.
“There is no need to ossify with anachronistic rivalries in foreign policy. We must look for what unites us and apply and cultivate it. The more understanding there is between the Spanish and French people, the closer and clearer our interests will be revealed to us,” the dictator then declared to Le Figaro.
The commercial prospects and the common and crossed interest in North Africa made the Francoist ministers begin to land in Paris. Within this framework, on June 9, the Republic appointed Porcioles an official of the national order of the Legion of Honor. A few weeks later, the Comité France Espagne received him in the French capital.
The mayor of Barcelona, as noted by the historian Josep Lluís Martín Berbois in Josep Maria de Porcioles. Biography of a singular life (2021), he was a Francophile and dreamed of the idea of turning his city into a Paris of the south.
The press, however, did not echo the distinction too much. La Vanguardia made only a brief one. He stressed that it was a "tribute to his personal and official activity in favor of a greater and more complete rapprochement between France and Spain through the intense relations established by the mayor in Barcelona both in the fields of culture and tourism and the sport".
It was clear. He did not receive her for any personal merit, but for her political approach. At the end of that June 1958, the mayor of Madrid, José Finat, the Count of Mayalde, also received the Legion of Honor.
As this newspaper has learned, the title of Porcioles reached the Mercantic in June 2021 from the dismantling of the office of a former president of Futbol Club Barcelona. The Captain Patch store sells it for just over three hundred euros. "Only French visitors take notice, who are the ones most familiar with the Legion of Honor," explains the owner of the establishment, Francesc Cantín.
On the same wall where the former mayor's diploma hangs, a large painting of Charlot leers at him. He wonders, languid, which of the two will find a buyer before
