This week the book by the journalist Manel Pérez with the title La burguesía catalana is presented in Barcelona. Portrait of the elite who lost the game. The expectation generated is understandable, not only because of a very eloquent title, but because of the author's status, a journalist responsible for decades for the Economy section of La Vanguardia and, therefore, a scholar of the ins and outs of Catalan business and a good connoisseur of first person of the protagonists.
In his introduction, the author draws the recent history of Catalonia, consuming the first ten pages to present his central thesis: that the Catalan economic power – which he identifies with the Catalan bourgeoisie – seeks, after the independence process, a political strategy that rebuilds his relations with Spain and with the Catalans themselves, from a position of decline and after realizing – surely too late – that the elite he represents was out of the race for too long.
The race for power. Without abandoning a direct and concise literary style, the story passes quickly before the reader's eyes as a choral plot full of characters, without us having to stop to reread the subordinate clauses. It is a story that is both detailed and comprehensive, that does not lose the thread, without harassing with philosophical interpretations of the facts and that leaves the reader's discretion freely.
Maybe not all of them are there, but all of the ones in the book played one role or another. At first, it might seem that this essay intends to tell a well-known story, explained before from different angles by other authors; but in my opinion, it contains a more complete perspective of the whole, with unpublished details, practically unknown to the ordinary citizen.
There, the invisible threads that connect families, politics, the economy and the power of the State are unraveled, that silent Leviathan that hits very hard at the end, suddenly, as if no one had foreseen it, as if some kind of fatum had descended on the heads of an entire country, which is surprising despite the growing restlessness that dominated a difficult decade until its end. And the financial panic.
Some passages reveal a literary style with great descriptive restraint – I would almost say with the coldness of a Truman Capote recounting the enormous tension experienced in private and official offices. And also the nervousness of people in Catalonia, but also in Madrid, and throughout Spain. A chill that ran through the entire Catalan society and whose effects on all of it cracked political and economic self-confidence, while dividing it into two halves. And in relation to this tension, fear led thousands of companies to move their headquarters overnight, while pushing small savers to save their bank accounts beyond the Ebro.
A story that is followed with growing interest until we reach where we are today, probably an unfinished place, a strange point where there are no sutures with the past and no future solutions are yet in sight that will turn the last decade into true and definitive history. This is a book not only to understand how it was, but to meditate on the processes of deconstruction of power – political and economic – and perhaps its reconstruction in other lands. And perhaps we will also read this chronicle as a reflection. How collective dreams are created and vanish without necessarily having died forever.
