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 Les Corts stadium. Naturally, this bothered many culés, who in a match between Barça and the British Royal Navy team gave a monumental whistle for the national anthem.
It's a familiar scene. In retaliation, the authorities closed the Barça stadium 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: Dictatorship, populism and nation, an admirable work that is impossible to read without mentally going back and forth, over and over again, from the Spain of a century ago to the current one.
It is also not easy to stop thinking about the present day by reading El rey patriota, by Moreno Luzón, about the reign of Alfonso XIII. Moreno Luzón draws the trajectory of a monarch who, in the first years of his reign, was considered by many as a potential factor for the regeneration of the worn-out political system of the nineteenth-century Restoration.
He was a young, friendly, popular king, who traveled tirelessly around the Peninsula, who emerged unscathed, without losing his composure, from several terrorist attacks - one of them on his wedding day -, who mixed with the people and who did not He wanted to limit himself to being an English-style constitutional monarch, because he believed that the dynastic turn system imposed by Cánovas del Castillo was not enough and required a thorough renovation and that it was his turn to promote it.
However, as the years passed, all those hopes evaporated and Alfonso XIII became an obstacle to the regeneration of the country. The excessive desire to intervene in politics, the penchant for shady businesses and, above all, the support for the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera made him lose all credibility. He ended up having to leave Spain before the imminent proclamation of the Republic and died in exile, abandoned by everyone, including his own, who considered him jinxed.
It's hard not to make comparisons. Alejandro Quiroga's book about Primo de Rivera also boils with resonances that take us to closer moments in time. The Primo dictatorship was a dress rehearsal for Francoism. The dictator managed to project the image of a good-natured and paternalistic ruler, popular, promoter of public works, but he had no scruples in applying the law of escapes and in murdering anarchists, imprisoning political opponents, consenting to the torture of unionists and militants of left-wing parties, massacring the civilian population in the Moroccan protectorate with chemical weapons and breaking the laws when it suited them.
Primo de Rivera matured the plan for the coup d'état while he was captain general of Catalonia. It is surprising to see the extent to which his bloodthirsty methods to combat unionism and anarchism, supported by his friend and collaborator Martínez Anido, one of the most sinister characters of the Spanish 20th century, had the support of the Catalan ruling classes.
In 1923, the president of the Mancomunitat – precursor of the current Generalitat –, Josep Puig i Cadafalch, supported his coup d'état, innocently believing that the dictator would strengthen autonomism, as he had promised. Primo's response was the suppression of the Mancomunitat and the prohibition of the use of Catalan in education (in 1936, Cambó and many leading men of the Lliga also supported Franco with the same hope and Franco repaid them with a similar coin).
From different angles, both books describe political and economic oligarchies and military and ecclesiastical establishments that acted as if the country belonged to them, as if no one except them had the right to govern it, or even to have an opinion on how to do it, ready for anything – literally – to retain exclusive power.
The Catalan question pulsates in many pages and that can make us think that history is like the famous dinosaur of Monterroso, that we wake up and it is still there. The difficulties of royal visits to Barcelona, the demands of the Catalan parties, the will of the authorities to stop the public use of Catalan, constantly refer to more recent episodes.
But the lesson that emerges from reading, especially Alejandro Quiroga's book, is that attempts to subject Catalonia to a suffocating centralism, to Spanishize it, are always counterproductive and, as a reaction, generate a contrary movement of sovereign tenor. The closure of the Barça field 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 club's membership Barça became an unequivocal and non-punishable way of expressing opposition to the military regime.
The perspective of these hundred years also shows that, no matter how extraordinary the parallels between what was happening then and recent history, the course of events is changing. The tension between Catalonia and the rest of Spain is still as alive as during the reign of Alfonso XIII, but now, fortunately, we are giving ourselves a new opportunity to channel it. Furthermore, now the defenders of exclusive Spanish nationalism have no choice but to give up power when the ballot box and parliamentary arithmetic dictate, even if it is as reluctant as in recent months. Time passes slowly, but not in vain. Happy Holidays.
