Francesc Macia
Francesc Macià i Llussà, who signed as Francisco Maciá until he was 55 years old (Villanueva y Geltrú, September 21, 1859-Barcelona, December 25 1933), was a Spanish politician and military man of Catalan republican and independence ideology, lieutenant colonel of the Army, president of the Generalitat of Catalonia and one of the founders of the Estat Català and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya parties; he was succeeded at the head of the latter by Lluís Companys after his death at the age of 74.
Biography
Born in Villanueva y Geltrú on September 21, 1859, at the age of fifteen he entered the Guadalajara Academy of Engineers. He finished his training after five years and went to Madrid as a lieutenant in the telegraphy section. He is assigned to Seville with the rank of captain (1882) and later to Lérida, where he becomes lieutenant colonel.
He married Eugenia Lamarca in 1888, daughter of the architect and landowner from Lleida, Agapito Lamarca Quintana. In 1896, Lieutenant Colonel Macià volunteered to be transferred to Cuba, a request that was not accepted.
However, he had to leave the military institution after condemning the attack by some army officers on the weekly La Veu de Catalunya in 1905. They attacked the printing press where the weekly was produced where a cartoon had been published that they considered vexatious to the officers stationed in Catalonia, the satirical magazine Cu-cut and just after the site of the Regionalist League. Instead of taking action against the military, they were found to be right and the authors of the cartoon were tried by a military court, that is, the Law of Jurisdictions. This fact led to the creation of the Catalan Solidarity, and Macià began his political activity.
Beginnings in politics
He ran for deputy in the elections of April 21, 1907 on the lists of the Catalan Solidarity representing Barcelona, obtaining a seat with great success for his political coalition (44 of 47 deputies from Catalonia). But in 1908, he withdrew from the courts.The same year there is evidence of his participation in a Carlist rally in the town of Butsènit d'Urgell, in which he would offer his military sword to the cause.
He will be elected deputy again in 1914, 1916, 1918, 1919, 1920 and 1923. In Congress he initially dedicated himself to promoting the regeneration of Spain, although he gradually slipped towards republicanism.
At the end of 1918, he founded the Federació Democràtica Nacionalista, a small nationalist formation fundamentally located within the political left, although not exempt from affinity with the Carlist hosts. In July 1922, he led the founding of a paramilitary organization, Estat Català ("Catalan State", EC).
Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera
In 1923, after the coup d'état of September 1923 by Miguel Primo de Rivera, he went into exile in France. Initially settled in Perpignan, he would move to Paris at the end of the year, after passing through Châteauroux. at this time when Estat Català developed its insurrectional character by maintaining contact with anarchists and communists, it obtained financial aid from the Catalan communities residing in South America and supported almost all insurrectional attempts in Spain.
In 1925, he made an unsuccessful trip to Moscow to try to get help from the communist authorities, having meetings with Grigori Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin.
In 1926, during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, he organized an armed incursion of volunteers —the so-called «Prats de Molló plot»– to invade Catalonia from France, provoke a general insurrection and proclaim a Catalan republic; The poorly prepared expedition did not cross the Franco-Spanish border when it was stopped by the French Gendarmerie in Prats de Molló. This will make it very popular in Catalonia. After the plot was aborted, Macià was arrested and exiled to Belgium.
After living in Brussels for a few months, he clandestinely entered Argentina, where he lived for more than half a year. After making visits to the Catalan communities in Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, he arrived in Cuba in August 1928. In Havana he founded the Revolutionary Separatist Party of Catalonia, of which he was president and in which he studied for the first time (in September -October 1928) the possibility of constituting a Catalan Republic that adopts "as a form of Government the technical-democratic-representative Republic".
Second Republic
After the dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera fell (January 1930), Macià returned to Spain on February 22, 1931. He was elected deputy to Cortes in 1931 (and later also in 1933). In 1931, Estat Català united with the Partit Republicà Català of Lluís Companys and the group L'Opinió to found the new party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), maintaining internal autonomy.
On April 14, 1931, the municipal elections that led to the Second Spanish Republic also gave the majority in Catalonia to ERC. On the same day, from the balcony of the Palace of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Macià proclaimed the Catalan Republic in the following terms:
On behalf of the people of Catalonia I proclaim the Catalan State under the regime of a Catalan Republic, which freely and with all cordiality craves and asks the other brotherly peoples of Spain to collaborate in the creation of a Confederation of Iberian peoples by offering them by means that are to be freed from the Bourbon Monarchy.
At this time we bring our voice to all the free peoples of the world, in the name of freedom, justice and peace of peoples.
President of the Catalan Republic, Francesc Macià
The proclamation was a few hours ahead of the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in Madrid. The following day, April 15, Macià sent "instructions for the proclamation of the Catalan Republic to the municipalities of Catalonia"
After the proclamation, leaders of Catalan Carlism came to offer their "patriotic collaboration".
The proclamation of the Catalan Republic by Macià opened a conflict with the newly constituted Provisional Government of the Republic. To resolve it, three days later, three ministers of the provisional government (Marcelino Domingo, Nicolau d'Olwer and Fernando de los Ríos) arrived in Barcelona to negotiate, reaching an agreement by which Macià accepted the commitment of the provisional government that it would present in the future Constituent Cortes an autonomy statute for Catalonia:
The three ministers of the interim government of the Republic have confirmed in the most complete and absolute way, the security of compliance with the Pact of San Sebastian and it has been recognized by all the assembled ones the desirability to advance the elaboration of the Statute of Catalonia" which, "once approved by the Assembly of Catalan Municipalities, will be presented, as a presentation of the provisional Government of the Republic and as a solemn manifestation of the will of Catalonia, to the resolution of the Constituent Courts
In practice, after the negotiations, Macià renounced the Catalan Republic and the Government of Catalonia would henceforth use the name Generalitat de Catalunya:
With the creation of the Catalan parliament, Macià was elected deputy for two different circumscriptions, Lérida and Barcelona city, having to renounce one of the acts. He was elected president of the Generalitat with 63 votes in favor in the Catalan parliament on December 14, 1932. He remained in office until his death in 1933.
During his tenure, there were some social conflicts such as the general strike in Barcelona in September 1931. With the creation of Estat Catalá he tried to assemble an ultra-nationalism compatible with left-wing populism. Representative of a peripheral radical nationalism, his This figure came to be taken temporarily as a model by Ernesto Giménez Caballero when elucidating about the formation of a combative and fascistic Spanish nationalism. On the other hand, during the period of the Second Republic, from the perspective of European liberalism, imbued with heroic aura, he tended to be seen as the standard-bearer of a democratic movement.
Personality
According to Cruells Pifarré, «he was a man of action, more than words. He was a man of simple ideas, of political ideologies without philosophical speculations, without abstractions. In short, without any special philosophical or ideological preparation."
Death
Macià died of acute appendicitis on December 25, 1933 at the age of seventy-four. He was replaced as head of the Generalitat of Catalonia by Lluís Companys.
The heart of Macià
When Macià died, a Masonic rite was carried out for his burial consisting of placing his heart and viscera in urns. Macià's heart and take it into exile and informed the family that, to avoid desecration, Macià's body had been secretly transferred from its official tomb to the Collaso Gil pantheon. In 1954 Tarradellas was appointed president of the Generalitat in exile. During the Spanish Transition, Tarradellas returned to Spain and the family claimed Macià's heart from him, since the Barcelona City Council wanted to carry out a solemn act of returning the heart to the tomb. The corpse of the Collaso Gil pantheon was exhumed but it was discovered that Macià had not been buried there, which caused the deep indignation of Macià's family and the City Council. After this it was verified that, indeed, Maciá's body was in its original grave. in addition, that in Macià's tomb the heart was still there, with which the supposed heart of Macià that Tarradellas kept was from an unknown individual.
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