CHAPTER XIX. A historic meeting between the CNT and Companys

Scholars of this extremely agitated period in Spain’s history have passed over this meeting between the CNT and Generalitat President Lluís Companys. Indeed, we have never seen it cited and were ourselves unaware of it for a time. We learned of the meeting only by chance, while reading the CNT’s underground publications from the era.

There is an article on page three of the first issue of La Voz Confederal, (dated June 2, 1934) entitled “Report on the meeting between the President of the Generalitat and comrades Sanz, Isgleas, García Oliver, Herreros, and Carbó, representatives of the CNT’s Catalan Regional Confederation.”

The meeting took place on Wednesday May 9, 1934, three days after the brutal attack described in the previous chapter. Had the encounter been arranged before or after those events? We don’t know. We also do not know if a CNT regional gathering had mandated the meeting or if it was arranged by militants in some other capacity, although it is notable that Ascaso, the Regional Committee’s Secretary, did not participate. A curious fact about the comrades meeting with Company stands out: all except for Ricardo Sanz were Catalan (Sanz was from Valencia). Was this an attempt to show Companys that the CNT’s leading men were not Murcianos, as the Catalanist newspapers of the Esquerra and the Estat Català continually claimed? Possibly. And it might have also been a way to appeal to Companys’s nationalism and thus strengthen their position in the discussion. Whatever the case, their effort was doomed to fail at the outset. The conflicts between the CNT and the Catalan government were equally or even more severe than those between it and the Madrid government. There was a social war between authority—the government—and the freedom represented by the CNT, an organization created by the working class to destroy capitalism and the state. There can be no understanding between enemies of this sort. A brief truce is the very most that can be expected.

Before examining the meeting, we should point out several things. One issue pertains to García Oliver, whom we saw distance himself from Durruti and Ascaso during the discussion of the December 8, 1933 rebellion. By this time, Ascaso and Durruti functioned as a pair, whereas there is a vacuum with respect to García Oliver’s activity. We wonder if his participation in the meeting with Companys indicates that he was moving away from his earlier revolutionary positions, given that it went against the prevailing current of opinion within the CNT and FAI. There is no evidence of objections to the meeting in the CNT, but a careful reading of the editorial in the fourth issue of FAI (June 1934) suggests some discord. The title is suggestive: “Warning, a yellow traffic light!” It discusses disagreements within the CNT and the Esquerra’s continued efforts to recruit CNT activists. It also underscored the brusque change within the Socialists, who seemed to wink at the CNT as they talked about “social revolution.” The piece says:

“Warning! The traffic signal is turning from yellow to incandescent red! It’s time to expose the loafer, the opportunist, and the informer, who hide behind their bureaucratic positions and leaderesque vanities.” In another article, while discussing the last meeting of anarchist groups in Catalonia, the paper declared:

The FAI has embarked on a new stage of its revolutionary journey in Barcelona and its effects will soon be felt. The recent signs of revisionism in the Confederation should prompt all anarchists to be vigilant. The FAI will know how to carry out its duty with regard to such things...

Nevertheless, the publication also carried an optimistic piece titled “Salutation.” It noted that the FAI had urged the CNT to print underground propaganda to ensure that the workers were not left without guidance. Welcoming the CNT’s decision to do so, FAI wrote: “Clearly our call resonated in Confederal circles, given the appearance of La Voz Confederal, the underground publication of the unions in the Catalan Region. We send a fraternal greeting to the paper from the pages of FAI.”

It appears that the matter of the CNT’s legality was what the delegates hoped to resolve at their meeting with Companys in May. Their effort, as we will see, failed and the CNT remained underground. We will look at the May 9 meeting.

There is a preliminary note in the account of the meeting printed in La Voz Confederal specifying that the meeting with Companys was arranged between him and the CNT as an organization. It is important to bear this in mind to understand the attitude that Companys adopted. He stated that “as a representative of the government, he could not have a dialogue with delegates of an illegal organization, which would be a clear contradiction in terms.” The CNT activists responded “that they were authorized by the Regional Committee to speak in its name and, since they were not accepted as such, they considered the meeting over.” Apparently their attitude “caused an abrupt and clear change in Companys.” He stated: “Evidently, you’re accustomed to playing with words and making them a matter of the utmost importance.” They replied that it was not a question of words but of something substantive, to which he responded: “OK, since words aren’t the important point, we will forget the issue. I receive you as representatives of the CNT.”

The meeting lasted two hours. According to La Voz Confederal, the CNT men gave Companys “a detailed statement, explaining that the government’s ruthless actions against the Confederation are making its life impossible.” A key issue was clarifying why there was such an acute difference in how authorities treated the CNT nationally and how they treated it in Catalonia, and even a difference in how they treated it in the rest of Catalonia and Barcelona. In other parts of Spain or the three Catalan provinces, the government might close a union, but never as completely and permanently as in Barcelona. The pretext for banning the CNT in Barcelona was that it did not submit to the law of April 8, although that was patently absurd. The CNT did not submit to that law anywhere. On the contrary, it continued to abide by the 1876 Law of Associations, which the government had not repealed and remained in vigor. Indeed, Interior Minister Casares Quiroga publicly admitted that it was not obligatory to observe the law of April 8: “If they consider it more consistent with their interests, the unions can follow the 1876 Law of Associations, which was reinforced by the August 6, 1906 decree and which has not been annulled.” According to the CNT representatives, Companys “claimed that he was unaware of these things and limited himself to taking note.”

They also protested the practice of the “ ley de fugas” and the harassment and suspension of the workers’ newspapers. Lluís Companys again limited himself to “taking note” when they raised these issues.

At the end of the meeting, he declared that “he had heard the CNT’s complaints with pleasure, due to the frankness with which they had been expressed.”

On May 12, the Generalitat sent a note to the press, stating:

The President informed the government about the complaints made by members of the CNT, who assert that they receive an inferior treatment in Catalonia as compared to that applied to them by Republican authorities elsewhere. The government does not know how it could improve its treatment of citizens or socio-political organizations, because it has no directive other than the law, within which it hopes all can co-exist, without the need to force them to do so. The government protects all ideologies within the legal framework, without distinctions or exceptions of any sort. But we cannot make deals or accord special treatment to any group, as this would undermine the authority and prestige of the state, which is a direct expression of the free and articulated will of the people.

Consequently, the government sees no reason to change its conduct and will continue as before. It will fulfill its duty and act in the interest of the moral and effective defense of autonomous Catalonia and the democratic Republic.[400]

If the CNT men had hoped that Companys might alter the government’s stance toward their organization, they must have been discouraged after reading the above statement. The Generalitat made it clear that it would not modify its posture, which was a duty to the “moral and effective defense of autonomous Catalonia and the democratic Republic.” Did autonomous Catalonia really demand that the government fight a war against the CNT? Or was it actually imposed by Miguel Badía and Josep Dencàs, who held the Esquerra and Lluís Companys as captives?

Events demonstrate that it was Badía and Dencàs who dominated Catalan politics at the time. These two individuals—founders of a fascist ideology that lived off Catalan ultra-nationalism—wanted nothing less than to establish an authoritarian regime that would militarize life in region. It is safe to assume—given what was later learned about Josep Dencàs and Mussolini’s penetration into Spain through the island of Majorca—that Dencàs was operating under the guidance of Mussolini’s agents and attempting to destroy the workers’ movement and push Companys into taking impossible positions on Catalan independence.

Did Companys know that he was a pawn of the Estat Català? Possibly. This would explain his frenzied attempt to create his own “escamots” during those months. He entrusted that mission to Catalanist deputy Graus Jassaus—soon to be Badía’s victim—who understood that Companys wanted to free himself of the burden of the rightwing Catalanists.

Catalan authorities’ preoccupation with these power struggles in the region made it impossible for them to institute reforms that might mitigate the suffering caused by the deep economic crisis. The CNT denounced the mediocrity of Catalan politics and the dirty game played by its leaders, but couldn’t do more than take swipes. The government’s permanent crackdown on the CNT was not a secret to anyone and was in fact a product of Catalan politics itself. Manuel Cruells brings this out clearly when he writes:

The Esquerra had profoundly mediocre goals and plans, which it tried to conceal by feeding demagogic propaganda to the Catalan masses. That is why the autonomous Catalan government turned toward a more verbal than genuine nationalism, on the part of its followers within the ruling party and Dencàs’s “escamots.” It also turned, as a counter-weight, toward a novecentista[401] democratic republicanism, which was a little imprecise and exaggerated for President Companys’s followers.... The period between Macià’s death [December 25, 1933] and the events of October is marked politically by inflammatory ultra-nationalism from the ruling party and by a confrontation, also a little demagogic, between the “rabassaire” [small tenant farmer] agrarian movement and the large Catalan landowners. These two currents, opposed since time immemorial within the same governmental party, became perfect allies when the conflict pit the autonomous government against the central government, thanks to imprudent acts of both.[402]

Cruells take us to the heart of the problems weighing on the Generalitat at the time. They will be the cause of the events on October 6.

On April 12, 1934, the Generalitat enacted a law on agricultural contracts [ Llei de Contractes de Conreu], which the Catalan Parliament approved. This law changed how land was rented and benefited the so-called “rabassaires” (renters, medium sized landholders, etc.). [403] The Lliga Catalana—the party of the large Catalan bourgeoisie that Cambó led—pushed the large landowners to appeal the law in the Spanish Republic’s Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees, which they forced to determine whether or not the Generalitat had authority to legislate on such matters. On June 8, the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees declared that the law approved by the Catalan Parliament was null and void.

Catalans saw the Madrid government’s annulment of this law as an attack on their sovereign authority, although in reality the central government had merely bestowed “autonomy” to Catalonia. We have pointed out how vehement Catalan nationalism had become, and this helps explain the Catalans’ response. Lluís Companys, pressured by the ultras, replaced the Catalan Interior Minister (Joan Selvás), who was seen as too moderate, with Josep Dencàs, a proto-fascist Catalan nationalist. He made this change on June 10, two days after the ruling from the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees. Companys then presented a new law to the Catalan Parliament on June 12, which was a verbatim reproduction of the law contested by the central government. It was approved. Esquerra Republicana deputies withdrew from the Spanish Parliament to show that a battle with Madrid had begun. The Generalitat was at war with the central government from then on and carried out a jingoistic campaign designed to win the multitudes over to its cause. To do so, it had to discredit the CNT and undermine the workers’ faith in the organization. That is the source of its persistent claims about the CNT’s “banditry,” the FAI’s “Murciano” composition, and the endless slanderous clichés that filled the Catalanist press at the time.