nor the image of Francesc Cambo that his enemies created nor the one that he himself reconfigured in his memories resist the comparison with the torrential documentation that he has handled the historian Borja de Riquer over three decades and which leads to his latest book, ‘Francesc Cambo. The last portrait (Edicions 62/Editorial Crítica). After publishing monographs that illuminated partial aspects of his figure (Argentina, his relationship with Alfonso XIII, the fall of the monarchy, the civil war) from unpublished materials that were emerging from his research work, the historian Borja de Riquer ends to publish what will be the reference biography about the most influential Catalan of the first half of the 20th century, free from the restrictions and conditions of previous works written under the inspiration of the same politician or, after his death, of his family, especially the canonical work by Jesús Pabón.
After extracting oil from thousands of letters, De Riquer prefers to expose the numerous contradictions of the character who experienced the impossibility of being a “Catalan nationalist and a Spanish ruler, a reformist and a conservative”, in “all its nuances”, rather than “doing neither as a prosecutor, neither as a defense attorney, nor as a judge”.
Cambo and Franco
Francesc Cambó’s support for the rebel side during the civil war, of which “he was ashamed but not sorry”, is the most reproachable and reproachable aspect of the political performance of De Riquer’s object of study. But in rare cases like this it is necessary not to forget “all the nuances of it” about it. In his memoirs, Cambó justifies his support, which led him to finance the war effort and create the most effective international propaganda network for the rebels, with the well-known argument that it was necessary to avoid the revolution that the Front was preparing. Popular. Yes, very soon (December 1936) he wrote in British newspapers that it was a fight of “barbarism against civilization”.
But, in part, these were justifications after the fact, undoubtedly under the impact of revolutionary violence. That same July of 1936, while his enemy Juan March was instead financing the preparations for the coup, in his correspondence with Joan Ventosa, around July 17 or 18, he congratulated himself that after the assassination of Calvo Sotelo there had not been “an violent reaction that would have had serious and painful repercussions” and maintained that it would be positive for the Popular Front to last in power before falling due to its own disrepute, but not before having consolidated the autonomy of Catalonia. “A dictatorship would be much worse,” he added. And a military raid would be “untimely, premature and disturbing.”
According to De Riquer, Cambó not only consciously opted for the lesser evil, but also “naivety” and “detachment from reality”, which made those of the Lliga aspire to an autonomous Catalonia under a benevolent Catalan-speaking viceroy… General Emilio Mola.
The failed ‘Cambó operations’
Cambó’s attempts to intervene in Spanish politics are counted as failures, despite his direct and conflictive relationship with Alfonso XIII, and his various ministerial positions. His refusal to lead the Council of Ministers in 1922 so as not to give up his Catalan project is one of those frustrating moments. But it was an offer from the monarch declined by him. There is, De Riquer considers, two large ‘Cambó operations’ in which their ambitions derail miserably. When he tries to bring together diverse regionalisms in a failed candidacy in the 1918 elections and when he tries to create a political option that would save the Monarchy in 1930, the Constitutional Center, with Cambó seen by many as the providential man who would lead a Transition.
A hitherto unpublished document that Riquer already used in a previous work shows the difference between the official history: in his memoirs he assures that the diagnosis of cancer made him resign from heading the Government after the fall of General Berenguer, when in that previous text he clarifies that he backed down due to threats of a coup d’état if he agreed to the presidency of the Council, and that he planned to try again after a few months, with his second Suction Cup already placed in the Cabinet to lead the way.
A failure not only personal
In the epilogue of the book, De Riquer states that beyond personal failure (the impossibility of being the Bismark of Spain and the Bolívar of Catalonia that Alcalá Zamora reproached him for, he taunts that Cambó accepted acknowledging that this had hurt him because it was quite true) , that of Cambó is a collective failure and that continues to this day. Not simply the frustration of a certain Catalanist proposal” for “harmony” between Catalonia and Spain, but “a clear Spanish political failure”, the victory of “a defensive, immobile and conservative attitude”. “The fear of change, however reasonable and necessary as they are, it seems that it has always prevailed in the sad Spanish political life. And so we have been for a century “, he concludes.
A bitter end due to corruption accusations
Cambó began as a lawyer’s intern and became an international billionaire. Knowing how to create his own study and analysis service, having a vision of the future in his investments and international contacts allowed him to do so, although his large operation, the Hispano-American Electricity Company (CHADE), required another skill, bribery and the ability to hide it. What became the third largest company in Spain and the fifth largest electricity company in the world was created as a front to prevent its German owners from seeing their properties seized after the First World War and gave Cambó, as president and grunt of the engineering network company, 1.5% of the millionaire annual profits of one of the most profitable companies in the world. With total control of the Argentine energy market thanks to a web of corruption that was revealed after the military coup of 1943 and the subject of an investigation that was buried after a month by order of Colonel Perón. That, Riquer points out, shortly after he saw how his 1946 presidential campaign was financed by the company. That Cambó’s final years were embittered by this scandal (and the liquidation of the company by the Spanish government) is not without certain resonances.
patronage
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For Riquer, the immense patronage work of Cambó (with a collection of classics such as Bernat Metge that only has parallels in English, French and German), although for operational reasons he analyzes it independently in his book “is part of the political project from Cambo. He is also inseparable from his ability as a businessman. Just one example. The “risky” purchase of an art collection with a credit from a Swiss bank that goes up for fractional auction at such prices that he can acquire a good part of the works for himself and profit from the operation… months before the crack of the 29.
Private life
Cambó was a conservative and Catholic patrician. But from a time when that used to imply that the evangelical verse was applied without remorse to that left hand that does not know what the right is doing. The “complicated love life” de Cambó deserves a chapter in Riquer’s biography, in which he confesses that, of the “legends” about Cambó and women, he has kept only those that he has been able to document, and even so there are not few. From love affairs with singers (Maria Gay and Maria Barrientos) to the only wedding plans following the conventions of high society (Josefina Güell y López and Glòria Bulbena, frustrated by the death of the first and in the second case by the “bad reputation” of the suitor), to suspicious relationships such as those of Pilar Moraleda, wife of his friend Gonzalo Arnús, or those he had with the mothers of his two daughters (Montserrat RIbera, of the unrecognized Montserrat Girona Ribera, and Mercè Mallol, with the one who would end up getting married to guarantee the rights to the inheritance of her daughter Helena Cambó in which she invested all her paternal interest in the last years of her life). Although not everything ends here: a “very tough anecdote” collected in Joan Estelrich’s diary depicts Cambó as a Catalan Weinstein: according to an Austrian lady, “he proposed to be her lover, if she wanted her husband to prosper; her refusal determined a persecution against him”.