Published originally in Spanish. Manuel Jabois. El País
The social force of the pro-independence movement is that of Òmnium and ANC, two associations protecting the roadmap of the independence process.
In Catalonia, Joan Baptista Cendrós was such an important man that he became a smell. Strong and mentholated. His was the fragrance of Floïd, an after-shave balm invented by Cendrós in the barber’s shop his parents had left him: exported to 50 countries, it made him a millionaire. Cendrós hosted other rich men in his home — friends united by an exquisitely revolutionary ideal. Among them was Fèlix Millet i Marista, a businessman who fled to Italy to save his life during the Civil War, later returning to fight on the Francoist side. Also with them was another patrician, Lluís Carulla, who –together with his wife María Font– used his knowledge of the family pharmacy to create Gallina D’Or, later renamed Gallina Blanca, before inventing the Avecrem bouillon cubes. Yet another, Joan Vallvé, literally manufactured money: his factory in Poblenou minted pesetas. The last man in the quintet was industrialist Pau Riera, son of Tecla Sala Miralpeix, a businesswoman with an extraordinary life who managed to build a textile empire in a world of female employees and male executives.
They were united by Catalanism, their desire to break through the lines of the dictatorship in the only area in which a slight breeze was starting to blow: the cultural scene. They were, essentially, patrons of the arts. And they created Òmnium in 1961. They injected money into it –lots–, opening branches all over Catalonia to promote Catalan language and culture. Outside Òmnium, this intellectual bourgeoisie joined other renowned families in building a universe of their own around which the future Catalonia would revolve: the Nova Cançó, the Sant Jordi and Carles Riba awards, the Great Catalan Encyclopedia, the Institute of Catalan Studies, the Orfeò choral society, the Palau concert hall, the Liceu opera house, Banca Catalana; they launched the careers of writer Terenci Moix and singer Raimon, among others. They tried to get the Swedish Academy to award a Nobel prize to poet Salvador Espriu. They also engaged in quite a bit of nastiness: they completely took over, and their cultural dominance, which extended into the era of Pujol, was so stifling that Cendrós actually denied the Prize of Honor of Catalan Letters –also his creation– to the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century, Josep Pla, who he claimed had been involved with the Francoist dictatorship. Many years later, Fèlix Millet did a headcount of this elite: “There must be about 400 of us — not many more, because we meet everywhere and it’s always the same faces”.
This bourgeoisie of Cendrós and Millet set out to breathe some air into the cultural scene of the Francoist dictatorship after two public scandals fueled the resurgence of Catalanism. The first was the Galinsoga Case, which broke after the editor-in-chief of La Vanguardia Española, Luis Martínez de Galinsoga, complained about a mass being delivered in Catalan by crying out — in the middle of church — that ‘Catalans are all shitheads’. Catalan society reacted with a boycott led by a group of young Catholics known as the Cristians Catalans, and La Vanguardia lost 20,000 subscribers before the Count of Godó fired Galinsoga and replaced him with Manuel Aznar, grandfather to Spain’s ex-President.
The Cristians made the news again a few months later, during the 100th anniversary of poet Joan Maragall. The Orfeò choral society had been banned from ending its performance at the Palau concert hall with the Cant de la Senyera. Yet several youths stood up to sing it, also filling the air with anti-Franco flyers written by the young leader of the Cristians, a thirty-year-old Jordi Pujol. In his biography of Pujol (El Virrey, Planeta), journalist José Antich recounts how Pujol considered leaving the country upon hearing about the first arrests, but ran up against Marta Ferrusola: ‘This is the time to stay. When we got married, you told me Catalonia might come before us. Well, now’s the time. I’ll be by your side, but this is the time to pull out all the stops’. Pujol faced a court-martial, was sentenced to seven years in prison and served three. It was 1960. The rest is Spanish political — and judicial — history.
As Òmnium and numerous other publishers and organisations strengthened their hold on Catalonia, left-wing nationalists in exile began to question the conservative cultural empire being created in their country. In a book about the life of Joan B. Cendrós (El cavaller Floïd, Proa), writer Genís Sinca describes the tension between Catalan President-in-exile Tarradellas and patron of the arts Cendrós in Paris, regarding the growth of Òmnium. Cendrós snapped, as Núria Escur recalls in La Vanguardia: ‘We’ve opened the Paris headquarters because I fucking felt like it, and you know when we’ll close it? When I fucking feel like it.’
There was the power of civil society, and its ease in infiltrating all spheres through language and culture, represented by a businessman willing to pour his money into the cause. It’s impossible to understand the independence process without analysing the hold and drawing power of Òmnium. After a period of irrelevance, the organisation came back to life thanks to the support of the other great civil platform, the Catalan National Assembly (Assemblea Nacional de Catalunya, ANC), which allowed Òmnium to reemerge as a de facto power in the cause Cendrós summed up before his death: ‘I’ve been happy in my country, because being able to fight for your own country is a pleasure worthy of the gods’. Òmnium did this first through Muriel Casals and now through Jordi Cuixart, who has just given a statement as a suspect in a crime of sedition, together with Jordi Sánchez, head of the ANC. These two men, plus a chorus of inflamed opinions with access to the Palau, embody the civil pressure on politics, the formidable strength of the independence movement on the streets, which is responsible for the implementation of a strategy of mobilisation with the cooperation of the Republican and anti-capitalist left.
Cuixart (‘I was born to a butcher from Murcia and a construction worker from Badalona who worked for Coguesa. They spoke Spanish with each other, but decided to talk to their children in Catalan’) always dreamt of becoming a businessman of the homeland, like the five founders of Òmnium. He has done so by jeopardising his freedom and Catalonia’s social harmony. But like Sánchez, he’s willing to go as far as it takes. They both know that what’s happening now is the reflection of many failed attempts. Jordi Sánchez first played a role in the Crida da Solidaritat (‘Cry of Solidarity’), the first great rehearsal for the current process. Created in 1983, the archives of El País testify to how heavily the past weighs on the present: in 1984, they announced direct action against businesses failing to catalanise their signage, with ‘monthly inspections’ to verify that their demands were met.
Behind the ANC is the original spirit of the Crida and its ability to stir up unrest. Having managed to bring together 12,000 people, hundreds of them with torches, to protest alleged police torture in the eighties, it has more recently organised all sorts of massive events to celebrate Catalonia’s Diada, from the ‘Catalan Way’ to a 400-kilometre human chain in support of independence. These days in Barcelona, many feel that the pro-independence process is no longer led by any particular political leader, but rather by the extraordinary and noisy civil forces for independence, which safeguard the orthodoxy of the roadmap and can think of nothing other than the Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
Many things remain from the sixties. Starting with Taradellas’s rebuke to Pujol: ‘People forget that it’s the right that governs Catalonia; that there’s a very dangerous white dictatorship which does not execute, which does not kill, but which will leave behind a heavy burden’. The son of Félix Millet i Maristany is one of the symbols of corruption in Catalonia: he plundered the Palau’s treasury and held his daughter’s wedding reception there, charging half the cost to his in-laws while paying for everything with public funds. Joan Vallvé, the son of the industrialist who minted coins, was an advisor to Pujol and is the vice-president of the organisation his father founded: Òmnium.
As for the grandson of the gentleman of Floïd, Joan B. Cendrós, that would be David Madí, architect of the most tumultuous events in Spanish democratic history: the transformation of CiU into a pro-independence party and the break with the state. A movement that has dragged many ideologies and sensibilities along with it, but whose most conspicuous leaders, hidden or not, privately share their hatred of Spain. This occasionally emerges into plain sight, leaving both friends and enemies aghast, as in this 2015 article in El Punt Avui by Jordi Cabré: ‘We are better (…) And in the hypothetical case that we weren’t, this would pose a problem. It would be shameful (…) We have an infinitely higher density of geniuses per square metre (…) We are better, yes, or at least we have the right to be’, he writes, after citing the military marches of the Spanish National Holiday on 12 October, the Presidential Box of the Bernabéu stadium, Spanish ‘cultural genocide’ or the AVE high-speed trains. Cabré was the director of cultural promotion in the Generalitat during the presidency of Artur Mas.
There was a time when all men smelled of Floïd. Sinca, the author of Cendrós’s biography, described the origins of the fragrance in the journal Ara. Cendrós’s father used to give the Piarists free haircuts. One day, the clerics gave him a balm made with flowers, herbs, lemon and alcohol, which they used as an all-purpose remedy for everything from cuts to soothing their skin after shaving. That gift made him a millionaire, and Joan Baptista Cendrós, grateful, devoted a large chunk of his fortune to Catalanist causes. It had fallen like manna from Heaven, and as he said before his death, fighting for one’s country is a pleasure worthy of the gods.
