Lluís Companys' Legacy

Companys is sitting while he waits in the living room. They tell him that someone just knocked on the door. “Lluís, les allemandes sont arrivées!” (Lluís, the Germans are here). Calmly, he turns the page of the book he is holding and keeps reading. The members of the German police find him in his chair, reading Vies des saints (Lifes of Saints). Being as he is a liberal politician, of strong unionist convictions, his reaction is profoundly telling. He could have fled many days ago, but he's tired. Besides, he has important reasons for staying in France. His son, Lluïset, ill with schizophrenia, disappeared from the French mental hospital he was in after a bombing by the Germans forced it to be shut down. What will men be capable of when they give themselves to hatred...

Lluís Companys

Companys knows that he has made a few mistakes, that his reputation is destroyed, even (or especially) among Republicans and Catalanists. He has many doubts, hopes, and regrets. How many friends did he lose? He is far from home, the Catalan Government is gone like the wisps of smoke of a cigar, and he, who used to feel all-powerful at the Monumental not even three years ago, is now just one more refugee. However, he knows deeply that human beings do not only have one earthly life, but that there is another life after death, the final journey that makes heroes and martyrs of the defeated. Companys accepts his own destiny. He will lose his life but will reach immortality, and he will be a part of history. All his sins shall be forgiven. The day will come when teachers in schools will explain with excitement to their eager but slightly bored students the last hours of his life; his journey to the border as a prisoner of the Nazis; the harsh conditions on his trip to Madrid; his stay in prison; his torture; the illegal proceeding around his trial; the death that catches him unshod while he screams with his face to the wind Per Catalunya! in a futile but patriotic act. His time will pass and soon no-one who remembered him will be alive, but he will remain in the memory of those who will come after him, forever stoic, standing up straight in front of the firing squad in the early hours of the day.

After they are done unloading their guns on him, the firing squad lieutenant goes to finish him off (he just wasn't dying), and on top of that, the cocky officer steals from him his blood-stained scarf as a war trophy, for which he will be discharged from the army. The President of the Generalitat is dead. The cycle of hatred and violence will not be over until later, but the last traces of Republican legitimacy are physically dead. So it dies a defeated president, but a martyr is born. Many Francoists would have rather let him rot in jail, where he would not cause any trouble, like a slowly vanishing candle in the darkness. Alas, nobody listened to them, blind as they were from their thirst for revenge.


Bernat Roca, Historian

__________


Lluís Companys i Jover (1882 - 1940) was the 123rd President of Catalonia, from 1934 and during the Spanish Civil War. He is the only incumbent, democratically elected  president in Europe to have been executed, and seventy-two years later the the court martial  which sentenced him to death has not been revoked. This is Help Catalonia 's homage to him.