Catalan military rising in 1926 remembered

Dozens remembered today the rising lead by the colonel Francesc Macià. In November 1926 hundreds of Volunteers joined and effort by the political-military movement Catalan State (Estat Català) formed four years ago by Macià and Daniel Cardona. Estat Català tried to enter Catalonia from France in November 1926 via Prats de Molló.After being discovered by the French police the attempt was frustrated from acrosso the Pyrinean border that divides Catalonia under French and Spanish rule.


Macià devised a plan to free Catalonia: independence. For months, he sought funding in the Americas amongst the Catalans who had made their fortunes there. He managed to gather over 8 million pesetas, the equivalent today of €50 million. He created a powerful clandestine propaganda apparatus, bought weapons and instructed 500 volunteers who were to initiate the revolution for independence in the Pyrenean region of La Garrotxa. As they were about to cross the border —at Prats de Molló— a nephew of Italian hero Garibaldi, who had infiltrated the volunteers, betrayed the operation to Il Duce Mussolini. French gendarmes deactivated the plot, and Macià and 16 activist leaders of the Estat Català party were arrested and tried in Paris. France did not want problems with Madrid and Rome’s authoritarian regimes and so finished the affair off with a quick trial (January 20-22, 1927) and a judgement of Solomon, a symbolic condemnation. From then on, the figure of Macià would become mythical, and this led him to win a landslide victory in the first Republican elections. On April 14, 1931, he restored Catalonia’s Generalitat government and became its 122nd President.

Today dozens of militants of the Estat Català party paid a tribute to the Volunteers of the movement who sacrified everything for the Catalan freedom and later were to exile.  The meeting in Prats de Molló (Catalonia under the French rule) was in front of the Vile Denise, HQ of Macià in 1926 where the general secretary of EC, Tomàs Callau, spoke.