Great Statesman or Unscrupulous Opportunist? Anglo-Saxon Interpretations of Lluís Companys

Abstract

Lluís Companys was the President of the Generalitat de Catalunya during the Spanish Civil War. He had led an abortive federalist rebellion in October 1934 and later faced the contradictory problems of a war effort against General Franco's military rebels and the revolutionary, and often murderous, aspirations of anarchists and the anti-Stalinist Communists of the POUM. After the Civil War, he was exiled in France, seized by the Gestapo and executed by the Franco regime on 15 October 1940. The contemporary Anglo-Saxon views of Companys ranged from admiration by supporters of the Spanish Republic to the hostility of right-wingers. Knowledgeable experts on Catalonia like Professor Edgar Allison Peers or the writer John Langdon-Davies regarded Companys with sympathy. The most extreme example of the latter was the British consul, Norman King, who blamed Companys for the breakdown of political authority and for the atrocities perpetrated by the left. Sympathy or antipathy to Companys did not depend on realistic analysis of his performance and its context but rather was usually the consequence of their prior leftist or rightist views.