Letter of the Belgian Consul in Barcelona, Jules Simon

The outbreak of the Civil War was followed by the fracturing of the institutions of power in Republican Spain. Although the Constitution of 1931 and the Catalonia Autonomy Statute of 1932 remained in force, the collapse of the state in the summer of 1936 changed everything. With areas like the Basque Country, Catalonia and part of Cantabria isolated from the rest of the Republic, with a front in Aragon dominated by anarchist militias from Barcelona, and with provincial committees everywhere, Republican Spain was a puzzle of units of power with weak links to the government of the Spanish Republic. Among the people who witnessed this fracturing of the institutions of power in Republican Spain that followed the outbreak of the Civil War were the foreign diplomats posted in Barcelona. Among them was Jules Simon, the Consul of Belgium and the author of this letter to the chief minister of Catalonia, Josep Tarradellas.

The government of the Generalitat led by president Lluís Companys, experienced a schizophrenic relationship with the multiple organisms of official and actual power with which it had to deal. Effectively the administration of a de facto independent state, but unable to fully control its own territory which was in the hands of militias belonging to the anarchists and other organizations, the Generalitat assumed jurisdiction over activities that did not belong to it. These included taking over the local offices of the Bank of Spain, creating an Army of Catalonia and a Ministry of Defence, as well as the Collectivizations Decree that would affect many foreign-owned business, among them the Belgian Company Solvay, which owned mines in Catalonia.

The letter Jules Simon sent to Josep Tarradellas in November 1936 encapsulated this situation. It was a forthright denunciation of the seizure of Solvay’s assets: the potash mines in Súria, the company’s offices and its bank deposits, and a demand that they be returned. The Generalitat had acted illegally.