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Francesc Cambó Biography

Francesc Cambó

(Francesc Cambó i Batlle, also called Francisco Cambó; Verges, Gerona, 1876-Buenos Aires, 1947) Spanish politician.Militant since his youth of Catalan nationalism, he adhered to its more conservative tendency.In 1901 he participated in the founding of the Regionalist League of Catalonia, starting his political career as a councilor for the Barcelona City Council.He promoted the Catalan Solidarity coalition, with which he reached the Congress of Deputies in 1907.

Francesc Cambó

With his election, the idea that the Catalanists should be present in the central institutions of the State (from which he assumed the defense of Catalan industrial interests), but from now on he would move in the tension between two irreconcilable objectives: to obtain a decisive power in the Spanish political system and to increase the levels of self-government of Catalonia.

Politically, Francesc Cambó defended the need to reform the Restoration system by eliminating caciquismo and electoral corruption, to build a liberal parliamentary regime in the style of those that prevailed in Western Europe.Such ideas led him to promote the Assembly of Parliamentarians, which in 1917 met outside the constitutional institutions to demand profound political reforms.

But Cambó was also a conservative, close to business points of view, so he moved away from the protests when the general strike gave the crisis a social slant; Thus, when Antonio Maura formed a Government of National Union in 1918, Cambó joined in representation of the Catalanists, assuming the Development portfolio.Later he was Minister of Finance in another Maura government (1921-22), a circumstance that he took advantage of to adopt a favorable protectionist tariff for Catalan industry, as well as a Banking Regulation Law.

The social tensions of those years tipped him towards increasingly reactionary positions, consistent with his interests as the rich businessman that he was.The coup d'état of Miguel Primo de Rivera removed him from active politics during the time that the dictatorship lasted (1923-30), but he did not fight it, convinced of the need for repression to stop the labor movement.

For the same reasons he tried to save the monarchy of Alfonso XIII after the fall of the dictator; It did not succeed and the Second Republic that was established in 1931 was associated with the electoral defeat of the regionalist League.Fearing the revolutionary aspect of the new political situation, he went into exile in France, from where he returned in 1933-once the democratic character of the republican regime had been verified-to reorganize his party, under the name of Lliga catalana.

He was elected deputy in the elections of 1933, which gave the victory to the right, but not in those of 1936, which the Popular Front won.Finally, his conservatism prevailed over his Catalanism and supported the military uprising that led to the Civil War (1936-39) and that brought Francisco Franco to power.

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