A Barcelona Heiress Read Online Free PDF Page A

violence than Barcelona, and the successive authorities appointed by the nation’s government proved, one after the other, powerless to halt its spread.
    The rapid and uncontrolled industrial development of the day brought wealth and created jobs, but along with that came job insecurity and untenable work conditions. The industrialists didn’t know how to use dialogue and social policies to appease the workers’ demands, which were at times fair, though often vented through incendiary rhetoric denouncing the fatherland, order, and religion. At the tensest of times this would result in the burning of a church or convent as, among all their supposed class enemies, the revolutionaries attacked those offering the least resistance, and didn’t dare attack barracks or police stations. The prudent and moderate
movimiento catalanista
, which called for Catalan autonomy, had emerged through its early political activity at the close of the nineteenth century as the sensible voice of an active and triumphant bourgeoisie committed to progress within Spain, a country which at that time founditself in a state of moral and social deterioration, demoralized by its historical decadence. Not even this movement, however, could stem the spread of violence perpetrated by the groups of trade unionists and, in order to keep these factions from frustrating many of their initiatives, they were, in fact, reduced to constantly pleading for aid and solutions from the very authorities in Madrid who they simultaneously railed against.
    Catalonian industry had flourished by supplying the belligerent states engaged in the Great War, during which my mentor, the then-president, Eduardo Dato, who years before had given me my start in the legal profession in his private law firm, had pronounced Spain’s neutrality in the conflict, a decision ratified by King Alfonso XIII. At the same time the city had been flooded with German and French spies along with shady characters such as the famous Baron de König who, like so-called anarchist Joan Rull ten years before him, had been accused of such a litany of crimes committed for political reasons, on both sides of the spectrum, that nobody really knew what side he was on, that of the workers or the bosses, or if he really cared about anything at all except for lining his own pockets. In 1908 Rull would pay with his life for having deceived the Barcelona police, presenting himself as an informer and reporting attacks he himself had been behind. Meanwhile, Baron de König (a false title, of course), following his infamous exploits in Barcelona, would return to Germany where he would carry on with his mischief for many years. Like something out of G. K. Chesterton’s fascinating novel
The Man Who Was Thursday
, in the Catalonian capital there were many times when nobody was surprised that the anarchists were actually police, and vice versa. In the meantime, bombs exploded every day in the streets, bosses and workers were killed by the dozen, accounts of attacks carried out by anarchist groups filled the papers, and strong-arm tactics used against judges, witnesses, and defenseless citizens were the order of the day.
    Against this backdrop, nihilistic and unbearable for the average person on the street, Ángel Lacalle had appeared. He was an ardent orator and a radical demagogue who saw the system as rotten, and the bourgeoisie, in collaboration with the government and the clergy, as responsible for every outrage. Without going so far as to condemn the activists, Lacalle declared himself to be opposed to personal assaults, thefts carried out by gangs, bank robberies, and the use of bombs—tactics many of his associates had no qualms about employing. This, and only this, was the reason why I had chosen to give him a few moments of my time.
    Perhaps this was also why he was in the line of fire, despised by some of his fellow comrades as a tepid ally, almost a traitor to the cause, while at the same time being in the