As on other occasions, today in this column of “Planet Earth” we reflect a work session of the Plenary Session of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (RACMP) that we had this week: exhibition and debate of the interesting presentation by academic José María Serrano, on the figure of the jurist, economist and politician was Francesc Cambó (the entire text can be seen on the RACMP website).

Cambó was born in Verges (Gerona) in 1876 and already in his student days he joined Catalan organizations, orienting himself to the most possibilist conservative sector, led by Verdaguer and Prat de la Riba. He participated in the founding of the “Lliga Regionalista” in 1901, and that year he was elected councilor of Barcelona, ​​in whose City Council he carried out outstanding renovation work. In 1915, he directed the campaign “per Catalunya i l’Espanya Gran”, with the aim of reforming the Spanish political system as a whole with maximum relevance for Catalonia, beyond the Catalan Commonwealth achieved in 1912.

That purpose, binary?, earned him criticism from Niceto Alcalá Zamora of his life dilemma, of “wanting to be the Simón Bolívar of Catalonia, and at the same time the Bismarck of great Spain.” An idea that did not convince the regional bourgeoisies.

He was minister in two of the national governments, for several months of Development (1918) and of Finance in 1921-22, chaired by Maura, promoting protectionism. Later, during the Primo de Rivera Dictatorship, Cambó maintained a distant, but not hostile, attitude to the regime.

Practically, his aversion to the Second Republic withdrew him from his political pursuits and he dedicated himself to his own economic issues that enriched him. In 1936, he supported Franco from outside Spain, spending practically the rest of his life in Buenos Aires at the head of the large electrical company Chade.

Globally, Cambó failed as a politician. It could have been all in the last days of the reign of Alfonso XII in Spain, but the dilemma of his life led to the fiasco in what he wanted as a policy of harmony. He was a great collector and patron of the Prado Museum and the National Museum of Catalonia.