Lluís Companys

Lluís Companys i Jover
Spanish Republic state institutions Liberalism and republicanism Nationalism Spain Spain (Catalonia) 1882–1940 ✕ Shot by firing squad

Leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia who headed the Catalan government in the Civil War and was shot by the Franco regime

A lawyer close to the labour movement, he was deported with trade-union leaders in 1920 and elected to the Cortes. He helped found the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) in 1931 and proclaimed the Republic from the balcony of Barcelona City Hall that April. President of the Generalitat from 1934, he proclaimed a "Catalan State" that October and was sentenced to thirty years, then was pardoned and restored after the Popular Front victory of 1936. When the Civil War broke out he brokered the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias. Arrested by the Gestapo in France in 1940, he was handed over to Spain and shot at Montjuïc Castle.

Also known as: Lluís Companys i Jover · Luis Companys

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

The militia committee of July 1936 and the May Days of 1937

When the military rising began in Barcelona on 19 July 1936, it was the workers' militias and the parties, more than the Generalitat's police, that defeated the rebels in the streets. By the end of the fighting on 21 July real power lay with organisations such as the anarcho-syndicalist union CNT, its ally the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) and the anti-Stalinist communist POUM. Companys chose to bring these organisations under one roof without dissolving the Generalitat, and the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias he brokered was formed that same day, sponsored by his government, to organise the war effort and recover control. Juan García Oliver headed its war department for the CNT.

The coalition was fragile from the start. In November 1936 members of Estat Català, a pro-independence breakaway from the ERC who objected to his conciliation with the anarchists, plotted to replace him and were exposed. When the Soviet consul Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko threatened to cut off aid if he kept collaborating with the anti-Stalinist POUM, Companys dismissed the POUM leader Andreu Nin as Catalan Minister of Justice in December. After the street fighting between Republican factions in Barcelona in May 1937 (the May Days) public order passed to the central government, and Companys could only protest. On 16 June the POUM was outlawed, and Nin disappeared soon afterwards.

In February 1939 he crossed the Pyrenees into exile in France. Delaying his departure because of his son's illness, he was arrested by the Gestapo in August 1940, handed over to Spain and held for five weeks in solitary confinement under the security headquarters in Madrid, where he was tortured. His court-martial in Barcelona in October lasted less than an hour. At dawn on 15 October, at Montjuïc Castle, he refused a blindfold, faced the firing squad barefoot and shouted "For Catalonia!"