spain 1808 by carr

Author:carr
Language: eng
Format: epub

respectable and solid class than the nouveaux riches of the midcentury. The career of Juan March, who became the richest man in modern Spain, represents the persistence of an earlier type of capitalism; like Salamanca his money was made out of a government monopoly (tobacco) or--according to his enemies--smuggling; like Salamanca he invested his gains in transport. Majorca became his private fief and Barcelona Traction the centre of his financial empire. Whereas most of the respectable industrialists and bankers became conservatives, Juan March was sympathetic to politicians like Santiago Alba and Lerroux; the conspirators of 1930-1 always hoped that he would finance a Republican rising. The renversement des alliances produced by the Republic, which regarded his conviction for fraud as a political duty, is shown by the fact that March, like all his fellow capitalists, supported Franco.

In Catalonia a class of great industrialists developed naturally out of the patriarchal family business; as in the old aristocracy inter-marriage concentrated their wealth and the spread of their interests was very large. Thus the second marqués de Comillas controlled the biggest Spanish shipping concern (the Transatlántica), mining interests, a bank, and large agricultural estates. With Comillas, a court chamberlain, the Catalan business magnates entered Spanish society in the narrow sense of that term, and shared its interests in the Catholic revival; he financed pilgrimages to Rome and laid down minute regulations to prevent opportunities for immorality on his ships. 1 In the north the great financial and industrial dynasties, sprung from humble origins like the Urquijos, followed a similar development somewhat later: thus the richest Basque industrialists

____________________ enterprises tended to be dominated by politicians (cf the railways earlier) and, as an interest group, came into sharp conflict with the board of the Canal of Isabella II that supplied the water that had been the basis of Madrid's development as a great city. For this conflict within the conservative classes see Memorias, informes y documentos relativos a la gestión de la Commisaria Regia . . . en el año 1907 ( 1908). The Santillana Electrical concern (with which the conservative leader Maura was connected) wished to sell water to the Canal of Isabella 11 (of which the conservative politician Sánchez de Toca was president); it therefore opposed the Canal board's plans for combining water supply with production of electrical power (op. cit., esp. 161 ff.).

1 For a curious portrait of Comillas see E. F. Regatillo, Un marquís modelo ( Santander, 1950). It is a curious quirk of history, and an indication of the economic importance of Comillas, that Huysman's hero, des Esseintes, had a Transatlántica poster in his room.

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