Today marks a decade since the death of Gregorio Peces-Barba.
In the hours prior to this painful anniversary, I have once again passed through my heart to the dear friend who was, to the charismatic teacher, to the heterodox fellow socialist militancy, to the prestigious philosopher of law and politics, to the statesman,
father of the Constitution
and President of Congress, the patriot who dreamed of an open and civil Spain, the (theoretical and practical) defender of fundamental rights and the good, generous and fun human being.
With these brief lines I would like to modestly contribute to avoiding the loss of his memory, honoring his memory and underlining the value of the continuity and permanence of his example and his ideas, that "achievement forever" to which he refers Thucydides in his
History of the Peloponnesian War
.
Because Peces-Barba did great things for this country, for this Spain of ours, which is worth remembering in these difficult times, of so much polarization, fragmentation and mutual misunderstanding.
During the 1960s, Peces-Barba was a brilliant young human rights lawyer.
He practiced in Franco's Spain, before war tribunals and before the Court of Public Order.
He saved lives in a country with the death penalty and defended rights and guarantees that did not exist in the legal system of the dictatorship.
Malgré lui
and without it serving as a precedent, he acted, for once, as a natural law scholar.
He was confined by the Regime in Santa María del Campo (Burgos).
He progressively increased his political participation and his commitment to the arrival of democracy, militating in the PSOE since 1972 and helping to create, together with his teacher Ruiz-Giménez, one of the flagship magazines of the Transition:
Notebooks for dialogue
. .
In 1977 he was the socialist representative in the constitutional report and we largely owe him the contents linked to fundamental rights and superior values, to the principle of equality in articles 9 and 14 and the special resistance in our Constitution to the right to education.
Between 1982 and 1986 he presided over the Congress of Deputies.
He was the first socialist president since Besteiro.
He had the favorable vote of the vast majority of its members and performed this lofty function, aware of the enormous legitimacy at the origin of his election, with scrupulous institutional neutrality.
"You have to vote for Gregorio," Fraga ordered his group.
He was a man of genuine convictions but who fled from the dogmas
From 1989 and well into the 21st century, Peces-Barba was rector of a prestigious public university, Carlos III.
In her he put his soul.
His personal imprint was marked from the beginning following two fundamental maxims: excellence and universality.
Its first campuses were established in Getafe and Leganés, two towns on the outskirts of Madrid.
It was a deliberate act of social justice by the socialist government of González that Peces-Barba embodied perfectly by equipping this public university with valuable professors and the best means, with a scientific vocation and a humanistic spirit, in the good tradition of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza.
In 2004, and without leaving the rector's office or teaching, he accepted the commission from President Zapatero to be High Commissioner for Support to Victims of Terrorism, a position of enormous complexity, in which he displayed his empathy and kindness with the families and the survivors of the terrorist violence, reaching a maximum level of public exposure in the midst of the tension over the government's management of 11-M and the controversies over the end of the dialogue with ETA.
He no longer needed to make merits and, nevertheless, in the autumn of his life, he decided to take a step forward, one more.
I had the privilege of accompanying him.
Only his high-mindedness explains why he then accepted this extremely difficult task and rejected the most important one as Minister of Education and Universities.
He died without money, but wise, as a wise man he lived, detached from everything except his 'citadel'
Peces-Barba was a man of genuine convictions but not of dogmas.
He did not believe in absolute truths, although he did have certainties.
And he was always open to revision of his ideas.
If through study, dialogue with others and experience itself, he thought, we find reasons to abandon our starting positions, we should do so, even if that abandonment produces a feeling of failure, emptiness or loneliness.
He recommended never having an excessively high opinion of oneself.
He had read the
Rhetoric
of Aristotle and knew that an exaggerated self-love could open an insurmountable gap between human beings.
That is why, above all, he was a great humanist, who simply practiced and defended solidarity and the noble feeling that feeds it: compassion.
Christianity first and democratic socialism later were for him only the paths he had to follow to work for a fairer world that would place the human being and his equal dignity at the center of coexistence.
He was also a moderate for the means and a radical for the ends.
He was situated between the too conservative and the excessively extreme.
He moved well in that wide space of good sense that allowed him to understand, persuade and agree.
He always sought balance, temperance, and made an effort to understand the other, his reasons, his points of view.
Although he was passionate, his natural kindness, his reason and the memory of the dead (the memory of the history of Spain) enthralled him and led him quickly to communication, tolerance and reunion.
He respected people even though he could openly discuss his ideas.
And he fought especially those that he considered dangerous for coexistence: extremism and disintegrating or excluding nationalism, including the Spanish if he did not recognize the plurality of our country,
Thoroughly honest, he died penniless.
But he died wise, as he lived wise, detached from everything except his
citadel
from him, as
his
Montaigne from him.
At the beginning of July 2012 he went to Ribadesella, like every summer since 1984. There, in what he felt was his paradise on earth, he spent the days he had left to live.
In Memoriam
.
José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes
is the Spanish ambassador to UNESCO and was Minister of Culture and Sports between 2020 and 2021
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