Gaziel, the total and liberal journalist, returns

The golden age of Spanish journalism is born and dies in Paris that never ends. It is a quarter of a century of great reporting. A choral story that narrates the catastrophe of the European civil war live and with literary excellence. It was written by Gaziel (1887-1964) and Manuel Chaves Nogales, also by Josep Pla, Ramón J. Sender or Eugeni Xammar. They traveled the entire continent with their pen and notebook. From Rome to Moscow, from Old Houses to Berlin.

This parable of memorable chronicles began at the beginning of the First World War with an article whose pretext was the general mobilization in the French capital and would culminate with a report on how the Nazi occupation short-circuited the civic nerve of the city of light. That final point was written by Manuel Chaves Nogales in

The Agony of France

before dying in London, while the first stone had been laid in 1914, at the age of 26, by Agustí Calvet,

Gaziel,

when he began publishing the series

Diary

of a Student in Paris.

If Chaves came into the world in 1897 with journalism in his DNA, there was nothing to suggest that Gaziel, born 10 years earlier, would excel in the exercise of a profession that he earned prestige as a columnist and director. In their prime, both were reformist liberals. During the Civil War, as they both wrote using almost the same words, one or the other could have killed them. Then the trace of the quality of their career as newspaper writers would be lost. But in 1993 Manuel Llanas' doctoral thesis laid the foundations for Gaziel's comprehensive recovery; In 1998, María Isabel Cintas Guillén's had the same function for Chaves. Since then they have not stopped being reissued. Today Chaves is considered a classic and Gaziel should be too.

Gaziel was the son of a bourgeois family dedicated to the cork industry. Originally from Sant Feliu de Guíxols, on the Costa Brava, he grew up in the Eixample neighborhood, which was beginning to redefine the identity of Barcelona residents. The first vocation of this Frenchman was philosophy. He imagined himself as a member of the academic elite who, while substantiating a national culture from the professorship, was committed to the cultural framework of the first Catalan nationalism with institutional power. In 1913, when he was already working in a section of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, he applied for a chair in the History of Philosophy. He crashes in oral exercise. In March 1914, to escape the terrible relations with his father, he settled in Paris. His pretext was to expand his studies, his fantasy was not to return. “It is liberation!” He recorded in some autobiographical notes.

His freedom did not last long. His life project was cut short because the story crossed into his life. That summer the Great War began. Gaziel did not return immediately. He will surely return to Barcelona on September 6. He will make a fundamental decision. He begins his regular collaboration in

La Vanguardia,

always viewed with suspicion by his nationalist generation colleagues. Her article of September 9, written with encyclopedic prose and syntax, showed how war infiltrates the spirit, in every street, in every house. Also in the boarding house where he lived.

By literaryizing that experience, Gaziel already explores his main talent: the description and analysis of his time through a view shaped by the best Western tradition. That founding article, which looks with pity on a German girl who the day before was one of the others and now was an enemy, would be unthinkable without her knowledge of the chronotope of the guest house prepared by Balzac. The formula was to merge journalism with literature. The success of

Diary of a Student in Paris

was immediate. It was published as a book and

La Vanguardia

hired its author as a correspondent. Another war book, the journey through Greece and the Balkans that is

From Paris to Monastir,

would have been signed by Kapuściński if he had lived in 1915.

When the war ended, he did not resume academic activity. His work will be his articles. About the city, about national and international politics, about the palpitations of the time, about art and letters. He will be a total journalist. A bourgeois journalist who thinks about the present with the instruments of high culture, ascribing to the ethics that evolved from humanism to liberalism after having mutated during the Enlightenment. Thus he founded his intellectual freedom.

He wrote about the best literature, like Ortega, in search of being and to understand his time

The anthology

Literary Talks,

which Francisco Fuster has just edited, demonstrates this. It is a book that compiles articles about writers, published between 1919 and 1933, although it is not just literary criticism. Agree that in the Spanish press perhaps no one wrote more astute comments about Proust than him and it would not be easy to find today an article as original about Byron as the one he wrote a century ago, when the first centenary of the death of the great was commemorated. Romantic. They could be Shakespeare or Pirandello, Tolstoy or Baroja, Queiroz or Stendhal, Valery or Carner. The humanist Gaziel, like the Ortega who wrote about art, commented on these figures and their books in the search for being and time. He understood that this was also one of the civic functions of the press.

The civic commitment of journalism with his society, on which Gaziel would not stop reflecting, was assumed with the conviction of an enlightened man, especially after the death in 1920 of his mentor Miguel de los Santos Oliver. He leaves reporting. He will increasingly have greater weight in the modernization of

La Vanguardia.

He would soon also collaborate in

El Sol,

as can be read in the volume

¿Sere yo español?

In his articles on politics he tried to resolve a contradiction that he experienced as irresolvable: the elaboration of an ideological discourse that would make the stabilization of the current order compatible, as stated by the editor and rewarded by readers, with his genuine commitment to a Catalanism that had entered into a phase of radicalization after seeing his attempts at moderate reformism of the Restoration system fail.

Badly seen by his own and ignored by others, he acted as a critical conscience in no man's land.

Badly seen by his people or ignored by others, he felt like he was in no man's land. It is the place where, among lament, vanity and above all lucidity, he discovers the anthology of articles

Tot s'ha perdut

that he prepared himself and that was recently republished. Gaziel had begun to contemplate himself in a mirror where he saw the intellectual's face reflected: he understood that his responsibility was to act as a critical conscience, even lambaste like a prophet. This meant denouncing constitutive failures of Spanish society, which delayed its democratic politicization.

In few places did he elaborate his diagnosis as clearly as in the laudatory obituary he dedicated to the literary critic Eduardo Gómez de Baquero. December 1929. “Among us, in a country that has never had a true liberal spirit, neither in its masses nor in its individuals, because the three great European R's—the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Revolution—slid over its crust , almost without even scratching it, the true reaction, in the dynamic sense of the word, is liberalism. His practice of journalism was a derivative of that idea: a pedagogical will.

But his liberalism was neither elitist nor conservative. It is clear in her response to a survey by the newspaper

El Liberal,

published at the end of 1927, that she was rescued by Llanas. “Liberalism and socialism do not just have to go in agreement. They can't do anything else. I, at least, do not conceive of an illiberal socialism or a liberalism that remains outside social realities. Liberalism is one of the eternal ways of being—for me the most fruitful—of the human spirit. “Socialism seems to me to be the most modern incarnation of that spirit.” Surely that is why she read the advent of the Second Republic as an opportunity. But it would not take him long to critically review her judgment on the development of the new regime: his basic problem was that it was a republic without republicans. She tried to accompany the process, above all she tried to prevent its collapse. And it failed.

“I always tried to open the eyes of others to avoid this tragedy,” he declared during the Civil War.

Shortly after the Civil War began, the Catalan authorities recommended Gaziel leave the country. He is 48 years old. End of the journalist. They amputate part of his identity: they steal his library, “one of the best private ones in Barcelona,” as he confessed to Josep Pla. After having tried to build an intellectual alternative to the two sides in Paris, after having collaborated to survive in the counterrevolutionary propaganda financed by Francesc Cambó—whom he always admired—he decided to seek his fortune in Latin America by founding a publishing house. On May 30, 1937, the Cuban magazine

Carteles

published an interview conducted during the stop of the ship

Virginia

whose final destination was Caracas. He interviews Arturo Ramírez, who asks him why he had to leave Barcelona. “I don't know…” he answers, leaning on a column on the deck, “I always tried to open the eyes of others to avoid this tragedy.” The publishing project did not turn out as expected.

Return to Europe while the war continues. His main occupation was to rewrite a history of modern Spain whose original version had been written at the request of Cambó. In the text there is again the intellectual contradiction. His objective was to make it seem like a work legitimizing the coup against the republic, but in reality it incorporated arguments so that it could be read as a moderantist version of the process that led to the Spanish tragedy. In the whirlwind of the end of the Civil War and the start of World War II, Gaziel does not control his destiny. After experiencing an epic, while the German army seems to be on his heels, he ends up crossing the Spanish border on the day the swastika was raised in the south of France. He must face a court martial and a trial for political responsibilities. They were acquitted, but he was already a plague.

He settled in Madrid. He writes two splendid short essays: the prologue to a biography of Machiavelli (“one of the most lucid and great thinkers of the new Europe of the Renaissance”), the prologue to a translation of

The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In the text that preceded the novel, he referred to the Oscar Wilde of the decadence in Paris as one buried alive. In some way, in that first five years of the 1940s, he was too. His world—the world of liberal journalism—had been annihilated.

However, for a time, he had a fantasy of resurrecting him. It was proposed to him by Luis Montiel, editor of the republican

Ahora,

which had Chaves Nogales as deputy editor and in which Gaziel had collaborated punctually. Llanas explains that Montiel had recovered the machinery and proposed to Gaziel to start over with a newspaper called

La Hora

that could be published in Barcelona. To look for investors in 1942, Gaziel wrote a long report titled

The Spanish Press.

There are historical considerations that rhyme with today. “With few exceptions, from the assassination of Cánovas in 1897 to 1936, when the most terrifying of civil wars broke out, Spanish newspapers contributed – consciously or unconsciously – to the progressive discredit of all institutions and to the implacable collapse of successive regimes. established.” Liberal journalism had to act, once again, against this toxic prey.

The only possibility for that project to reach the newsstands was if the Allied victory in World War II was accompanied by the restoration of democracy in Spain. I do not pass. Churchill made this clear in the Westminster Parliament. Gaziel knew it and, deep inside, he never forgave that betrayal of the liberal countries and especially the one that had best embodied their values: England. With that lament he begins his bitter diary

Meditations in the Desert

,

a very harsh accusation that ruthlessly describes the Madrid of the dictatorship and denounces the surrender of liberal intellectuals (he points to Ortega and Marañón). RBA will soon reissue the Spanish translation of a work that seems written in purgatory.

During Holy Week in 1944, almost as if he were writing a testament to his generation, Gaziel composed a meditation on the lack of political aptitude of the Catalans. He listed a series of examples ranging from the medieval past to the rebellion against the republican order of October 1934. It was not chance. It was a constitutional defect. “Catalonia is precisely a perfect example of how it is not enough to be a nation to create a State.” He is of relentless sagacity, and Gaziel did not have a crystal ball to contemplate the umpteenth repetition of a fatality. 'El disconhort' can be found in the posthumous volume

Quina mena de gent som.

Diéresis will reissue it in Catalan with a prologue by Màrius Carol while also publishing it in Spanish for the first time (translated by Gaziel's great-granddaughter). The author read that funeral speech at a clandestine literary meeting on May 7. It had been three days since Manuel Chaves Nogales had died in London.

In Madrid Gaziel earned his living as literary director of the Plus Ultra publishing house. His public name disappears. Shortly before retiring he asked the Barcelona newspaper archive if they could microfilm all of his articles and hired a typist to copy them all. There were hundreds of pages. He reread them, corrected some texts, and prepared three anthologies for posterity. Later, upon retiring, he wrote those essays disguised as travel books and which constitute the trilogy of

The Unfinished Peninsula,

his old Iberian obsession. In 1957 he began to write his world of yesterday: the autobiography of childhood and youth that concluded with his entry into the world of journalism. In 1959 they had considerable success. He titled them

Tots els camins duen a Roma. Spoiler:

the Institut Ramon Llull is looking for a publisher to take on the challenge of translating this classic of European liberal memorialism into Spanish. It is Gaziel's last battle, the missing link in our liberal journalism.

Reading List

How we Catalans are 

Gaziel  

Translation by Paola Calvet

Umlaut, 2024

300 pages. 19 euros

On sale April 15

Gaziel  

Literary Talks 

Fundación Banco Santander, 2024

229 pages. 10 euros

Tot s'ha perdut 

Gaziel  

La Magranal, 2022

288 pages. 17.95 euros

Dispersed work  

Gaziel  

Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat, 2020 

280 pages. 27.55 euros

Dear friend. Correspondence 

Gaziel / Josep Pla 

Destino, 2018

272 pages. 18.50 euros

Meditations in the desert 

Gaziel  

L'altra, 2018 

352 pages. 19 euros

Will I be Spanish? 

Gaziel  

Peninsula, 2018 

544 pages. 22.90 euros

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