León has been the land of many great men in Spain. And in terms of representativeness of the people, it boasts of being the Cradle of European and world Parliamentarianism. Throughout the centuries, various people from León have been part of the decisions of Spain, and many of them at the top, since among them there have been several presidents of the Government of Spain. The most famous Leonese deputy in the current democracy is, without a doubt, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who became Prime Minister between 2004 and 2011. His successor was related to León, Mariano Rajoy (who was not a deputy for this constituency), who studied in the Leonese capital as a child.
The Leonese democrats forgotten by the democracy brought by the 1978 Constitution
Further
But before the democracy of 1978, who were the most famous deputies elected by the province of León? Among them, between 1810 and 1936, two presidents of the Government and even a president of the Council of Ministers of the Second Republic in exile.
In order to manage the large volume of business of the Gómez Álvarez Carballo family from Leon, they hired the services of a young Galician lawyer residing in Madrid named Eduardo Dato, who in turn was closely related to the Rothschild banking house of German origin, who had become related in Spain to the Fagoaga y Dutari family of Navarre origin. Joaquin de Fagoaga, Santiago Alonso Cordero the MaragatoPedro Álvarez Carballo, Eduardo Dato, Secundino Gómez, the Marquis of Salamanca and other very high-ranking entrepreneurs and speculators from Madrid, together with the Viuda de Salinas bank from Leon, maintained very close and cordial relations in Madrid supported by prosperous and common businesses and investments of all kinds, both in León and in the capital of the Kingdom.
Eduardo Dato intervened directly in the estate of the Baron de Rothschild in Paris, a fortune that amounted to a billion francs. When the Rothchild family asked him for the bill, Eduardo Dato presented an invoice for 250,000 pesetas, but the family of German origin quadrupled the amount to be received (with a check for one million pesetas).
All the Leonese charitable associations such as Monte de Piedad and Caja de Ahorros owe a lot to Eduardo Dato and Secundino Gómez. Regarding donations to all this type of charitable associations (economic kitchens, Casa de la Caridad, public libraries, holiday camps for children…) we only have to review the press of the time to verify the amounts delivered by Secundino Gómez –owner of the Conde de Luna palace down to the last house in that entire lineup, today Regidores street–, near the confluence with Ancha street (in those days called San Marcelo street). The Gómez Álvarez Carballo family had Eduardo Dato as plenipotentiary administrator since 1878, to whom they handed over the political representation of their electoral district of Murias de Paredes (the largest of the Leonese districts).
Dato was in the Cortes for thirty years in a row, while Secundino Gómez lived. Eduardo Dato held many ministerial portfolios, the presidency of Congress and the Senate and the presidency of the Government at various political junctures, until his vile assassination by some anarchists in 1921. At the home in León de Secundino Gómez (in the Plaza del Conde) the room that Eduardo Dato always occupied in his visits to our city is preserved. During his stays in the mountains, he lived on the properties of the Gómez Álvarez Carballo family.
It was Secundino Gómez (Pedro Álvarez Carballo’s brother-in-law) who took over the maintenance of the family patrimony and became Eduardo Dato Iradier’s political mentor, making him a deputy to Cortes for the district of Murias de Paredes on several occasions, from 1884 (with a hiatus from 1886 to 1890) until 1915. Dato also became mayor of Madrid, president of the Congress of Deputies, several times minister, etc. until being assassinated by anarchists in 1921, when he presided over the Government of Spain. Dato was one of the inspirers of the Neutrality Statute of the Kingdom of Spain in the First World War.
Deputies for León in the 19th century
Going back to the origin of Spanish parliamentarianism, in 1810 the elections for deputies to the Cortes brought together a series of Leonese in the house of Cathalina Antonia de Cuenllas, great-grandmother of Secundino Gómez and widow of Fernando Gómez Buelta, where they were nominated to stand in said election. Among them, the brigadier of the Royal Navy José Valdés Flórez and Patricio Álvarez del Campillo. The Leonese from Vidanes Luis de Sosa y Tovar, deputy for León in the Sovereign Junta of the Nation in 1810, in the middle of the war against the French, was another of those nominated to sit in the Cortes (as it happened).
The second most famous deputy was Philip Sierra Pambley. Born in San Miguel de Laciana in 1774, he was a Spanish jurist and politician, Secretary of State and of the Universal Treasury Office from February 28 to August 5, 1822, and interim Minister of War, during the Liberal Triennium. Honorary State Councilor in 1823, he participated in the Legislative Assembly as a deputy to Cortes for the León constituency between 1820 and 1822. He is the patriarch of the philanthropic family of the Sierra-Pambley de León Foundation.
Patricio Alvarez Quiros, Gabriel Balbuena the FoxGarcía Prieto, Gullón, Merino, Quiñones de León, Saavedra, Azcárate, Molleda, González Regueral, Sánchez Arriola and Sierra Pambley are just some of the Leonese surnames whose lineages have given deputies for several generations.
Of modest origin he was Manuel Garcia Prieto, but he reached the top in the politics of the Restoration. He left his town to study, obtaining his law degree at a very young age. In 1888, he was elected deputy to Cortes, for the district of Astorga, as his father had been years before and he went through several governments in various ministries until he was appointed president of the Council of Ministers on several occasions: between 1917 and 1918 (replacing precisely Eduardo Dato); and 1922 until September 1923, when he presided over the Government, when the coup d’état led by Primo de Rivera took place.
In the archive of the Fernández-Llamazares bank, hundreds of unpublished letters from all these deputies are preserved using the paper of Congress to carry out and give orders to the Fernández-Llamazares bank on all kinds of private businesses.
Who were these deputies and what did they do? If a common characteristic united them –at least in the 19th and 20th centuries, until the arrival of the Second Republic– it is that they were owners, and some of them can even be described as landowners, who also imposed their political representatives, as we have seen in the case of Eduardo Dato. Whether or not they were dedicated exclusively to maintaining their heritage, the truth is that, generally speaking, many of them were lawyers (whether they practiced or not), engineers (Salustio González Regueral), industrialists (Fernando Merino Villarino), bankers (Mariano Andrés Lescún), ambassadors (the Marquis of Montevirgen and later his grandson José María Quiñones de León was in Paris, or Pablo de Azcárate Flórez in London, representative of the Popular Front, so brother of Gumersindo de Azcárate and grandson of Patrick Azcarate).
precisely his uncle Gumersindo de Azcarate, was another of the great deputies from León, for being the promoter of the Law for the Repression of Usury, of 1908 and which is still in force today. Of republican ideology since 1873, this member of the Azcárate lineage was elected in 1886, for the first time deputy for León; constituency which he will continue to represent until the 1917 elections, the year of his death.
The Leonese representatives, for the most part owners, simply took care of maintaining their private activities. Or they ended up being high officials, like the next protagonist, Fernando González Regueral, deputy for León in the judicial district of Sahagún from 1896 to 1898 who was civil governor in Navarra, Teruel, Soria, Logroño on two occasions, Lugo, Castellón on two occasions, Álava and Vizcaya. But he is mainly remembered for his shooting murder in León in 1923 on the same street that today bears his name.
In 1890, universal masculine suffrage had been reestablished in Spain (the Sagasta government). Called at the time “Universal Suffrage”, it was recognized in the Constitution of 1869 and was definitively established in 1890. This would not change until 1933, when only men could vote, despite an attempt to vote for women in the Municipal Statute of 1924 during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera.
Deputies (and deputy) of the Second Republic
Women’s suffrage was exercised for the first time in the 1933 Elections (Second Republic), one of the first recognitions of women’s suffrage in the Western world. León contributed to Congress (1933) a deputy named Francisca Bohigas Gavilanesone of the only nine women who won a seat among the more than a thousand male deputies that existed during the period of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1936). Felix Gordón Ordás (who was later president of the Council of Ministers of the Second Republic in exile), Alfredo Nistal, Justino de Azcárate Flórez or Miguel Castaño were some of the deputies from Leon elected until the arrival of the war and Francoism. Another famous deputy was the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset also representing León in 1931.
By the way, Pablo de Azcarate, closely linked to León, arrived in September 1936 as ambassador to London. Winston Churchill, in a November 1936 speech in the House of Commons, accused Russia of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Pablo de Azcárate, in his memoirs, recalls the attempt to shake Churchill’s hand at a banquet in London: “Churchill declared that he did not want to have any relationship with me and walked away muttering:” Blood, blood…! Pablo de Azcárate was the representative of the Popular Front in England…
One of the deputies without assets, Gordón Ordás (like the socialists Alfredo Nistal and the mayor Miguel Castaño), according to Josep Pla, “was an elephantine speaker without limits.” On the tension experienced in the Spanish Parliament, Pla assures that “what the socialists have said about the radicals of Gordón, and the radicals to the socialists, cannot be reproduced because it offends the ears. These scenes in Congress make us doubt, with reason, the possibility that this regime subsists with the concentrated passion that exists between the parties and the difficulties that general coexistence encounters in Spain”. A bad omen for Josep Pla that sadly came to an end…
After the Second Republic and the Civil War, in Franco’s Spain the participation of citizens in political decisions was articulated through the so-called ‘Organic Democracy‘, a system by which the representation of individuals was postponed in favor of the so-called “natural entities”: the family, the municipality and the union. Franco’s fear of political parties and his electoral system during the Second Republic, in what he considered had caused the destruction of Spain, led him to replace the idea of party with that of ‘Organo’. Franco would call two referendums in 1947 and 1966, but no elected deputies came out of those popular consultations…
It will be time to tell it another time.
2023-07-23 08:35:40
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