República i autonomia. El difícil arrelament del catalanisme d’esquerres, 1904-1931

2006. Pròleg de Josep Termes, 226 pp.

A thick synthesis, descriptive and interpretative at the same time, where it draws with precision and clarity the backbone process of the left-wing Catalan. First it studies how the ‘Centre Nacionalista Republicà’ was born, a product of the scission of the ‘Lliga Regionalista’ in 1904. The dissidents started a newspaper, ‘El Poble Català’ (by the CNR and the first prove of national and republican Catalanism), where we can find politicians like Jaume Carner and Ildefons Suñol. The CNR, engulfed by the policy of anti-Catalan repression led by the military establishment, could not prevent the success of the thrust of the catalanism was owned by Cambó and ‘La Lliga’. Then, follows a careful analysis of the Unió Federal Nacionalista Republicana, born in 1910 in the shelter of the open crisis in catalanism by the envents of Tragic Week, which finally derived into a pact against the Radical Party unable to replace ‘La Lliga’. Throughout the book, the author poses a series of question and obvious realities. It emphasises one that is fundamental: the difficulty of intellectuals, writers and journalists to become political leaders, and correlative with this, the difficult necessity to convert the ideas, the ideology if one wants, in a program of practical government, pragmatic, able to combine the idealism with the realities, and to make comprehensible and desirable for the multitudes a policy of real change.