article Journal of Catalan Intellectual History, Issue 3, 2012 | Print ISSN 2014-1572 / Online ISSN 2014-1564 DOI 10.2436/20.3001.02.38 | P. 29-45 Reception date: 5/07/2011 / Admission date: 12/12/2011 http://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/JOCIH

Jaume Miravitlles and Marxism: a Twentieth-Century Voyage

Enric Pujol Grup de Recerca «Manuscrits». Universitat Autònoma de [email protected]

abstract This article examines the political career of writer and journalist Jaume Miravitlles i Navarra (Figueres, 1906 – Barcelona, 1988). It proposes that the importance of his contributions to intellectual thought and politics deserve reassessment, partly because Miravitlles’s political progress was typical of certain left-wing European in- tellectuals during the period in discussion: of those whose initiation in politics was full-blooded Leninism, but who then progressively distanced themselves from Soviet ideology and finally became profoundly critical of political Marxism. Miravitlles played a leading role in the of 1936–1939, when he headed the Generalitat’s Propaganda Commissariat. After 1939, in exile, he became one of the leading narrators of human experience during this period of war and revolution, a role that he reaffirmed on his return to in 1963.

key words Leninism, the avant-garde, Salvador Dalí, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc (Bloc Obrer i Camperol), the Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya), the Civil War, the Propaganda Commissariat (Comissariat de Propaganda), exile, cold war, historiography, political thought.

Miravitlles as a representative figure

Jaume Miravitlles i Navarra (Figueres 1906 – Barcelona 1988) is one of Catalan intellectual history’s most interesting thinkers but also remains, quite undeserv- edly, one of its least well-known. Specialist historians may identify him as the head of the Generalitat’s Propaganda Commissariat during the Spanish Civil War, the work of which has been widely recognized even by its detractors; his name may also mean something to scholars of contemporary art and the Sur- realist movement, given that Miravitlles shared with Salvador Dalí the native town of Figueres, a close friendship and, from the 1940s onwards, an increas- 29 Journal of Catalan Intellectual History. Issue 3. 2012. P. 29-45 Enric Pujol

ingly important working relationship in which Miravitlles was of the artist’s main standard bearers; finally, he may even be familiar to researchers for his journalistic production of over 10,000 articles of different kinds, variously pub- lished in Europe and America1. But Jaume Miravitlles is rarely cited as an important intellectual or po- litical thinker of his times, even though his writing is highly relevant and his in- tellectual and political progress reveal a great deal about the transformations and contradictions that characterized the twentieth century. And in the progress of his association with Marxism he was especially representative of his fellow Eu- ropeans and of Europe’s experience of Marxist thought. Raised in the ideologi- cal trenches of anti-Stalinist Leninism, during the Civil War years Miravitlles distanced himself from the Marxist-affiliated parties and went on to hold, in the years following the Second World War, a clearly articulated pro-NATO and anti-Soviet position. That position, not at all uncommon in postwar Europe, did however make him something of a rara avis when he returned to Catalonia, which had become characterized by its hegemonic Marxist and communist re- sistance to Franco. At the same time, however, although he changed some of his ideas and political affiliations over the years, there were basic Marxist principles that remained important to him throughout his life.

Miravitlles’s initiation in Marxism-Leninism

In his youth and still in his native town of Figuer