Pompeyo Gener

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Pompeyo Gener
(Barcelona) Retrat de Pompeu Gener - Francesc Inglada - Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.jpg
Portrait of Pompeu Gener by Francisco Inglada. Collection of the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC).
Born Pompeyo Gener Babot
c. 1846 or 1850
Barcelona, Kingdom of Spain
Died 14 November 1920
Barcelona, Kingdom of Spain
Occupation Journalist, author
Nationality Spanish

Pompeyo Gener Babot[lower-alpha 1] (Catalan: Pompeu Gener i Babot; c. 1846 or 1850 – 14 November 1920) was a Spanish essayist, journalist, translator and playwright. A representative of the ethnicist component of Catalan nationalism, he embarked on an attempt to connect nationalism with scientific foundations. His approach — which combined positivism with evolutionism — led him to social Darwinism. A bohemian with progressive ideas, he lived for long periods in Paris.

Biography

Pompeyo Gener was born in Barcelona.[lower-alpha 2] His youth was spent apparently in Cambrils, in the company of his grandfather Antonio Babot. Gener studied medicine, although he left college without graduating. He studied Egyptology, Philology, Oriental Languages and History of Religions in France, Holland, Switzerland and Germany.

A close friend of Ramon Casas since childhood. Their families were connected. A well-known cosmopolitan figure in the modernist movement, he often traveled to various European countries, accompanied on several occasions by Apel·les Mestres. In Paris he came into contact with positivist and vitalist currents that he spread to Catalonia and Spain. Gener contributed to the development of modernism. Víctor Balaguer commissioned him to guide his librarian Joan Oliva i Milà through the libraries of France to learn the craft.

Very active politically, he was linked to republicanism and specifically to federal republicanism during the revolution of 1868, participating in the First Catalanist Congress organized by Valentí Almirall in 1880.

As a journalist, he collaborated in several newspapers, such as La Vanguardia, and magazines, such as L'Esquella de la Torratxa and especially in Joventut. His work Un somni futurista espaterrant, published in 1910, is one of the first science-fiction stories in Catalan.

He died poor and insane — he had lost his sanity a few years before his death — in a sanatorium in Barcelona on November 14, 1920.

Part of his personal collection is preserved in the Photographic Archive of Barcelona. The collection is made up of portraits of Pompeyo Gener and of people from the world of culture and entertainment. The photographs are dedicated to and show the relationship that Peius, as Gener was known, maintained with the cultural movement of his time.

The Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona also conserves part of Gener's personal collection, in this case made up of documentation for his memoirs, journalistic works, theater manuscripts and correspondence.

Thought

Pompeyo Gener, caricatured by Ramón Escaler. La Semana Cómica, No. 17 (1892)

Well known within the modernist movement, he often traveled to various European countries, and on one occasion, — together with Apel·les Mestres (1874) — to Asia and Africa. In Paris, where he lived for long periods, he came into contact with positivist currents, which he wished to spread into Catalonia. Thus, under the influence of Jules Soury and Paul Broca's Society of Anthropology, he introduced the French racial doctrine into Catalanism. He has been described as "restless heterodox and a man of the world".

In 1887, Gener published Heresies. Studies of Inductive Criticism on Spanish Affairs. In Heresies, Gener, who at that time had not yet discovered Catalanism, applies racial doctrines to Spain.[lower-alpha 3] For Gener, the idea of race also includes a historical sense, a "historical race", which he connects with the concept of nationality.[lower-alpha 4]

Gener's concept of nation is organic, it has an identity, established by its physical environment, it has a life, a physiology and struggles for its existence, it is the characterization of a social organism. Here we can see the influence of social Darwinism, the "struggle for existence" of the nation will give the conceptual justification for imperialism: nations are perfected in the struggle, which is equivalent to obtaining a destiny, a "historical mission", an unassailable mandate:

All nations, then, with their particular way of being, are as necessary to mankind as the brain, the heart, the lung, the stomach and the other organs are to the human individual.[4]

Naturally, while some nations are natural leaders (brain), others will have various functions (heart, lung, stomach, etc.). In this way, with the specialization of nations, Gener believes that the "final convergence", the ideal of humanity, will be reached.

Gener points out that the rest of Spain, although of Indo-European, would be contaminated by the blood of inferior races. With this doctrinal equipment, Gener considers that Spain, under the influence of its Semitic and pre-Semitic elements, has been in decadence since the reconquista, very much in line with the black legend[lower-alpha 5] and that these evils would extend to Catalonia.

In Heresies, Gener considered the existence of a distinct "Catalan race", "each Catalan has a king in his body", which would have given his literature its characteristic energy, vigor and hardness. In contrast to the "Castilian race", in which the "lack of oxygen and atmospheric pressure; poor nutrition" and the well-known Semitic and pre-Semitic influences ("the Andalusians"), would determine a language unsuitable for great literature. These Berber and Semitic characteristics of the center of the peninsula would configure for Gener, according to Martínez Hoyos, other qualities such as "morosity", "disregard for time", "bad administration" or "caciquismo".

Picture by José Demaría López (1916)

In 1897 he returned to Barcelona for good, signing from then on with the name Pompeu Gener, establishing contact with the circle around the magazine Catalònia, where he would be one of the intellectuals who defended the modernity of nationalism. Thus, by 1900, he had completed his turn towards nationalism.

For Gener there were three currents within Catalan nationalism.

  • The federalist current, seeking autonomy.
  • And the "supernationals", which Gener wants to see as the current of the moderns, liberal intellectuals, formed by men of letters, sciences, workers, artists, students, etc.; which is the group in which he is included. The main organ of this movement would be the magazine Joventut, in which Gener would publish the foundational manifesto: Manifiesto de los Supernacionales, one of whose decisive elements was the rejection of egalitarianism.

In his reprint of Heresies, expanded with the "Catalan question", he presents in a synthetic form his nationalist thought: it would simply be a dispute between races. To save the Catalan race from its decline, it would be necessary to reinforce the primordial Aryan, Celtic, Latin or even Basque elements, and purify it of Castilian elements, that is, Semitic and pre-Semitic elements. The inferiority of the Castilian race would come from the "ethnic elements", but also from "the excessive heat and extreme cold and [sic] the barren heights, the earthquakes of certain regions, and above all the dryness of the soil. " "Madrid's atmosphere is poor in helium and argon" and its waters lack "krypton, neon and xenon," so it should cease to be the capital of Spain. In short, "we [Catalans] know that we [Catalans] are European Aryans and that as men we are worth more on the path of the Superman."

In popular culture

Gener appears as a character in the novel Homes artificials (1912) by Frederic Pujulà i Vallès.

Works

  • La Mort et le Diable (1880)
  • Heregias. Estudios de crítica inductiva sobre asuntos españoles (1887)
  • Los cent consells del Consell de Cent (1891)
  • Literaturas malsanas (1894)
  • El caso Clarín (1894)
  • Amigos y maestros (1898)
  • Senyors de paper! (1901–1902)
  • Inducciones. Ensayos de Filosofia y de Crítica (1901)
  • Historia de la literatura (1902)
  • Leyendas de amor (1902)
  • El Anticristo y la moral ascética (1903)
  • Monòlegs Humorístics (1903)
  • L’agència d’informes comercials (1905)
  • Dònes de cor (1907)
  • Pasión y muerte de Miguel Servet (1909)
  • Un somni futurista espaterrant (1910)
  • Intelecto y Belleza (1916)
  • Coses d'en Peius (1922)
  • Últimos momentos de Miguel Servet
  • Un pontífice del oculistmo (1917)
  • Filosofemas (1918)
  • El intelecto helénico
  • Servet. Reforma contra Renacimiento. Calvinismo contra Humanismo

Notes

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Towards the end of his career, he came to sign his writings as Pompeu Gener; also known as Peius.
  2. ↑ The precise year of our his birth is uncertain. Some sources give the date 1846, 1848, or 1850. Likewise Eusebio Blasco, in a book published in 1886, speaks of him as "a wise man of 32 years".[1]
  3. ↑ We have been doubting for some time that the majority of Spain is capable of modern progress. Only the provinces of the North and Northeast we have seen real elements, in race, and in the organization of the country, that allow us to hope for the development of a culture like that of the Indo-Germanic nations of origin. In the center and in the South, with the exception of several individualities, we have noticed that, unfortunately, the Semitic element predominates too much, and even more the pre-Semitic or Berber with all its qualities: moroseness, bad administration, contempt for time and life, caciquism, hyperbole in everything, harshness and lack of half-tones in expression, adoration of the verb.[2]
  4. ↑ What characterizes the races in the sociological sense of the word, then, is a common physiology, and even more, a common psychology, for those we find in history are only a mere product of adaptation. [...] The soil, with its geological structure, its vegetation, its own animals, the atmosphere, the waters that it contains or that limit it, in a word the environment in the physical sense of the word, constitutes the MOLD that gives form or cohesion to the race or races that are going to establish themselves in a country.[3]
  5. ↑ There is too much Semitic and Berber blood scattered throughout the peninsula for modern science to become generalized in the majority of its peoples, for them to acquire a conduct in accordance with the universities of Nature, for them to abandon thinking with absolute ideas, or only with words. [...] Spain is paralyzed by the necrosis produced by the blood of inferior races such as the Semitic, the Berber and the Mogul, and by the spurge that the Inquisition and the Throne made on its strong races, selecting all that they thought, leaving as a residue nothing but fanatics, servile and imbeciles. The understanding of intelligence has produced here an agitating paralysis. From the South to the Ebro the effects are terrible; in Madrid the morbid alteration is such that almost its whole organism is a foreign body to the general European organism. And unfortunately the disease has already forded the Ebro, making a terrible prey in the virile races of the north of the Peninsula.[5]

Citations

  1. ↑ Blasco, Eusebio (1886). "Pompeyo Gener." In: Mis contemporáneos: semblanzas varias. Madrid: Francisco Álvarez, p. 39.
  2. ↑ Gener, Pompeyo (1887). Heregias. Madrid: Fernando Fé, p. 14.
  3. ↑ Gener (1887), p. 22, 31.
  4. ↑ Caja, Francisco (2009). La raza catalana.. Madrid: Encuentro. p. 92.
  5. ↑ Gener (1887), p. 222, 238–39.

References

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