The tailor from Besalú who ended up defending protectionism in Madrid

On June 6, 1981, a voracious fire engulfed a historic building in the city of Barcelona, which was located at the confluence of Pelai Street and Ronda Universitat. It was not just another building, because years earlier it had been the headquarters of the El Águila department stores, one of the most important in the Catalan capital for decades. The emblematic image that the press reflected the next day was that of the figure of the eagle that presided over the building completely surrounded by smoke. It fell a few minutes later and put an end to a long history.

At the time of the incident, the building belonged to a company that had gone bankrupt, and the maintenance of the premises, which were abandoned, was non-existent. Curiously, the same Carrer Pelai, but at the end that leads to the Rambla de Canaletes, a few days earlier had been the center of attention for the entire country due to the assault on the Central Bank, events that were never fully clarified. The El Águila department stores were one of the last remnants of the era of large-format retail in Barcelona, a field where El Siglo, Can Jorba, the Almacenes Alemanes (later, Capitol), or Sepu had also shone. Interestingly, the El Siglo building also ended up defeated by the flames exactly fifty years before the events we are talking about.

The empty plot was not built on again until 1997, after a series of companies kept passing the property of the plot among themselves without anyone starting construction. If we look back in time, we will find that the previous owner had been Julio Muñoz Ramonet, who had acquired it in the fifties. But we can travel even further back in time, because the person who had built the building in 1925 had been Pere Bosch-Labrús Blat. This businessman, executed at the very beginning of the Civil War, was the son of the founder of a very prestigious tailor shop called El Águila: Pere Bosch Labrús, the true protagonist of this story.

Defender of protectionism

Outside of business, if Bosch Labrús was known for one thing in his time, it was for his fierce defense of protectionism, an ideology in which he had fellow travelers such as Joan Güell Ferrer, for whom he served as secretary. His political involvement led him to be a deputy in Madrid in almost every legislative session between 1876 and 1893, always in support of protectionist theses.

To become an influential man in politics, he first had to build his empire, by no means an easy task, given that he came from a family of humble origins in Besalú. After completing some studies, at the beginning of the 1840s, he decided to settle in Barcelona to try to make his way in life. His first job was as a clerk in a fabric warehouse, at a time when people who could afford it would stock up on quality fabrics to then visit a tailor who would manufacture their clothing from the materials.

A few years later, in 1850, when he considered that he had learned enough, he set out on his own and opened a tailoring shop. The business did not stop growing, so he had to change premises on several occasions and even ended up opening branches in cities such as Madrid, Seville, Cadiz, and Valencia. This would be the embryo of the El Águila department stores, which would dedicate themselves to marketing much more than just fabrics. With the profits, he bought a rustic estate in Jaén that he converted into one of the main agricultural holdings in Andalusia.

In his time, the protectionist forces were not at all united, but rather there were basic differences in approach that caused conflicts and splits. Bosch's vision had a certain Spanish regenerationist tone, and in this, he was distanced from a good part of the Catalan businessmen. This desire to evangelize the Peninsula led him to be aligned with General Prim, with whom he maintained very close theses until his death in the 1870 assassination. A year before that event, Bosch Labrús led the Protectionist Declaration of Barcelona.

Between 1870 and 1876 he was president of the Foment de la Producció Nacional and three years later he would be president of the Foment de la Producció Espanyola, a spin-off of the former. The two entities would end up merging to form the current Foment del Treball. In 1883 he founded the Círculo Conservador-Liberal of Barcelona and years later, in 1889, he wrote that "Catalonia can aspire, and must do so, to something more than being the first province of a poor nation; it must aspire to be the first of a rich nation".