Historian Salomó Marquès dies, the voice of the teachers of the Republic

BarcelonaIn times of educational crisis, the death of Salomó Marquès (l'Escala, 1942) leaves a particularly painful void. A benchmark in the study and advocacy of the pedagogical revolution that the teachers of the republican years undertook, most of whom were later purged or went into exile, Salomó Marquès leaves Catalan society an extensive body of research and dissemination, and an example of civic commitment. In recent times he suffered from Alzheimer's. He passed away this Thursday, at the age of 84, just as he was about to enter a nursing home.

The son of a teacher and a printer, he was formed in scouting within an ecclesiastical environment. He studied theology at the seminary of Girona, and was ordained a priest. He continued his pedagogical studies at the Pontifical Salesian University of Rome. In his thirties, in 1973 he left the priesthood and deepened his academic training: in 1978 he graduated in educational sciences from the UAB.

His undergraduate thesis dealt with the pedagogue Baldiri i Reixach – from whom he recovered unpublished documentation – and teaching in the 18th century in Girona. Over the years, however, he would eventually specialize in the pedagogical renewal of the 20th century, and more specifically in the teachers of the republican period and the Francoist repression they suffered, often also at the hands of his colleague and friend Josep Gonzàlez-Agàpito. Research on the forgotten teachers of the diaspora led him to travel to collect their testimonies in Perpignan, Béziers, Narbonne, Toulouse, Venezuela, Chile, Cuba, and, very especially, Mexico.

In 1991 he participated on the front lines in the founding of the University of Girona, where he was the first dean of the Faculty of Educational Sciences and of which he was professor emeritus since 2006. He also presided over the Catalan Society of the History of Education, and collaborated with the Museum of Memory of Exile in La Jonquera and the Carles Pi i Sunyer Foundation, among many other institutions of history and memory.

From Carles Pi i Sunyer, the director of its historical archive, Francesc Vilanova Vila-Abadal, beyond his kindness and generosity, highlights that with Marquès "we are left with one of those people who honor the culture and memory of a country, who make them greater, more solid and profound: a researcher who united the diaspora of Catalan teachers exiled in 1939 in a joint memory, which today is the heritage of all those who understand that, without this memory, we are worth nothing". Recently, he had received a civic tribute in Girona at an event to present the book Salomó Marquès, education, memory and democracy, published by Edicions UDG.

Besides his wife, the geographer Montserrat Terradas, Salomó Marquès had a close relationship with figures from the cultural and pedagogical world such as the socialist politician and teacher Josep Pallach or the erudite priest Modest Prats. According to the pedagogue Xavier Besalú, writing in the Diari de l'Educació, Marquès "has been, above all, an educator who believed in teaching as a tool for the transformation of people and societies. It has been his way of doing politics: to awaken the full potential of people, to bring out the most human and most selfless that lay within each person".

His funeral will be held this Friday, at 6:00 PM, at the Santa Susanna del Mercadal parish, in Girona.