Pau Claris and corruption in the Generalitat

Pau Claris (1586-1641) is known for having been president of the Generalitat (Catalan Government) at the beginning of the Reapers' War, the revolt against the armies of the Count-Duke of Olivares, and for having declared the Catalan Republic under the protection of France, thanks to an agreement with Cardinal Richelieu. His death has not yet been clarified, and John H. Elliot and Josep Sanabre believe he was poisoned with water. tofana, also known as water of Naples, a mixture of arsenic and herbs widely used in the 17th and 18th centuries and then difficult to detect. It seems that his secretary, Rafael Nogués, died with similar symptoms and at the same time. The court of Madrid had powerful reasons to eliminate him. Without him, it was thought plausible to reach an agreement, something that, however, did not occur.

All this is explained by the historian Antoni Simon in the brief biography – less than a hundred pages long – that makes up number 375 of the collection of the Episodes of history by Dalmau Editor. But beyond the mystery of death, two interesting political details are worth highlighting.

Pau Claris, a member of a lineage of jurists (jurists were then pillars of Catalan institutions), had studied law in Rome and Pisa, and rose rapidly through the ecclesiastical ranks. At the age of 26, in 1612, he was appointed to the important position of canon of La Seu d'Urgell. That same year, he obtained a benefice from the cathedral of Barcelona, the city where he would reside permanently from 1621 onwards, serving as trustee and lawyer for the Urgell chapter. From 1622 onwards, he began to become directly involved in matters of the General Council, or Generalitat.

In 1626, when political and institutional tensions with Olivares were already the order of the day, the issue I wanted to talk about arose: once the Cortes of that year were dissolved due to the unresolved clash with the Spanish crown, Claris was appointed a member of the Visita, an entity created in 1599 to oversee abuses and corruption within the Generalitat (Generalitat). To put it simply, it was a kind of Anti-Fraud Office. Each case was given three months in three phases: offense, defense, and sentencing. The Visita of the years 1626-1627, led by Claris, issued 144 sentences and imposed fines worth 17,418 pounds. And for the first time, it published a 136-page summary as an exercise in transparency about what this oversight institution had done.

Claris gained increasing political prominence, cultivating notorious friends and enemies. In the context of the Spanish-French war, the rejection of billets for the Spanish army—and also the increase in tax pressure and the recruitment of men—was increasingly poisoning the atmosphere in Catalonia. It was at this point that in 1638, using the traditional system of insaculation (slips of paper with the eligible names were placed in a sack, in this case 524, and an innocent hand drew the agreed number), Pau Claris, Tamarit, and Josep Miquel Quintana were elected deputies to the Generalitat. All three were prominent figures who had stood out in the defense of Catalan constitutionalism.

Historian Antoni Rovira y Virgili believes that Pau Claris's lucky draw was manipulated. I'm inclined to agree with him, although, of course, there's no evidence of this. Thus, we have that Claris was exemplary in her work of administrative transparency, but that, at the same time, she may have lent herself to a, let's say, fraudulent election, which, on the other hand, must not have been an exceptional practice. In any case, Simon, in this brief biography, includes for the first time the character's will, which was drafted in 1637, shortly after he passed the age of fifty and recognizing his growing political prominence and the dangerous direction things were taking. He made his mother his sole heir and, in case of her death, his brother Francesc, who in 1638 was second councilor of the Council of One Hundred of Barcelona, an institution that actively participated in the revolt alongside the Generalitat. Undoubtedly, the brothers formed a team. Pau Claris paid for it with his life.