Ildefons Cerdà and his friends
This Friday marks 150 years since the death of the engineer Ildefons Cerdà, creator of Barcelona's Eixample and father of modern urban planning. In our tortured 19th century, he embodied the progressive enlightened spirit. There are people with a powerful personality who mark an era. Cerdà, a social scientist and politician, a man of thought and action, was one of them. But he was not alone. He had good influences and good friends, such as the economist Laureà Figuerola, the hygienist and humanist Felip Monlau, and the geographer Pascual Madoz.
Normally, Cerdà's enemies have been discussed, who first sidelined him during his life – well, in reality he was well-connected and managed quite well – and then, once he was dead, they rushed to push him into ostracism – that was more true. The best known of these latter was the modernist architect and conservative Catalanist Josep Puig i Cadafalch, a fierce critic of his urban plan, whom he considered aesthetically too little monumental and socially too egalitarian. His disturbing influence still endures.
The conservative liberal state also did not do Cerdà justice. Indeed, he had evolved from moderate progressive liberalism to revolutionary federal republicanism. The fact is that neither the State nor the Barcelona City Council ever repaid him for the rigorous and extensive work on the Eixample plan, which he financed by paying the surveyors, mathematicians, engineers, architects... out of his own pocket... He himself, therefore, like so many others, was a victim of a country with a chronically bankrupt public sector.
Inheriting after the death of his two brothers, a good part of the family fortune was spent on the work of his life, which would become an obsession and at the same time lead to his marital separation: in this too he was ahead of his time because, even though his wife, the painter Clotilde Bosch, left him, he acknowledged the daughter from another relationship, Clotildita, who soon became the prodigy child harpist Esmeralda Cervantes (this is how Victor Hugo and Queen Isabella II, who was her godmother, christened her). She always recognized him as her father.
By the way, Esmeralda, honoring her father's social and progressive spirit, and violating the courtly environment in which she had been formed, she sided with Cuba's independence and against slavery. And then, at only 24 years old, she founded and financed a school for poor girls in Barcelona – historian Isabel Segura has documented it well. But that's another story... Ildefons Cerdà didn't see it anymore: he died in a kind of health retreat (calling it exile, as has been done, is an exaggeration) at the Caldas de Besaya spa in Cantabria on August 21, 1876. He probably wasn't exactly ruined, because it was a luxury establishment. He died relatively young, at 60 years old, the age I am now. Upon his death, Figuerola was his testamentary executor.
We return to Figuerola and the other colleagues. The four mentioned were the technical elite of progressive liberalism: visionary scientists and socializing modernizers. They contributed from empirical knowledge, and from industrial Catalonia as a base, to modernizing Spain. Without them, the failure of the Spanish liberal state would have been even more resounding. Perhaps this failure has weighed like a slab on the weak memory of their figures, who have remained, and still remain, too forgotten despite having left tangible and most notable works.
What works? Cerdà's fabulous and still admired Eixample of Barcelona, the introduction of hygienism by the multifaceted Monlau (known for the slogan-book "Down with the walls" which would make Cerdà's work possible), the establishment of the peseta (a Hispanized diminutive of "small piece", the single currency of the State created by Figuerola in 1868 as Minister of Finance) and, in Madoz's case, the disentailment (from 1855, also Minister of Finance, mainly of municipal and ecclesiastical property) and the promotion of the railway; in addition, Madoz was the author of the eleven volumes of the monumental "Geographical-Artistic-Historical Dictionary of SpainFiguerola and Madoz were Freemasons, as were other figures of the time with whom Cerdà had relations in that bustling and extreme Barcelona, such as the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, the businessman Josep Xifré – the one with the arcades –, the erudite politician Víctor Balaguer, and the military man and politician Joan Prim, who, incidentally, spoke Spanish with an even more Catalan accent than Cerdà, who in his first intervention in the Congress of Deputies (yes, Cerdà was a deputy in Madrid and even chaired the Diputació de Barcelona) apologized thus: "Being the son of a country where a dialect very different from the national language is spoken".
On another level, relevant figures in his circle were his father-in-law and businessman Josep Bosch Mustich, an Indiano; the military man and lawyer Manuel Gibert; the philosopher Jaume Balmes; and Baron Haussmann (the urban planner of modern Paris, who proposed that he stay with him in the French capital).
The Cerdà Year, despite the efforts of some, has passed with too much discretion again. In any case, the monographic journal dedicated to him by the College of Civil Engineers, Canals and Ports – in collaboration with the Catalan College – is appreciated, with texts by Francesc Magrinyà, Joan Fuster Sobrepere, Antón Costas, Andreu Ulied and Pere Macias, among others. Fabià Estapé, Salvador Tarragó, Albert Serratosa and Oriol Bohigas preceded them in the vindication of the great Catalan urban planner, about whom there is still much to know.