The communist who built nuclear submarines
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Paco Monzonís and his wife Pili live in Paris, but now that they are retired they spend long periods of time in Artana (the Plana Baixa), which is the town of her family. They both met in the French capital, children of Valencian emigrants who arrived after the war. Paco's family was from Burriana, and they emigrated because his father, who was an anarchist cabinetmaker, thought that by taking advantage of the status of republican refugee in France things would go better for them, as they did. Paco went to university and joined the Communist Party. This couple of young idealists turned their house into one of the safe houses that the party made available to Spanish exiles. Many Catalans also passed through there, like Quico Pi de la Serra. "One day we came back from a few days' holiday and found the whole house occupied by a theatre company," he once told me, laughing.
When they had children, Paco and Pili decided that they would give them names in Valencian and that they would speak to them in their parents' language, although they usually used French. The eldest would be Guillermo, the middle one Juan and the youngest Èlia, a name with classical resonances.
I met Paco, known in the village as the Frenchman, because one day he offered to cook, like the true gourmet that he is, for all of my party group, and we immediately became very good friends. One day I asked him what he had done for a living and his answer left me speechless: "I worked for the French army, I was the engineer in charge of supervising the construction process of nuclear submarines." I asked him if this was compatible with his communist militancy and he replied that, indeed, there had been some debate within the French Communist Party, but that in the end it had been concluded that if France wanted to be militarily independent of the United States it had to have a powerful army and nuclear weapons. In this, the PCF thought the same as General De Gaulle, a supporter of French strategic autonomy.
I have been thinking a lot these days, following the evident divorce between the EU and the United States and the debate that has been opened on the need for European rearmament. This is a taboo subject for the Spanish and Catalan left. A Catalan left-wing MP confessed to me the other day, sadly, that it is a debate that cannot even be opened, although he would be in favour of seeing soldiers flying the European flag in Ukraine.
The curious thing is that what is taboo here because of the mixture of anti-militarism (which ends up turning Europe into a subsidiary of the United States) and anti-Americanism (which ends up playing Putin's game) of a certain left, in France the Communist Party has always been clear about it. In fact, in some way, what is being proposed now in Europe is nothing more than a Frenchification, that is, giving reason to the old General De Gaulle and betting on a real European strategic autonomy, which added to the Draghi and Letta reports result in a Keynesian model with a significant weight of the states in the economy.
As Andreu Mas-Colell pointed out in a recent articleThe difficulty now will be to make this increased investment in the military industry compatible with maintaining the welfare state. In fact, the replenishment is being done precisely to save the European welfare model. And here we must look again at France, where the military industry has always had a significant weight, and has recently begun a close collaboration with Germany to jointly build the new MGCS supertank and the new fighter jet within the framework of the FCAS project.
There is no doubt, then, that in the future the European military industry will create many qualified jobs, and it would be good if Catalonia were not left out. Kichi, the mayor of Cadiz from Podemos, already said this when someone questioned him about the frigates for Saudi Arabia that Navantia was building: "They are jobs."
By the way, Paco's son, Guillermo, also now works for the French military industry.