Expand: date=August 2007

Lluís Companys i Jover (June 21 1882 – October 14 1940) was a Spanish Catalan politician and lawyer, leader of the political party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, and President of the Generalitat de Catalunya from 1934 and during the Spanish Civil War. Exiled after the war, he was captured and delivered to the regime of Francisco Franco by the Gestapo, which executed him in 1940.

Life

Companys was the son of private farmers Josep Companys and Maria Lluïsa de Jover. After getting his license to practice law from the Universitat de Barcelona, Companys had participated in the political life of Catalonia from a young age. In 1906, as a result the military burning the writings of Catalan newspapers Cu-Cut! and La Veu de Catalunya, and after the passage of the Ley de Jurisdicciones ("Law of Jurisdictions", which made speech against Spain and its symbols a criminal offense), he participated in the creation of Solidaridad Catalana. Later, he affiliated himself with the ephemeral Unió Federal Nacionalista Republicana, of which he was president of its youth section. He was investigated for his intense youth activities and was jailed fifteen times, being classified after the Tragic Week of Barcelona as a "dangerous individual" in police records.

With Francesc Layret, Companys represented the leftist labor faction of the Partit Republicà Català (Catalan Republican Party), in which he was elected councilman of Barcelona in 1916. In November of 1920, he was detained together with Salvador Seguí (known as El Noi del Sucre), Martí Barrera, Josep Viadiu, and other syndicalists and was deported to the Castell de la Mola on Mahón in the Balearic Islands. Shortly afterward, Layret was assassinated after his defense was arranged.

Despite his deportation, in the 1920 legislative elections, Companys was elected deputy of Sabadell, taking the place of Layret, who was supposed to take that seat prior to his assassination. This gave him parliamentary immunity, which secured his release from prison.

He was one of the founders of Unió de Rabassaires in 1922, for which he worked as a lawyer and director of the magazine La Terra during the years of the regime of Primo de Rivera.

Detained again, he was unable to attend the Conferencia de Izquierdas (Conference of Leftists) held between March 12 and March 19, 1931, from which was born the political party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya; however, he was elected as an executive member of that party, representing the Partit Republicà Català. Thanks to the bonds between the Spanish labor movement and the Spanish syndicalist movement, the election of Companys to this position gave the ERC great prestige in leftist public opinion; before, it had been considered a party of the small progressive bourgeoisie.