Miquel Roca (Bordeaux, 85 years old) was born in French exile, while the Nazi army was besieging the city where his parents had taken refuge. “No one could doubt which side he was on.” An active anti-Francoist since he was 20 and expelled from the University together with some of the brightest young professors of his generation, he participated in the foundation of Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya, was one of the members of the constitutional committee and spokesperson of the Catalan minority in the Cortes from 1977 and for almost two decades. Punctual, on the ninth floor of his law firm building, overlooking Barcelona’s Eixample, he responds with his legendary effective oratory.
Ask. Did you know Franco was running out?
Answer. The realization that he was going to die had been coming for a long time, but there was a moment, in the last 15 days, when you saw: “this is over”. The news is not surprising, but shocking. “Now a new phase begins.” We basically intuited where we needed to go, but we only intuited it.
Q. When did you find out?
R. I was at my in-laws’ house, at a family party, at an anniversary… And we returned to our house with my wife. Around three in the morning someone called, I don’t remember who, and said, “hey, that’s it.” And I thought: “and what do I do tomorrow?” Because you have your normal life, you work as a lawyer, but you know that tomorrow it won’t be the same. I noticed it immediately. Already that morning the people I spoke to were wondering “what now?”
Q. Did you celebrate it?
R. YES. I don’t like telling it so as not to explain it badly and not to be misunderstood. YES. We celebrated it with some friends.
Q. Have you made any significant calls?
R. Calls among us. Surely that morning I spoke with Jordi Pujol, with Antoni Gutiérrez Díaz—the Guti of the PSUC—, with all of us who were in the Consell de Forces Pítiques… That morning we had to tell each other things and prepare our positions. Because it was a change. We clearly knew that we would be building the answer for the future.
Q. His parents, who had gone into exile during the war, were still alive. How did they experience it?
R. They had very politicized children and sons-in-law. A brother-in-law of mine was Antón Cañellas, leader of Unió Democrástica. Another was the socialist Francesc Casares, a labor lawyer. And myself. For my parents there was a certain fear. All the people who had lived through the war, and had suffered it, welcomed this news with a highly politicized conscience and opposition militancy, and with a positive evaluation, but with a certain fear because they remembered the confrontation with the panic. Civil confrontation is always very tough.
Q. What sensations did you experience in those hours?
R. Many and simultaneous. A part of joy. Those of us who were in the anti-Franco opposition wanted that phase to end. But that feeling was mixed with an assumption not of fear but of responsibility. Because from that moment on everything we did would have made much more sense. With Franco, the hope of the continuity of the dictatorship dies. It wasn’t possible. It had started with the death of Carrero Blanco, there would be no succession within the regime itself. With Franco’s death an evolution began: a solution must be sought in the framework that represents Europe. Those of us who were part of the anti-Franco opposition, there were many, but not that many, knew that we would have a certain responsibility in this new phase. How to do it?
Q. Could the dictatorship last?
R. One thing is what the media broadcast, which was the official version. But within the regime itself there was a very clear awareness that this was coming to an end. There was no succession within the same regime and this was expressed relatively shortly after the presidency of Adolfo Suárez. There was already a request for change, this ran out because the dictatorship was incompatible with what Europe already represented. There is a very powerful image that must now be remembered: the inauguration of the King. For the first time, European presidents accompany this event. It had never happened before. One thing is that (Augusto) Pinochet came, but the most important thing is that (Valéry) Giscard was there. Even Europe, with that presence, said that a change was beginning.
Q. When you saw Franco’s burial in the Valley of the Fallen, what did you think? And with the proclamation of the prince as King?
R. Bye bye. With all the love for so many, everything that was pathetic, an expression of a sad ending, which for me was happy. It was pathetic. And the most important thing in the proclamation was Europe’s commitment to change, its support for the advent of Juan Carlos. It was a conditional bet, it was believed that it could open what had been opened: the negotiation process. It wasn’t the words that were important, but the images. And Giscard, who I had the opportunity to meet, knew very well what would happen: “this time Spain cannot escape us, we must help what is starting to have European continuity”. Juan Carlos knew that Giscard was absolutely crucial.
Q. In those days the opposition had no significant activity.
R. I couldn’t have it. It was time for the pathetic goodbye and that was it. We were called for the next day.
Q. When do you feel the change has begun?
R. The good path begins with the dismissal of Arias Navarro. “We were right,” we said to ourselves. A new era begins. Although the appointment of Adolfo Suárez was a bit of a surprise at first, we quickly saw that the will was there. Opening by Del Rey, Suárez and Torcuato Fernández Miranda. There was a team that wanted to bet on something that was already more than enough: holding free elections. We left poetry for prose. Elections must be called. Because if this is the spirit, democracy comes. The important road was opening up. Bring out the opposition, which comes out into the open. And that is why the legalization of the Communist Party, which had an enormous symbolic load, had such a special meaning. He was confirming that the bet made sense.
Q. How was the Political Reform Law possible?
R. It’s a question to which many years later I don’t have a very clear answer. Many knew what he was doing and some must have believed it was an excuse to get out of a bad situation. It is self-dissolution. When they vote for that law, they vote for its death.
Q. How did your first day at the Constituent Cortes go?
R. I always remember that on the day of my inauguration, passing in front of the seats, I heard an usher who came from the previous era. I was talking to someone else, I told him: “well, these are temporary”. I remember the phrase because it was appreciated. It wasn’t a bad idea. “These are temporary.” For some, all of this may have an aftertaste of temporariness. But little by little they began to see that this was not the case, but it took some a while…
Q. What was the activity of the opposition at the beginning of the Transition?
R. We had to move from poetry to prose. We had been installed in revolutionary poetry. What we knew is that a certain type of negotiation was starting. It was necessary to quickly build a basis of understanding between us and see how to extract from Francoism those sectors that had already begun to separate from it. The Tacitus already existed… Talk to them in terms of building the country, not of patriotic exaltation. It was necessary to lay the foundations of coexistence and translate the somewhat poetic concept of freedom into constructed freedom.
Q. What do you think when you read polls of young people who don’t know or relativize what Franco’s dictatorship was?
R. I understand many young people who can be critical. We sought freedom so that they could criticize us. I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m happy you can criticize because I couldn’t. We have given them a regime that allows them to criticize. What I ask them is that they know that, sometimes, the way they do it may lead them one day to surprise themselves with losing their freedom. That’s why you need to know the story.
Q. Wasn’t it counted?
R. At this point we have had a huge failure in our education system. In others it doesn’t affect me. History has always been explained here until the end of the 19th century. But we don’t know the Spanish 20th century and what the dictatorship was has never been explained. The objective of making the history of Spain known did not exist.
Q. What should we have learned?
R. I have always loved to say that when we created the Constitution we did not respond only to the dictatorship. We were responding to a long period in which Spain had the Inquisition, persecutions, repression, coups d’état… We were responding to all this history. Because in our history confrontation has dominated much more than coexistence. And when they say that the Constitution is insufficient, of course I respect that. But please explain that image. When the age table in Congress was set, after the elections of June 15, 1977, none other than Dolores Ibárruri stepped down from those high positions, The Passionflower, and Rafael Alberti, arm in arm, to take possession of that old table, waiting for (Jesús) Esperabé de Arteaga (UCD MP) to eventually set up the table. It was impressive. The two sides met, greeted each other and opened the Cortes. That buried poetry, that’s where prose began. I’m very sorry that this wasn’t explained. I think it’s a big failure.
