A few days apart, two important journalists from Catalonia have died. Forged in very different professional fields, they held positions of great responsibility in the recent history of the country. Antonio Franco Estadella and Ramón Pedrós Martí shared their age, 74 years; they both had, by chance, an important emotional connection with the city of Lleida and they treasured priceless stories of journalism, politics, economics, power, institutions and the not-always-easy relations between these worlds. I had interaction with both of them, deep interaction I could say, at a time when journalism was, in some respects, more rudimentary, much more like a job without schedules than a profession with the stopwatch on the table. The current world of communication did not exist and journalism did not find it itself facing the legion of communications directors who today prevent us from doing our job.
Much has been written these days about Antonio Franco, whom many of us admired. A few hundred have been able to confirm, with the passing of the years, how privileged we were to witness his cries, his passion, his stubbornness and, above all, his professionalism. Because a generation of journalists in the city, if they weren't under Antonio Franco, were not on the list of those chosen to work from dawn till dusk and thus learn from his priceless teaching, because he fulfilled a condition within the reach of very few: he knew how to lead and everyone loved him.
Franco was a giant in a small and fearful country. Able to argue with the most powerful without giving way even an inch if he had right on his side, as well as to be endearing and close to the last of his readers, both in El Periódico, a newspaper he launched in the late 70s, as in El País, whose Catalan edition he started in 1982. Those were times when it seemed possible for Spain to abandon its atavistic fears of a transformation that could accommodate Catalanism.
This is a country in which obituaries are often oversweetened and necessarily benevolent. Antonio Franco is also the exception here. No praise has been imposed. Justice has been done to an untamed journalist, an advocate of the truth. It has been said by the profession, undoubtedly the only thing important to him, that he never wrote for the powerful. In a small country, lacking the institutional ways of a state and lacking a funeral protocol for its heroes, the absences at Franco’s funeral stood out more than those who attended. It is clear that he would not have cared, uncomfortable as he always was with praise from politicians and the powerful.
The absences, some as unjust as they were incomprehensible, did, however, cause annoyance to those present. Despite being a convinced francophile, he would surely have seen it as an exaggeration to have been given a state funeral like that in Paris for the actor Jean Paul Belmondo, in the courtyard of honour of Les Invalides, an historic site at which France pays homage to its illustrious citizens upon their passing. Bebel was just an actor, a great actor, a person beloved by the French, as was also the actor Pepe Rubianes, who died in 2009. Here everything is so lacking in formality, we have a country so unsure of itself, that we do not even know how to say goodbye to our most illustrious people in the way they deserve.