Abelló Linde Centenary Book

THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SITUATION
The international scene in those years is centred upon the First World
TWar (1914-1918), a conflict that affected the major European countries
and pitted Linde’s Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire against
France, the United Kingdom, Russia – until 1917 – and Italy. Spain kept out of it
and this neutrality was to be financially very profitable for it. Sweden and
Switzerland, other European neutral powers, also did well out of it.
Neutrality made Spain one of the chief suppliers to the countries at war of
all kinds of products, if we leave the military materiel to one side. The factories of
the countries at war concentrated on producing war materiel and bought all they
needed and could not produce at that moment, which was a lot, abroad. For
Catalonia and Spain, the main customer was France, as it was so close. Moreover,
when the Germans imposed a sea blockade on their enemies in the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the Spanish companies were able to sidestep the
real threat posed by the German submarines and torpedoes by being able to
export overland. Catalan businesses made a lot of money, especially between
1915 and 1919; some of them directly by exporting their products, as was the
case with the textile sector; others indirectly because they sold the production to
the former, who were faced with a heavy demand. As we shall see, they were
also good years for Isidro Abelló, for the latter reason.
In Catalonia, the war in Europe was seen from a different point of view.
There was a faction rooting for the Germans and a Francophile one, on the side of
the allies. Germania. Revista de confraternidad hispano-alemana (Magazine of
Hispano-German Fraternity) was published in Barcelona, edited by Lluís Almerich, a
writer who later became known, using the pseudonym Clovis Eimeric, as the author
of children’s novels and love stories, of considerable literary value. Barcelona was a
centre of espionage, a centre of smuggling and a city seething as a consequence of
what was happening in Europe and in the lives of its own citizens.
Socially, these were years of conflict in Catalonia. We have already
mentioned the Tragic Week of 1909, which shocked a Catalan middle class that
saw in it what might be an anarchist revolution. Later, with the Soviet revolution
of 1917 the fears grew, although the threat was a different one, but to be feared
just as much. Catalan businessmen had neither the vision nor the sensitivity
necessary to share the extraordinary gains from the Great War with the workers.
Quite the contrary, in years of high inflation, they were unable to compensate the
workers for the loss of spending power of their wages. The result was social
conflict and violence. Barcelona, the European capital of anarchism, was known as
the “rose of fire”, a very pretty name were it not for its allusion to the terrorist
bombs. After the First World War came the years of the gunmen, in which the
anarchist trade union and the most radical workers’ forces confronted the union
closest to management and the company owners, happy to respond to violence
with yet more violence.
The end of the war in Europe, the restoration of industrial normality and the
recovery of international competitiveness also saw the end of the economic
euphoria for Catalonia and Spain, which had profited greatly out of it. Europe
entered a period of recession and Catalonia, closely linked to the continental
economies, bore the brunt of it with a serious financial and industrial crisis from
1920 to 1922.
The Company “Isidro Abelló, fábrica de oxígeno Linde” (1907-1922) 43