Academic year 1873-1874: Anton try again the admission

Gaudí had not gotten discouraged in his studies. In the extraordinary convocation of autumn of 1873, he requested to make again the examinations of admission in the School, besides the exams of French and Rational Mechanics (in the Faculty of Sciences), and of the five subjects of Architecture where already he was registered. We only have evidence about he presenting himself in "Copy of plaster", which failed on the 17th November of 1873. The reason was that the works in plaster that he brought were defective for not having hired a professional modeler. In Barcelona, Gaudí correlated with other naturals of Reus, like his friend Josep Oriol Canals i Zamora, who in 1873 was appointed director of the branch in Barcelona of the "Old Steam" of Reus. At the end of 1873 or principles of 1874, he contacted another born in Reus, Salvador Pagès i Inglada, the promoter of the working cooperative of Mataró, a social project in which his colleague of the Piarist of Reus the poet Bartrina was also linked. The Obrera de Mataró had pioneered its activity as soon as the Revolution of 1868 had legalized the working societies. It had started to work on the 1st as July of 1869 with 107 partners and 6 looms of second hand in a workshop rented in Gràcia. In 1870 it suffered a severe crisis for the fever yellow and for the First Working Congress, that took an anarchist orientation and that advocated a strike in three months. In 1873, when Gaudí entered in touch with them, it had 45 looms and 83 partners, and they had just bought a terrain in Mataró to build a factory of property. Gaudí drew the first flag of the Cooperative of Mataró. There are years in which the youngster Gaudí was absorbed by many questions out of the classrooms of the School of Architecture and of the work as a draftsman tat the orders of Fontserè. He become inseparable of the poet Bartrina, who was the most brilliant orator of the Ateneu of Barcelona, and of the literary critic Yxart. With them, Gaudí read the classics of all periods and nations, forming himself an exquisite literary taste. The basic questions absorbed to him so seriously that to understand them and to solve them he was proposed and make complete studies of History and of Economics, especially of the workers problem, that worried him hugely. He took some notes of the books «Économie Polítique des Athéniens», of Dacier; of «Le problème de la misère et des solutions chez les anciens et les modernes», of Moreu-Cristophe; and of the «Histoire des classes ouvrières a France», of Levasceur. During 1874, he attended the lessons with great attention about working-class movement that they were imparted in the Ateneu Barcelonès. The political illusions of the Democratic Six-Year, the attraction of the utopian cooperatives as a solution to the conflict among capital and work and the influence of Bartrina, of Pagès, of the leaders anarcho-syndicalists of the workers movement, of Fontserè and of determinate new colleagues of the School of Architecture, like Camil Oliveras i Gensana, freethinkers, agnostics or atheists and some of them freemasons, contrasted in the young soul, thirsty of justice and generous, of Gaudí with the formation religious received in his family and in the school, and they dragged him in the atheism. July of 1874, Francesc Gaudí father, with a blind faith in the future of his sons in Barcelona, together with his mother "la Calderera", who was the usufructuary, sold two estates of the part of Burgar, for which they achieved 3.865 pesetas. That month, on the 13th July of 1874, the works of the market of the Born started, which will go on until the 28th November of 1876. Gaudí had been called on rows in Barcelona at the beginning of year, on 21 January of 1874. He entered in the box of recruitment on the 7th July of 1874, which it meant should incorporate as a soldier into the Army in January of 1875. If had been a convinced Carlist, it was the moment for deserting, crossing the front of the civil war and adding himself to the Carlist army. Gaudí was not Carlist, but that he lived the ideals of the Democratic Six-Year and admired the work of government of the general Prim, but either was presented as a liberal volunteer to the National Militia. It is more, if he wanted to avoid to go to the fronts of the Third Carlist War or of the War of Cuba, he have how entering the School of Architecture and acquiring the condition of student, that it would allow him to fulfill the service soldier in an administrative department in Barcelona.

Josep Maria Tarragona, April 9, 2007
COMMENTS



©2013 antonigaudi.org
All rights reserved

Last update: 06/05/2016