Juan Negrín López (; 3 February 1892 – 12 November 1956) was a Spanish physician and politician who served as prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic. He was a leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and of the left-leaning Popular Front government during the Spanish Civil War. He also served as minister of finance and minister of defence. He was the last Republican prime minister of Spain (1937–1939), leading the government forces defeated by the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco. He went into exile in Paris, France, where he served as prime minister of the Spanish Republican government in exile until 1945, when he was replaced by José Giral. He died in exile on 12 November 1956.
None of the leaders of the Second Spanish Republic has been as vilified as Negrín, not only by Francoist historians but also by important sectors of the exiled Spanish Left. After the end of the civil war there was no person more hated than Negrín. The leaders of his own Socialist Party were among his detractors, including his friend and fellow socialist leader Indalecio Prieto. He has been depicted as primarily responsible for losing the civil war, ruling with a dictatorial style, yielding to Communist influence, and giving Spain's gold reserves to the Soviet Union.
Subsequent scholarship has painted a more nuanced picture that clears Negrín of most of these allegations. This work portrays Negrin as mainly a pragmatic, social democratic leader who had no other choice to ally with the Soviets, due to the non-commitment of Great Britain and France to support the democratically elected government against the aggression of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Under the banner "Resistir es vencer" (), he tried to keep the Republican cause alive until the outbreak of a world war, which would have granted Republican Spain more allies in Western Europe. The PSOE expelled Negrín in 1946, but he was posthumously rehabilitated in 2008.
Early years Born in Las Palmas on the Canary Islands, Negrín came from a deeply Catholic middle-class family. His father, Juan Negrin Cabrera, was a prosperous and reputable merchant and businessman of the islands, married to María Dolores López Marrero. Juan was the firstborn son and had one brother Heriberto, who adhered to the Claretian order, and a sister Dolores. Since Juan had excelled in science subjects and had shown an interest in medicine, his father decided to send him, at the age of 15, to study in Germany in 1906, attracted by the enormous prestige of German universities at the time.
In Germany Negrin studied for two years at the Medical Faculty of Kiel. In 1908, to specialize in medical physiology, he moved to Leipzig, to the best physiology institute of Germany and even in Europe. He stayed in Germany for almost a decade, studying first medicine, then chemistry and to some extent, economics. He proved to be a brilliant student with extraordinary capacity for scientific research. In 1912 (when he was only twenty years old) under the guidance of Theodor von Brücke he obtained a doctorate in medicine and was immediately incorporated into the Institute of Physiology in Leipzig as a research assistant and then as an assistant professor.
On 21 July 1914 he married María Fidelman Brodsky, a piano student and daughter of a wealthy family of Russian exiles living in the Netherlands. The couple had five children, three of whom survived: Juan, Rómulo, and Miguel. Negrín spoke English, French, German, and Russian, in addition to his native Spanish.
Back to Spain At the end of 1915, in the middle of the First World War, the increasing difficulties he encountered working in Germany prompted Negrin to return to Spain. He already had professional prestige due to his research on the adrenal glands and the central nervous system and by a series of articles published in scientific journals in Europe. He was a pupil of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who won the Nobel Prize of Medicine. In 1919 he obtained his medical degree in Spain, and in 1922, aged 29, he became a professor of physiology at the Physiology Department at the Complutense University of Madrid Medical School. His physiology laboratory in Madrid became an internationally renowned research centre and a school of scientific training. Among the many students he inspired was Severo Ochoa, winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine:
Negrin opened wide, fascinating vistas to my imagination, not only through his lectures and laboratory teaching, but through his advice, encouragement, and stimulation to read scientific monographs and textbooks in languages other than Spanish.
According to Ochoa, Negrín was a demanding tutor and a high proportion of students failed his exams. He also set up a private laboratory that was very successful. In 1923, his youngest daughter died in childbirth, which Negrín himself attended. Two years later, his other daughter died at the age of ten as a result of a typhus epidemic. These misfortunes would lead to the estrangement of the marriage and the entry into Negrín's life of Feliciana López de Dom Pablo, one of his laboratory assistants, who would become his companion in 1926 until his death. His wife did not tolerate this relationship and attributed permanent affairs to him. 50 años de la muerte del energético defensor de la República, El País, 12 November 2006
In politics
During his stay in Germany, Negrin had become very close to German social democracy, then at one of the moments of its maximum height and socio-political and cultural influence, but far removed from his conservative family tradition. Negrín joined the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the spring of 1929, at the height of the crisis of the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera and the monarchy of Alfonso XIII. He aligned himself from the very beginning with the moderate and reformist faction headed by Indalecio Prieto – with whom he forged a close friendship that only broke down due to the civil war – and opposed to the one led by Francisco Largo Caballero, representing the left (Marxist and revolutionary) wing of the UGT trade union and the PSOE. From 1930 onwards, he declined his academic activity in favour of politics, and in 1934 he requested a leave of absence from his professorship. In the 1931 Spanish general election he was elected deputy for Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, and re-elected in 1933 and 1936.
Between April 1931 and July 1936, as political tension and social polarisation increased in Spain, Negrín identified in the socialist movement with Prieto's moderate positions and firmly opposed to the radical tendency led by Largo Caballero. The moderate faction of the PSOE, the majority in the executive committee, was in favour of maintaining the coalition with Prime Minister Manuel Azaña's Republicans in order to complete the ambitious programme of social democratic political and social reforms that had been launched by the left-wing government between 1931 and 1933 (secularisation of the state, agrarian reform, administrative decentralisation, military reform, progressive labour legislation, etc.). According to Prieto, Negrín and their supporters, this republican-socialist conjunction was essential to successfully promote the reforms and overcome the double opposition offered by the possible reaction of the right-wing defenders of the status quo with the help of the army and by the also possible revolution of the anarcho-syndicalist or communist-inspired workers' left.
In Spanish socialism he represented a clear option of republicanism and centrism, identifiable with the political position of his friend Indalecio Prieto. With regard to the revolutionary general strike of 1934 – against the appointment of three ministers of the conservative Catholic Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (, CEDA) to the right-wing government of Alejandro Lerroux – sponsored by Largo Caballero, Negrín opted for the option of republican unity advocated by Prieto as opposed to the revolutionary project put forward by Largo Caballero, which caused him to distance himself from Luis Araquistain and led to an irreparable split within Spanish socialism. The events of 1934, in particular the uprising in Asturias, were a prelude to the civil war.
Spanish Civil War
After the military uprising in Morocco on 17 July 1936, Spain was rapidly divided in two: a "Republican" or "Loyalist" Spain consisting of the Second Spanish Republic, and a "Nationalist" Spain under the insurgent generals, and, eventually, under the leadership of General Francisco Franco. The Republic faced tremendous odds from the outset, including the Nationalist military superiority, internal divisions, and European non-intervention. The military uprising sparked a social revolution in the Republican zone, primarily in Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia, and parts of Valencia.
The Non-Intervention Agreement, initiated by the French and the British governments, and signed in August 1936, in which European powers renounced all trade in war material, direct or indirect, effectively subjected the Spanish Republic to international isolation and a de facto economic embargo and placed the Republicand only the Republicat an enormous material disadvantage throughout the conflict. Italy and Germany supported the Spanish Nationalists from the outset of the Civil War. The Soviet Union began supporting the Republicans four months later.
From the first moment of the war, Negrin combined his activities as a deputy and, later, as a minister, with frequent visits in his private car to different places on the front line of Madrid to encourage the combatants and provide them with food and supplies. Negrín helped many people to escape from the revolutionary in July and August 1936. His personal courage in pursuit of this was attested to by a friend who recounted that he "made every effort, at considerable risk to himself... to save people in Madrid." As a result, Negrin was nearly killed by anarchists but was saved by the intervention of finance ministry security staff.
Minister of Finance He was named Minister of Finance in September 1936 in the government of Largo Caballero. He only accepted the post out of party discipline, as he considered that Largo Caballero as Prime Minister gave an excessively radical image of the Republic to the outside world and was a serious political and diplomatic blunder that would make it impossible to obtain vital aid from France and Great Britain. As the finance minister, he built up the Carabineros (custom guards), a force of 20,000 men which was later nicknamed the "Hundred Thousand Sons of Negrín" (an allusion to the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis), in order to recover the control of the French frontier posts, which had been seized by the anarchist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT).
With the approval of President Azaña, Largo Caballero and other influential ministers (including Prieto), he took the controversial decision to transfer the Spanish gold reserves to the Soviet Union in return for arms and equipment urgently needed to continue the war (October 1936). Worth $500 million at the time (another $240 million had been sent to France in July), critics argued that this action put the Republican government under the control of Joseph Stalin.
Prime minister