ABSTRACT
On the morning of 10 February 1930, General Primo de Rivera arrived in Barcelona by train. From the Paseo de Gracia, the Marqués de Estella caught a taxi to the Captaincy-General. He must have had mixed emotions. Primo was returning to the place where he had launched his coup d’état on 13 September 1923, but he arrived this time as a former dictator. Two weeks earlier, he had been forced to resign as President of the Council of Ministers. At the Captaincy-General, Primo visited his old friend, General Emilio Barrera, the man whom the Marqués de Estella had chosen as Captain-General of Catalonia in September 1923. Primo and Barrera lunched together. Afterwards, the Marqués de Estella gave a press conference in which he denounced the smear campaign against the work of his dictatorship, which he claimed was based upon ‘notoriously unjustified attitudes and cruelties’. 1 The former dictator also announced that he was going to spend two weeks in Paris, adding that it would be ‘very good for relaxing […] I am sure I will be bored’. Barrera replied, ‘Indeed, given your nature, I am sure you will be bored’. 2
