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The History and social commitment: Josep Fontana discusses the life and work of Jaume Vicens Vives

never sit on the couches of the old and imposing mansion in Madrid Lion Street houses the Royal Academy of History but hardly could understand the development of English and European historiography without the work of Josep Fontana, professor emeritus at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona . Vitality and lucidity surprised when about to turn eighty, called attention to his brilliant exposition, the argument coherent and well articulated his thoughts outside the topic, prejudice or banality biased. Although I am not a historian, I have followed many of his personal and scientific as well as the daunting task displayed as editor in charge of the Editorial Review, where readers will find some of the references most important of any which have been published in the world in the last twenty years.

no way he could lose his lecture on Jaume Vicens Vives, organized by the Instituto de Historia Simancas University of Valladolid. Fontana's presence to speak of Vicens Vives, in the year that marks the centenary of his birth, is above any other commitment when you have clear how much he has meant to the historian born in Girona in 1910 and died prematurely at fifty years in the modernization of both history and the English culture.

"How did our generation to survive the education you received?" These eloquent words Fontana began his speech to describe the context of hardship, oppression and intellectual poverty that reigned in Spain in the fifties and was not merely an expression of cultural back tax by Franco's dictatorship, responsible for "egregious topping" brought about the intelligentsia, vigorous and brilliant, they tried to give new direction to the arts, literature and science in the years preceding the civil war.

In this context, remarked Fontana, "Vicens was something else." He was a representative of the Catalan bourgeoisie, sensitive to the reality of his time and with clear awareness of the need to change the way history to thereby transform the country culturally and assume the role that historical facts, when investigated with rigor and transmitted intellectual honesty and reliability, training plays in improving society, based on serious knowledge of the past. For if the perceived value of history makes us more aware of our own mistakes and contradictions, and this allows us to overcome, the historian can only be considered as such he understands the social usefulness of his profession and is convinced "You can serve the country through the science of history" .

"What we do is meaningless if has no social utility, "wrote Vicens Fontana in a letter to the mid-fifties, while it revealed the need to open up to European trends, the major refereed journals (including the famous French Annales) the study of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, deliberately delayed, to the knowledge of History of Economics , shelter that is welcomed by historians who were excluded from official history and academic control exerted from the power to strengthening links with territorial approaches Geography (hence the importance of Geohistory ), Or the rationalization of teaching methods (teaching people to think for themselves, "said another of his letters) through the publication of manuals" that taught to think. "

can imagine this gives Vicens apply these principles in an era in which the manipulation of history in the service of an ideology of misrepresentation and distortion facts to justify spurious targets, was the strongest, and which was to permeate the classroom, textbooks, university chairs and the overall work of teachers, forced to defend it ethically and professionally indefensible.

Fighting that environment was not easy . Hence the value of the intellectuals who tried to dignify history being made in Spain and Spain in which stood a few, but of a great intellectual force. Jaume Vicens Vives be one of them. And Josep Fontana, who will never be academic, one of his most prominent disciples.