Juan Negrín
| Juan Negrín | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| 67th Prime Minister of Spain | |
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In office 17 May 1937 – 1 April 1939 |
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| Preceded by | Francisco Largo Caballero |
| Succeeded by |
Francisco Franco As (Caudillo) |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
3 February 1892 Las Palmas, Gran Canaria |
| Died | 12 November 1956 (aged 64) Paris, France |
| Political party | Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) |
Juan Negrín y López (Spanish pronunciation: [xwan neˈɣɾin]; 3 February 1892 – 12 November 1956) was a Spanish politician and physician. He was a leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and served as finance minister. He was the last Loyalist premier of Spain (1937–39), and presided over the defeat of the Republican forces by the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. He collaborated with the Communists until the last minute; he died in exile in Paris, France.
Born in Las Palmas, Negrín came from a religious middle-class family. He was a pupil of the Nobel Prize of Medicine winner, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, qualified as a doctor in Germany and later he became a professor of physiology at the Complutense University of Madrid at the age of 29. Negrín spoke English, French, German and a little Russian, besides his native Spanish. On 21 July 1914 he married María Fidelman Brodsky. They had three sons, Juan, Rómulo and Miguel.
Negrín joined the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in 1929. He belonged to the Indalecio Prieto faction, opposed to that led by Francisco Largo Caballero, left-wing extremists. In 1931 he was elected deputy for Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. Negrín helped many people to escape from the revolutionary checas 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.
He was named Minister of Finance in September 1936 in the government of Francisco Largo Caballero. 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 Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). He took the controversial decision to transfer the Spanish gold reserves to the Soviet Union in return for arms 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.
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