France

Paris was the first city outside the Spanish state where the Basque Government opened a Delegation. During the war it twice took in the Government itself, and afterwards it was the seat of the exile, first on the avenue Marceau and, when that was taken from it, on the rue Singer.

The Delegation of 1936

According to Eneko Sanz Goikoetxea and Óscar Álvarez Gila, the Paris Delegation opened in October 1936 and was the Basque Government’s first outside the Spanish state. France brought together several reasons at once: it had a Popular Front government, it took in the colonies of evacuated children, it was the place to counter, before Catholic opinion, the Spanish Church’s support for the rebels and, besides, it included part of the Basque Country.³ The Delegation was set up at 11 avenue Marceau, in a building bought with funds from the Basque Nationalist Party according to the most recent research, although the literature does not agree. It was headed by Rafael Picavea, who set up a printing press to produce anti-fascist propaganda in at least seven languages.³

That building was twice the seat of the Government itself: between July and September 1937, after the fall of Bilbao, and from the beginning of 1939, after the evacuation of Barcelona. It was in Paris that Euzko Deya was born, a masthead that other Delegations would repeat, and on 16 December 1938 the Liga Internacional de Amigos de los Vascos (International League of Friends of the Basques) was born there too; it brought together Cardinal Verdier, Archbishop of Paris, François Mauriac, Jacques Maritain and Senator Ernest Pezet, its secretary general.³

The Basque Government had other Delegations in France. Between 1936 and 1940 the one in Bordeaux looked after the ships and the refugees arriving at the ports of the south-west coast, from Bordeaux to La Pallice, and in 1944 and 1945 there were for a few months Delegations in Pau, Tarbes, Toulouse, Ychoux and Bordeaux.³

The world war interrupted the one in Paris. In May 1940 the French authorities ordered the avenue Marceau building closed; after the Germans entered Paris it was occupied by the Gestapo, which on 18 July handed it over to Franco’s embassy.³

The exile after 1944

With the liberation of Paris, in August 1944, Javier de Landáburu recovered the building, and the lehendakari Aguirre settled there on his return from New York.³ From Paris, the Government resumed publication of Euzko Deya in January 1945, launched in 1947 the Monday-to-Friday bulletin of the Oficina de Prensa de Euzkadi (Euzkadi Press Office) and in 1948 opened a medical dispensary for the Basque refugees.³

But the Spanish Government went to court over the ownership and won. On 28 June 1951 the French police evicted the Basque Government and the League and handed the building over to the Spanish embassy.³ The Government then moved to the rue Singer, in the sixteenth arrondissement, to premises bought by the Basques in exile, and it operated there until the seventies.³