Mathematics of History.

Special supplement.

Unfortunately, twenty-five years after his death the character and the works of Alexandre Deulofeu have been forgotten. For lack of space, I cannot write a biographical and/or bibliographical compilation, but luckily it is still possible to find in bookshops many references to his work. Now, I want to take the opportunity to point out a feature which was never taken into consideration when appraising Deulofeu’s work. I mean his unusual ability to make political and social analyses. Perhaps the cause of this underestimation was due to the fact that Deulofeu’s ideas were not orthodox enough. Now, if we see where orthodoxy is taking us, maybe the time has come to reclaim the ability of being original.

Quite soon, in 1934, he published his first political-historical essay, under the title Catalunya i l’Europa futura (Catalonia and future Europe), where he demonstrated his own particular view of the geopolitical situation in the Old Continent, while he pointed out the task necessary to fully wake up the national Catalan conscience. A Catalonia which he located in a European and world foreground. At the time Deulofeu was a rising young political promise, and Rovira i Virgili himself wrote the foreword to this book.

The brutal blow of the Civil War compelled Deulofeu to go into exile. At a time of a dark landscape our man made the most of his misfortune and, in the middle of chaos, war, far from home, in a blank time, after earning some money which will ensure his sustenance, he does things which, being so matter-of-fact and normal may look frivolous: he visits the public libraries, he reads, thinks, write and plays the violin. It is intellect’s triumph, and sometimes I think that this has not yet been forgiven to him.

It was in Montpellier where the young professor and chemist drafted with mathematical precision de future of the peoples of Europe. It was then that he convinced Francesc Pujols that that time the Germans would not win, that their great moment would still have to wait. It was then that he announced the future fall of the old States born from modernity, such states as France and England, future victors in the world war which was then taking place. None of them survived Deulofeu’s predictions, in the same way as communism did not survive the disappearance of the Soviet giant. As Deulofeu used to repeat in King Jaume’s I town, communism was not the problem, it was not the cause of anything, but just the consequence.

Yes, the new Germany, rising up again from the war ashes, takes up the room that the old empire left in Central Europe, and thinks up a Europe which fits exactly in that which Deulofeu had imagined, a great confederation of free peoples, where Catalonia will again be the spiritual catalyst of the future Europe.

And then, in the dark days of exile, he reached the conclusion that it was in the sister lands of Empordà and Rosselló that, after a centuries old sleep, the waking up of a new creative yearning that would later crystallize as the so-called Romanesque Gothic culture. Catalonia, a march country, had no need to import Romanesque art, well on the contrary, and so it has been acknowledged by such scholars as Marcel Durliart and Pierre Bonassie. One hundred years ago was born Alexandre Deulofeu, the patriarch of the Romanesque style and mathematician of history.