Biscayan lawyer and politician born in Bilbao on 19 September 1868. He died on 27 December 1940.
He studied at the Bilbao Secondary School and graduated in Law on 28 November 1890 at the University of Madrid. During the summers he learnt languages, especially French and English, which he spoke and wrote correctly. Later he studies in London at the Middle Temple where he becomes a Barrister at Law, moving simultaneously to Italy to follow a course at the University of Turin with professors Lombroso and Garófalo. He then collaborates with the newspaper ‘El Porvenir Vascongado’ in Bilbao with his letters from Italy ‘El País del Arte’ which he finishes on his return to Twickenham, London. He also wrote about El Rojo, a child delinquent from Bilbao at the time, whose case he focused on with Lombroso. One of the few lawyers with a good command of English in Bilbao, he set up his office at 7, Sendeja Street, dealing mainly with problems of Maritime Law, a subject on which he published his book Cuestiones de Derecho Marítimo (Questions of Maritime Law) in 1899.
He married Cruz de Astigarraga y Amézaga on 19th September 1895, and spent a year travelling around Europe following humanistic training courses in Heildelberg, Rome, etc. He had six children, the eldest of whom, Nicolás, a lawyer and Cambridge graduate, accompanied him in his law firm. In his political career, he defined himself as a republican, in favour of the creation of a large independent republican party, without prejudice to remaining in the republican-socialist conjunction through the Autonomous Republican Party. He stood in the 1910 general elections for the district of Barakaldo (republican-socialist conjunction) and was defeated by Fernando M.ª de Ybarra. He was elected provincial deputy in 1911 for this conjunction and was the most voted candidate in the elections. He was also a defeated candidate in the 1923 senatorial elections against the powerful Monarchist League.
He was president of ‘El Sitio’ during the Great War. In the summer of 1930, he was a member of the board of promoters of the weekly magazine ‘Frente’ together with Ulacia, Somonte, T. Echevarria and A. de Arzadun, with the slogan ‘República, democracia, fueros’ (Republic, democracy, privileges). With the advent of the Second Republic, he was elected councillor of Bilbao and was appointed managing member of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia. Months earlier he had already been collaborating with the Basque Studies Society and was one of the main drafters of the Society's preliminary draft of the Basque Statute of Autonomy, drafting most of its articles. He then worked to ensure that both the left-wing town councils and the Gestoras of the Basque Provincial Councils supported the Statute. José Antonio de Aguirre commented:
‘This fortunate change in the attitude of the Management Commissions was mainly due to the energetic impulse of a man, Ramón de Madariaga, an enthusiastic autonomist and an old Basque republican. His willingness to serve the cause of autonomy led him to accept a post on the Government Management Committee of Biscay with no other aim than to ensure that the Basque Statute was brought to a successful conclusion through its approval. The country will always know how to be deeply grateful to someone like Mr. Madariaga who rendered invaluable services, being the one who with his tolerant spirit later facilitated formulas of intelligence within a common programme for those who until then disagreed. Ah! but Mr. Madariaga worked, pushed, never ceased to fight for Basque freedom’ (Entre..., p. 182).
(Entre..., p. 182).
In 1931, he proposed to the mayors a meeting with the managers of the four deputations in which a formula for concord would be worked out. This meeting took place on 15 December and an agreement was reached to set up a commission made up of mayors and representatives of the management bodies. Madariaga was, as we have said, a representative of the Gestora de Bizkaia, of which he was president of the Junta de Cultura. Within this commission, he once again demonstrated his desire for autonomy for the Basque Country. Aguirre himself will tell us:
‘I remember, for example, those meetings in Mr. Madariaga's office, in which, day after day, the formula to be established in social matters in the Statute was studied, taking exquisite care to combine Christian social doctrines with the spirit of just and necessary social vindication that beats in some of the Marxist doctrines. There, with the respective texts in hand and with the right intention in their hearts, those men (Madariaga, Leizaola, Horn, Basterrechea) were drafting with the utmost care and mastery the postulates that were later to be accepted by organisations of opposing doctrines and on many points irreducible’.
(Entre..., p. 197).
In 1932 he published El Derecho Foral de Vizcaya en relación con la organización familiar, a lecture given in Pamplona on 5 September at the summer course of the Sociedad de Estudios Vascos. At the meeting of mayors held in Vitoria on 6 August 1933, he gave a speech in which he explained the Basque Statute and its vicissitudes. At the same assembly, it was agreed to form a pro-Statute commission made up of 18 members. Madariaga was elected president as representative of the Gestora de Bizkaia (Ref. Aguirre, J. A. Entre la Libertad y la Revolución, Bilbao, 1935, pp. 33, 49, 94, 182-183, 187, 188, 195, 197, 213, 269, 365, 371, 373, 379 and 405), and managed to get a large part of the country's socialists and republicans to vote in favour of the Statute in the November Plebiscite, which was won by the autonomists.
In the middle of the war and in the election of the president of the Autonomous Government of Euskadi held on 7 October 1936 in Gernika, he was the only one to obtain votes (100) apart from the elected José Antonio de Aguirre (291,471). He then went into exile and lived in Biarritz, where he acted as a lawyer on behalf of Sota in the lawsuit with Aznar, which they lost in 1939. In addition to the economic hardship and sadness of exile and with his children scattered, he suffered the hard blow of losing his wife on 14th April 1939. Soon the Second World War began, his children Juan and Teresa, who were in Tarbes working, took him to live with them in January 1940, but he became bored and nostalgic for his gathering of friends in Biarritz (B. Belausteguigoitia, J. L. Azaola, R. Sota, J. L. Landaburu, etc.) he took the train to see them, only to find that the authorities were internment and banishment of all refugees, so he quickly returned to Tarbes.
Faced with the spectre of Nazi Germany approaching and his daughters in Bilbao assuring him that if he did not let himself be seen he could return ‘and nothing would happen to him’, he made up his mind and in March 1940, he was picked up at the border and taken to his summer home in Algorta. Soon his walks in the garden no longer went unnoticed. Someone spotted him and he was denounced. He was immediately arrested by the Guardia Civil and imprisoned in the Carmelo prison in Bilbao. He remained in prison until almost the end of the year, and was released under house arrest. A few days later, on a visit to his house in Sendeja, which had been seized and burgled, he suffered a seizure from which he did not recover.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)