Agustí Chalaux i de Subirà

Agustí Chalaux died in Barcelona on 26 April 2006.

With Lluís Maria Xirinacs and other persons, a new association was created to study his new political, economic and social model, and in 1984 they founded the «Centre d’Estudis Joan Bardina» («Joan Bardina Study Centre»), which had its offices in the old family factory.

In 1968 he left his job as a chemist. He took part in the «Universitat al Carrer» («Street University»), which later was officially renamed «Institut de Cultura Popular» («Institute of Popular Culture»).

In 1956, after the occupation of Hungary, he reached the conclusion that violence was the wrong path for the introduction of a political change.

He returned to Catalonia in 1945. He was a regular reader of «La Semana Internacional» («The International week»), a magazine published in Chile by Joan Bardina, who also had an influence on him.

In 1939 he went into exile to Paris, where he was caught up by Second World War. He was mobilized in the Artillery School for officers, and after the German occupation of the country, the French government, at whose head was Pétain, demobilized him and he resumed his studies.

Agustí Chalaux i de Subirà (Sant Genís dels Agudells, 1911, Barcelona 2006), was a Spanish thinker, who designed a political, economic and social model meant to reduce as much as possible the misuse of power, extreme poverty and corruption.

He was born at Sant Genís dels Agudells (Catalonia, Spain), which was then a hamlet with 15 inhabitants near Barcelona, on 19 July 1911. His father was a French businessman who had a factory producing dyes for woollens in Almogàvers street, in Barcelona. His mother was from the Subirà family, with a Catalan Carlist tradition. When he was four he was sent to the Montessori school, one of the first to be opened in Europe. At nine years of age he was sent to France to study, where he stayed in Toulon until he finished high school.