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On this occasion, the featured piece is not inside a display case: it is the very room in which we stand. Victoria Eugenia’s Room, as it is known today, is part of the Palacio de los Marqueses de Malferit, home of L’Iber, Museo de los Soldaditos de Plomo. For a few months during the Spanish Civil War, however, this building served a completely different purpose.
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Between November 1936 and May 1937, its rooms housed the Ministry of Justice of the Second Spanish Republic. In all likelihood, the room we now know as Victoria Eugenia’s Room was linked to the office of its minister, the anarchist Juan García Oliver. To understand how an old Valencian palace ended up turned into a ministry, we must go back to November 1936.
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Valencia, capital of the Republic
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The Spanish Civil War had begun in July 1936. A few months later, the rebel troops were advancing towards Madrid and the situation in the capital had become extremely dangerous. For that reason, on 6 November 1936 the government led by Francisco Largo Caballero decided to move to Valencia. From then until the end of October 1937, the city became the de facto capital of the Republic.
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Ministries, official bodies, diplomats, journalists and civil servants arrived in Valencia. The government needed buildings from which to keep running the State in the middle of a war. As a result, many palaces and large properties in the city were assigned to official uses.
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Today’s Calle Caballeros, one of the main streets of the historic centre, was then called calle de la Metalurgia. Several government departments were concentrated there: besides the Ministry of Justice in the Palacio de Malferit, the Ministry of Agriculture was set up very close by, in the Palacio de Trénor.
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A Ministry of Justice inside the Palacio de Malferit
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The Ministry of Justice was installed in today’s Palacio de Malferit, which at the time was listed as number 26 of calle de la Metalurgia. We even know the impression the building made on the new minister thanks to his own memoirs, El eco de los pasos. García Oliver recalled the moment it was assigned to him like this:
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«It was the palace of a marquis, a very fine-looking building, with enormous wooden beams holding up the ceilings. A wide entrance, with a small courtyard in the centre and empty rooms across the whole ground floor. On the first floor, a reception room, a large hall and a small adjoining room. On the walls of all the first-floor rooms hung old paintings, most of them on religious themes and a few landscapes.»
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García Oliver gave express instructions that no one should remove those paintings from the walls, not even the religious ones. As Minister of Justice he was also Minister of Religious Affairs, and he wanted any priest who visited the building to «feel at home». Some time later, the Dean of Canterbury, on a visit to Valencia, confessed his surprise: he had toured several ministries set up in other palaces of the Valencian nobility, and in all of them the walls had been left bare, marked only by the outlines of the removed paintings. Justice was the only one where they still hung.
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The very building that L’Iber visitors walk through today was therefore the everyday setting of a ministry in the middle of the Civil War.
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A photograph that points the way to Victoria Eugenia’s Room
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Identifying this room as the former ministerial office does not rest on the logic of the building’s layout alone. It is also supported by a period photograph showing García Oliver working in his office, accompanied by two other men.
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In it we recognise several elements that Victoria Eugenia’s Room still preserves: the woodwork, the large mirror with a carved frame crowned by a garland crest, and the arrangement of the light and the doorway in relation to the rest of the room. The furniture in the photograph —desk, lamp, telephone— has disappeared, but the architectural space itself, with its proportions and finishes, has barely changed. It is this convergence of details, together with the minister’s own description in his memoirs, that has led Alejandro Noguera, director of the Museum, to propose this identification after careful study.
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Juan García Oliver: an anarchist turned minister
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A singular figure stood at the head of that Ministry. Born in Reus and linked from a very young age to the anarcho-syndicalist movement, García Oliver had been one of the most prominent leaders of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, the CNT.
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His arrival in government was an enormous paradox. Anarchism had traditionally defended the disappearance of the State and had rejected taking part in its institutions. Nevertheless, the exceptional situation of the Civil War led several CNT leaders to join the government of Largo Caballero on 4 November 1936.
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García Oliver accepted precisely one of the portfolios that most contrasted with his revolutionary career: Justice. He remained in office until 17 May 1937, when the fall of the Largo Caballero government ended his time at the head of the Ministry. During those months, the Palacio de Malferit became the centre from which he carried out intense legislative activity and tried to reorganise a justice system deeply disrupted by war and revolution.
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A historic decree for women’s rights
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Among the measures promoted during those months, one stands out especially, because it connects the Palacio de Malferit with the history of women’s rights in Spain.
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The Republican Constitution of 1931 had recognised the legal and political equality of citizens and had opened the way to women’s suffrage, whose great champion in the Cortes was Clara Campoamor. There was, however, an important contradiction: women could vote, be elected as members of parliament and even hold public office, yet the old civil laws still imposed significant limitations, especially on married women.
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To put an end to that contradiction, García Oliver created within the Ministry itself a Legal Advisory Commission, made up of jurists of different political leanings. He entrusted it with draft decrees on matters that had been pending for decades. The most far-reaching was the decree on the civil capacity of women.
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On 4 February 1937, the Gaceta de la República (no. 35) published the decree countersigned by minister Juan García Oliver. Its first article stated:
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«Sex gives rise to no difference in the extent and exercise of civil capacity. Women, whatever their status, have the same capacity that the Laws recognise, or may recognise, for men to exercise all civil rights and functions.»
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Years later, in his memoirs, García Oliver explained the real scope of the reform in these words:
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«How many women in Spain have realised that since 4 February they are free women? […] Think of the contrast, and how absurd it was that a married woman could be elected mayor, member of parliament or minister, could make laws, and yet could not dispose of herself in civil terms, nor of her property. She could not even leave home to go elsewhere without her husband’s permission.»
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The reform sought to bring into civil life the equality that the Republican Constitution had recognised earlier in the political sphere. The Franco dictatorship repealed it and restored the legal incapacity of married women; Spain would take decades to recover that level of equality.
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Other far-reaching reforms were also driven from this same palace: the legalisation of civil marriage, the streamlining of adoption procedures for orphaned children —especially urgent in wartime— and an amnesty for ordinary offences committed before 18 July 1936.
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Was Clara Campoamor ever in the Palacio de Malferit?
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The link between this decree and women’s rights may suggest that Clara Campoamor was connected to the Ministry housed in the Palacio de Malferit. There is, however, no documentary evidence of this, and the chronology rules it out.
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Campoamor had played a fundamental role in defending women’s suffrage during the Constituent Cortes of 1931. But she left Spain in September 1936, before the Republican government moved to Valencia and before García Oliver set up the Ministry of Justice here.
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Her importance therefore belongs to an earlier and complementary stage. Campoamor was one of the great protagonists in the conquest of women’s political rights. Years later, in completely different circumstances and in the midst of the Civil War, the Ministry of Justice housed in the Palacio de Malferit tried to extend that equality to the field of civil rights.
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Other episodes lived within these walls
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The Ministry of Justice’s time in the palace also left other episodes that illustrate the tension of those months. In the «large hall» on the first floor —today the room of the Battle of Almansa, which was previously the library— the so-called Blood Tribunal (Tribunal de la Sangre) was once convened. García Oliver wanted to bring its actions under control in order to end the extrajudicial executions taking place in wartime Valencia.
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Nor was the building safe from the war itself. In his memoirs, García Oliver recalled an air raid on the city in which a bomb exploded on the roof of the Ministry, right above one of the enormous oak beams that held up the ceilings. The first floor, where the minister’s office was, filled with dust and smoke.
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An official decree, dated just a few weeks after the Ministry moved into the palace, bears witness to the episode. It was signed in Barcelona on 19 December 1936 by President Manuel Azaña and by García Oliver himself, and it was published in several provincial official gazettes. The text acknowledges that the building occupied by the Ministry of Justice had suffered damage «caused by the shelling of enemy batteries and aircraft», which destroyed much of the Central Register of Convicts and Rebels. The impact devastated what is today the room of Antiquity, whose beams are not the originals: the roof did not regain its former appearance until the building was restored in 1945.
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When he left office in May 1937, García Oliver gathered his documents, left a strongbox open and empty with the keys still in the lock, and said goodbye to the guard he himself had organised at the palace. It was an almost theatrical gesture with which he closed, after six months of intense activity, his time in these rooms.
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A palace turned witness to History
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In May 1937, after the fall of the Largo Caballero government and the arrival of Juan Negrín to the presidency, García Oliver left the Ministry of Justice. He was replaced by Manuel de Irujo, who continued working in this same building and focused his efforts on protecting clergy and members of the Church from the Palacio de Malferit.
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Months later, in October 1937, the Republican government moved its seat once again, this time from Valencia to Barcelona. The Palacio de Malferit thus closed one of the most singular chapters of its long history. Today, as the home of L’Iber, Museo de los Soldaditos de Plomo, the building preserves a memory that goes far beyond the collections it houses.
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When visitors enter Victoria Eugenia’s Room, they are not merely looking at a historic room of the palace. They stand in one of the spaces that probably formed part of the Ministry of Justice of the Second Republic during the Spanish Civil War, in a Valencia temporarily turned into the capital of the State. Within these walls ministers and civil servants worked, justice was administered at one of the most difficult moments in modern Spanish history, and legislative reforms were driven that still resonate today. That is why, in this room, the building ceases to be merely the setting of the museum and becomes itself a piece of History.
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Sources and references
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- García Oliver, Juan. El eco de los pasos. Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1978.
- Decree of 4 February 1937. Gaceta de la República, no. 35, pp. 635-636.
- Decree of 19 December 1936 (Manuel Azaña / Juan García Oliver). Boletín Oficial de la Provincia de Castellón, year CV, no. 155, 26 December 1936 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica, Ministry of Culture).
- Aragó Carrión, L.; Azkárraga Testor, J. M.; Salazar Bonet, J. (2011). Guía Urbana. Valencia 1931-1939: La ciudad en la II República. Universitat de València.
- Palacio de los Marqueses de Malferit. L’Iber, Museo de los Soldaditos de Plomo – Fundación Libertas 7.
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