Los fundadores

Every later Brunet — the Patriarch, the Captain, the murdered firstborn, the builder of the Belle Époque — descends from a single decision: that of José (Francisco) Brunet Segura (Copons, 21-XI-1766) and his brother Francisco Jaime (Copons, 27-X-1768) to leave the wool-and-mule country of the Anoia for the Atlantic port of San Sebastián. Their father, Francisco Manuel Brunet Casulleras (Copons, 1731), had married twice; the eldest son, Manuel Brunet Tudó, went his own way. The two younger brothers went north — and became «los fundadores».

I.Tobacco, and other people's wars

The house's first fortune was made in partnership, not alone. Gárate's reading of the earliest books shows the Brunets in the tobacco business with the widow Collado e hijos and Pedro Queheille e hijos — the two other great merchant families of the port — and holding a share of the tobacco factory Ph. Rinchan y Cía with the Queheille. Thirty years later the three houses still gave charity as one line in the press («los señores Collado, Queheille y Brunet de San Sebastián», 1821), and in the Carlist war they would stand together again among the five largest forced lenders of the besieged city.

Strictly, though, the first firm belonged to the eldest brother: «Manuel Brunet y Cía», trading from the late 1700s (with offices reported in Barcelona and Burgos), was Manuel Brunet Tudó's house — and José and Francisco broke away from him to found «José y Francisco Brunet», which soared while Manuel's rump firm dwindled into debts his sons were still settling in 1840. The family rift is documented in his will, which names executors from outside the family. And yet one scene redeems «el Apartado» forever: in the burning of San Sebastián in 1813 — while José and Francisco ran the business from wartime Lekeitio — Manuel was inside the city, and testified afterwards as an eyewitness to the fire (Gárate, per Murrugarren). Staying while the city burns turns out to be the oldest family trait of all; Manuel's excluded son, Francisco Ramón Brunet Vidal, would carry it up the road to Irún in 1837 as the family's one decorated captain.

The second business was war. A surviving letra of 1794 shows the house provisioning the voluntarios de Guipúzcoa against the French Convention; in the next war they financed the three battalions of Jáuregui's guerrilla — credits still alive on the books in 1823 — and accumulated vales reales, the crown's paper debt, «de todas clases». By 1797 the firm's capital stood at some 45.000 pesetas; a generation of tobacco, army contracts and sovereign paper would multiply it more than twentyfold.

II.1823 — the terrible year

Everything the founders were came due at once in 1823. The Cien Mil Hijos de San Luis blockaded the city; the population was expelled or fled until barely 200 civilians remained; and the constitutional Ayuntamiento «se vio reducido a un alcalde: D. José Brunet» — the elder founder, holding the vara alone in a bombarded town (the full story is its own artifact, El alcalde del bloqueo). And the house drew up its great reckoning: the balance of 1823 — the first full inventory of what the brothers had built. It survives, and it is the first X-ray of the fortune:

III.The hidalguía, and the handover

In 1827 the Juntas Generales of Gipuzkoa recognised the hidalguía of both brothers — the province formally receiving the Catalan newcomers into its gentry, four years after one of them had held its capital's city hall through a siege. (Both brothers were indeed alive to receive it: the diocesan index — two death entries, San Vicente and Santa María del Coro, 21/22 March 1838 — settles that Francisco Jaime lived until 1838, correcting Gárate's Arroyave chart, and thereby confirms him as the family's first British vice-consul of 1825.) The succession was already seeded: José's son José Manuel Brunet Prat «el Patriarca», who had entered the counting-house as a boy in August 1824, would run it for sixty-eight years, to the month of his death in 1892. The razón social the founders left — «José y Francisco Brunet» — outlived them both so long that it was still nominally a shareholder of record in 1878, decades after either man could sign.