Catalan Identity: Origins, Culture, and Political Movements
Origins and Consolidation of Catalan Identity
A New Catalan Culture
The Persistence of the Catalan Identity
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a century after the promulgation of the Decree of Nueva Planta, which had abrogated all political and administrative structures of the former Crown of Aragon, Catalonia remained in clear rejection of the process of administrative centralization and the attempt to identify with the laws and language of Castile.
The Literary and Cultural Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that began in the 1830s in Catalonia as a vindication of the public use of the Catalan language and culture.
The Popular Renaissance
In parallel, outside and in opposition to the literary Renaissance movement, a popular culture developed that advocated the use of “spoken” Catalan and that had a tradition of literature and popular theater that questioned established topics.
Hiking: contributed to rediscovering many sectors of Catalan society with the landscape, history, and people of the country, extended the patriotic feeling, and was the driving force behind the recovery of cultural and artistic heritage of Catalonia.
The Beginnings of Political Catalanism
The Criticism of Centralism
The various constitutions of the new Liberal state defined Spain as a nation that offered the courts as the only deposit of national sovereignty (in fact, shared only with the king), and they pushed for example a model of state-based political, economic, administrative, legal, and military centralization.
Federalism
Since the decade of 1840, in a context of political and social struggles, federalism began with Abdó Terrades as the first reference. In 1868, with the emergence of the Republican Party Federal Democratic, federal political ideas underwent a major expansion.
Valenti Almirall and the Catalan Center
Valenti Almirall was a leading figure in the definition of Catalan politics, i.e., the transformation of the Catalan nationalist movement into doctrines and parties who wished to intervene in public administration.
The Failure of the Almirall Project
The proposal of Almirall to set up an organization with all the currents of Catalanism and become a political force capable of intervening in the elections proved unfeasible.
The League of Catalonia and the Message to the Regent
He founded a new organization, the League of Catalonia (1887). The new organization had a more conservative plan than Almirall, so he better tuned with a middle class increasingly dissatisfied with political dynasties.
The Conservative Catalanism
Catalanism Traditionalist
During the implementation of the liberal state, much of the clergy in Spain and Catalonia had embraced Carlism and the positions adopted by fundamentalists and anti-liberals. During the Restoration, and after the Holy See had made public its support for Alfonso XII, the clergy abandoned these ideas for a space in the more conservative liberalism.
The Formation of the Union Catalanist
The campaign against the draft civil code showed the need to organize the Catalan nationalist movement better, and the League proposed the establishment of a new entity to coordinate all the regional Catalan nationalist groups.
The Formation of the Regionalist League
The Impact of 98 in Catalonia
The situation of 98 favored the consolidation of a new generation of intellectuals and activists advocating a new political program and the creation of a party to submit to elections as a strategy for access to autonomy.
The Foundation of the Regionalist League
The electoral success of the single candidacy favored the merger of all the conservative sectors of Catalonia: the bourgeois industrial, urban and rural landowners, professionals, and traders.
Nationalism and Regionalism in Spain
Basque Nationalism
The autonomy charter that protected the Spanish Bascongadas from uniformity was maintained until 1839, when he abolished most of the particularities of these territories as a legal punishment for their commitment to the first Carlist uprising.
The Galician
The Galician society was predominantly rural. The emergence of Galician nationalism was much later than the minority in Catalonia and the Basque Country, although the Galician society was much more homogeneous and that the language and cultural traditions were maintained much more rooted within the farmer society.