Catalonia Since the Spanish Civil War

Reconstructing the Nation

By Andrew Dowling

Sussex Academic Press

Copyright © 2014 Andrew Dowling
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84519-530-4

Contents

Preface by Series Editor, Nigel Townson,
Acknowledgements,
Glossary of Parties and Organisations,
Introduction,
1 Catalanism and the Spanish State, 1898–1939,
2 Repression, 1939–1955,
3 Revival, 1955–1970,
4 Restoration, 1970–1984,
5 Nationalism and Autonomy, 1984–2011,
Epilogue: Towards Independence?,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Catalanism and the Spanish State, 1898–1939

The Spanish case between 1900 and 1936 – and ever since – was marked by a ‘confrontation of nationalisms’, that is by the antagonism of Spanish nationalism on the one hand, and peripheral nationalisms on the other.

Throughout what can be termed Spain’s long nineteenth century, the modernisation of the country was halting and in the view of many authorities, failed. Commentators from Richard Ford to Karl Marx found Spain seriously wanting, the latter referring to a country that suffered from a rule akin to ‘oriental despotism’. Spain seemed unable to reverse its historical decline, falling further behind the major European powers, who were entering a new imperial phase. The comparative weakness of the Spanish state also had consequences for Spain’s inability to create a modern, coherent project of national unity. European imperial expansion took place at around the same time as the emergence of the modern programme of nation building and nationalism. Internal consolidation appeared to facilitate overseas expansion. Spain seemed equally unable to participate in either process and saw how its European counterparts built modern and cohesive nation-states, whilst adding overseas possessions. This weak and ineffectual Spanish ‘nationalisation project’ would ensure that Spain’s minority national questions, in particular those of the Basque Country and Catalonia, would continue into the twenty-first century. This was compounded by the fact that it was on the periphery of Spain that the earliest expressions of modernisation took place, in particular in the territory of Catalonia which, by the late nineteenth century, was the most dynamic centre of industrial and cultural power found in the Spanish state. The sophistication of Catalan society meant that it produced two key variables that were not present in other areas of Spain: a political nationalism and an indigenous labour movement. In the case of Galicia, nationalism-regionalism was a late arrival and it remained an overwhelmingly rural society into the 1930s. In the Basque Country, the response to rapid industrialisation produced a labour movement largely made up of impoverished southern Spanish migrants and the Basque nationalist movement, which was an expression of the cultural dislocation produced by economic advance and the Spanish-speaking migration. Thus, in the Catalan case we see in intense form, a rivalry between labour and nationalism to become politically dominant. This mobilising rivalry between labour and Catalanism was not resolved in the favour of the latter until the 1960s. Catalonia was, in the late nineteenth century and into the 1930s, the most complex and advanced society in Spain with a strong middle-class sector. It is striking that so many of the key moments of modern Spanish history were centred in the city of Barcelona: the general strike of 1902; the Tragic Week of 1909; the Assembly movement of 1917; the ‘gun wars’ of 1919–1920 and the launch of the coup by General Primo de Rivera in 1923. Catalonia, due to its strong labour movement and nationalism, remained the key territory of concern to Spanish nationalism into the 1940s.

Due to the historic divergences amongst the territories where Catalan was spoken, the national project that emerged in the late nineteenth century concentrated its energies on the principality of Catalonia. Whilst the cultural, political and economic relations between the other territories in Spain where Catalan is spoken have been, particularly in the Valencian case, complex, the focus on the Principality of Catalonia has become the convention in European historiography. As will be noted later, the post-Franco settlement prevented any greater Catalan unity and the conditions of Francoism led to the emergence of an anti-Catalanist discourse in urban areas of Valencia. Thus in contrast to other national movements of the late nineteenth century, concerned with the largest territorial expansion possible as in the cases of Great Albania or Serbia, or other forms of national unification in the case of Italy and Germany, the case of Catalonia stands out as one where a wider territorial ambition was not claimed. Rather Catalanism became a project centred on a consolidated and affluent Catalonia. Here the Catalan case can be contrasted with the status within Basque nationalism of Navarre, which has been central to Basque national ambition. Thus, whilst the notion of La terra (the Land) became key in the emergence of Catalanism, when used it always referred to Catalan land and not to that of Valencia or the Balearics.

Whilst the creation of the Catalan nationalist movement largely coincided with the emergence of the Catalan business class in the nineteenth century, it was not a creation of this class, though Catalanism later served the economic interests of the business class. When considering Catalan nationalism it is important to separate the emergence of nationalism from the idea of national identity. Nationalism can best be understood as a product of modernity. Nationalism as a political movement emerges with varying degrees of strength in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century and involved not only smaller linguistic and cultural communities, but the great powers of Europe. Catalan national identity, or a sense of what it is to be Catalan (Catalanitat), preceded the emergence of nationalism as an ideology. For Llobera, ‘nationalism strictu sensu is a relatively recent phenomenon, but a rudimentary and restricted national identity existed already in the medieval period’. This form of national consciousness, described by some as being ‘pre- patriotic’, found expression in various forms, in particular in its loyalty to the monarch. As Hastings has noted, ‘medieval historians seem … increasingly agreed that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries national identities in western Europe had stabilized in a form … that we take for granted’. For those who defined themselves as nationalists in the modern period, this pre-modern identity would provide the building blocks for a narrative of national construction: an eternal essence and a thousand years (or more) of ‘national history’. Inevitably, with no national state to speak of and periodic phases of cultural and political repression, expressed in their most brutal form under the Franco regime (1939–1975), the Catalan national movement has been defensive. Where Catalanism sought its greatest political mobilisation was in its defence of economic interests, and its first political expression, the Lliga Regionalista, maintained throughout its existence the defence of Catalan industry and protectionist measures for it.

Part of the inability of orthodox Marxism to comprehend nationalism (it has been described as its ‘greatest theoretical weakness’) has been its belief that nationalism has been a tool of the bourgeoisie to distract the masses. This belief was also due to the personal prejudices of Marx and Engels, who were of course products of an ascendent German nation who looked with disdain upon the Slavs in particular. ‘The world market, world industries and world literature predicted with such exultation in “The Communist Manifesto” all conducted, in fact to the world of nationalism.’

The development of Catalan nationalism in the nineteenth century closely parallels the three-stage theoretical model established by Miroslav Hroch. The first phase is one of scholarly enquiry and the dissemination of linguistic, cultural and historical attributes. The second phase sees the emergence of a new type of activist who ‘awakens’ national consciousness. The final phase is the emergence of a mass movement and its divergence into conservative, liberal and democratic strands. In Catalonia each phase corresponds roughly with the periods 1830–1870, 1870–1898 and post-1898. As we will see, these three phases also have strong parallels with developments during the Franco dictatorship, where existing conditions meant that the reconstruction of the Catalan national project was, until the early 1960s, the task of the self-appointed cultural or political activist. Within modern political cultures, there is a frequent confusion in the uses of the modern word ‘nation’ and the modern concept ‘nationalism’. Nationalists demand to be ruled by their own, and to have their culture, their language promoted. In this the demands of nations without states are no different from the unchallenged assumptions of actually existing states, whether Britain, France or Spain. Billig has noted how nationalism and expression of national identity occur in all nation states.

The French historian Pierre Vilar has argued that Basque nationalism began, ‘as the reaction of an economically advanced region against the underdeveloped political leadership of the country’. For Vilar, Catalan nationalism ‘fits even better this definition’, although he acknowledges that Catalan nationalism ‘began as a manifestation of linguistic renewal’. Part of the explanation for the strength of Catalan and Basque nationalism lies in the fact that the Spanish state had little over a century to attempt the cultural homogenisation of its population. After perhaps two centuries of decline, by the late eighteenth century Catalonia was experiencing an economic revival and became the first area of Spain to undergo industrialisation, and by 1790 Catalan cotton production was second only to that of England. The textile industry in Catalonia would play a fundamental part in the economic regeneration of Catalonia throughout the nineteenth century and would benefit Catalan cultural revival through the patronage that became possible due to this industrial revolution and the material improvements this allowed.

The rumblings of Catalan cultural revival can be discerned in the publication of Gramsàtica i Apologia de la Llengua Catalana (a Grammar and Defence of the Catalan Language) in 1814 by the Catalan priest Josep Pau Ballot. This work can be cited as an early illustration of the internationalisation of cultural production, as the first quarter of the nineteenth century was marked by a great European interest in the origins of languages and a focus on their grammatical structure was prominent in studies undertaken throughout Europe. It is this period that saw the creation of the Indo-European ‘family tree’ with its subdivisions of Celtic, Romance etc. Literate elites in Europe increasingly turned to the languages of their own countries, a process which reversed the adoption of French or German as the languages of the ‘cultured gentleman’. Pushkin wrote in Russian, grammars appeared in languages such as Irish and Polish, and the trajectory of the Catalan revival demonstrated that Catalonia participated in the mainstream of European developments. Throughout the next two centuries Catalonia would be much more inclined to adopt the latest cultural and political trends from Europe than was the case in the rest of the Iberian peninsula.

The Catalan cultural renaissance, the Renaixença, was the Catalan response to the Romantic movement. Romanticism produced a European-wide phenomena of interest in the past of the nations with and without states. The Romantics, witnessing the emergence of industrial capitalism, praised the supposed idyllic purity of the rural world and invoked the rural populace as bearers of the true essence of the people. Usually urban dwellers themselves, they felt particularly strongly the sundering of themselves from their historic cultural community, which they located in the countryside. ‘The land as a historically unique and poetic landscape, as a decisive influence over historical events and as the witness to ethnic survival … these are all components of a general process of “territorialization of memory”‘.

The Catalan Renaixença was a project of cultural revivalism to restore a perceived broken continuity with the past. The early Catalanists looked to the medieval empire of Aragon-Catalonia as a pre-industrial Golden Age and praised all its apparent glories. ‘Golden Ages provide essential blueprints for realizing the national self and for encouraging the process of national regeneration’. Catalonia at that time was a European conquering power, its economic strength centred on the port of Barcelona and its cultural vitality rested on the Catalan language. In the Renaixença, following the examples of their European contemporaries, Catalan intellectuals undertook the study and promotion of the Catalan language, law and folklore. All of the movements of national revival had their poetical input, frequently using the Epic form to re-launch the nation, and the publication of Carles Aribau’s Oda a la Psàtria (Ode to the Fatherland) in 1833 is usually seen as the beginning of the cultural Renaissance. As with other European territories in the same period, the construction of a national narrative began. As Berger has noted, ‘many of the tropes of national belonging and identity, which were prominent ingredients of national histories, went back to medieval and early modern times’. In 1859 a medieval poetry contest, the Jocs Florals (Floral Games), was revived, part of a pattern elsewhere in Europe including the Highland Games in Scotland and the Eisteddfod in Wales, where the rural in particular was evoked. However, unlike in the Basque Country, the nationalist movement that emerged in Catalonia was not anti-urban.

Whilst the Catalan language still remained the vernacular for the majority of the population (a majority still overwhelmingly rural), it had been the urban middle classes and the rapidly growing bourgeoisie who had undergone the most extensive Castilianisation. For a period in the nineteenth century the language of ‘progress’ in Catalonia became Spanish. ‘The Catalan bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century had enthusiastically devoted itself to the task of the construction of the modern Spanish nation and had gone on to relegate its own language to the position of a subordinate one.’ However, amongst the Catalan intellectual elite a rise in the status of Catalan did occur. ‘The national or would-be national middle class is always compelled to “turn to the people” … what are the implications of turning to the people … First of all, speaking their language.’ As Marfany has shown, ‘it is evident that at a certain point the attempt at the construction of Spain based on the Castilian cultural tradition was experienced by many Catalans as an intolerable threat to its Catalanitat’. Early Catalanism was directed to these urban sectors of Catalan society and a standardisation of the language was undertaken, a task not completed until the early twentieth century, with the publication of Pompeu Fabra’s Catalan dictionary. Significantly the work of Pompeu Fabra sought whenever possible to ‘purify’ the language of Spanish loan words, often choosing words from the countryside as the standard that were unknown in the city of Barcelona.

As Catalan industrialisation proceeded apace, the contrast between Catalonia and the agrarian stagnation of the rest of the Spanish peninsula became apparent. This economic divergence had a cultural consequence. From being seen as an agent of backwardness to be abandoned in the race into the ‘modern world’, the Catalan language, by the end of the nineteenth century became, for Catalan economic and cultural elites, an agent of modernisation. In the history of Catalan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the language experienced many problems, but never that of low status in the eyes of the populace. This can be contrasted with experiences of languages such as Occitan, Breton and Irish, where associations with rural ‘backwardness’ made language revival particularly difficult, if not impossible. The peculiarity of Catalan nationalism was to be based in an economically advanced territory, but as part of a state that lagged behind in the development of European capitalism and industrialisation. The agrarian stagnation of Spain’s nineteenth century would feed into the modernising discourse of liberal Catalanism. The faltering development of a modernised Spanish liberalism was unable to find a project that included a role for Catalonia. If ‘progress’ meant urbanisation and industrialisation, then Catalonia was ‘advanced’ whilst the rest of the territory of the Spanish state was ‘backward’. It was the overwhelmingly ‘rural’ aspect to Spain that meant that Catalan nationalism, once it was a consolidated ideology, felt itself to be fully comfortable with notions of the city, modernity and the future. During the course of the nineteenth century, the twin processes of Catalan industrialisation and the Renaixença became entwined, and gave the Catalanist movement sufficient vigour to launch a political movement at the end of the 1890s. For Pi Sunyer, ‘the Renaixença was distinct from, but not unrelated to, the political and economic discontents that moved the industrial elite’.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Catalonia Since the Spanish Civil War by Andrew Dowling. Copyright © 2014 Andrew Dowling. Excerpted by permission of Sussex Academic Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.