Rural Traditionalism and Conservative Nationalism in Catalonia, 1865-1900

History, historiography and the ambiguities of Catalan nationalism

“…Therefore, whatever their deeper feelings or motives, all the authors -like those cited above -who gave ideological and historiographic content rather than poetic voice to the Renaixença, the Catalan Renaissance or Rebirth, were forced to accept the liberal program in one way or another, or else they would find themselves defending the muntanya, its rural past and its hopeless future economy, against the winning pressure of urban progress and industrialisation. 30 At the same time, a backward--looking topos was quite tolerable in poetry -indeed it defined much of the movement to recover Provençal motifs in the Jocs Florals (or Tournaments of Flowers, in which contestants disputed each other in verse), 'recovered' from medieval reminiscence and held annually in Barcelona after 1859 - but such a blatant recovery of the lost past had no place in what purported to be fact (or at least historical fiction). Writers such as Balaguer, Pi, Mañé or Bofarull, all attempted, each in his own way, as historians or social theoreticians, to present a modern basis for Catalonia out of its historical experience, as the means for a reorganisation of Spain in terms of the alleged plurality and representativity of medieval Catalan--Aragonese institutions, and based on the simultaneous submission of the Crown of Castile to the royal will, and the Castilian tendency towards imposing its traditions on its neighbours, the crownlands of Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal, leading to their outright annexation.…”