2023-09-07 13:08:01
The former president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, raised this Tuesday from Brussels his demands for his party, Junts, to support the investiture of Pedro Sánchez. The most controversial, an amnesty law for all those prosecuted for the illegal referendum and the unilateral declaration of independence in 2017, episodes for which he himself, still being prosecuted, has not yet sat in the dock as he has fled from Spain. But what he did in his press conference once again was reinterpret history at his whim to demand greater self-government.
Puigdemont held a meeting with the acting second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, in which he set as a condition for investing Pedros Sanchez as president of the Government a “historic” agreement with the PSOE “like the one that no government has attempted since 1714.” The former Catalan president was referring to the political status that Catalonia supposedly had before Barcelona’s capitulation to the Bourbon troops on September 11 of that year. A scenario on which the current independence movement has built a good part of its ideological corpus, despite the fact that the War of the Spanish Succession had very little secessionism, as many historians defend.
The conflict began in November 1700 with the death without issue of Charles II ‘The Bewitched’, the last representative of the House of Habsburg. During the previous years, the succession question had already become an international issue that made it evident that all of Spain constituted a very tempting loot for the different European powers, and Catalonia was only a part of that Kingdom. But it was with the death of the King of Spain when the true ‘Game of Thrones’ began throughout the continent, and not only in the Iberian Peninsula.
Both the King Louis XIV of Franceof the House of Bourbon, as the emperor Leopold I of the Holy Roman Empire, of the House of Habsburg, claimed to have the right to the Spanish succession because they were both married to Spanish princesses, daughters of King Philip IV, father of Charles II. A feeling that they transmitted to their descendants, who formed both sides: on the one hand, that of Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV, supported by France, Spain, Bavaria and part of Italy, and on the other, that of Archduke Charles of Austria , son of the emperor, supported by England, Holland, Portugal, Austria and a large part of the German states.
Unity of Spain
The first, known as the Bourbon or “Felipista” side, was mainly concerned with preserving the unity and independence of Spain, and the second, called the Austracist or “Carlist”, had the objective of preventing the union of the Spanish and French crowns, whose This fight would be the one that the independence supporters sympathize with today due to a very subjective interpretation of the facts. The two contenders faced each other in this long and bloody conflict that left hundreds of thousands of dead throughout the continent and that also led to a civil war between the Bourbons, with Castile as an ally, and the Austracists, the majority in Aragon, whose The last embers were not extinguished until 1714 with the aforementioned capitulation of Barcelona.
The historian Aitor Díaz Paredes, author of ‘Almansa. 1707 and the Bourbon triumph in Spain’ (Desperta Ferro Ediciones, 2022) explained the true nature of this confrontation a year ago on ABC: «The conflict can be seen as a civil war, but also as an international struggle of an economic and commercial nature. for placing on the throne of Madrid a king who was favorable to the interests of each side. In this sense, it is a deceptive war, because in the north of Europe, the Netherlands, the Bourbons lost the war, but on the Peninsula they won it. That is the paradox: the British and the Austrians were winning the war, but at the same time they knew that the ‘leitmotif’ of the war, which was Spain, could no longer win it. The Utrecht treaties, in fact, are the embodiment of the fact that no party was able to prevail satisfactorily. Hence that feeling of open wound that the fight left.
Although it was an international dispute, the defeat of the Catalan troops belonging to the Crown of Aragon in 1714 has fueled the historicist victimhood of generations of Catalan intellectuals and the current leaders of the Catalan independence movement, such as Puigdemont. In fact, the Diada festival, which is celebrated every September 11, and which since 2012 has filled the streets of Barcelona with hundreds of thousands of secessionists, refers to the resistance and fall of the city of Barcelona on that same date that marked the end of the war. «In 1714, Barcelona resisted because it had an entire country behind it. If we are not free, we are nothing,” the then Catalan president, Quim Torra, highlighted in 2018.
The repression
According to Puigdemont and the sovereigntist story, that defeat marked the beginning of the plundering of Catalonia at the hands of Spain. That idea, however, is totally false for British historians like Henry Kamen: «The Bourbon Army occupied Catalonia, but contributed to its economic growth. There was also no repression of the people, because the majority of the population gave their support to Philip V’s troops. In fact, on all the Diadas, the festival that is celebrated every September 11 that defeat against the Bourbons, a floral offering is made in honor of Rafael Casanova, who the independence movement has erected as its hero in the resistance against the Spanish, when His family defines him as a firm “patriot.”
The same victimist tone is used by the Generalitat’s website, in which it is stated that “Catalonia feared that a monarchy headed by Felipe V, with an absolutist spirit, would clash with the Catalan political organization that was parliamentary and pactist in nature.” Four years ago, the historical popularizer and philosopher Pedro Insua also defended on ABC, however, that the victory of the Bourbons, in reality, saved Catalonia by ending the despotism of the Catalan oligarchies.
The secessionist narrative insists on maintaining, based above all on old romantic historiography, that the War of the Spanish Succession was something like a war of independence of Catalonia with respect to Spain. That is, a democratic and independent people who, as they argue, “were conquered and their freedoms abolished.” Hence, Torra repeated the mantra that “if we are not free, we are nothing,” and that the only thing they have to choose is between “freedom or freedom.”
A “subjected” Catalonia
That is to say, the idea that Puigdemont and his acolytes try to spread is that what happened to the Catalan people is exactly the opposite of what happened to the American people, who in 1773 freed themselves from the British colonial yoke. For them, however, Catalonia was subjected. Beyond the international nature of the conflict, there is an even more important fact that is collected by the great specialist of that period, the historian Joaquim Albareda, and that is that, at the beginning of the war, the Catalans also welcomed the Bourbon with great enthusiasm. It was not, therefore, a war of one nation against another, of Catalonia against Spain, nor an independence or patriotic war.
“The history of what happened on September 11, 1714 has been totally distorted,” added Insúa. It is based on a completely false vision in which Catalonia is seen as an independent political society, something it has never been, and which is invaded by Spain, when it was and continues to be one part among others. […]. In fact, in Barcelona Archduke Charles will be proclaimed ‘Charles III’ King of Spain, never ‘of Catalonia’. […]. What hurts me most is that this misrepresentation is that practically all institutions, national and international, consider the Diada as a ‘national’ holiday, when Catalonia was not a nation and could not be ‘defeated’ by Spain.
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