Centuries of friction between Catalonia, Spain

The crisis pitting Spain’s government against leaders in Catalonia over an independence referendum banned by Madrid is but the latest episode of centuries of friction between this region and central authorities. The separatists who currently govern the wealthy region in northeastern Spain often make references to the short-lived 1931-1939 republic crushed by general Francisco Franco after a three-year civil war

Franco’s troops only took Catalonia months before the war ended in April 1939, sparking a mass exodus to neighbouring France.

“The first thing Franco did in Catalonia was to abolish the Generalitat,” the autonomous regional government, says Jordi Canal, a historian at the Paris-based School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences.

“The trauma of 1939, of exile, is very present” in Catalonia, adds Joan Baptista Culla, a historian at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Even before this during the fledgling republic, the Generalitat’s president Lluis Companys proclaimed a “Catalan state in the Spanish federal republic” in 1934 to oppose the conservatives who governed in Madrid. He resisted “six or seven hours, and he came out, under arrest, his hands up,” says Canal.

But the photos of the leader in his cell were widely shared, galvanising Catalans.

Which is “exactly what the Spanish government is trying to avoid now,” says the historian, pointing out that Spanish authorities have so far spared separatist leaders and have instead detained lowerlevel members of the team.

Exiled in France, Companys was denounced by the Nazis in 1940 and handed over to Spain where he was executed.

“It’s the fundamental image martyr president,” says Culla.

But Catalonia’s history is marked by symbols dating from far earlier in time.

The Diada, the region’s annual holiday on September 11 which since 2012 has been the scene of big separatist rallies, commemorates the fall of Barcelona in 1714 to troops of the Spanish King Philip V. of the

After this battle, Catalonia, was “subjected to the laws of (the Crown of Castile),” says Culla.

Andrew Dowling, a Catalonia specialist at Cardiff University, says Catalans did lose “their rights and privileges but it was not a nationalist war”.

“The Catalans were punished because they backed the wrong side of the war,” supporting archduke Charles of Austria during the 1701-14 European war for the Spanish throne.

He says the first Catalan party only emerged in 1901.

“Catalans perceived themselves as an economically advanced, culturally advanced people and looked at Spain as a kind of backwards, illiterate society,” says Dowling.

It was around that time that the Catalan hymn was created, with lyrics pointing to a peasant revolt in the 17th century against the presence of soldiers belonging to the crown. But the role of these symbols in the rise since 2010 of separatism, which had until then been marginal in Catalonia, divides historians.

“The current pro-independence movement is buoyed by what happened over the past seven or eight years,” says Culla.

The Catalans were angered in 2010 when Spain’s Constitutional Court cancelled a key part of an official text that gave them bigger autonomy and the status of “nation,” and Madrid’s subsequent refusal to negotiate.

Canal believes it stems more from the role of “schools and media” in Catalonia, which have “convinced the Catalans, especially the younger ones, that they are members of a nation that deserves to be a state.” nationalist