Catalan Identity and Banditry in the Ancient Regime

Introduction

In recent times, studies of nationalism and collective identity have proliferated in Europe as well as in the Spanish state. Many of these studies are in response to current problematic territorial issues with nations demanding the right to self-determination from their states, as with Scotland, Quebec or Catalonia (Franco, 2017; Elliott, 2018) Some medieval and modern historians have published various studies in recent years trying to reaffirm or refute certain claims or myths of peripheral nationalist movements.

However, the present study does not seek to fall into the most extreme ‘present day ism’ by having a quick glance at the past, but to explain how identities and patriotism were understood in the Ancient regime in Catalonia and how it influenced banditry therein. But one step at a time: Can we speak of nation before the emergence of nineteenth century nationalism? (Cepeda & Calvo, 2012) It is a question which many researchers interested in the question of national identity have asked. Until the 1980s the majority of studies and folklorists used to interpret “nation” as a Volksgeist. (Smith, 1997) or the soul of the people. These people believed that the nation was created independently from the will of individuals and from the historical context, that is to say, a nation was formed naturally and inevitably and nationalism was born when the nation forming process was “ripe and ready” (López, 1965). Following this argument, one can speak of a nation being in a state of growth during the whole of the Ancient Regime, as if history were marked and pre-established in order to create a national conscience so that sooner or later national states could flower. The great historian Pierre Vilar was a fruit of his time (1962) when he wrote, in La Catalogne dans l’Espane modern, that:

Hans Kohn was also in favour of seeking the roots “in a far distant past” in order to understand the “roots” of modern nationalism, (Kohn, 1944; Torres, 2001); but this conception started to change as a result of the publication of the works of Benedict Anderson (1983), Ernest Gellner (1983) and Eric Hobsbawm (1990), amongst others. This new historiography puts the accent on the constructive and artificial nature of nations and their ‘narrative, discursive or imagined’ texture; in other words, nations are not natural elements but as in the title of Anderson’s work, Imagined communities, produced by modern nationalism, this being a contemporary social and political phenomena related to industrialisation, the democratic politics of the masses and secularisation (Archilés, 2013).

Despite the fact that the three authors were in agreement that nation and nationalism were contemporary questions, they also recognised that antecedents with similar characteristics could also exist in the Ancient Regime. Gellner (1983) called it “cultural chauvinism” (p.40), linked to a historical and cultural legacy, but unconnected to modern nationalism. Eric Hobsbawm, for his part, spoke about “protonationalism” with supralocal links to popular identifications or also supralocal ties but with more institutional identification. The British historian remarks that “protonationalism alone is not enough to shape nationalities, nations and even less so, states (…) if protonationalism were sufficient, a serious national movement of Mapuches or Aymaras would have already emerged”. Although Hobsbawm theorised greatly about this question, he also affirmed that the absence of many popular testimonies before the 20^th century make it very difficult to explain the concept and that ‘the apparent universal ideological domination that nationalism exerts today is a kind of optical illusion.’ (Hobsbawm, 1991, p.86)