The Carlin Catalonia of Sílvia Orriols
In history, buried continuities are usually stronger than explosive ruptures. Even if they are continuities processed through the blender of geek nostalgia, behind which one doesn't need to rummage much to find the defense of unconfessable interests and ultranationalism. Now Donald Trump wants to return to the 19th century: commercial protectionism (multi-purpose tariffs), superpower geopolitics (peace through the threat of war, not through diplomatic multilateralism), and shattered democratic institutions (strong, personalist, autocratic political leaderships). Does the 21st century Catalan resemble the 19th century too? The political scientist Jordi Muñoz argued a few days ago for the similarity between territories where Sílvia Orriols' xenophobic Alliance has more demographic momentum and the regions where 19th-century Carlism received more electoral support towards the end of the 1800s.
What was Carlism? What did it represent and to whom? It was an immobilist, anti-modern traditionalism, frightened by progress, which clung to religion, family, and homeland as lifelines against accelerated and poorly digested changes. Changes at the pace of the Industrial Revolution and a censitary liberal democracy, meaning, for rich gentlemen. In response, on the one hand, redemptive ideologies emerged – socialism, communism, and anarchism, but also feminism, hygienism, and vegetarianism – and on the other, the impossible return to an order of the Old Regime type, to a hierarchical society of immutable traditions: Carlism.
The Carlist motto was "God, Homeland, and King." In response to what many people experienced as chaos, they clung to religion – a voluntary submission –, to the land – loyalty to ancestors –, and to the monarchy – an absolute and savior leadership –. The Catalan and Spanish Church were ultramontane and involutionary during the early 20th century. Patriotic sentiment, on the other hand, yielded notable and inter-class results: the Renaixença and political Catalanism. And the dynastic question tangled things up with no less than three wars, the Carlist Wars, and other conflicts: the First Carlist War (1830-1843); the Second (1846-1849); the ephemeral uprisings of 1855, 1860, and 1869, and the Third (1872-1876). Half a century of bellicose instability, to which we would still have to add the precedents of the uprisings during the Trienio Liberal (1820-23) and the War of the Malcontents (1827).
The Carlist Wars were the violent expression of the clash between absolutism and liberalism, between the rural and urban world. Queen Isabella II was seen as liberal and had as a visceral rival the pretender Charles Maria Isidore of Bourbon, who gained support mainly in the Basque Country, Navarre, and Catalonia as a defender of their respective territorial fueros, which in the Catalan case were lost after the Nova Planta decree. Carlists were a kind of romantic guerrillas, poorly equipped, organized into bands, who fought against a regular army. It ended badly, of course. For them, but also for a liberal state that ultimately failed, which did not manage to modernize society with good education and good infrastructure, for example.
The society of the 19th century, in effect, was highly polarized in economic, social, and cultural terms. And this is what we have again today. Hence the traditionalist "revivals" of the Orriols type, which poke at popular discontent and cling once again to "our" way of life: God (Christian values and secular traditions against the supposed Muslim invasion and the multiculturalism of immigration), homeland (emotional independence and the rural-urban grievance), and of course, there is no king now, but there is a strong leadership that questions democratic power (bureaucracy, governmental elites, institutions, taxes, etc.), just as Carlism questioned the liberal state. As in the 19th century, regression will not win now, but it can seriously and persistently shake collective progress.