In history, underlying continuities tend to be stronger than explosive ruptures. Even if they are continuities blended by the mixer of geek nostalgia, behind which one doesn't have to stir much to find the defense of unspeakable 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 diplomatic multilateralism), and shredded democratic institutions (strong, personalistic, autocratic political leaderships). Does the 21st-century Catalan resemble the 19th century as well? Political scientist Jordi Muñoz argued a few days ago for the similarity between territories where Sílvia Orriols' xenophobic Alliance has more demographic traction and the regions where 19th-century Carlism received more electoral support towards the end of the 1800s.
What was Carlism? What and whom did it represent? 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 census-based liberal democracy, that is, 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 slogan was "God, homeland, and king." In response to what many people experienced as chaos, they clung to religion – 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 involutionist during the early 20th century. Patriotic sentiment, on the other hand, yielded notable and interclassist results: the Renaixença and political Catalanism. And the dynastic question entangled matters 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 Liberal Triennium (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, in the Catalan case lost after the Nueva Planta decree. The 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 an ultimately failed liberal state, 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 that is what we have again today. Hence the traditionalist "revivals" of the Orriols type, which stir up popular discontent and cling again to "our thing" of all time: 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 rather 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.
