Elna, the first town hall that celebrates the partition of Catalonia

BarcelonaAnti-Catalan controversy in Northern Catalonia. The far-right municipal government of the symbolic city of Elne has decided to celebrate for the first time the partition of Catalonia as a result of the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 –a consequence of the Catalan defeat against Castile in the Reapers' War–, which meant that the Catalan regions of Roussillon, Capcir, Upper Cerdanya, Vallespir, and Conflent remained under the yoke of the Kingdom of France. It will do so in an event this Saturday organized by the local executive of the ultra Steve Fortel –who supported the collaborationist Marshal Henri Pétain and who ran with the local candidacy Elne à Cœur, which is positioned even further to the right than the National Rally– to exalt the dismemberment of Catalonia. The initiative has generated a lot of controversy.

On the event poster, the flag of France appears joined with the Catalan one to claim the French affiliation of the Northern Catalan territories: "Celebration of the union of Elne and Roussillon to the Kingdom of France," reads the poster, which specifies that the mayor will be present along with the consequent "municipal address," in addition to a lecture under the title "The contributions of the treaty to Elne and Roussillon."

"It had never happened before, it is a provocation, they want to humiliate and punish, they are anti-Catalans who have a hatred for Catalan history," assures the former mayor of Elne and current vice president of the department that corresponds to Northern Catalonia, Nicolas Garcia, to ARA. Bluntly, the radical right is already celebrating "the mutilation" of Catalonia, as he relates, which has triggered an alternative event by various Catalanist entities against what Fortel wants to celebrate on Saturday. "No one had dared to do it, there is an unashamedly anti-Catalan will, they want to vex us and insult the Catalans and all our dead against the French troops," asserts the leader of the Catalanist party Yes to the Catalan Country and former councilor in the town, Jordi Vera. Elne was besieged numerous times by France.

A controversy that goes back a long way

"They have created a memory commission to review the French resistance and remove all communist relations and the Catalan history of Elne, and on Saturday they will explain how good it has been for Roussillon to join France," points out Garcia. Furthermore, he denounces that they are trying to "destroy" everything that was done by the previous municipal government led by him, with the addition that "the far-right is hyper-nationalist in Perpignan and in all the villages, and here the hatred is toward Catalan identity," in his opinion. He also points out that the councilor responsible for memory, Gilles Glin, was also the head of the opposition when Garcia changed the municipal regulations so that Catalan could be spoken in plenary sessions and filed a complaint with the prefect, which has ended up leading to theban on Catalan in plenary sessions as a language of normal use in the plenary. "They want to settle scores, it is a revenge," he says categorically.

In this sense, he emphasizes that even though the mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot, promotes a Roussillon identity separated from the Catalan one, there is a part of Northern Catalonia that "thinks like them, but they had never dared so much before." He also does not understand how the Castelló d'Empúries City Council, led by the republican Anna Massot, met in mid-October with the new ultra-right executive. "I don't know if they know who they are; at the very least, the twinning should be suspended. You cannot work with far-right people who are also anti-Catalan," he insists. For this reason, he wants to get in touch with the mayor to convey his opinion.

In turn, Vera states that in 1959, coinciding with the 300th anniversary of the treaty, the then-mayor of Perpignan, Paul Alduy, "said he would celebrate it, but canceled it." "National Rally is secessionist, but it would not be in favor of that because many voters would not accept it," he comments. Following the failed attempt to change the name of the department –the proposal for Catalan Pyrenees did not succeed– and the social demand for more education and presence of the Catalan language, he maintains that "there are people who are very unashamedly anti-Catalan who cannot even stand the assertion of Catalan identity and manifest this with aggression." Furthermore, he denounces that they do so "by lying," because since the partition, "Northern Catalonia has not been able to get back on its feet: it has gone from being the second richest city in Catalonia to the poorest in France.