The bourgeoisie—a word that, in all fairness, only designates the upper middle class of a fairly large city—presents some fairly clear constants, throughout the continent, in terms of its attitude towards forms of high culture: the folore (as it was said before) is something else, and it differs from what we call "culture" here because culture always presents new things, and folklore very few, or none.

Does a Catalan bourgeoisie really exist? Or has it already died out? "They went from being company executives a few generations ago to being local representatives of multinationals. This has resulted in a bourgeoisie that, compared to other parts of the country, has been weaker," Carreras said.

The great-grandfather of Juan Carlos I returned to Spain to lead the Bourbon Restoration thanks to three multimillionaires living in Barcelona: Antonio López, Ignasi Girona and Evarist Arnús. Through the Banco Hispano Colonial they advanced money for Alfonso XII to come from abroad. "These people dominated politics, finance and everything that could be vital in the country", said the influential historian Jaume Vicens Vives, who at the founding conference of the Cercle d'Economia, in 1958, explained an incident that illustrates the mood of those patricians: 1885. Alfonso XII dies. Panic on the stock exchange. All shares plummet. Arnús buys everything on sale in Madrid and Barcelona. Not out of instinct, but because his friend Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, head of the liberals, has told him that he has signed a pact with the conservative Antonio Cánovas de Castillo to alternate at the head of the Spanish government. It was the bipartisanship of the time. The next day, when the rest of mortals found out about the agreement, the stock market went into a tailspin. Arnús had made a fortune because he had taken all the money in circulation. But he broke up the securities he had bought and saved the vast majority of speculators from ruin. A gesture of political intuition", said Vicens Vives, "because Arnús had lived through the crisis of 1826 and knew that this gesture not only brought him peace but also prosperity".

Much has changed in the Catalan economy since the 19th century and much has also changed in Catalan society and the balance of the weights of the public and private sectors and their mutual relations up to the present day.