Napoleon Bonaparte never set foot in Catalonia. But since the French war (1808-1814) does not appear in Ridley Scott’s film, we do not know if the director would have made him walk around Barcelona. For much of the 20th century, however, Catalan nationalism, including separatism, was attracted to the military. He used the annexation of the country to the French empire between 1812 and 1814, with its own government that used the Catalan language, as a mirage of a Catalan State.
Parallel to the birth of political Catalanism, Àngel Guimerà included the emperor in his speech at the Assembly of the Catalanist Union in Manresa, in March 1892. As part of the preparation of the Bases for the Regional Constitution Catalan, the playwright assured that Catalonia had done everything to preserve independence. “Let the giant of our century say it, this Napoleon who left his eagles, previously invincible, fluttering in agony on the plains and mountains of our encounters”.
Twenty years later, the republican Catalanism framed in the newspaper El Poble Català described Antonio Maura in June 1909 as “the new Napoleon”. The president of the Council of Ministers of Spain drew up a plan to send men to the war in Morocco. After the Tragic Week—the popular revolt against the mobilization of reservists in North Africa—the republican journalist Màrius Aguilar wrote in La Campana de Gràcia that the league leader Francesc Cambó, “like Napoleon”, after the escape of the ‘island of Elba, would like to begin the reign of the hundred days, without thinking about Waterloo. But Cambó’s name is not Napoleon, but the vulgar name of Francis, and a few dozen shopkeepers are a bad imperial guard to win battles”.
At the end of August 1914, with the beginning of the First World War, in La Campana de Gràcia, Napoleon contemplated the beginning of the contest from the sky next to the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, and Marshal Helmuth von Moltke. And at the beginning of September, the humorous weekly Papitu also draws it on the cover, saying that it seemed like it was yesterday.
But Catalanism used Napoleon, above all, to emphasize that during the invasion of Catalan territory he had established a government of Catalonia and had used Catalan as the official language. During the campaign to demand a statute of autonomy, at the end of November 1918, the regionalist newspaper La Veu de Catalunya asserted that “Napoleón constituted Catalonia as a State, albeit for a short time”. Two years later, the European-inspired magazine D’Ací i D’Allà explained that the Diari de Barcelona – with the addition of the Government of Catalonia – became its organ and was published in two columns, in French and Catalan.
In May 1921, the literary publication La Revista dedicated a special to the centenary of Napoleon’s death. Antoni Rovira i Virgili maintained that the use of Catalan in the pamphlets and communications of the French was not a ploy, but a frank attitude. According to him, the emperor’s fondness “especially for the language and literature of Catalonia” was well known. The historian lamented that in the French war the Catalans “were nothing but Spaniards”.
Also at that time, the writer Josep Massó Ventós published a two-page report on Bonaparte in D’Ací i D’Allà. Even the children’s magazine En Patufet explained in the publication the creation of a particular government in Catalonia “completely independent of the rest of Spain and with direct relations with Napoleon” and the organization of French Catalonia.
Behind this interest in the emperor was the Committee for the Centenary of his death, of which Frederic Camp, lawyer and historian, military scholar, was Secretary of State. The popularity was such that in October 1921 the satirical weekly L’Esquella de la Torratxa caricatured Napoleon’s tomb as that of a Catalan nationalist.
During the 1920s, the speech of Napoleon, a friend of Catalonia, was deepened. Joan Montalt, in the influential satirical weekly El Borinot, but not in a joking tone, in August 1925, assured that according to Napoleon’s library one of his favorites, in addition to the chronicles by Bernat Desclot and Ramon Muntaner, it was that of King Jaume I, “in the copies of which he put several marginal notes in his own hand”. Montalt assured that with them he had learned to read “Catalan perfectly, a paradoxical thing, precisely when Catalan was in full decline”.
That December, Rovira i Virgili insisted to the Revista de Catalunya, which he directed, that the Catalans had “let lose” the opportunity that the Great War (1793-1795) and the Napoleonic Wars had meant. Rovira considered that the lack of national consciousness had not allowed to take advantage of “the beneficial action of the Napoleonic bureaucracy”, nor the sympathy of Napoleon, and that is why Catalonia “remained loyal to Spain”.
The moment when Napoleon took off more, however, was in March 1928 with the premiere in Barcelona of Abel Gance’s film. La Campana de Gràcia published a couple of caricatures. While L’Esquella de la Torratxa criticized the French filmmaker for his glorification of the military, La Veu de Catalunya praised his technique and assured that it was “the most spectacular film known”.
Proclaimed the Second Republic, the newspaper Nostalges Sols! , in June 1931, recovered Guimerà’s speech on the occasion of a commemoration of the Manresa Bases and insisted that Napoleon had recognized the “case of Catalonia”. This, according to separatism, meant that Catalonia was an independent State and that “in hours of spiritual and material submission it has rebelled – unconsciously if you will – against all tyranny that tried to drown it”.
During the 1930s, the writer Carles Rahola and Frederic Camp published several articles in La Publicitat to remove from oblivion the men who had been part of the government of Napoleonic Catalonia. As part of the studies for the regional division of Catalonia, the choir came out again. In May 1933, the journalist Lluís Aymamí, in La Rambla, explained the creation of the Napoleonic departments of Ter, Montserrat, Boques de l’Ebre and Segre, and the annexation of the Vall d’Aran to the French department of Haute Garonne
It was mainly from then on that Catalanism used the name of the military, to ridicule political leaders of the opposite side, assimilating them to their despotic side. The Bell of Grace dressed Cambó de Bonaparte in front of the pyramids of Egypt. El Be Negre, in October 1932, said that the league was an “emul”.
On the other hand, the newspaper Defensa dels Interessos de Catalunya laughed at Francesc Macià saying that Napoleon was “a pygmy” next to our hero of the events of Prats de Molló.
Catalanism, in a more derogatory tone, equated Adolf Hitler, Engelbert Dollfuss and Benito Mussolini with Napoleon since La Campana de Gràcia in 1933. And the director of La Veu de Catalunya, Joaquim Pellicena, said in March 1934 that the French was “the last of the great captains and conquerors of history but also the first of the modern dictators”. In the following two years, some Spanish leaders such as the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, from the DIC did not escape the comparison either. According to the ERC newspaper La Humanitat, the leader of the CEDA, José María Gil-Robles, was a “narrow way” Napoleon.
At the end of August 1936, in one of the last references to Bonaparte of Catalanism, L’Esquella de la Torratxa equated the feat of the Spanish against Napoleon with that which was done to stop the uprising against the Republic. During the long Francoist silence, the Catalan press in exile showed no interest in the emperor.
When democracy was restored, the then UCD leader Carles Sentís turned the argument of the separatism of the 1930s. Asked by l’Avui in March 1978 how he would define Spain in the historical coordinates of the time, the journalist expressed that Catalonia had demonstrated its Hispanic vocation in the popular movement against Napoleon “when precisely it would have been possible to swing given the facilities offers for the big heart”. It was, precisely, what Rovira and Virgili had regretted so much that it had not been done.
The motivations of the Catalans in the 19th century, the seeds of modernization, the ravages of six years of occupation, the French repression, the frontal rejection of the Napoleonic armies, however, Catalanism and its political objectives mattered little. At the end of the day, nationalism – as Ridley Scott has expressed in the film that opens in cinemas this week – “cannot be a history lesson!”.
