Commonwealth of Catalonia

Presidents of the four Catalan representatives.

The Commonwealth of Catalonia (in Catalan, Mancomunitat de Catalunya) was a Spanish institution that brought together, between 1914 and 1925, the four Catalan councils into a single regional entity.

Promoted by the leader of the Catalan Regionalist League Enric Prat de la Riba, the Commonwealth of Catalonia was created by a Royal Decree of the Spanish Government in March 1914. «It was the first crack, outside the Basque-Navarrese area, in the rigid territorial scheme that, except for the brief parenthesis of 1873-1874, had characterized the State since the Constitution of 1812»; for this reason it provoked a rejection not only among the Spanish right, but also among the socialists, who considered it an instrument at the service of the "Catalan bourgeoisie".

It was dissolved in 1925 by the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.

History

Birth

Portrait of Enric Prat de la Riba.

In 1911, Enric Prat de la Riba, president of the Barcelona Provincial Council since 1907 and one of the two leaders of the Regionalist League along with Francesc Cambó, decided to promote an old Catalanist demand, which also appeared in the program of the Solidaritat Catalana coalition that won the 1907 general elections in Catalonia: bringing together the four Catalan councils into a single regional entity. On October 16, the four provincial bodies jointly approved the Bases of the Catalan Commonwealth, which provided for the formation of an assembly made up of all the provincial deputies and a permanent council of eight members, two per province. A month and a half later, the Bases project was delivered to the President of the Government, José Canalejas, who presented it to the Cortes on May 1, 1912 as a Commonwealth Law project. However, a sector of his own party, headed by Segismundo Moret and supported by the deputy Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, he opposed the project.

To get the support of the majority of the liberal deputies, Canalejas had to deliver one of his best parliamentary speeches, despite which nineteen of his deputies —including Moret— voted against. The project was approved on 5 June 1912 by the Lower House. However, when Canalejas was assassinated, it had not yet been ratified by the Senate. Finally, the law entered into force in December 1913, and the Commonwealth of Catalonia was constituted at the beginning of 1914.

To support the petition presented by the provincial deputies and the Catalan parliamentarians for the constitution of the Commonwealth, in 1913 the four Catalan councils organized a plebiscite of all the Catalan city councils in favor of the project, which was accompanied by a large demonstration held in Barcelona on October 23 of the same year.

It was the conservative politician Eduardo Dato who promulgated the Royal Decree by which the union of the councils for purely administrative purposes was authorized. On December 18, 1913, the king signed the Provincial Commonwealth Decree. Despite the fact that the law was applicable to all Spanish provinces, only the four Catalan ones came to see the Commonwealth of Catalonia approved. There were other proposals, such as the Valencian Commonwealth project, which did not go beyond this phase. And there were also numerous reactions from Spanish public entities against this Catalan singularity, such as, for example, the text prepared by the Assembly of Castilian-Leonese Provincial Councils on January 24, 1919.

Development

The Commonwealth was established on April 6, 1914 under the presidency of Enric Prat de la Riba. According to its own statute, the Commonwealth of Catalonia consisted of a General Assembly, made up of 96 deputies from the four councils; the Presidency, occupied by the president of the Provincial Council of Barcelona; and the Permanent Council, which included the following ministries: Roads and Ports, Culture and Instruction, Agriculture and Forestry Services, Welfare and Health, Hydraulic Works and Railways, Telephones, Social Policy, and Finance.

The four Catalan councils ceded their powers to the Commonwealth; but, contrary to what was expected by the Regionalist League, the State did not give up any of its own. Despite everything, the Mancomunidad «showed how honest management attentive to the needs of the territory could be effective despite having scarce resources. He carried out an important educational and cultural task founding technical schools (agriculture, industrial, labor, library, administration) or creating high culture institutions (Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Biblioteca de Catalunya), while promoting works of infrastructures promoting the networks of roads, telephones and social assistance services”. In this way "autonomist sentiment increased in broad layers of society". In addition, with the support of the town halls, it improved the supply of drinking water, promoted professional training, promoted the creation of a network of libraries, recognized the spelling regulations promoted by Pompeu Fabra and stimulated pedagogical renewal.

The relevance of the Mancomunitat also resided in its symbolic nature, «by representing all the Catalan provinces in a single institution, the first experience of self-government since the Nueva Planta Decree, whose anniversary Prat de la Riba did not forget mention in his inaugural speech on April 6, 1914. It was a trick that the Lliga would not let escape. The nascent and important administrative body would help to develop a Catalan conscience and constituted a first base with a view to a future autonomy of greater supply». And, on the other hand, «the Commonwealth of Catalonia also evidenced the turn of the Lliga towards a pragmatic pactism, offering parliamentary support to the Government of the day in exchange for concrete concessions, a strategy of conservative Catalanism that we will rediscover again after the Transition. Prat de la Riba remained in Barcelona transformed into a man of government, while Francesc Cambó became the parliamentary leader in Madrid. La Lliga was at its sweetest moment."

According to Jordi Canal, Prat de la Riba's project at the head of the Mancomunitat was to "build the Catalan nation", for which he proposed providing it with "state structures", focusing especially on the field of infrastructures and culture. For Prat de la Riba, no town in Catalonia should be without a road, without a telephone and without a school with a library.

In order to achieve a legislative capacity that they lacked, Francesc Cambó, leader of the Lliga after the death of Prat de la Riba in 1917, led the drafting of a draft statute for Catalonia. This statute, drawn up by the Commonwealth and by the Catalan parliamentarians, was approved on January 26, 1919, but subsequently rejected by the Spanish Cortes.

The Commonwealth of Catalonia was chaired by Prat de la Riba from 1914 until his death on August 1, 1917. After the interim presidency of Román Sol, he was succeeded by Josep Puig i Cadafalch who won the vote, by 48 votes against 39, to the dynastic politician from Lleida Joan Rovira.

Dissolution of the Commonwealth by the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera

Josep Puig i Cadafalch towards 1900

On December 24, 1923, Josep Puig i Cadafalch resigned in protest against the anti-Catalanist policy of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, established three months earlier, and went into exile in France. On January 12, 1924, Primo de Rivera dissolved all the provincial councils, except the regional ones, since according to him regionalism could contribute to "undoing the great work of national unity." Immediately afterwards, the new provincial deputies were appointed by the civil governors, all of them Spanishists, and the leader of the National Monarchy Union, Alfonso Sala Argemí, Count of Egara, became president of the Mancomunitat. inauguration speech, Alfons Sala said:

We have the duty of conscience to help the Board in the work of regeneration of the country; we, as Catalans, have the intimate duty of conscience to do everything possible so that, at once, those problems that still stir the life of Catalonia and that have put many times in shock the life of Spain

The Assembly of the Commonwealth was presided over by the Marquis of Marianao, and in the Permanent Council stood out Darío Romeu, Baron de Viver, conseller of culture of the Commonwealth and whom Primo de Rivera would appoint mayor of Barcelona. However, after a few months tensions began between Sala and the dictator, since the latter began to question the very existence of the Commonwealth, because he feared that in other hands —"biased"— it would be the embryo of "a small State”, “capable of harming Spain”. This is how Primo de Rivera explained it to Sala in a letter he sent him in August 1924:

I owe you. the most sincerity, I have to tell you that I have a bit of fear of the Commonwealth, more now than before, because being currently in your hands, you cannot assail me any suspicion about the people, so I have to transport to the nerve of the same regime these fears, because still managed in Spanish, by whom it is as preclar as you would, could one day come to have such personality, autonomy and independence that constituted a much better case. In such a way you with a noble emulation of doing for the body that presides more than your predecessors did – and this triumph will certainly not be difficult for you – gives you a personality that could in your day be dangerous.
You know that we study the provincial regime as a complement to the municipal that is very advanced the project, and I think, when you. I know him, as good Spanish and good Catalan, will estimate that in the provincial faculties there is sufficient means for the prosperity and progress of the community of municipalities that essentially constitute the province, without having to make any other community more wide...

Criticism of the dictator intensified in the first months of 1925. In March he spoke clearly of the "failure of the Mancomunidad as a permanent, deliberative and executive political body". suppression de facto of the Mancomunitat, whose powers the Municipal Statute of 1924 had already cut considerably. In a long "official note" that accompanied the decree creating the Provincial Statute, he acknowledged that he had changed his mind about "regionalism"; Before, he thought that this could be positive for the regeneration of Spain, but now he had realized that "reconstructing the region from power, reinforcing its personality, exalting the differentiating pride between one and the other is contributing to undoing the great work of the national unity, is to initiate disintegration, for which there is always encouragement in the arrogance or selfishness of men". Referring specifically to the Commonwealth, the "unofficial note" said:

We have gone through an essay of this special regionalism with the commonwealth of Catalonia, and he has led to such a degree of misunderstood predominance of the regional feeling that, contrary to what was said to be convivible with that of the great country, we have seen him galopar unbridled towards nationalism and separatism, passing to the Catalan lovers of Spain hours of bitterness and humiliation, and to the Spaniards.

Alfons Sala tried to maintain certain functions of the Commonwealth as head of the coordination commission of the four provincial councils; but, when he understood that "it could not become a new version of the Mancomunitat", he resigned on April 22, 1925. The new president of the Barcelona Provincial Council, José María Milá Camps, Count of Montseny, chaired the Interim Management Commission of the Coordinated Services in charge of liquidating the last affairs of the Commonwealth. Primo de Rivera later justified the dissolution of the Mancomunitat saying that it had become the catalyst for a "true nationalism that every day threatened plus the roots and foundations of the true Spanish nationality».

The Barcelona Provincial Council then became the main policy instrument of the Dictatorship in Catalonia, with Milá Camps as president and Olano and Loyzaga, Count of Fígols, as vice presidency. The Provincial Council launched a campaign Spanishist that included patriotic conferences, ceremonies to exalt Spain and "citizenship courses".

In conclusion, as the historian Shlomo Ben Ami has highlighted: «the unitary spirit of Primo de Rivera had finally prevailed, when the nightmare of the Commonwealth was eliminated and the foundations of a new and inflexible unitary state".

Timeline

• 1907: the Barcelona Provincial Council, under the chairmanship of Enric Prat de la Riba, creates the Institute of Catalan Studies and, as a library of this institution, the Library of Catalonia (June).
• 1911: the four Catalan provincial councils approve together some Catalan Community Bases (16 October), then delivered to President José Canalejas.
• 1912: Canalejas presents the Bases in Courts as draft Commonwealths Act (1 May), approved by Congress (5 June). Canalejas murder (12 November).
• 1913: Catalan demonstration in Barcelona (23 October). Promulgation and ratification of the Royal Decree on Commonwealths (18 December).
• 1914: Constitution of the Commonwealth of Catalonia (6 April). Opening of the Library of Catalonia, during the first assembly of the Mancomunitat (28 May).
• 1917: the Regionalist League leads the movement of the Assembly of Parliamentarians (June-October). With the death of Prat de la Riba, Josep Puig i Cadafalch comes to the presidency of the Commonwealth (1 August). The Regionalist League first enters the Government of Spain (November).
• 1918-1919: Campaign for the autonomy of Catalonia, culminated in the approval by the Commonwealth and the Catalan municipalities of the Draft Statute of Autonomy (January 26, 1919), although evicted and rejected in Cortes.
• 1923: Miguel Primo de Rivera, general captain of Catalonia, leads a coup d’etat and establishes a military dictatorship (13 September). Puig i Cadafalch resigns in protest signal (24 December).
• 1924: dissolution of the provincial deputies (Real Decree of 12 January). General Carlos de Lossada and Canterac, the military and civil governor of Barcelona, is appointed interim president of the Commonwealth (17 January); later he is replaced by Alfons Sala (named 30 and proclaimed 31 January). Promulgation of the Municipal Statute (9 March).
• 1925: the Dictatorship dissolves the Commonwealth under the new Provincial Statute (21 March).