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Juan Vásquez de Mella y Fanjul
(8 June 1861—26 February 1928) |
The national spirit is not opposed to the regional spirit, for it is nothing more than the synthesis of regional spirits. Woe to the one who, in seeking to favor the spirit of a nation and of a historical race, attempts to diminish the attributes and characteristics of the regional spirits which, in communicating and uniting, have engendered it!
We possess a peculiar life of our own, which each region preserves to a greater or lesser degree, and each region shares common features with all the others. There is a common collective history and another that is proper and particular. Both must be affirmed in their entirety. I affirm the regional spirit in all its purity, but I also say that if even a single regional history were torn away, the common history of Spain would be mutilated and rendered incomprehensible.
Without the history of Catalonia, for example—and even considering only external politics—we would have to eliminate not only one of the armies of the Reconquest, the one that emerged from the Hispanic March, but also the conquest of the Balearic Islands, the domination of the Mediterranean; the expeditions to Oran, Tunis, and Algiers and Spain’s influence in Africa would be left without their principal foundation; the conquests of Italy would have to be subtracted, and therefore the rivalries they provoked with France, which led us to Pavia and San Quintín and so decisively shaped all subsequent history; we would even have to dispense with the sacred oath of Girona and the feats of the Bruch—and the general history of Spain would be truncated and incomprehensible.
When people here attempt to set Catalonia and Spain in opposition—what an absurdity!—it seems they ignore the history of Spain and refuse to acknowledge the greatness of Catalonia, which may stand as the firstborn among those that extend along the shores of the Mediterranean.
For tell me, gentlemen: without the Catalan tradition, without what it contributed to the Aragonese monarchy, would Gonzalo de Córdoba have gone to Naples if Alfonso V and Peter III had not first gone to Catania and Palermo? Would we have fought the Angevins and extended our dominion over Milan? Would we have fought and triumphed in Paris? Would we have had that duel to the death—which was not between two kings or two dynasties, but between two peoples representing different interests in the sixteenth century—between Charles V and Francis I? No; we would have to tear out a part of our national history of the sixteenth century; we would have to remove the domination of the Mediterranean, which was owed to the cooperation of Catalan history with our general history; without the contribution of that illustrious people, we would have to erase the blazing memory of Girona and the heroic tenacity of the soldiers of the Bruch, and we could not even understand the War of Independence at the beginning of the last century.
The history of Catalonia, like that of all the regions of Spain, has two parts: a primitive, particular one, corresponding to the character that marks each region while sealing its traditional identity—a sacred history that we must respect and love, not only with regard to the region in which we were born, but also all the other peninsular regions which, through coexistence over several centuries and through analogous needs and ethnic composition, maintain the strongest bonds; but there is another part common to all, to which these regions contribute through their lives, and that part in which they cooperate—the general history—is what properly and in the highest sense constitutes Spain.
Translation of the speech delivered at the Teatro Nacional de Barcelona on April 24, 1903; published in Juan Vásquez de Mella, Textos de Doctrina Política, Preliminary Study, Selections and Notes by Rafael Gambra (Madrid, 1953), p.45.
