page_title: History of Catalonia
section_title: Catalan nationalism and the workers movement
hierarchical_section_title: History of Catalonia / Modern period (1808–1939) / Catalan nationalism and the workers movement
caption_attribution_description: Valentí Almirall, líder catalanista
context_page_description: Catalonia was first settled during the Middle Palaeolithic era. Like the rest of the Mediterranean side of the Iberian Peninsula, the area was occupied by the Iberians and several Greek colonies were established on the coast before the Roman conquest. It was the first area of Hispania conquered by the Romans. It then came under Visigothic rule after the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire. In 718, the area was occupied by the Umayyad Caliphate and became a part of Muslim ruled al-Andalus. The Frankish Empire conquered the area from the Muslims, ending with the conquest of Barcelona in 801, as part of the creation of a larger buffer zone of Christian counties against Islamic rule known as the Marca Hispanica. In the 10th century the County of Barcelona became progressively independent from Frankish rule.
context_section_description: In 1874, a coup by General Martínez Campos in Sagunto led to a restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in the person of Alfonso XII. A period of political stability, of repression of the workers movement, and of a slow growth in Catalan nationalist identity extended to the early years of the 20th century, when once again political opposition broke to the fore, especially republicanism and Catalan nationalism, but also class-based politics reflecting social tensions.
  The following decades saw the rise of the political Catalanism still prevalent today: the first formulations of the modern Catalan national identity can be seen in Valentí Almirall, a relevant federalist republican. Almirall, despite being a left-wing republican, tried to unite the Catalan left and right, but he did not succeed because there were too many divergences between the two currents. He promoted the First Catalanist Congress, held in 1880, in which the different Catalanist groups were united: federal republicanism and the apolitical current, the literary one, from La Renaixença magazine, but the leftist tendencies of Almirall caused that the group of the Renaixença left the Congress and broke the agreement. However, the Congress took three fundamental agreements: creating an entity that brings together Catalanism (the Centre Català, "Catalan Center"), the beginning of efforts to establish the Academy of the Catalan Language, and the drafting of a document on defense of Catalan as official language. The crisis of the Centre Català were shown due the differences around the position about the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition. The opposite positions led to the dissolution of the group, and the left-wing Catalan nationalism was seriously weakened for decades.
  The conservative elements of Catalan nationalism founded the League of Catalonia in 1887 who, in 1891, were unite with the group La Renaixença, creating the Unió Catalanista (Catalanist Union). The Unió redacted, in 1892, the Basis of Catalan regional autonomy, also known as Basis of Manresa, a program which demanded a specific autonomy for Catalonia. In 1901 Enric Prat de la Riba and Francesc Cambó formed the Regionalist League (Lliga Regionalista), which in 1906 led the successful electoral coalition Solidaritat Catalana, created by diverse Catalan political groups (from conservative to Catalan left-wing nationalists and from republicanism to carlism) as a response to Cu-Cut! affair, in which officers of the Spanish Army, angry with this satirical magazine for publish an offending joke about the war in Morocco, stormed the Cu-Cut! offices, and the subsequent "Ley de Jurisdicciones", that punish the "crimes" and "insults" against the army and the symbols of the nation, putting them under military trials.
  Catalan nationalism, under the leadership of Prat de la Riba, achieved in 1913 a victory in obtaining partial self-government for the "Commonwealth" (Catalan: Mancomunitat; Spanish: Mancomunidad), a grouping of the four Catalan provinces, presided over first by Prat de la Riba, and later by Josep Puig i Cadafalch; this was later suppressed in March 1925, during the 1923–1930 dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. The Commonwealth of Catalonia established a modern infraestructure, such as roads and telephones and expanded the culture (libraries, professional education, use and regulation of Catalan language, promotion of sciences...). In 1919 the Commonwealth promoted the first project of Statute of Autonomy, but the disagreements with the government of Madrid, the opposition of sectors of Spanish society and the coincidence with the rise of the workers movement provoked the fall of the project.
  The Catalan workers movement at the turn of the twentieth century consisted of three tendencies: syndicalism, socialism, and anarchism, part of the last openly embracing "propaganda of the deed" as advocated by Alejandro Lerroux. Along with Asturias, Catalonia in general and Barcelona in particular was a center of radical labor agitation, marked by numerous general strikes, assassinations (especially in the la
caption: Valentí Almirall
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