page_title: Francisco Canals Vidal
section_title: Historian
hierarchical_section_title: Francisco Canals Vidal / Historian
caption_attribution_description: Imagen de Cristo Rey, como la que se ponía en las puertas de las casas católicas a principios del siglo XX.
context_page_description: Francisco Canals Vidal was a Spanish philosopher, theologian, academic and lay Catholic activist. The longtime chair of Catedra de Metafísica of the Barcelona University, he is recognized mostly as one of the most distinguished contemporary Thomists and leader of the so-called Barcelona Thomist school; his scientific focus was mostly on metaphysics of cognition. As a theologian he specialized in theology of history and Josephology, as lay Catholic he contributed to devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Historian of ideas and partially political theorist himself, he remained related to the Carlist version of Traditionalism and is considered one of its greatest contemporary masters.
context_section_description: Historiography formed a secondary yet visible section of Canals’ writings. He remained almost exclusively a historian of ideas. In terms of timeframe, he tended to focus on the late modern period, in terms of geography he tended to focus on Catalonia, Spain and the Hispanic realm, and in terms of key threads he tended to focus on confrontation between traditional structures and the challenges of Enlightenment, Absolutism, Revolution, Romanticism and Liberalism. Armed with his general theological vision of history, Canals discusses mounting feeling of perceived discontinuity between the past and the present, mostly against the background of 18th-19th century Romance-speaking Europe, and the efforts to bridge the gap, leading to birth of Traditionalism. Its key opponent is defined as Liberal Catholicism, examined at length as it developed and adopted itself to changing political circumstances; confrontation of the two is presented mostly in the Spanish setting though at times reaching also to a broader European milieu, e.g. in case of France covering also royalism of the Restoration, monarchist legitimism or Ultramontanism of the later era.
  Contrary to the currently prevailing view, Canals advances a thesis that the modern Catalan identity was forged as part of traditional Christian response to competitive universalist concepts gaining ground since the late 17th century and usually imported from the other side of the Pyrenees. Starting with the anti-Borbonic war of 1705-1714 - the theory goes - the Catalan political self was being built; the process gained pace and in fact was most dramatically expressed in a series of 7 counter-revolutionary wars, fought by the Catalans between 1794 and 1876: Guerra Gran, the War of Independence, Guerra Realista, Guerra de los Agraviados, the First Carlist War, Guerra dels Matiners and the Third Carlist War. Within the perspective offered, advances of the bourgeoisie-driven Liberalism gave rise to a new concept of Catalanism, which in fact is de-construction rather than re-construction of a Catalan self. Being a local copy of European nationalisms, it reportedly discards constitutive features of Catalan identity and leads to "Cataluña sin alma y sin vida".
  Canals’ historiographic writings are mostly essays, scattered across various periodicals, usually Cristiandad, and later gathered together in compact volumes. The first major work published was his scaled down PhD thesis Cristianismo y revolución: los orígenes románticos del cristianismo de izquierdas (1957); the work was centred on Felicite de Lammenais, considered one of the founding fathers of Liberal Catholicism. Almost 40 years later Canals published La tradición catalana en el siglo XVIII: ante el absolutismo y la Ilustración (1995), the work discussing birth of Catalan Traditionalism as response to new ideas imported from France. A minor Miscelánea (1997) was followed by Catalanismo y tradición catalana (2006), a booklet which contained a set of 8 essays, focused on history of Catalan identity. Some volumes of the currently issued Obras Completas series are supposed to re-publish historiographic Canals’ writings.
caption: I will rule over Spain
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