zantedeschi roussillon clergy - uva · 2017. 6. 15. · dictionaries, the invention of neologisms,...
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Vernacular culture as a religious rampart: Roussillon clergy
and the defence of Catalan language in 1880s
Francesca Zantedeschi
The aim of this paper is to analyse the attitude of Roussillon secular clergy towards
Catalan vernacular culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. I will explore the
clerical response to Third Republic anti-clerical politics to point out that the recovery of
vernacular culture by Roussillon clergy was suggested by a largely defensive attitude.
France’s attitude towards dialects in the long nineteenth century
At the beginning of nineteenth century, patois, a socially unworthy language, acquired new
authority by becoming subject of investigation. In fact, since its early appearance, the
word “patois” had had a negative implication. In the 1694 edition of Richelet dictionary,
besides the distinction between language and dialect – a purely denotative distinction,
dialect being considered a non-institutionalized language –, we could find the distinction
between dialect and patois. It was a socio-qualitative distinction, and patois possessed a
negative connotation, since it was defined as a «sort of coarse language of a particular
place which is different from the language spoken by honest people»1. Since the French
language had two definitions, one of a legal nature and the other of a social nature, it
follows that French language without a juridical legal status which belonged to the
masses was a patois2.
The 1789 Revolution, due to its will to establish a new world also through
language, confirmed and deepened this distinction between French and patois by
institutionalizing it. Even though a real language politics was not part of the
Revolutionaries’ original plans, their resolution to transform social reality had an
important repercussion also on the linguistic field. Their need to fix their ideas and
visions of the new reality went through the use of fetish words and their fixation in
dictionaries, the invention of neologisms, and created a «nomination’s fever» which
1 F. Garavini, Parigi e provincia, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 1990, p. 112. 2 S. Branca, «Espace national et decoupage dialectal: deux étapes de la construction de la dialectologie au XIXe siècle», Trames, Histoire de la langue: méthodes et documents, Actes du colloque du groupe d’étude en histoire de la langue française, Limoges, 1982, pp. 43-53.
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showed the importance both symbolic and political of their action. In order to
externalize the Revolutionaries’ political ideals, the French language was therefore to be
rethought so that it could reach the people and not be locked up in a bourgeois logic3.
According to the French linguist Sylvain Auroux, the political aspect of the language is
probably the most outstanding element within the French tradition. The amount of
“stories” about the French language shows its political use, typical of the French
tradition, in which there was no place for a spontaneous linguistic evolution4.
Along these lines, Grégoire’s enquiry on patois was one of the first measures
taken5. This enquiry, which began on 13 August 1790, prepared a turnaround in the
linguistic politics of the members of the 1789 Constituent Assembly, which did become
more significant from 1794. Since the attitude of Assembly’s members towards regional
languages was dictated by the necessity to spread as much as possible the revolutionary
ideas and to propagate all the decrees by translating them into local idioms, until then a
real linguistic politics did not exist6. The National Assembly’s members considered the
language as a communication tool and had a strictly instrumental idea about it. In 1794,
the Convention elaborated an intervention programme in order to clear up the «chaos»
generated by linguistic multiplicity7. The Grégoire’s enquiry had the purpose to define
precisely the number and extent of patois within the République’s territory, their linguistic
forms, their use and the ideas they spread. The 43 questions in total of the questionnaire,
combined a scientific enquiry with an opinion analysis, and were sent to Republic’s
commons, to Sociétés des Amis de la Révolution and numerous members of the clergy.
Grégoire’s inquiry was to have some important repercussions on how local
idioms would be considered. The linguistic and ideological distinction between
“language” and “patois” took for granted a «geographical difference» between Paris, the
capital, and the rest of France8. The written report by abbé Grégoire was therefore the
3 A. Rey, Mille ans de langue française, Perrin, 2007, p. 931 ss. 4 See S. Auroux, « Langue, Etat, Nation : le modèle politique », in P. Sériot (ed.), Langue et nation en Europe centrale et orientale, du 18ème siècle à nos jours, Cahiers de l’ILSL (Univ. De Lausanne), n. 8, 1996, pp. 1-20. 5 From the name of Henri-Baptiste Grégoire (1750-1831), an ex-abbé, the constitutional bishop of Blois and later a Convention’s member. 6 M.-C. Perrot, « La politique linguistique pendant la Révolution française », Mots. Les langages du politique, vol. 52, n. 1, 1997, p. 158-167. 7 See B. Schlieben-Lange, Idéologie, révolution et uniformité de la langue, Liège, Mardaga, 1996. 8 M. De Certeau, D. Julia, J. Revel, Une politique de la langue, Paris, Gallimard, pp. 49-51.
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«mark of a historical moment»9. It sanctioned a new idea of patois as an indication of
prejudices and reactionary ideals, thus creating an obstacle to the spread of revolutionary
ideals and democratic participation. It also legitimised the study of etymologic history of
languages as the history of the human spirit’s progress. According to Grégoire, the
knowledge of dialects correlated directly to the origins of the nation10. The concept of
local idioms promoted by Grégoire’s report would have enormous repercussions in the
future. By treating patois as “monuments”, it eliminated them from everyday usage,
however it promoted their study as traces of the history of the nation. The Coquebert de
Montbret’s enquiry (1806) had the same purpose to rescue and save a dying heritage. It
had political and administrative interests, and required all one hundred and thirty prefects
of the empire to know the dialects used in their portion of territory and so to be able to
draw the limits of French in relationship to different languages, such as Flemish, Breton,
Basque, Catalan, Italian, Germanic Alsatian and German11.
In France, at the beginning of the 19th century, a new interest in gathering
cultural and “ethnic” data took place; beliefs and customs, languages, monuments were
all collected as fundamental factors for interpreting and explaining popular life. After the
1789 Revolution, a sense of disappearance concerning the ancient world lead to the will
of saving the collective heritage which belonged to the history of France12. Popular
culture gained a new dignity as the «conservatory of collective heritage»13. Interest in
national antiquities led towards various directions: enquiries into origins, the writing of a
national history, exploration of all that was considered to be an historical heritage of the
nation. Archaeological remains, art, architecture, manuscripts, traditions, customs and
local idioms, became the object of a new attention and worthy of being recorded. It is in
this political and cultural context, greatly marked by the recovery of national antiquities,
that neo-Latin studies originated. At the beginning of 19th century, the works of
François-Juste-Marie Raynouard (1761-1836), Henri-Pascal de Rochegude (1741-1834)
9 Abbé was the title formerly used in France for members of the secular clergy. 10 De Certeau, op. cit., pp. 339-340. 11 This enquiry, made under Napoleon I's reign, was led from the Office of the Statistics of the Ministry of the Interior, which was created in 1801 by Napoleon to know the effects of the Revolution and be able to direct the action of the new regime, the Consulate. See, T. Bulot, « L’enquête de Coquebert de Montbret et la glottopolitique de l’Empire française », Romanischen Philologie, 2-89, Auftr. 659/Sch. 1/tr79, Spreu, p. 287-292. 12 F. Mélonio, Naissance et affirmation d’une culture nationale, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 150 sqq. 13 A.-M. Thiesse, La création des identités nationales, Paris, Seuil, 1999, p. 50.
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and Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1767-1825) helped to restore the dignity of troubadours’
language and of all neo-Latin languages.
At the same time, Romanticism stimulated the study of history, folklore and
popular poetry and therefore of philological studies. During XIXth century, language
became a relevant matter for dominant elites. According to Herder’s theory, language
was a fundamental symbol of the innate nature of a nation which expresses its spirit by
means of its literature, and so turned into a fundamental tool to exercise power. A first
step towards political awakening of a national community, literary revival has to highlight
the literary dignity of the people, before language is converted into a facilitator of ethnic,
social and political claims.
In France, the slowdown of the centralising assimilation process brought about
by Romanticism encouraged the rise of dominated cultures, which found their own
momentum by means of their literary revival (as it was the case of Britons, Occitans,
Catalans, Basques and others). These cultural movements led an action different from
the simple activity of classification and "monumentalisation" of the local languages and
cultures. After being inventoried as “national monuments” belonging to French history,
local languages and cultures became the object of comparative and scientific studies, and
were used to express values inherent to secular civilizations, whereas the stories of the
ancient provinces were celebrated as passing on a particular national character.
Cultural Revival in Roussillon
Because of its specific historic, geographic and cultural situation, Roussillon represents a
very particular case. Since 1660 it has belonged politically to France, while from a cultural
and linguistic point of view Roussillon remained within the Catalan cultural sphere, the
rest of which was almost completely included within the Spanish State. Due to the
growing weight of Barcelona as the Catalan cultural and economic capital in 19th
century, it was also natural for Roussillon’s Catalan cultural promoters (and not only for
the clergy) to turn to the south, to a culturally close Catalonia, rather than to “France”,
which represented in a sense a geographically and culturally distant “north“.
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Nonetheless, at the very beginning, the cultural and linguistic revival of Roussillon in the
nineteenth century was much more influenced by Occitania’s linguistic and literary
revival than the Catalan one14. The French historian Philippe Martel observed that
although activists on both sides of the border thought in terms of a Catalan and Occitan
germanor or brotherhood, in fact they were driven by the internal political affairs of the
two separate states in which Occitans and Catalans lived (that is France and Spain
respectively). The same can be said about French Catalans in their relationship with
Spanish Catalans. They were citizens of two separate States and therefore were subjects
to different political, economic and social contexts: these different contexts were much
more influential as regards their attitudes toward vernacular language and culture than
sharing a common language and culture. Therefore, at the very beginning, the Occitan
revival within France was more influential on French Catalans than the Spanish Catalan
revival over the border in Spain.
This particular situation implies that Roussillon was simultaneously a participant
in both the Occitan and Catalan revivals. In fact, Roussillon’s linguists and philologists,
while participating in the development of Romance studies within France, also made a
considerable contribution to the historical and philological study of the Catalan language.
In particular, they help to establish the relationship between the Catalan and the Occitan
language. At the beginning of nineteenth century, they were among the first to doubt the
statement made by the Provençal Romance philologist, François-Juste-Marie Raynouard
(1761-1836), that Provençal had played a major role in shaping all the Romance
languages. In 1833, in a letter to the Catalan religious Félix Torres Amat regarding
Raynouard’s theories, the Roussillon scholar and publisher Josep Tastu (1787-1849)
asserted his intention instead to argue that the Catalan language had the primary role,
rather than Provençal. The discussion on the origins and the status of Catalan became
more and more animated during the 1870s, in particular because of the presence of some
Roussillon philologists in the “Société pour l’étude des Langues Romanes”, which was
14 “Occitania”, to which Roussillon geographically belongs, is that area of the Midi of France where a Neo-Latin language is spoken. The main actor of the Provençal literary and cultural revival in the second half of XIXth century was the Félibrige, an association of Provençal poets which was founded in 1854 by Frédéric Mistral and other young poets. Established in Provence, the Félibrige then spread in the whole south of France where an Occitan language was spoken. Because of the peculiar geographic and cultural of its position Roussillon, Félibrige propagated also in Roussillon
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created in 1869 in Montpellier (its first president was the Roussillonnais François-Roman
Cambouliu).
As a result, Occitan philologists argued that there was a basic unity between the
Occitan and Catalan languages, and therefore they classified Catalan as an Occitan
dialect, and the counter-claims made by Roussillon linguists and philologists were
sidelined. But because of the intellectual formation of Roussillon linguistics took place
within a French context, and their ideological and epistemological assumptions were
deeply marked by the intellectual and academic French tradition, they were also isolated
from the Catalan context.
It is also complex to provide an exact chronology for the Roussillon’s Renaixença.
The historiography concerning the Renaixença rossellonesa usually locates its early stages in
the 1880s, when the abbé Josep Bonafont, in his preface to a collection of poems by
another abbé, Antoni Jofre, issued a call for a champion to bring about the resurrection of
Catalan language and to lead the Catalan revival in Roussillon. According to the official
historiography, the preface by Bonafont should be considered the manifesto of
Renaixença rossellonesa and Bonafont therefore be considered as belonging to the first
generation of writers and poets who laid the foundations of cultural and literary revival in
Roussillon. However, if we look closely at this “first generation” which should stimulate
the cultural and language revival in Roussillon, we will observe that the majority of its
protagonists came from the Catholic ecclesiastic world. They were highly cultured, had
received good educations and were often intrinsically linked to wealthy and influential
families15.
The anti-clerical politics of the French Third Republic
The “first generation” was active in the period of the early Third French Republic, with
its strong anti-clerical politics. The dawn of the Third Republic saw, in fact, a flare-up of
the conflict between clericals and anti-clericals.16 1870, year of the French defeat against
Prussia, was also significant as the closing year of the First Vatican Council. This council
15 L. Creixell L., «Ideologia de la llengua», Sant Joan i Barres, No. 62, 1976, pp. 19-28. 16 To René Remond, anti-clericalism is a fundamental component of the French political history, indeed a fundamental element of the French political system; R. Remond, L’anticléricalisme en France de 1815 à nos jours, Paris, Fayard, 1976, p. 4. As the author remarks, anti-clericalism does not mean anti-Christianism, nor anti-Catholicism.
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was summoned by Pope Pius IX by the bull Aeterni Patris of 29 june 1868. Its purpose
being the condemnation of contemporary errors (rationalism, liberalism and materialism),
and the definition of the catholic doctrine concerning the church of Christ.
After being defeated in the Prussian war in 1870, and the creation of a
Republican electoral majority in the 1870s, the new French government introduced a
series of reforms designed to “moralize” and “nationalize” French civil society. As the
leadership of the Third Republic identified the Church with superstition and regression,
they fought against its influence on the civil society in order to build an authentic
republican and national state17. When the Republican élites introduced their reforms,
Pyrénées-Orientales (the official name of the department which comprises Roussillon,
that is French Catalonia) was one of the departments with a low literacy rate: in 1877,
only 48,7% of the people could read and write in French. The main reason for this was
the poverty of the region, which prevented the municipalities from opening new schools,
and thus the Church continued to play a prominent role in the provision of education.
However, in the period 1881-1883, school reforms promoted by the Republican
Minister Jules Ferry established a non-denominational, but also a compulsory education
system and obliged all municipalities, with a population of more than twenty children of
school age, to provide a primary school.
The clergy of Roussillon, whose politics tended towards royalism, and which was
profoundly attached to its privileged control over education, considered the politics of
secularization promoted by the French government as without morality and they resisted
these developments. The clergy found itself confined to background by more and more
restrictive regulations. Therefore, it tried to get closer the people through their vernacular
language. As the Alsacian clerical and political activist Pierre Zind remarked: «Language
speaks to the hearts and makes itself heard by the heart […]. To reach the depths of a
person, religious instruction must use the channel of material dialects; to avoid being
17 It is interesting to remark the presence, beside an anti-clericalism coming from the profane world, of an endogenous one, coming from within the religious world. It was a religious, sometimes Catholic, anti-clericalism. In his exhaustive PhD thesis, Joseph Ramoneda relates the case of abbé Roca (1830-1893) in Perpignan, who fought against the clericalisation of the civil society and Catholic Church and who created a magazine entitled La Semaine anti-cléricale des dioceses du Midi; Joseph RAMONEDA, Cléricalisme et anti-cléricalisme Durant la IIIème République concordataire dans les Pyrénées-Orientales (1870-1906); PhD thesis, University of Perpignan, 2008, p. 19 [unpublished work].
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removed from everyday life as a consequence of school language, it must tie its destiny to
that of the material dialects»18.
Its seems to me that in Roussillon the so-called “first generation” of Catalan
cultural revival was more involved in religious activism than in cultural activism. It is not
a coincidence that in the early 1880s, the period of Republic’s attack on the Church, also
witnessed a proliferation of a great number of activities and writings in favour of the
Catalan language. It seems to me that the cultural action of the Roussillon clerics was
more a reaction against the Third Republic anti-clerical politics rather than motivated by
devotion towards the Catalan language and culture. Certainly their cultural activism
would prove very useful to the Roussillon cultural revival, but preaching and catechizing
in Catalan so that everyone could understand “God’s will” can also be seen as the
clergy’s attempt to prevent the Third Republic gaining influence over their flocks.
We must bear in mind that during the Third Republic, an attitude of indifference
towards the Church and religious practice continued to develop in the Pyrénées-
Orientales department. The evidence for this is the decrease both of religious
observation and the number of new vocations. In 1887-1889, the percentage of the
population that made their Easter communion was 34,6% with some individual cantons
going as low as 13,9% (although it is noticeable that there was a marked gender and
generational differences among communicants)19. This situation not was a burden on
parish clerics, and it also worsened the alienation from Church: by he end of the century,
religious practice was one of the lowest in all France. Nonetheless, the historian of
religion in Roussillon and Alsace, Joseph Byrnes, draws a distinction between attending
church and more popular local religious practice, which continued to find favour. As the
church had served as a refuge in times of trouble, but not as a «unifying force in the
maintenance of cultural identity», official observation was feeble but local devotions
continued to attract adherents.
According to Jules Carsalade du Pont, who would be Bishop of Perpignan (that is
the capital of Roussillon), between 1900 and 1932, the neglect of Catalan language in the
18 P. Zind, L’enseignement religieux dans l’instruction primaire publique en France de 1850 à 1873, Lyon, Centre d’Histoire du Catholicisme, 1971, p. 248; J. Byrnes, «The Relationship of Religious Practice to Linguistic Culture: Language, Religion, and Education, in Alsace and the Roussillon, 1860-1890», Church History, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Sep. 1999), p. 603. 19 J. Sagnes (ed.), Le Pays Catalan, Pau, Société nouvelle d’éditions régionales et de diffusion, 1998, pp. 729-730; Byrne, op. cit., p. 602.
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teaching of catechism was one of the reasons of the religious decline among the
population20. And, after 1905 and the separation between State and Church, which he
saw as the State’s official denial of the existence of God, Carsalade du Pont would
become one of the most active defenders of Catalan language and culture in Roussillon
in the first half of the twentieth century. As Joseph Byrnes points out «in the Carsalade
era, priest-writers and priest-poets were strong promoters of the preservation of Catalan
in the Roussillon»21.
Roussillon’s secular clergy and Catalan
In order to oppose the politics of the Third Republic, Roussillon clerics tried to get
closer the people by adopting Catalan, since it was the language used in daily life, an
essentially oral language. In addition, only the Church used Catalan as a written language.
As the historian of Catalan language, Lluis Creixell, pointed out, even if on a superior
level of hierarchy the Church adopted French (the bishops, for instance), on a local level
it was necessary for clerics to know and to speak Catalan. Up until the first half of
nineteenth century, publishing and translating catechisms and religious books into
Catalan was an attestation of this will to use and maintain the vernacular language.
Moreover, because of their recruitment was primarily local, the great majority of the
clerics were themselves native Catalan speakers and they also were spiritually more tied
to Spanish than French Church22. As a consequence of this situation, not only was
cultural transfusion from Spanish Catalonia easier among clergy, but also the clergy was
the last group, which was able to write literary Catalan in Roussillon.
In 1880s, among the Roussillon’s secular clergy who were engaged in the Catalan
revival, we can distinguish two sorts of activities toward language. Whereas some clerics
20 «L’abandon de la langue catalane dans l’enseignement du catéchisme était, sans aucun doute, une des principales causes de l’ignorance religieuse don’t nous souffrons si douloureusement, et, par suite, de la diminution de la foi dans nos populations», in J. Sagnes (ed), Le Pays Catalan, op. cit., p. 732. 21 Byrne, op. cit., p. 623. 22 In 1857, Perpignan prefect wrote that «le clergé de Cerdagne et du Roussillon entretient des relations plus fréquentes, plus intimes, surtout avec les prêtres espagnols qu’avec le clergé français. Il en résulte que les ecclésiastiques du diocèse de Perpignan, qui comme leurs voisins d’au-delà les Pyrénées ont la langue catalane pour idiome maternel, sont par les idées et les tendances bien moins français qu’espagnols»; L. Creixell, «La Renaixença al Rosselló», in Actes del col.loqui internacional sobre la Renaixença, Barcelona, Curial, 1992, pp. 66-67.
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wrote in Catalan in order to oppose its decline, some others were more concerned with
theories about language. They all defend language and culture for religious purposes.
Among the first language activists we find Antoni Jofre, Josep Bonafont,
François-Joseph Jean Rous, Jacques Boher, Gabriel Boixeda, his nephew Jacqes Boixeda,
Esteve Caseponce and Pierre Bonnet. They were principally writers and poets. They used
Catalan to write religious verses and odes and traditional lyrics poems, and they were not
particularly concerned by theories about language. Gabriel Boixeda (1809-1874), for
instance, who was called “Le Fontaine català“, published, in an anonymous way, Catalan
fables on the catholic periodical Le Roussillon, in which he told about common people’s
everyday problems. According to Jacques Boher (1820-1908), Catalan was the beloved
mother-tongue, the natural organ that permitted fraternization with the men who
celebrated it on the other side of Pyrenees23. In his preface to Garbèra catalana, a collect of
poems by Josep Bonafont, abbé Boher wrote that language is the crowning achievement
of God’s masterpiece, that is man. By receiving the gift of language, man comes to life as
a moral, religious, social being.
Beyond all doubt, the most famous of all these activists was Josep Bonafont
(1854-1935), called “Lo Pastolleret de la Vall d’Arles“ (the Arles Valley pastor). He
studied Catalan songs, tales, goigs (Catalan religious songs) and proverbs with the purpose
of resuscitating «the soul of our ancient province»24. He published then Las Bruxas de
Carança (1882) by Antoni Jofre (1801-1864), La Garbera catalana (1884), and Ays in 1887.
It was in the preface of this anthology that he wrote about the will of resuscitating the
faith, the traditions, the songs and the language of Roussillon25. He was also one of the
founding fathers of the Société d’Etudes Catalanes (SEC, Catalan Studies Society, 1906) and
of La Colla del Rosselló (The Roussillon’s band, 1921). In 1913 he was the first Roussillonais
who was elected Felibrige’s majoral.
Since these activists were well aware of the absence of an organized movement
similar to Provençal Félibrige, which was dominated by the impressive genius of Frédéric
Mistral, they aspired to arouse a movement in favour of language, in order to stimulate
such an organisation. As mentioned above, in 1883 Bonafont called for a man of similar
23 J. Boeher, preface de La Inmaculada, 1891, p. IX. 24 Le Roussillon, February 6th, 1890. 25 «Nosaltres los pochs catalanistas dels Pireneu-Orientals… volem que lo nostre crit sia un toch de somatent que desperte la fé, les costums, les festes y la poetica historia de la nostra terra… la llengua que parlem… qu’es Deu que l’ha feta exprès pel nostre pays»; p. 13.
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genius to Mistral, who should have been able to lead Catalan language and literature
awakening in Roussillon.
However other clerical language activists – for example Tolra de Bordas and abbé
Santol – were more interested in the history of Catalan literature, and wrote a lot – in
French – about the language, its origins and formation. They knew works on linguistic
and philological topics very well and they provided their own theory of language or
history of literature. In this sense, their works and essays belong to a long tradition of
studies and researches about linguistic and literary “monuments”, which had become
common in France since the early nineteenth century. The period was favourable to this
kind of studies, since vernacular language became a fundamental factor in definition on
national identity.
Tolra de Bordas (1824-1890) wrote the French preface to Atlantida by the Catalan
poet Jacint Verdaguer and translated from Catalan into French another epics by the poet,
Canigó. As the Catalan philologist Ramon Pinyol has remarked, Tolra de Bordas wrote
the “Essay” with the purpose to popularize and to increase as much as possible the value
of the Verdaguer’s poem outside Catalan and Spanish literary circles. He also aimed to
point out the national and religious character of Atlantida. (p. 52) In an article on the
Catalan language, published in L’Espérance in June 1882, Tolra de Bordas asserted that the
language is the sweetest prerogative of a nation, especially if this language is considered
to be the source of all the neo-Latin languages26.
I would like to focus now on the «Essai sur la langue catalane en Roussillon» by
abbé Joseph Santol (1853-1923)27. The essay, written in French, was published in the
Monarchist and catholic magazine L’Espérance in 1883. It claimed to be a philological
study on Catalan language and provided a theory on the origin and formation of Catalan.
26 «La langue c’est le plus cher apanage d’une nation, alors surtout que cette langue peut passer à juste titre, pour être la souche des langues néo-latines, et que, traversant les siècles sans subir de notables altérations (6), elle est pratiquée et honorée sans interruption dans plusieurs contrées, comme la langue catalane, qui, produisit des poëmes, des romances et des histoires ou chroniques, et fut la langue maternelle des rois d’Aragon, écoutée et applaudie, non-seulement dans les cours d’Aragon et de Provence, mais dans les cours de Castille, d’Angleterre et d’Italie, avant même d’être célébrée par Dante et Pétrarque ; cette langue qui sert aux rois d’Aragon pour correspondre avec le Pape et les divers monarques d’Europe, le rois de Grenade et le Sultan, la reine de Chypre et le rois d’Arménie, le comte de Foix et les Prudhommes de Marseille, etc.»; Tolra de Bordas, “La Langue Catalane“, L’Espérance, June 17th, 1882. 27 Born in Céret in 1853, Joseph Santol was ordained in 1870. He was vicar of Banyuls-sur-mer since 1879, and on Cerbère since 1885. In 1894 he left for Paris, where he created the “Œuvre du Placement familial”. He died in Paris in 1923.
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Santol knew very well the linguistic and philological studies of its time. He was familiar
with the works of Romance philologists like Raynouard and Fauriel and all the French
philological and “dialectological” studies (Anatole Boucherie, Achille Montel, Granier de
Cassagnac, Pierquin de Gembloux, Gustave Fallot), and the modern anthropological
school – Paul Broca, Emile Littré, Topinard, Abel Hovelacqe, Frédéric Diez. He
distinguished between Catalan and Provençal and between Catalan and Castilian. He
claimed that Catalan was a distinct language, with its own grammar and dictionaries.
Even though Catalan was similar to Provençal, it had closer links to Latin than Mistral’s
language. And whereas Catalan was rich in Iberian roots, Provençal had deep French
influences. He stated that 1) Romance languages were barbaro-latin languages, and 2)
Catalan was not a Romance language, but the Romance language itself.
Contrary to the opinion of the majority of philologists of his time, abbé Santol
located the origin of Catalan in a mixture of Latin and Basque. Moreover, to him,
Roussillonnais was not a particular dialect of Catalan, but Catalan itself. He regretted that
French centralization had a fatal effect on Roussillonnais and pointed that the only way
to preserve the language was to use it in writings.
Santol defended Catalan against those who wanted to secularize everything. He
rejoiced at Catalan cultural and language revival. On the occasion of a meeting between
North and South Catalans, held in Banyuls-sur-mer in 1883, he reminded the lectors of
the deep ties that existed between Church and Catalan from immemorial time. Since the
meeting dealt with the celebration of an ancient language, he justified the intromission of
religion in it. In fact, he claimed that the majority of the Catalan language’s words had a
religious meaning and that Catalan language was necessarily written and spoken by
religious people28. According to him, a Catalanist revival could not be successful if it
28 «Nous avons entendu dire qu’en principe la religion (qu’on confond trop souvent avec la politique) doit être bannie de toute reunion scientifique et littéraire. Cela est vrai dans tous les cas, moins un… s’il s’agit de célébrer une vieille langue don’t la plupart des termes sont comme empreints de cachet surnaturel et débordent de sens réligieux, au point qu’un très grand nombre d’entr’eux n’auraient point de sens, si la religion était letter-morte; s’il s’agit de célébrer une langue qui ne fut parlée que par un peuple religieux qui ne fut écrite que par les auteurs religieux et qui jouissait de toute splendeur à une époque où l’idée religieuse remplissait le monde»; Santol, «Le Congrès Catalaniste», L’Espérance, 11 juin 1883.
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remains laic and civil. After having provided a list of Catalan writers and poets over the
centuries, Santol stated the religious character of all these works29.
Contradictions in clergy’s attitude towards Catalan
All these writers, poets and philologists demonstrate the eminent religious character of
the Catalan language revival. They all tried to revive the old traditional songs as the
expression of natural manners, simplicity, grace and purity. But their efforts went
unheeded. Their view of language removed them from social reality of the time. They
complained that people were to deserting their language, whereas French was gaining
ground as the language of social advancement. In that period, in fact, French was slowly
but irreversibly penetrating the countryside. This diffusion raised a major problem since
French, after having conquered cities and dominated the literature, was henceforth seen
as a necessary instrument of social advancement.
These clerics were also unable to eradicate contemporary prejudices against
Catalan. Furthermore, their own prejudices about language induced them to use it only
for poems, not for prose, so they used French to write articles and historical and
philological essays. This dichotomy between a literary language (Catalan) and a scholarly
one (French), which was good for prose, contributed considerably to the depreciation
and decline of Catalan in Roussillon.
Moreover, in spite of cultural transfusion from Catalonia to Roussillon we talked
about before, the differences between a French Catalan and a Spanish Catalan attitude
towards Catalan language are evident. Ideas coming from the south, after having passed
the Pyrenees border, suffered a transformation and an adaptation to the French political,
social and economic context. Unlike in Roussillon, Catalonian cultural activists realized
that only literary appreciation of the Catalan, although fundamental, was not enough for
the social recovery of the language. It was necessary to bring the discussions about
Catalan out of the literary domain, to spread its usage from the private sphere to social
life by transforming the Catalan language into an instrument of the modern culture.
29 «Il suffit de lire le titre de tous ces ouvrages, pour se convaincre du caractère religieux qui distingua toujours la langue de nos ancêtres. Aujourd’hui le clergé catalan, par profession et par gout est assurément le plus dévoué et le plus autorisé conservateur de l’idiome peternel»; Santol, «Essai sur la langue catalane»; L’Espérance, 5 août 1883.
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Suffice it to say, for instance, Josep Torras i Bages (1846-1916), the author of La Tradició
Catalana (The Catalan Tradition, 1892), who was an authoritative representative of the
Spanish Catholic catalanist thought that had its own intellectual nucleus in the Vic’s
seminar. For the Catalan Catholics, his work would represent the "gospel" for many
years. In La Tradició Catalana, Torras i Bages found the justification for the natural unity of
the Catalan people in «the historic existence of a national and unchanging spirit inspired
by God», that was the guarantee of its «right to live». The Spanish Catalan regionalism so
became the instigator of a strategy of regeneration that plunged its roots into the moral
obligation that Catalan people have to improve themselves. But unlike Roussillon’s
clergy, this generation of Catalan clerics, who grew up in Vic’s seminar, was aware of the
necessity to adapt itself to a quickly changing social reality. In fact, as the Catalan
historian Josep Fradera observed, in Torras i Bages’ work, regionalism, in strict
association with Catholicism, presented itself as the more solid rampart against
revolution and the dissolution of society30. Moreover, as regards the political domain, the
theoretical systematization of Torras i Bages found an urban implementation in the
creation of the Unió Catalanista (Catalanist Union, 1891) and in the political document
called the Bases of Manresa (1892)31; in the impulse given to the foundation of Acadèmia
Catalana (1891), a centre for gathering and mobilizing the university youth from
Barcelona; in the transformation of the weekly La Veu de Montserrat – the first organ of
the catholic Catalanism, created by the canon Jaume Collell in 1878 –, into La Veu de
Catalunya (1891), much more political. This periodical intended to wake up the Catalan
people’s awareness by reawakening their history and protecting local institutions and
language.
In Roussillon on the contrary, in spite of their pro-Catalan ardour, Catholic
clerics did not intend reversing the course of events and, just like the State did, took part,
30 Josep Fradera, « Catalanisme : histoire d’un concept », La Vie des idées, January 26, 2010. ISSN : 2105-3030. URL : http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Catalanisme-histoire-d-un-concept.htm]. 31 «In March 1892, the Catalanist Union held a meeting of delegates in Manresa with the aim of drawing up the organisation's political programme. The result was the Bases per a la Constitució Regional Catalana. The Bases de Manresa, as the document has since become known, was inspired by federalism and the traditional constitutions, and proclaimed Catalonia to be a sovereign country, structured the country by dividing it on the basis of the districts within it, declared Catalan to be the official language, and established a corps of volunteers to form the army. For the first time, Catalanism had a defined political project». http://www.en.mhcat.net/the_mhc_offers/permanent_exhibition/a_steam_powered_nation/rebirth_patriotism_and_nationalism/the_bases_de_manresa.
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against their will, in spreading the centralist, linguistic and mythic ideology of “France”.
As Lluis Creixell has pointed out, the action of the Catalan cultural activists, even that of
the clergy, was an individual action and it could not spread an ideology able to oppose
the official linguistic (and cultural) ideology that the French State could elaborate and
spread thanks to the means of indoctrination at its disposal. Not to mention that
frequently they simply did not intend to do it. In 1920, Mossèn Sarréte would write to
Bonafont about Carsalade du Pont’s “official catalanism”: « It’s rather a pity that
Monsignor, who has been the standard-bearer of the Catalan’s revival for 20 years, never
thought of making our colleges and diocesan seminaries and brothers' schools adopt the
system which he recommends himself so piercingly»32.
32 Quoted in L. Creixell, op. cit.