Estat Català

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Estat Català is a historical independentist party of Catalonia and among with the Sinn Féin it is one of the oldest in Europe.

Estat català was founded by Francesc Macià in 1922 as a political and fighting organisation which purpose was the independence of Catalonia. During the 1920s the party was active in the fight against the General Primo de Rivera and the monarchy, including a failed assassination attempt against the King of Spain Alfonso XIII in an operation that was known as the Complot de Garraf (Conspiracy of Garraf). Estat Català also raised a small army leaded by Francesc Macià to invade the south of the Principality from Prats de Molló, a Catalan territory under the rule of the French administration.

The governament of Primo de Rivera unleashed a great repression, the party became clandestine and Francesc Macià went to the exile. Despite of this, Estat Català was one of the promoter parties of the Pacte de Sant Sebastià, where among with the Basque and Galician nationalists and Spanish republicans they accorded to impulse a democratic process in the Spanish State (then it was the Kingdom of Spain).

At the so called Conferència d'Esquerres, celebrated the 17 and 19 of March of 1931 at the Cros street in the quarter of Sants, Estat Català joined the Partit Republicà Català and the political group L'Opinió, giving birth to Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya.

In April 1931, Francesc Macià proclaimed in Barcelona the Catalan Republic, and established the Generalitat de Catalunya, which was abolished by the Spanish and French troops who, in 1714, had established a borbonic absolutist monarchy with the king Philip V of Spain. Francesc Macià, with the support of a wide majority of the Catalan people, was the first president of the re-established Generalitat. In 1936, the Spanish fascists, with the support of Mussolini and Hitler and leaded by ther acolyte, the General Franco, revelled against the Spanish Republic and the Spanish Civil War began.

Estat Català fought actively in all the war fronts creating its own corps of volunteers, being the most important the Pyrenaic militias and the expeditionary corp that tryed to free Mallorca from the fascist yoke.

From 1939, having lost the war, many of the combatants of the party were executed and many more died in the exile where, after being put in concentration camps by the French governament (who treated them like enemies when they were, indeed, freedom fighters) were captured by the german nazis and deported to the extermination camps of Mathausen and Gusen. Those who stayed free joined the French Resistance and had an intense activity in the evasion nets for the allied aviators and the jews, who were helped to flee France.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Estat Català was restructured and started again with the military and political action against the Franco's regime.

Needed to say that Estat Català gave the Catalan nationalism a globalised vision of the Catalan nation: as early as in 1942, the party published the first map of the Catalan Countries which include the Principality (with Northern Catalonia included), the Valencian Country, the Balearic Islands and the coterminous area of Catalonia with Aragón (known as La Franja or The Stripe).

At the beginnings of the 1970s, the popular fight against Franco increases. In response, the repression of the regime also increases.

By then, since the Civil War, many people was arrested because of their membership in the FAC (Front d'Alliberament Català) and Terra Lliure (a Catalan radical independentist terrorist group). They suffered prison and it was requested for some of them to be sentenced to death because their ideas. Many other militants fleed to the exile.

In 1975, Franco died. Spain started a democratic process and in 1978 the Spanish Constitution was approved. In 1979 the Estatut d'Autonomia was approved for Catalonia.

In 1975 Francisco Franco died. Spain started a democratic process and as a result of this the Spanish Constitution (1978) and the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia (1979) were approved. Estat Català was legalized and it still exists today despite its number of militants has been decreasing with the time and it has no real political power in Catalonia.