The Catalan Haute Bourgeoisie and the State, 1875–98

Abstract

Catalanism would become further radicalized from the early 1880s and a nationalist movement would emerge at the end of the decade. In the 1960s and 1970s a number of Marxist historians put forward the argument that, unable to construct the Spanish nation and state in its own image, from the mid-1880s the bourgeoisie (through its ‘organic intellectuals’) either led or took over the construction of an alternative Catalan nationalist project.¹ This analysis represented an adaptation to Catalan and Spanish conditions of the classic Marxist position that nationalism was a product of the newly dominant national bourgeoisie’s efforts to build its own state and construct a national market.