Exploring the Bourbon legacy

The Mercé con­vent

In Barcelona, one of the req­ui­si­tioned pub­lic build­ings is still in use: the Cap­i­ta­nia Gen­eral, which today houses the of­fices of the Span­ish armed forces in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal. How­ever, be­fore Philip V's oc­cu­pa­tion of the city, the build­ing had housed a re­li­gious order ded­i­cated to the city's pa­tron, La Mercé. In the 19th cen­tury the build­ing was first turned into bar­racks be­fore be­com­ing the Cap­i­ta­nia Gen­eral, the head­quar­ters of the Span­ish army in Barcelona.

Under the Bour­bon regime, the Cap­i­ta­nia Gen­eral was the fore­most rep­re­sen­ta­tive of royal power in Cat­alo­nia. Ac­cord­ing to the writer and pho­tog­ra­pher, Jordi Peñar­roja, au­thor of many stud­ies of this era, the only el­e­ment that re­mains of the con­vent is its clois­ter. Un­for­tu­nately, a re­quest to visit the build­ing went unan­swered.

The Bour­bon axis of con­trol over the Barcelona pop­u­la­tion was made up of the Ciu­tadella fortress (which was built on land that be­fore 1717 had been oc­cu­pied by around a thou­sand dwellings in the Born neigh­bour­hood), Mon­tjuïc cas­tle, the Es­tudi Gen­eral (the Barcelona uni­ver­sity that was con­verted into a bar­racks near the top of the Ram­bla) and Dras­sanes.

Until Ciu­tadella was knocked down in 1868, the fortress was the main sym­bol of the Bour­bon re­pres­sion. Mean­while, the first for­ti­fi­ca­tions on Mon­tjuïc were built in 1640 to de­fend the city. Later, how­ever, the struc­ture would be used to main­tain con­trol over the city and, in the 19th cen­tury, to shell Barcelona into sub­mis­sion. In the 18th cen­tury, the Bour­bon regime en­larged the cas­tle along with its gar­ri­son and ar­tillery ca­pa­bil­ity, which rose to 120 can­nons aimed at the city below.

In ex­er­cis­ing his “right to con­quest”, Philip had his coat of arms in­stalled on Dras­sanes, where it can still be seen today. Dras­sanes, where Barcelona's ship­yards were lo­cated, stopped pro­duc­ing mil­i­tary ves­sels dur­ing the re­pres­sion, ac­cord­ing to Peñar­roja in his book, Barcelona: Sen­tir l'Onze de Setem­bre 1714-2014, and the area be­came “a large bar­racks for ar­tillery and cav­alry troops, as well as func­tion­ing as an or­di­nance work­shop, a func­tion it main­tained until 1936.”

An­other ex­am­ple is the con­vent of Sant Agustí Vell, be­tween the streets of Comerç and Tan­ta­ran­tana, which was turned into bar­racks that were partly knocked down around the time that Ciu­tadella dis­ap­peared. Today a cul­tural cen­tre, the build­ing ex­hibits a mix of styles in­her­ited from its var­i­ous uses.

Eras­ing the past

The Bour­bon model of gov­ern­ment, which was much more cen­tral­ist, was in marked con­trast to the Aus­trian style of rule, which had man­aged its re­la­tions with Cat­alo­nia. “The re­pres­sion was very harsh in many ways, with sum­mary ex­e­cu­tions of lead­ing re­sis­tors, the im­pris­on­ment or exile of thou­sands of Aus­trian sup­port­ers and sys­tem­atic sack­ings”, says his­to­rian Jaume Dantí.

Be­fore the siege of Barcelona, Philip V's de­struc­tive ap­proach to rul­ing had been seen in 1707, when the Va­len­cian town of Xàtiva was burned to the ground for re­sist­ing the Bour­bon ad­vance. How­ever, the raz­ing of Xàtiva was not only phys­i­cal, but also his­tor­i­cal: its en­tire mu­nic­i­pal archive was also de­stroyed and along with it vital doc­u­men­ta­tion from the King­dom of Va­len­cia, the city was de­pop­u­lated through de­por­ta­tions and a new city was built in the place it had once stood with a new name, Colo­nia Nueva de San Fe­lipe. What's more, Xàtiva's dis­ap­pear­ance from the map led to the re­nam­ing of the is­land of Xàtiva, part of the Tierra del Fuego arch­i­pel­ago at the foot of South Amer­ica, to sim­ply, and cyn­i­cally, Tierra de Fuego.

How Philip went about con­duct­ing his “right of con­quest” can be traced in the his­tory of the build­ings and sym­bolic struc­tures de­stroyed fol­low­ing the fall of Barcelona. Peñar­roja cites a num­ber of ex­am­ples of Philip's ob­ses­sive ten­dency for per­se­cu­tion in the in­ter­minable crush­ing of sym­bols that, in the fol­low­ing decades, turned the state of oc­cu­pa­tion into the sta­tus quo, mark­ing the pop­u­la­tion's col­lec­tive con­scious­ness to the ex­tent that all mem­ory of the pre­vi­ous regimes was ex­punged.

Some ex­am­ples are the de­struc­tion of the pas­sage­way built by the Cata­lan king Martí l'Humà so that he could lis­ten to mass in the cathe­dral. Mean­while, noth­ing now re­mains of the Sant Francesc con­vent, where the Cata­lan con­sti­tu­tion was sworn in.

The plaça del Born once had a pyra­mid ded­i­cated to Our Lady of the Con­cep­tion, which the Aus­trian Arch­duke Charles had or­dered built to com­mem­o­rate the break­ing of the first Bour­bon siege. In 1715, the Duke of Berwick had the struc­ture re­duced to ruins.

Nat­u­rally, the Pla de Palau, which had nu­mer­ous build­ings from the time of Arch­duke Charles, be­came a focus of the Bour­bon oc­cu­pa­tion.

One more thing: why is it that no por­trait of the, mostly Cata­lan, mil­i­tary fig­ures who de­fended Barcelona and Cat­alo­nia now re­main? “There are al­most none, be­cause they were all burnt,” says Peñar­roja, who adds: “When you have no state, you have no na­tional image, but you be­long to a state that does have a na­tional image. In that case, theirs is as­serted and yours is de­stroyed.”