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a seven-month siege, while Napoleon did his cause no good at all by attacking
and sacking the holy shrine and monastery at Montserrat. Fierce local resistance
was eventually backed by the muscle of a British army, and the French were at
last driven out.
The slow Catalan revival
Despite the political emasculation of Catalunya, there were signs of
economic
revival
from the end of the seventeenth century onwards. During the 1700s
there was a gradual growth in agricultural output, partly caused by a doubling
of the population: more land was put under cultivation, and productivity
improved with the introduction of easy-to-cultivate maize from the Indies.
Barcelona also saw a steady increase in trade, since from 1778 Catalunya was
allowed to trade with the Americas for the first time; in this way, the shipping
industry received a boost and Catalunya was able to export its textiles to a
wider market.The other great export was wine, whose widespread production
in the region also dates from this period.A chamber of commerce was founded
in Barcelona in 1758, and other economic societies followed as commercial
interests increased.
After the Napoleonic Wars, industry in Catalunya developed apace – it was an
industrialization
that appeared nowhere else in Spain. In the mid-nineteenth
century, the country’s first
railway
was built from Barcelona to Mataró, and
later extended south to Tarragona, and north to Girona and the French border.
Manufacturing
industries appeared as the financial surpluses from the land were
invested, encouraging a shift in population from the land to the towns; olive oil
production in Lleida andTarragona helped supply the whole country; and previ-
ously local industries flourished on a wider scale – in the wine-growing districts,
for example,
cava
(champagne-like wine) production was introduced in the late
nineteenth century, supported closely by the age-old cork industry of the Catalan
forests. From 1890, hydroelectric power was harnessed from the Pyrenees, and by
the end of the century
Barcelona
was the fastest-growing city in Spain – it was
one of only six with more than 100,000 inhabitants.
Equally important was the first stirring of what became known as the
Renaixença
(Renaissance), in the mid-nineteenth century. Despite being
banned in official use and public life, the Catalan
language
had never died out.
Books began to appear again in Catalan – a dictionary in 1803 and a grammar
in 1814 – and the language was revived among the bourgeoisie and intellectuals
in the cities as a means of making subtle nationalist and political points. Catalan
poetry
became popular, and the late medieval
Jocs Florals
(Floral Games), a
sort of literary competition, were revived in 1859 in Barcelona: one winner
was the great Catalan poet, Jacint Verdaguer (1845–1902). Catalan
drama
developed (although even in the late nineteenth century there were still restric-
tions on performing wholly Catalan plays), led mainly by the dramatist Pitarra.
The only discipline that didn’t show any great advance was prose literature
– partly because the Catalan language had been so debased with Castilian over
the centuries that writers found it difficult to express themselves in a way that
would appeal to the population.
Prosperity led to the rapid
expansion of Barcelona
, particularly the mid-
nineteenth century addition to the city of the planned Eixample district.
Encouraged by wealthy patrons and merchants, architects such as Josep Puig i
Cadafalch, Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Antoni Gaudí I Cornet were in
the vanguard of the
modernista
movement which changed the face of the
city. Culture and business came together with the
Universal Exhibition
of
CONTEXTS
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A history of Barcelona and Catalunya