The State of Catalan in Rosselló (Roussillon)

Abstract

In the year 1659, Louis the Fourteenth of France signed the Treaty of the Pyrénées with Spain. The Catalan Parliament (Les Corts Catalanes) was not a party to the agreement. In principle, the treaty was created to establish a “natural” border between the two countries defined by the Pyrénées mountains, a fact belied by a division drawn across the center of the great plain of the Cerdanya plateau, putting half of it under French rule while the other half remained under the titular rule of Spain. At the time of the signing, and for many years thereafter, the region on both sides of the border remained culturally and linguistically Catalan. After the French Revolution when France was divided into departments, this large Catalan territory, with its capital in Perpignan, was folded into a new administrative division, the Pyrénées Orientales, which, in its northern portion, included a region whose inhabitants spoke Occitan. This was part of a general pattern in France, which, in creating these political divisions, never allowed traditional linguistic areas to fully match the new political divisions. This is as true of the Basque country and Brittany as it is of the Pyrénées Orientales, and remains today a bone of contention between Paris and those regions that might want to create culturally homogeneous political units.KeywordsOfficial LanguageMinority LanguageFrench RevolutionFrench LanguageRegional LanguageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.