The Pyrenees are a cedar flung high;
Peoples nest, like birds, amongst its branches,
Whence no race-feeding vulture can remove them;
Each and every range where life takes hold
Is but a branch of this superb colossus,
This mighty trunk of life.
—Jacint Verdaguer, Mount Canigó, 18861
The fascination with the Cathars is not limited to Nazis and connoisseurs of mystical conspiracy theories. Today the Department of Aude advertises itself as “Pays Cathare”—Cathar Country—and promotes its Cathar castles and towns as part of its identity as a “land of history and tourism, of warmth and authenticity.” Each year thousands of walkers trek through the medieval castles of the “Sentier Cathare” (Cathar Way), which runs roughly parallel to the Pyrenees from Foix in the west to Port-la-Nouvelle on the coast. Numerous “Cathar holidays” in France and Catalonia follow the trails supposedly taken by the Cathar Bon Hommes (Good Men) across the Pyrenees while fleeing persecution into Spain. One company advertises a walking holiday in the Pays Cathare through “a time forgotten landscape of legend and great natural beauty.” Another promises clients the opportunity to “discover the land of the heretical Cathars and solve the mystery of Rennes-le-Château—inspiration for Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.” Yet another offers “good local food, robust Languedoc wines and a part of the Pyrenees that has a strong Mediterranean influence,” where visitors can “find secret trails and castles of the châteaux Cathars.”
The unlikely transformation of one of Europe’s most brutal episodes of religious persecution into a leisure destination for gastronomers, winetasters, and recreational walkers owes as much to pop culture and esoteric fantasy as it does to the more enduring romantic fascination with the Cathar tragedy itself. But the reinvention of “Cathar Country” is only one of many different ways in which history and the imagination have combined to give the Pyrenees their very particular genius loci. On one level this should not be surprising. For a mountain range that has so often been depicted as a savage and inhuman wilderness, the Pyrenees are saturated with history. Physical evidence of thousands of years of human settlement can be found up and down the mountains, from prehistoric dolmens, watchtowers, castles, churches, and mountain chapels to medieval walled towns and villages, statues and monuments. Yet until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this history received little attention from the outside world. Before their “discovery,” the Pyrenean past, insofar as it was known or remembered at all, tended to be considered solely in terms of its relevance to the history of Spain or France.
With the emergence of the Pyrenees as a tourist destination in the nineteenth century this began to change, as travelers and tourists increasingly included the more notably dramatic or picturesque components of the Pyrenean past in their travelogues and itineraries. Thus the erudite polymath Sabine Baring-Gould insisted that his book on the Pyrenees was “not a guide, but an introduction to the chain, giving to the reader a sketch of the History of the Country he visits.” Other nineteenth-century travelers included key places associated with Pyrenean history alongside their descriptions of the mountains and the landscape.
Such references generally served the same purpose that historical summaries do in contemporary tourist guides; they provided atmosphere, intellectual interest and stimulation, and a colorful embellishment to the landscape itself. In establishing the (romantic) Pyrenean past as a tourist attraction, however, these potted histories also helped to shape the way the Pyrenees were imagined and perceived by those who passed through them and by those who imagined them from a distance. This interest was not only touristic. As was the case with mountain ranges elsewhere in Europe, the Pyrenees acquired a new significance in the nineteenth century in both Spain and France as a unique and grandiose landscape that was a source of national pride; as repository of national resources and national power; as a site of scientific exploration and discovery—and also as a landscape of culture and history that was both regional and national. In effect, the mountains became part of the way that both Spain and France imagined and defined themselves, in which the old image of the “savage frontier” was displaced by the recognition that the Pyrenees had a history, and this history was also part of the national stories of Spain and France. In the same period, Pyrenean history began to fire the nationalist imagination of the “states within states” whose territories also reached into the Pyrenees.
For the history of the Pyrenees is not just the history of Spain and France; it is also the history of Aragon, Catalonia, Navarre, and the Basque Country, of Languedoc and Occitania, of the ancient counties of Foix and Toulouse and the former viscounty of Béarn, of the “co-principality” of Andorra and many other lordships, counties, and viscounties associated with particular localities and Pyrenean places. Some of these states and statelets belong to what the historian Norman Davies calls “half-forgotten Europe,” and some are barely remembered at all.2 But others have provided cultural inspiration to nations-in-waiting whose territories reach across both sides of the Pyrenees, and which have never fully accepted the reality of the Pyrenean border.
States into Provinces
A complete political history of the Pyrenees before the advent of the nation-state is beyond the scope of this book. Such a history would have to go back to the Celtiberian tribes conquered by the Romans, to the Franks and the Visgothic province of Septimania. To do justice to its subject, such a history would have to trace the political histories of individual Pyrenean valleys whose rulers often had only tenuous control over them, and the convoluted evolution of dynastic houses, countships, and lordships as a result of armed conflict, territorial acquisition, dynastic changes, and strategic marriages. Some of the great Pyrenean seigneurial houses, such as Foix, Ribagorça, and Sobrarbe, established by the Franks in the Spanish March, controlled the lives of thousands of people until well into the sixteenth century, and would require entire books dedicated only to them.
Today the “foral (chartered) community” of Navarre in Spain is all that remains of the medieval Kingdom of Navarre, which once extended from the Basque provinces in the west to the upper Ebro Valley in the east, with its capital in Pamplona. During the high-watermark of Navarrese power under Sancho III “the Great” (994–1035), Navarre also reached northward across the Pyrenees into France and south into Spain almost as far as Burgos. By the end of the fourteenth century, a traveler crossing the Spanish Pyrenees from west to east would have passed through the Castilian Basque provinces, the remnant of the Kingdom of Navarre and its former territories in the Crown of Aragon, the co-principality of Andorra, and the principality of Catalonia.
On the French side of the mountains the same journey would have taken the traveler through a mosaic of territorial jurisdictions, beginning with the French royal territories of Guyenne and crossing the viscounties of Soule and Béarn and the countships of Bigorre, Comminges, Armagnac, Foix, and ending with Languedoc—part-annexed to France in 1229 following the suppression of the Albigensian heresy—and the countship of Roussillon, which was part of Catalonia. In 1512 Ferdinand of Aragon assumed the title of king of Navarre and invaded the seven-hundred-year-old kingdom, driving its rulers Catherine and Jean d’Albret north into the splinter kingdom of Basse-Navarre in the ultra puertos (beyond the passes) of the Pyrenees, thus initiating more than a decade of war, which finally came to an end when Hispanic Navarre was annexed by Castile in 1524, leaving only the viscounty of Béarn and Basse-Navarre under the control of the Albrets.
In 1589 the kingdoms of Navarre and France were united when Henry III of Navarre (1553–1610) became King Henry IV of France, and in 1620 the two kingdoms were definitively merged. By 1694 a French map of Les Monts Pyrénées placed all these territories within the confins (borders) of Spain or France. The same map also includes the former Catalan territories of Roussillon as part of the French confins in recognition of the acquisitions obtained as a result of the Treaty of the Pyrenees. Other countships and viscounties of the French Pyrenees were subsequently absorbed into new administrative departments created as a result of the French Revolution. These new boundaries were confirmed in the marvelous maps designed by the nineteenth-century French cartographer Victor Levasseur (1800–70), which combined cartographic detail about the regions of France with evocative illustrations of historic places and personalities associated with them.
A similar process unfolded in the Spanish Pyrenees. In 1479 the Crowns of Castile and Aragon were formally merged in an arrangement that laid the basis for the creation of the Spanish state and the end of Aragonese autonomy. Even after the union of the two crowns, the Aragonese and the Catalans continued to hold on tenaciously to their medieval autonomy. In 1716 the Catalans lost their language and their medieval liberties as a result of the Nueva Planta decrees, promulgated in the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession by the Bourbon monarch Philip V. On paper, the only independent remnants of the medieval past in the Spanish Pyrenees in the eighteenth century were the Val d’Aran and Andorra. Until 1834, the former continued to enjoy the autonomy granted by James II of Aragon in 1313, which exempted its inhabitants from feudal duties in exchange for annual tributes of wheat.
The co-principality of Andorra was first granted a charter by Charlemagne in the eighth century as reward for its assistance in fighting the Saracens, and it still retains the status of a semi-independent state under the co-administration of France and the bishopric of Urgell. By the end of the nineteenth century a journey across the Spanish Pyrenees was administratively, if not culturally, a journey through Spain and France, with the exception of Andorra, and it was in this period that travelers first began to discover the lost Pyrenean past as a point of attraction and an object of fascination.
The Lord of Foix
As is often the case, such interest inevitably tended to focus on the more colorful and romantic aspects of Pyrenean history that reflected contemporary assumptions and expectations about mountains and their inhabitants. Victor Hugo noted the republican spirit of the Basque provinces and the “deep secret bond, which nothing has been made to break, [that] ties, in spite of treaties, those diplomatic borders, and in spite of the Pyrenees, those natural borders, all the members of the mysterious Basque family.” During a visit to Lourdes, James Erskine Murray reminded his English-speaking readers of the days when Edward the Black Prince had ruled the Western Pyrenees as prince of Aquitaine during the fourteenth century and invited future visitors to consider “while they admire the fine situation of the castle of Lourdes, and the gorgeous scenery which surrounds it, that there was once a time when the banner of England floated from its towers, when the elite of France could not pluck it from its resting-place.”3
In Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces (1907), the American writer Francis Miltoun informed his readers of his intention to go beyond the “geographical and topographical limits” of the old French provinces and generate an “imaginary hub” that would “radiate lines of historic and romantic interest.”4 Many travelers followed these conventions, and certain names and places tend to recur repeatedly in their writings. Few visitors to Cauterets resisted the temptation to describe the picnics where Marguerite of Angoulême, the queen of Navarre (1492–1549), allegedly composed the story cycle the Heptaméron—the French variant of Boccaccio’s Decamaron—with her courtiers.
Visitors to the towns of Orthez and Foix invariably recounted the life and character of its most famous lord, Gaston III, Count of Foix and Viscount of Béarn (1331–91), more commonly known as Gaston Phoebus, and easily the most celebrated “romantic” figure in Pyrenean history. Phoebus was born in Béarn, which had only recently become part of the Comté de Foix at the end of the thirteenth century, and he was steeped in the independent traditions of the Pyrenean valleys and the Bearnese mountain clans, whose motto, Toquey si gauses (Touch me if you dare), he adopted as his own. Phoebus often demonstrated this prickly defiance in his dealings with outsiders. Though he pledged the allegiance of Foix to Philip VI during the Hundred Years’ War, he refused to do the same on behalf of Béarn, on the grounds that “my lord Count is now in his own land of Béarn, which he holds from God and from no man in this world, and for which he is not required to aught but what pleases him.” Phoebus maintained an equally lofty distance from the victorious Plantagenets and the Kingdom of Aragon.5
A courageous warrior and prolific hunter, he fought in various wars against an array of opponents that included the English, his archrivals the Counts of Armagnac, and Prussian pagans. Phoebus was not short of confidence or self-esteem; he gave himself the name Gaston Phoebus because of his blond hair and good looks, and he combined a taste for war and killing with a cultured and refined sensibility. He spoke three languages and various local dialects and wrote poetry and books, including the illustrated hunting manual known as Le livre de chasse, which contains a marvelous image of Phoebus himself wearing a splendid purple gown embossed with gold griffons. His well-stocked library at the Foix château included translations of Arabic works on philosophy, math, and medicine, and his courts were renowned for their opulent entertainments and for the poets, musicians, and troubadours who gravitated to them.
Phoebus was also prone to violent rages and paranoia. He once stabbed a cousin to death. He also imprisoned his only son and heir, who he believed had tried to poison him, and killed him shortly afterward. In 1388 the chronicler Jean Froissart visited Phoebus in Orthez and was immediately smitten. “I have, in my time, seen many kings, princes, and knights,” Froissart wrote, “but I have never met such a good-looking and well-formed man, with such a fine figure and such a pleasing and attractive face.”6 Froissart attended the nocturnal feasts that began at midnight, when guests were summoned to Phoebus’s castle by trumpet to be entertained by an “indoor circus,” confections served in the shape of castles, mythical beasts, and allegorical figures, and an array of jugglers, dancing bears, wrestling matches, strongmen, and minstrels, who included Phoebus himself.
Froissart’s writings did much to create the reputation of the “lord of the Pyrenees,” which continues to attract visitors to the imposing castle that looms over the medieval town of Foix, where Phoebus held one of his courts. Phoebus’s place in French history is primarily due to his ability to maintain his independence on the contested French/Aragonese borderlands, and his unsuccessful attempt to create what the French historian Pierre Tucoo-Chala once called “a grand homogeneous Pyrenean state from Foix to Orthez.”7 But his colorful character and his associations with medieval chivalry and troubadour culture made him an obligatory reference in nineteenth-century Pyrenean travelogues. Louisa Stuart Costello paid tribute to the “magnificent Count of Foix” and James Erskine Murray lamented the transformation of his former castle in Foix from an “abode of royal power and lordly pomp” into a debtors’ prison.8
Another indispensable historical figure in nineteenth-century travelogues was Henry IV of France (1553–1610), one of the most popular of all French kings. Like Phoebus, Henry was a product of the independent Bearnese/Navarrese tradition. The son of the dour Huguenot bigot Jeanne d’Albret (1528–72), the queen regnant of Navarre, he was born in Pau but grew up with the children of peasants and servants, where he learned the rough-and-ready manners that later earned him the mockery of the French court. As a child and a young man, his mother subjected him to a harsh parental regime that included regular beatings, poor food, and visits to the high mountains in all weathers to toughen him up. On one occasion Albret sent the young Henry into the mountains in the middle of a storm to prevent a duel that she had invented.
Like Phoebus, Henry was a passionate hunter and was fond of hunting bears. Though he fought bravely and ruthlessly for the Huguenot cause during the Wars of Religion as king of Navarre, he was a considerably more tolerant and amenable character than his mother, with a fondness for food, women, and tennis. Though he converted to Catholicism in 1589 in order to gain the French throne, his experience of the Wars of Religion and as an independent ruler of a peripheral Pyrenean state gave him sufficient independence of mind to sign the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which legalized freedom of conscience for the first time in France. Regarded by the decadent French court as an uncouth ruffian, he never lost touch with his Pyrenean roots. He regularly asked for grapes, figs, and even geese to be sent to his court from his native Béarn, and he famously promised that every peasant would have a “chicken in his pot” on Sundays—a gesture that undoubtedly owed much to his familiarity with the peasants he had known as a child.
Many nineteenth-century visitors traveled through the Pyrenees carrying a copy of Froissart’s medieval chronicles or The Song of Roland, which they often quoted or referred to in describing what they saw. On visiting Roncesvalles Lady Georgiana Chatterton imagined Roland’s “brilliant cortège winding through those romantic defiles, and thought of the various songs and legends which describe the battle” before quoting from the poem.9 “The shades of Henry and Sully [Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully and Henry’s informal chief minister] are said sometimes to walk along the ramparts even now,” wrote Louisa Stuart Costello of a visit to Henry IV’s château at Pau in 1844, “and it is firmly believed that near the great reservoir into which was said, Queen Jeanne used to have her Catholic prisoners thrown, numerous ghosts of injured men might be seen flitting to and fro.”10
A landscape steeped in history: Pau with a view of Henry IV’s chateau in the background, ca. 1890–1900. (Library of Congress)
The historical fascination for men like Phoebus and Henry IV and women like Marguerite of Angoulême was not due simply to their personalities or their achievements. Such rulers also demonstrated a streak of independence and defiance to central authority that many outsiders regarded as characteristic of the peoples of the Pyrenees in general, and which they found attractive and even inspiring. “Each valley is still a little world which differs from the neighbouring world as Mercury does from Uranus,” wrote the French economist Michel Chevalier in 1837 during a visit to the Eastern Pyrenees and Andorra. “Each village is a clan, a kind of state with its own form of patriotism. There are different types and characters at every step, different opinions, prejudices and customs.”11 Henry Swinburne commented on “the violent spirit of the Catalans, and their enthusiastic passion for liberty, [which] have often rendered the country the seat of civil war and bloodshed.”12 Michelet celebrated the “two impetuous spirits—the Basque and the Catalan”—as “warders” at the two extremities of the Pyrenees, “who introduce the stranger with marked appropriateness into the strange country of Don Quixote.”13 There were also those who saw the Pyrenees as a kind of living premodern museum, in which the appealing spirit of independence that many of them admired in the individual rulers of Pyrenean mountain-kingdoms had been miraculously preserved in whole communities.
Pyrenean Utopias
Such notions often converged on the Pyrenean “micro-republic” of Andorra. A stream of books and articles such the The Republic of the Pyrenees (1869), Andorra, the Hidden Republic (1912), and “Andorra: The Republic of the Pyrenees” (1895) give an indication of the curious fascination for the autonomous Pyrenean co-principality in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Andorra’s curious status dates back to Charlemagne’s eighth-century expedition against the Moors—an event that is still celebrated in the Andorran national anthem, “El gran Carlemany” (The Great Charlemagne), which praises “The great Charlemagne, my father / from the Saracens liberated me.” In 1287 a constitutional arrangement known as the Pariatges (Sharing) signed between the Count of Foix, Roger-Bernard III, and the bishop of Urgell exempted Andorrans from their feudal obligations in exchange for a biennial tribute to the Counts of Foix and the bishopric of Urgell.
Though Foix—later France—and the bishops of Urgell ruled the co-principality through their deputies, or viguiers, Andorra effectively governed itself through a general council elected by members of its six communes, or parishes. It had no police force and no army, except for a standing militia of six hundred men drawn from individual households, each of which was obliged to keep a musket, one pound of gunpowder, twenty-four balls, and caps, in the event of a call-up. Such events were rare. Until the completion of a road connecting it to the town of La Seu d’Urgell in 1914, Andorra could be reached from France or Spain only by bridle paths and mule trails. The territory is only 150 square miles (388 square kilometers), and at the end of the nineteenth century it had little more than three thousand inhabitants.
The existence of this remote mountain republic nevertheless intrigued many outsiders. When one of the male protagonists in Charlotte Gillman Perkins’s feminist utopian novel Herland (1915) suggests that his companions’ search for an uncharted female enclave might be fruitless, Vandyck “Van” Jennings responds, “What’s that old republic up in the Pyrenees somewhere—Andorra? Precious few people know anything about it, and it’s been minding its own business for a thousand years.”
In the nineteenth century a number of travelers visited the co-principality and depicted it as a lost mountain utopia of a different kind. For James Erskine Murray, Andorra was “the oldest free republic in existence,” whose inhabitants enjoyed “more real and substantial liberty, than was ever enjoyed under the purest of the Italian republics.”14 More than half a century later Harold Spender and his compantions met the former president of Andorra Francesco Duran at the Andorran capital, Andorra la Vella, and spent hours quizzing him about the organization of the republic and its constitution. Spender left these conversations “well content that there should be still one country in Europe where the power of wealth plays so small a part and the health of simple living is as yet so little marred by the ‘sick disease of modern life.’”15
Spender was pleased that a recent attempt to transform the spa at Les Escaldes into a “combined bathing and gaming centre—a sort of second Monaco”—had been blocked by France, even though it was supported by the bishop of Urgell, because “there is no need to thrust a gambling hell into the centre of this quiet pastoral country.” Other travelers echoed the image of Andorra as a republican Shangri-La that had remained miraculously untouched by the modern world. American travelers were particularly impressed by Andorra’s republican virtues. In The Republic of the Pyrenees (1869) the American poet and diplomat Bayard Taylor described the co-principality as “an ark of safety to strangers, as well as an inviolable home of freedom to its own inhabitants.” Taylor wrote of his first sight of this long-sought-after mountain republic, in which “the day was exquisitely clear and sunny; the breezes of the Pyrenees blew away every speck of vapour from the mountains, but I saw everything softly through that veil which the imagination weaves for us.”16
Other travelers viewed the co-principality through a similar veil. In Andorra, the Hidden Republic (1912), another American, Lewis Gaston Leary, a Presbyterian minister and teacher at the American College in Beirut, described his first sight of the co-principality he had spent years thinking about: “Yonder, in the golden glory that broke between the black storm clouds which shrouded her mountain ramparts, lay sheltered the strangest, least-known country in Europe—the hidden Republic of Andorra.” For Leary, the inhabitants of Andorra were “the freest persons in the world,” despite their grinding poverty and the domination of their government by a landowning aristocracy. Even the “invincibile taciturnity” that so many travelers noted in Andorrans was a product of their proud tradition of independence, Leary believed, since “you feel that they are so undemonstrative, not because they are churlish, but because, for all their poverty and illiteracy, they have the instincts of gentlemen.”17
Not all travelers were so enamored of Andorra’s anachronistic rustic charms. For the English traveler Victor Scott O’Connor, the Andorrans were “redeemed by their spirit of independence, by their love for this, their own fraction of the earth; otherwise there is little about them that is attractive. . . . They have accomplished nothing, they have no history, no great memories; unpicturesque to look at, they have moved forward but little in ten centuries. What profit is there in such independence? This is no idyllic peasantry, children of Hellas and of light, but just the rude Catalan in his primitive state.”18
Some seekers of Pyrenean mountain utopias found an even more improbable object of desire and wish fulfillment in the tiny hamlet of Goust in the French commune of Laruns. Situated 3,264 feet (995 meters) up on a mountain plateau less than a square mile (2.5 square kilometers) wide at the southern end of the Vallée d’Ossau, Goust consists of eight or ten houses and its population has rarely reached more than a hundred or so inhabitants. Many of them have lived for a long time. Centenarians have been common on the Goust plateau, and one man who was born in 1442 was allegedly given a pension by Henry IV before he finally died in 1605. Goust’s claims to republican status have always been nebulous, and it is not clear whether it has ever officially been a republic. Nevertheless, an 1848 article in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal described the “unknown Republic” as a “little fairy oasis, belonging more to the air than the earth,” ruled by a twelve-member government of wise patriarchs whose absence of pretension, ostentation, and hypocrisy was in stark contrast to the world below.19
In a year in which Europe was wracked by revolutions, the author found in Goust “an almost absolute equilibrium, individual, social and territorial” and “an expression of the democratic state in its simplest and purest form,” whose only defect as a model for the rest of the continent was the narrow conformity of its social organization, which meant that “in it individuals are nothing, and the mass everything.” Other visitors similarly portrayed Goust as a repository of ancient republican virtue. In 1890 Edwin Asa Dix visited what he called “this unique settlement, solitary, indifferent to time, and its new ways, Nature’s ‘children lost in the clouds.’” On climbing the steep path to the plateau and finding a handful of peasant women outside “eight hoary, grey-stone hovels,” Dix and his companions doffed their hats while he explained that “we have come from America to see this settlement, and that any courtesy they may extend will be considered as official by the nation we represent.”20
Dix’s tongue may have been firmly in cheek, but he was genuinely impressed by the egalitarian nature of the Goust republic and its inhabitants, whom he described as “those who fill, and fill faithfully, their single niches, living moveless as the trees.” In an 1894 feature on “pinhead republics,” a reporter from the U.S. Democratic Standard visited Goust and observed that “since the seventeenth century the population has varied but little . . . the inhabitants are long lived and robust, are shepherds and weavers of cloth and seem entirely contented with their lot, having little ambition either for riches or power.” The reporter was struck by the absence of churches and cemeteries, which obliged “the inhabitants of this tiny mountain republic” to build a chute “down which they slide heavy articles and the bodies of their dead to the cemetery far below.” In fact Goust was never quite as hermetically sealed as it seemed. Its inhabitants regularly descended to the surrounding valleys to sell their wool, seek wives and husbands, attend mass, and marry and baptize their children. Nevertheless, the idea of such Pyrenean “mini-republics,” whose ancient virtues had remained preserved through their isolation, was often more alluring for some of those who visited them than the reality—and perhaps also for more distant readers who never would.
Nations-in-Waiting
In his celebrated history of cultural attitudes to mountains, the historian Walther Kirchner noted the emergence of a “new national spirit” in Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, marked by a “more aggressive and exclusive character” that permeated “music, literature, art, and most of all politics” and which also reached into “the world of mountains, which soon begin to offer a field of special attraction for competitive nationalism.”21 In Kirchner’s view, such competition was expressed primarily through the conquests of mountain summits that were seen to embody the courage, daring, and physical prowess of individual climbers and the nations they represented.
The Pyrenees offered few such tests of national endeavor in comparison with the Alps or the Himalayas, but Pyrenean history did provide a different kind of inspiration to the nationalist imagination in the nineteenth century. The emergence of Navarre as a Carlist stronghold during the Carlist Wars was partly due to the fear that medieval liberties, or fueros, which now define Navarre as a “chartered community,” were under threat from the Spanish government, and such freedoms were often taken particularly seriously in the Pyrenean valleys that had governed their own affairs for centuries. Navarre’s medieval past has also served as a reference point in modern Basque nationalism.
For most students of military history, the Maya Pass in Navarre is most famous for Marshal Soult’s assault on Wellington’s army in 1813. To many Basques however, the pass is associated with the battle that took place in 1522, when two hundred Navarrese knights fought off seven thousand Castilian soldiers in a castle just above the village of Maya (Amaiur in Basque), for the best part of a month, before they finally surrendered. The fall of the Maya castle ended the attempts of the Albret dynasty and its French allies to recover Navarre’s lost territories from Castile, and paved the way for the temporary military occupation of much of Basse-Navarre by Castilian troops, who destroyed the castle to prevent its ever being used again.
Today the castle is undergoing restoration. At the center of the ruined battlements and ramparts, an obelisk of more recent construction pays homage in Spanish to “the men at the Castle of Maya who fought for the independence of Navarre: Everlasting Light.” For Basque nationalists, the eleventh-century Kingdom of Navarre was the first and only time in their history in which the seven Basque territories were united in a single kingdom. This history inspired the monument that was built in 1922, which was blown up by Spanish nationalists in 1931, at a time when Navarre and the Basque provinces were debating a statute of regional autonomy under the Spanish Republic. It was not until 1982 that the monument was reconstructed, and it remains a landmark in Basque and Navarrese politics, to the point where a Basque leftist-nationalist electoral coalition gave itself the name Amaiur in 2011.
Other would-be nations have their own Pyrenean sites of remembrance. In front of the town hall at the Catalan town of Sort in La Seu d’Urgell, a bronze bust of the long-haired General Josep Moragues, the defender of Castelciutat in the War of the Spanish Succession, pays homage to the “forgotten hero” and defender of Catalan national identity, who was drawn and quartered by Bourbon troops in Barcelona in 1715. Every year on September 11 locals gather here to mark the National Day of Catalonia. To many Occitan nationalists, the Cathar fortress of Montségur remains a symbol of resistance to the French “foreign invaders” led by Simon de Montfort, whose victories paved the way for the annexation of Languedoc by France. The anticlerical poet and historian Napoléon Peyrat (1809–81) once described Montségur as “an Essenian Zion, a Platonist Delphi of the Pyrenees, a Johannite Rome, condemned and untamed in Aquitaine.”22
The role of the Pyrenees in the nationalist imagination of these nations-in-waiting is not confined to memorializing and commemorative sites. From the music of Grieg to the Rocky Mountain painters, mountain landscapes often featured in the cultural nationalist imagination in the nineteenth century, and a similar process accompanied the development of a new national consciousness among Basques, Catalans, and Occitanians in the nineteenth century. Occitanian nationalists and linguistic revivalists have sometimes cited Gaston Phoebus as an inspiration. In his monumental dictionary compiling the dialects of southern France, the Occitan poet Frédéric Mistral compared himself to a “thoughtful shepherd” who “high up on the mountain slope . . . places a pile of stones in honor of his country, and marks the pastures where he has passed the summer.”23
The Basque composer José María Usandizaga entitled his Basque-language 1910 opera Mendi mendiyan (High in the Mountains). In the Catalan composer Felip Pedrell Sabaté’s opera Els Pirineus (1893), the “bard of the mountains” invites the audience “to see the Pyrenees . . . as I see them, cathedral of glory, fortress and palace, tribune and temple, reliquary of all that is great and refuge of all that is splendid, the splendours, haven for every thinker and every proscribed thing, protection for every liberty and every school.”24 The contemporary resonances of Balaguer’s references to the persecution of the Cathars would not have been missed by nineteenth-century Catalan audiences who saw Catalonia as a prisoner of the Spanish state.
The Pyrenees were a key focus of the Catalan “excursionist” movement of the late nineteenth century. In 1890 the Associació Catalanista d’Excursions Cientifiques (Catalan Association of Scientific Excursions) was reestablished as the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya (Catalan Excursionist Centre, CEC). For the CEC, “excursionism” was never simply about hiking and the outdoors: it was combined intellectual and aesthetic discovery with a strongly nationalist and patriotic orientation. Its members were encouraged to explore the Catalan countryside and also to “get to know synthetically and analytically the ethnic personality and philosophy of Catalonia,” as one of its members put it.
For the excursionists who contributed to the CEC’s journal the Butlletí del Centre Excursionista de Catalunya, hiking was a process of discovering—or rediscovering—nostra terra (our land), in which history, literature, folklore, and Romanesque churches were as significant as the study of rocks and plants. As Robert Hughes has written, “The reward for one’s efforts was not only knowledge but a kind of historicist rapture, an ecstatic dreaming of the lost cultural past,”25 which the artist Santiago Rusinyoll expressed during a hike through the Ter Valley in 1880 to the monastery of Santa María del Ripoll: “Ripoll!! What sweet inspirations and great memories crowd on the mind when we hear the echo of your glorious name among the mountains!! How the hearts of true Catalans beat when we hear it uttered! Ah! At last we are near you, jewel of the Middle Ages! Soon we will be in your humble monastery! We come to breathe the same air that hundreds upon hundreds of Benedictines have breathed here . . . we are entering an unknown land, dreamed of a thousand times.”26
In 1908 the CEC established a Mountain Sports Section partly in order to avert the possibility, as one of its members anxiously put it, “of converting our excursionism into a mere pastime and giving it an essentially sportive character.”27 Though the new section promoted mountain sports such as skiing and sledging, these activities were always less significant than the physical, emotional, and intellectual journeys into the Catalan past. These aspirations inevitably focused on the Pyrenees, and on one mountain more than others.
The Sacred Mountain
No single individual was more responsible for bringing the Pyrenees to the attention of the nationalist imagination than the Catalan “poet laureate” Mossèn Jacint Verdaguer (1845–1902). A Catholic priest whose troubled relationship with the church almost resulted in his excommunication, Verdaguer was a prose writer as well as a poet, and a towering figure in the nineteenth-century Catalan cultural renaissance known as the Renaixença who almost single-handedly revived and revitalized the Catalan language after centuries of neglect. Verdaguer was also a fervent excursionist and pyreneist, whose reputation is largely due to his two epic poems, L’Atlàntida (1877) and Canigó (1886), both of which featured the Pyrenees as a background and even as a protagonist.
In 1879 he walked in the Pyrenees for the first time while undergoing medical treatment at the spa in Prats-de-Mollo, and between 1887 and 1894 he undertook numerous solitary walks in the Vall Fosca, the Val d’Aran, the Conflent Valley, and other parts of the Pyrenees, carrying a notebook in his rucksack in which he wrote meticulous descriptions of landscapes, rivers, compass bearings, and folktales that he collected in his journeys. Verdaguer’s poetry and travel writings were often infused with a mournful and painful sense of Catalonia’s lost medieval grandeur, and he found cause for inspiration and demoralization in his Pyrenean journeys.
He climbed various summits, including Aneto, the Pica d’Estats, and La Maladeta, but he is most famously associated with Mount Canigou (Canigó in Catalan), the most celebrated mountain in the Catalan Pyrenees, which became the subject of his epic poem Canigó: llegenda pirenaica del temps de la reconquista (Canigou: Pyrenean Legend from the Time of the Reconquest). Of all Pyrenean mountains, Canigou was particularly suited to become the subject of what the literary scholar Ricard Torrents has called “the foundational poem of the Catalan people.” Standing at 9,134 feet (2,785 meters), just inside the present-day French province of Roussillon, Canigou has long been known as the “sacred mountain” of the Catalan people and a symbol of Catalonia itself. Every summer on June 23, hundreds of people carry burning torches down from a fire on top of the mountain to light bonfires across Catalonia for the festival of Saint John.
The mystique of Canigou is due partly to its location. It occupies a dominant position overlooking the historic Catalan territories of Roussillon, looming out of the flat plain in a curving fanlike shape that seems to be always visible wherever you are, and which offers views as far as Barcelona on clear days. Verdaguer climbed Canigou various times, and these hikes were reflected in the detailed descriptions of the landscape that permeate Canigó. The poem’s 4,378 lines recount the tragic events that ensue when Gentil, a noble in eleventh-century Catalonia, falls in love with the fairy queen Flordeneu, who places him under a spell on the slopes of Canigou, so that he fails to answer the call to fight against the invading Saracens. Around this narrative, Verdaguer merges real places, people, and events from Catalan history with legends, myths, folktales, and a poetic celebration of the Pyrenean mountains and Canigou in particular: “Mount Canigó is an immense magnolia / That blooms on a spray of the Pyrenees / For bees it has its faeries hovering round / For butterflies, its eagles and its swans / And for its calyx rise its rugged cliffs / Silver in winter and golden in summer / Great goblet where the stars come drink their fragrance.”
I first climbed the sacred mountain in the autumn of 2015, with my old friend Andreu from Barcelona. Andreu is a large, bear-like man who had not walked in serious mountains for some time, and he had never climbed Canigou. He also has asthma, and neither he nor I was entirely confident about his ability to reach the summit. But Andreu is also an ardent Catalanista who has been at the heart of the latest phase of Catalonia’s struggle for independence over the last five years, and his determination was intensified by Catalonia’s imminent regional elections, in which he hoped to see a new radical-nationalist coalition that would defy Madrid’s refusal to allow a referendum on Catalan independence.
We met at Vernet-les-Bains two days before the elections. The next morning we made our way up the mostly boarded-up streets of the out-of-season spa town that Kipling once made famous. From Vernet, Canigou is less impressive than it appears from a greater distance. The summit is difficult to make out along the extended ridge that curves upward above a bare, hollowed-out cliff strewn with rocks and stones, and the mountain’s fanlike shape is enhanced by the numerous smaller ridges, which converge on the summit like natural buttresses. Within half an hour this view had disappeared, as we were walking up a zigzag through a thick forest of pine and fir trees.
It was not until we had been walking for about two hours that Canigou reappeared again, and we saw the specks of Vernet-les-Bains and other towns and villages gleaming in the bright sunshine below. For the rest of the morning we walked mostly in shade, as the dirt path gave way to rocks and stones and curved its way briefly out onto ridges, promontories, and cliff edges before dipping back into the trees. There was no wind, running water, or birdsong, and only the sound of our own voices and footsteps disturbed the silence and stillness. Andreu walked slowly, stopping frequently to rest or take photographs, so that I sometimes walked on ahead. Whenever I was on the point of going back to look for him, he reappeared in his straw hat and red shirt bearing the slogan Ara es l’hora (Now is the time), walking at the same slow, steady pace. By midday we had begun to leave the forest behind us and were panting upward in the sunshine beneath an immaculate blue sky, or picking our way along narrow traverse paths and open trails with the most amazing views of the Conflent Valley and the Mediterranean to our left and the high peaks of the Pyrenees to our right.
In the late afternoon we reached the fork that led up to the summit and down toward the Portalet refuge. We had already decided to leave the summit to the next day, and we trudged down past the marshy remnants of the lake where King Peter III once claimed to have seen a dragon. We shared our table with Joan, a vigorous seventy-five-year-old Catalan from Barcelona, who had come to Canigou with his twenty-six-year-old daughter, Ana, he explained, to bring Catalonia good fortune in Sunday’s elections. We went to bed early, after a dinner table conversation dominated by passionate discussion of politics, referendums, and independence, and the next day we woke up at dawn, just as the sky was turning red far below along the coast toward Perpignan.
After breakfast we headed back up to the fork and along the craggy ridge that led toward the summit, past hikers speaking a babel of languages: French, English, Spanish, and Catalan. Along the way I found Joan conversing with two “Catalans from the North,” from Perpignan. “We want to escape from this shit that is Spain,” he said. “I don’t mean the Spanish—I mean Spain.” The two Frenchmen nodded politely, but I sensed they were not entirely on board with this. When I commented on the range of nationalities present on Canigou that morning, one of them beamed and said plaintively, “But we are all brothers!” In the mountains that morning at least, we were. We had been walking for about an hour when we reached the narrow pile of sharp rocks that led up from the ridge to the summit, and I scrambled up to the little obelisk bearing a quote from the Catalan singer Lluís Llach and an extract from Verdaguer’s poem.
Even though the sun was well up above the horizon, it was so cold that I could hardly feel my hands, and the wind and the narrowness of the summit unnerved me, as I sat down to look at the view. Far below me to the east a luminous plain of beige, brown, and sand dotted with the white patches of towns and cities gave way to the shimmering ocean. To the west the Pyrenees stretched out in all their jagged splendor beyond the metal cross with a Catalan flag attached to it, where Joan and his daughter and some of the other Catalans were draping themselves in flags and taking photographs.
A few minutes later Andreu came lumbering over the rocks at his sloth-like pace and whipped out the unofficial Catalan separatist flag known as the Estelada that he had brought along for the occasion. I sat and shivered while he posed for a photograph to send back to his local asamblea, and I was relieved when we descended from the summit and I was able to feel the sun’s heat again. Andreu, Joan, and Ana were exhilarated by their political pilgrimage to what Joan called “the mythical mountain of Catalonia” and optimistic about the emergence of a pro-independence bloc in the next day’s elections. Their pilgrimage had no obvious religious implications, but Canigou’s “mythical” significance is at least in part due to the melancholy priest who had climbed it so many times. Nations have to be imagined before they can acquire a political form, through language, history, territory, landscape, and tradition, and Verdaguer reminded the Catalan people of what they had been, and could be, as he invited his countrymen to imagine a mountain that he described as “a giant of Spain / Of Spain—and Catalan.”