(...) Gaudí’s relationship with Catholicism — and later with primitive Christianity — must be read against the background of the concordat between Spain and the Vatican, which had only just begun to be implemented when he was born. In 1852, the crown of Isabella II was beginning to totter, and the Holy See wanted to recover the power it had lost through the confiscation of Church property. The agreement sanctified the unity of Spain and gave the Church control over education. Under the concordat, Spanish identity became bound to the prestige of Rome, politically as well as spiritually.

Naturally, the fall of the Bourbons and the Catalans’ experiments in running the Spanish government left the Church in a difficult position. Neither the Savoy monarchy championed by General Prim nor the federalists of the First Republic were inclined to surrender power to Rome — quite the opposite. Moreover, the growth of cities and modern life was beginning to draw families away from religion. For the first time since the fall of Barcelona in the War of the Spanish Succession, Catalonia’s growing strength called Castile’s undisputed pre-eminence into question.

The return of the Bourbons required some form of outside support, especially since the dynasty was returning to Spain having repudiated Isabella II. The instability of the Democratic Sexennium — revolutionary years, to some — would not in itself have been enough to consolidate the Bourbon restoration without Catalonia’s cooperation. The country had gained too much power for Barcelona to be returned to the days of the Bourbon citadel. The Catalans could be driven out of Madrid through political assassinations and Quixotic coups de théâtre, such as General Pavía’s coup. But Spain could no longer be governed without Catalonia.

The cultural impact of the Renaixença was still limited — Gaudí’s earliest writings are in Castilian — but the Jocs Florals were already a phenomenon. Moreover, anticlericalism in Catalonia did not mean a rejection of Christian values. Rather, it was a way for Catalonia to distinguish itself from the official Catholicism of the Spanish state — still identified with the ancien régime — and to protect itself from Madrid’s use of religion to centralise power. It was also a way of aligning Catalonia with modernity, alongside science, industry and urban culture.

Startling though it may sound, Gaudí’s turn towards Catholicism can be read through the same lens as Salvador Dalí’s religious turn after the Civil War. With the Restoration of 1875, Catholicism became Catalonia’s only political instrument for dislodging Castile from the absolute centre of the Spanish story. Under early Francoism, things would be worse still, because in 1939 the prospect of restoring the Bourbons became the lesser evil for a country devastated by fascism and working-class revolution. But the point is that Gaudí would gravitate towards primitive Christianity for the same reasons that Dalí would embrace the mysticism of the dollar as the endurance of Francoism slowly tightened around his throat.

The artist needs to sublimate the contradictions produced by powerlessness and, in Catalonia, powerlessness demands the fanatical intensity with which geniuses embrace their world. The painter Gimeno, for instance, born in 1858, went so far as to learn Aramaic in order to read the Bible in the original. The poet Jacint Verdaguer, the father of modern Catalan literature, likewise sought redemption outside Catholic convention. Towards the end of his life, he was drawn to spiritism and to more primitive forms of Christianity. The trajectories of Gaudí and Verdaguer run parallel in this respect. The only difference is that the architect was younger and could therefore learn from the poet’s downfall.

We should remember that Catalan nationalism was not yet an organised political force when Gaudí and Verdaguer began their careers. I have already described the enormous void left in Catalonia by the spectacular failure of General Prim and the republicans. When Josep Pla writes that Santiago Rusiñol was a sad man, he seems to be describing his own father, who was twenty years younger than the celebrated painter and humorist.

In The Grey Notebook, Pla describes, with a subtle tenderness, the demoralisation spread by the failure of the Catalan progressives after a century of wars and political repression. In his autobiography, Dalí also makes this defeat echo when he sets his cynicism against the threadbare federalism of his father, who was born in the middle of the Sexennium.

Nineteenth-century republicanism was defeated on every front by the supporters of the Bourbons: military, ideological and moral. Of the ideals that had justified the Revolution of 1868 — dubbed ‘the Glorious’ after its seventeenth-century English predecessor — all that remained was the sentence attributed to President Estanislau Figueras before he resigned: ‘I’ve had it up to my balls with the whole lot of us.’ The fact that the Second Republic did not identify itself with the First, and that the arsonists of 1936 had no connection with the popular uprisings of the previous century, also helps to explain, retrospectively, why Gaudí retreated into Christianity.

Like Verdaguer, Gaudí had grown up between two emerging forces: the federal republicans and the Catalan Church. Even under Isabella II, certain figures in the Catalan clergy had gained influence because they offered the crown a semblance of reformism that Castilian churchmen could not provide. The unification of Italy and the fall of Rome to the Piedmontese forces, during Joan Prim’s government, presented the Catalan Church with a political opportunity. While Castilian Catholicism was tied to the losers of every European battle that marked the second half of the nineteenth century, Catalan Catholicism had gradually attached itself to industrialisation, liberalism, Romanticism and even Swiss- and American-style federal republicanism

This stew of forces explains why the Verdaguer who caused a sensation at the Jocs Florals of 1865 — while Gaudí was still in Reus — makes one think that his work might have developed towards a secular, liberal Catalanism. Verdaguer’s earliest poems have an insurrectionary energy that would reappear only during his confrontation with the Barcelona elites at the end of his life, when he wrote In My Own Defence.

The poet from Folgueroles was still in time to choose between the republicans and the clericals, if one may put it that way. It was not until 1868, the same year the Glorious Revolution broke out, that Verdaguer took the decisive step towards becoming a priest. Even then, his choice was not as radical as time has led us to believe. In 1868, he also entered the Jocs Florals with the first draft of Atlantis, the poem that would make him famous in Catalonia and renowned throughout Europe.

The work was originally entitled The Drowned Atlantis and Spain Rising from its Ruins. A decade later, when it was published in its finished form under the simpler title, it was dedicated to the Marquis of Comillas, the great patron of the Restoration, a Castilian who ran his businesses from Barcelona. It might seem that republicanism and the Catalan Church had compatible projects. And I think that is fair to say, if the matter is viewed in national terms. The problem is that after 1875 only the Catalan Church was in a position to try to modernise Spain.

Catalonia had no parties of its own and, after the Sexennium, had been excluded from the struggle for political power in Madrid. But it was the only Catholic nation on the Mediterranean to have industrialised in time. It was an unrivalled testing ground for an attempt to update the Vatican’s discourse: the concordat of 1851, drawn up to guarantee the unity of Spain, was now in Catalonia’s hands. Moreover, precisely because Catalonia had had no state since 1714, it had developed very strong family values, which could serve as a mould for adapting Christianity to capitalist society.

By the time Gaudí set up his office at number 11 Carrer del Call, the almond trees had already been beaten bare. Barcelona’s haute bourgeoisie had been unseated from Madrid politics and from the Spanish army — assuming it had ever had a chance of riding either of them under General Prim. Left without protection, it struck a bargain with the Bourbons and signed up to the Church’s moral project in order to give its economic ambitions a minimum of institutional support.

This history must be kept in mind if Gaudí’s evolution is to be understood. Gaudí takes refuge in God as the country drives him to take refuge in his work, because the artist is an unbeliever who can only manage to believe in God through his own creation. Like Verdaguer, he begins to radicalise as he watches the Church’s modernising project become corrupted and realises that he will never be able to cleanse the fortunes he receives from patrons such as Eusebi Güell. In short, he embraces God as he begins to anticipate the cataclysm of 1936.

The poet Joan Maragall, younger and more pusillanimous, also watches the bourgeoisie and the Church betray the hopes of the people, and dies of grief after writing The City of Forgiveness and The Burnt Church in the wake of the Tragic Week. In the youthful project of 1867 denouncing the abandonment of Poblet, Gaudí and his friends portrayed the Church and Spanish liberalism as equally negligent and anti-Catalan. By the end of his life, Gaudí knows that both Catalan alternatives have foundered, and searches desperately for God.

Gaudí, then, does not become an ultra-Catholic because he goes mad or falls ill — or because he sells himself to capital, as Juan José Lahuerta likes to insinuate. He commits himself to the Church because, with the liberal republican project in complete ruins, art and Christian faith become the only way to give continuity to the country’s history. One need only watch Objective: Sagrada Família, the documentary series produced by Barcelona’s public broadcaster to mark the centenary of his death. I was watching an episode the other day and discovered that one of the glaziers working on the basilica is called Vila Delclòs, just like me!

Mentioning my surnames here would be an act of vanity were it not for the fact that, for a century, the State has been disfiguring Catalonia by encouraging successive waves of migration. One thing that becomes immediately apparent when you enter the world of the Sagrada Família is that this is a church built by Catalans, for Catalans, even though masses of foreigners come to see it from all over the world. In a country that has seemed for so many centuries to be on the verge of disappearing into oblivion, the church’s connection with tradition is inherent in its magic. Today it is the surnames; under Franco, it was the four bars of the Catalan flag worked into the Nativity façade. Politics changes, but the problems of countries tend to remain the same.

Gaudí works this commitment to the country into his art from his earliest years: at Guimerà’s gatherings and at the table of the anarchist Fargas; when he allows Eusebi Güell to court him and when he strengthens his ties with the artisan dynasties of old Barcelona; even when he works for the friends of his beloved — and desired — Pepeta in Mataró. In art, everything is thought and cosmic calculation. Decisions must yield a higher return than in any business, however poetic they may appear.

Lahuerta is right when he says that Gaudí had no intention of resurrecting the world of the craftsmen, or of saving the trade of his father and grandfather, or indeed those of the specialists he employed in the old city. Although Gaudí discovered the mystery of forms and the power man exerts over materials in the family workshop, he was no nostalgic. Like every artist, he was above all a practical man. The artist must keep his feet planted on the ground, even when his thoughts are in heaven.

To remind us of this, Lahuerta opens his book Fire and Ashes with a text by Gaudí attacking loss-making buildings. He takes Gaudí’s youthful notebooks and quotes a passage against architects who squander technology and money in an attempt to move the public with overloaded aesthetics. The professor stresses Gaudí’s commitment to industrial Catalonia in order to portray him as the ultimate artist in the pay of plutocracy. But Gaudí does not want to tame the Catalans, as the Church and the bourgeoisie do. He wants to raise them up, connect them with history and draw them away from French and Castilian sensibilities. He believes the Catalans will only be saved if the country can develop an idea of modernity of its own.

Art is the last chance of redemption for defeated peoples, and Gaudí throws himself into it with ever greater fury as the country’s political options shrink or run out. (...)

There is a scene in Breaking the Waves that came back to me when I saw Sánchez embracing the Pope. The heroine begins to pray desperately because her husband is ill, and everything goes from bad to worse, but God says nothing. Finally, when God answers, she asks him, in anguish: ‘Where were you?’ And he replies, with an irony that struck me as brilliant: ‘I cannot be only for you. I have a great deal of work to do.’ The idea that God cannot occupy everything, because if he cancelled out man he would cancel out his own work, and so cancel out himself, touches the very marrow of the Divine Comedy, to put it with old Dante, and also of the Human Comedy, to put it with Balzac.

Artists know better than anyone that man is not an extra in Creation, but a free and dangerous collaborator, capable of lifting up or bringing down God’s work. That is why Gaudí did not build a church like the others, but a new temple, almost irreverent, conceived to renew Catholicism and the faith the Catalans had lost while chasing the glitter of American gold and absorbing the cruelties of geopolitics. Gaudí believed that the Church would either be condemned or saved in Catalonia, because no people in Europe was so pressured and so confused by the madness of the modern world.

As now, Gaudí’s Catalonia found itself lost in a world polarised between southern powers sustained by the desperation of the poor and northern powers sustained by the greed of the rich. The architect tried to adapt to his society. But in the end he concentrated on rising above his time. Around him he saw only pacts between faithless colossi sucking the soul out of his people. Whether because of the concordat between the Vatican and Isabella II to secure the unity of Spain, or because of the pact between the Catalan bourgeoisie and the Bourbons to secure the monarchy in exchange for the peninsular market, each attempt to save order only tangled the skein further.

The Sagrada Família is an attempt to raise a form that rests on no lie. It comes from the will to reconnect the Catalans with an international symbol that cannot be perverted. That is why Gaudí accepted that he would never finish the temple, and that is why his work has survived the arsonists of the Civil War, Francoist repression and the tourist exploitation encouraged by the hypocrisy of the left. If the Sagrada Família has caught the attention of the Japanese — another people threatened by the force of the American mirage — it is precisely because of the sense of purity it radiates. Gaudí wanted to inspire the Catalans and attract a little of God’s attention, so that he might look after his country.

There is no need to explain how Gaudí’s efforts ended. I am scarcely baptised. In my family they wanted nothing to do with priests, because of the Vatican’s perverse support for Franco, and they did not draw many distinctions between cassocks and the anarchist arsonists of the FAI. It has taken a great deal to lift our heads again, to recover the sense of continuity that makes hope possible. The Sagrada Família has always been there, offering warmth, growing through the anonymous contributions of the people, while official Catholicism lost strength as Europe became more democratic. One need only travel to Naples and Palermo to understand the disenchantment and misery that the geopolitical pacts between Rome and Madrid have brought to our side of the Mediterranean.

If the Pope blesses the Sagrada Família in Spanish, he will not betray only Gaudí. He will betray the historical and moral function of the temple itself. Catalan is the language of the Sagrada Família because Catalans are children of God like any other people, and because Gaudí did not raise that work for it to end up serving as the backdrop to the same political and religious lie he had wanted to overcome. Gaudí was not arrested during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera because he wanted to play the hero. He avoided Spanish even when addressing the king, out of the same love of detail and of roots that made the Sagrada Família possible.

The lies of the parties that administered the Catalan independence referendum, and the cynicism of those who backed Madrid’s direct rule, destroyed the democracy that had been so hard to build. That is why the Pope is now going to the Congress of Deputies to play his part in an unprecedented political act. With the Sagrada Família, the risk is deeper, because it is not political but spiritual. If Gaudí’s temple is blessed in Spanish — the language the state has tried to impose on Catalonia since the Counter-Reformation — it will not be merely an insult to the Catalans. It will be a lost historical opportunity for reconciliation. The Catholic Church itself and the Spanish government will place themselves under the divine gaze that Gaudí wanted to invoke.

Perhaps they will remind the Catalans that actions have consequences, and that God, from time to time, watches us and even needs us, even if he has a great deal of work to do and cannot come and bail us out.

Escribano, who is a friend of Salvador Illa and during the pandemic obtained a contract worth almost €30 million to supply ventilators, delivered the usual Spanish speech of a Castilian who feels more entrepreneurial than Henry Ford. The chairman of EM&M, who until recently was Indra’s largest private investor, leads Spanish exports of military technology: he is the perfect bridgehead for the BOE economy to complete its landing in Catalonia. European subsidies and the despair of the elites who inherited the Marshall Plan have made the Spain of Article 155 salivate. The Crown needs resources to finance the new political comedy, and Madrid’s vacuum cleaner has burned through the state’s capacity to generate a productive economy.

Escribano’s event consisted of tempting those present with the classic Spanish discourse of the lluvia de millones — the shower of millions — now being pumped out by the news cycle. The war in Ukraine and the financial needs of the United States have turned European defence into the latest form of social-democratic pedantry. What is presented as a strategic industry to protect freedom is in fact a worm-like tactic to weld Europe’s submission to the United States — and Catalonia’s submission to Castile — under cover of the Russian bogeyman. One need only look at the way Catalan leaders grovel: men who said they wanted independence and have ended up placing their cadres in state companies and licking the hand of the rivals who put them in prison, with no larger idea in their heads.

You do not have to scratch very deep to find familiar names such as Marta Pascal of PDeCAT, Roger Torrent of ERC or the Pujol family itself — through Ficosa — in the Spanish defence gold rush. A business that could have helped to rebalance the power relations between Catalans and Castilians is turning into a little raffle for opportunists and fantasists. That Castilians do not consider the possibility that a solid economy needs a cultural and political substratum is nothing new. But in Catalonia we know that the industrial revolution did not happen by chance, that Gaudí and the architects of modernist Barcelona did not appear by accident, and that SEAT and property speculation were a stopgap used to finance the integration of the Castilians whom Francoism brought in to keep watch over the country. The military industry is the sordid last resort of a system in decline because it has failed to keep its promises.

The Spanish and European elites have entered the phase of cynical and avaricious madness that precedes every war, and Catalonia will be making a mistake if it commits itself to a project whose only purpose is the survival of a corrupt and decrepit system. The raw truth is that the German car industry is no longer competitive, and that the reconversion of the German world will go nowhere if it is carried out on the statist terms desired by the elites forged by the Marshall Plan. European independence, in Spain, will either be built with Catalonia or not at all. Berlin will suffer if it once again flees forward and commits, under a different rhetoric, the same mistake as the Kaiser and, not long afterwards, the Nazis. To rebuild Europe, Germany needs the Catalan base, the Romanesque and Gothic substratum of the Mediterranean. The Sagrada Família is the Parthenon of Europe: the ripe fruit of Carolingian culture and of its Augustinian unity.

The counter-reformation fantasies of the Castilians, promoted by subsidised pamphlets, just like the visits of popes controlled by the Francoist and South American Church, are alien to the history of the country and to the history of all the nations of Europe’s great south. The Spanish state belongs to a misshapen world that is sinking. Replacing social Keynesianism with military Keynesianism will serve only to shore up the status quo with the desperation of immigrants. Catalonia does not have the strength to prevent official Europe from committing suicide, but it does have the national consciousness and the breadth of spirit to build the foundations of the future on the margins of the dusk. Just as the nineteenth century killed God, this century will kill money as the measure of all things. What feeds the new Spanish pelotazo are the dregs of a world besieged by forces of life that cannot fit inside the established international order.

Russia, Iran, Israel and Catalonia — apparently so different from one another, even incompatible — remind us that there are historical energies which no obsolete financial system will be able to contain. However much it now plays at toy soldiers.

If Sánchez can lecture the United States and Israel, it is thanks to Catalonia, because he knows everyone would rather put up with his theatrics than face a security problem in Spain. Madrid has sold the historic ports of the old Crown of Aragon to China. It has filled the Catalan Countries with Moroccans and South Americans, with the complicity of the local parties and newspapers it has kept in its pocket since the Transition. Now it wants to turn Catalonia into the hub of a new arms industry subsidised by Europe, but in Castilian. One of the first things Sánchez did on coming to power after October 1 was instruct municipalities to be flexible with residency registration. The idea was to trap Catalans between the effects of Article 155 and the spectre of fascism. Madrid did not expect the Americans to abandon Eisenhower’s old Europe and move into the twenty-first century.

Orriols has been allowed through because the original plan — to restore the two-party system as though the independence movement had never existed — did not work. A few years ago the PSOE was telling Brussels that October 1 had been no more than a tantrum by pensioners traumatised by Franco; now the Socialists must be explaining that Aliança Catalana is merely a local expression of the polarisation America’s civil war has produced in Europe. The reassuring lies Madrid tells Brussels closely resemble the ones a subordinate Barcelona tells Madrid. The Castilians like it when Catalans speak their language — and when we say we are just like them — but the French are terrified when we stand up for ourselves. For Europe, Catalans in the Middle Ages are what the Jews were to the Roman Empire: the memory of an alternative history. And in times of uncertainty, alternatives always inspire fear.

Europe thinks it has a problem with immigrants, but above all it has a problem with states, and especially with the French model of the state, which denies the nations of the continent so that it can extract their resources, just as it did in the colonies. Ripoll has not become a symbol because it expresses the condition of the modern West in some picturesque way. Ripoll has force because it reminds Catalans that Europe, like Spain and France, is incapable of sustaining historical and political continuity without dissolving it inside pyramidal structures that devour and denature it. If I can write that Ripoll is like Cadaqués or Reus, it is because the country always goes in search of a clean source of irradiation when Barcelona falls into the hands of invaders, wherever they may come from. The comedy of the peasant taking refuge in his farmhouse that Pla liked to perform, for instance, was a way of treating as muslims the Castilian Francoists occupying the city.

The danger facing Orriols’s party, and the Catalans who will vote for it, is that they may believe too much in transient fashions. Aliança must take care not to become an imported label. The temptation to create a miniature CiU, even more provincial and with no foothold either in Madrid or in Brussels, can be seen from a mile off. Jordi Pujol and Josep Tarradellas subordinated the country to international dialectics. They struck bargains with the forces of the Cold War and not only ended up tied hand and foot: they also destroyed the Catalan character of the left. Now the danger is that the country’s more centrist positions will be dismantled before they are able to adapt to the new times. For the moment, Orriols has avoided a head-on clash with Gabriel Rufián and Jordi Graupera. But Spanish dynamics will go on pushing towards a form of polarisation that fits neatly into the European one. In other words, a form that is easy to ignore because it is redundant and ridiculous.

Aliança should polarise only against the country’s adversaries, against everything that tries to expel us from history or turn us into a decorative anachronism. Precisely because the foundations of Spain lie in Catalonia, Madrid cannot function without spreading its own problems across our land. The same phenomenon can be seen in Europe. The Americans export their civil war to the continent so that the empire is not blown apart by its internal tensions. If today’s Europe were not a product of American imperialism, the internal problems of the United States would not destabilise us as they do. Catalonia has the cultural depth and the historical experience to separate the wheat from the chaff better than any other country on the continent. As the Pax Americana dissolves and history returns, European identities will emerge with increasing force. The Mediterranean, too, will grow in importance in relation to the Atlantic, which is the sea of the Castilians.

Having a politics of our own would help us enormously, not only to survive the storms that are coming but also to shape and set an example to the other nations of the continent. The alternative is that Catalonia once again pays the bills of the Spanish state, while Europe ends up paying those of the United States. For only when Catalans cease to be the scapegoat of the Spanish world — and the Castilians lose the system that has allowed them to postpone their contradictions — will Europe be forced to look at itself differently. Only if Catalonia has enough personality to overflow Brussels, as it has so often overflowed Madrid, will Europe once again learn to see itself outside the American umbrella and beyond the ageing structures of the states that fragmented it into artificial units. The Pax Americana is not the only thing coming to an end: the extension the United States granted to the Peace of Westphalia and to the Spanish empire, the oldest in Europe, is ending too.

Without the history that explains the phenomenon of Ripoll, the European Union will end up hollowed out from within, or else edge towards break-up — as Spain so often does.

Traumatised by seeing the metropolitan area turned into a kind of cultural Hiroshima, Catalan politicians assumed that the pre-war journalists were writing about a lost country and tried to turn them into a bit of folklore. But it soon became clear that their way of connecting with the world was more contemporary than that of the mummies filling the podiums. Catalonia’s independence push—the so-called procés—grew out of a deep cultural and historical shift rather than an economic crisis, as the propaganda claims. That is why the indignados, so idealistic at first, ended up installed in ministries, while Catalan politicians—so pragmatic and so timid—ended up in prison.

If Catalonia had surrendered, or if the procés had been a mere pantomime, Madrid would long ago have had a PP government propped up by Laura Borràs, as my friends Salvador Sostres and Bernat Dedéu argued for a few years ago. But a country cannot stop existing, nor can it forget its history because a constitution says so, or because Brussels issues a directive, or because you turn it into a prison full of immigrants. Sánchez will hardly find the moment to step aside, because he will come under increasing pressure from the judges and will have ever more room to defend himself by picking at the Catalan wound.

Spain will only be able to turn the page on the events of 1 October 2017 when it allows Catalans to be as Catalan as they want to be, or when it traumatises them again with a war more brutal than the one in the twentieth century. Attempts to pretend that Catalonia is a free country and that Spain has completed the democratic process that began in 1978 will come to nothing. They will end, like the gesturing of the indignados, with a lurch in the opposite direction—that is, towards nostalgia for dictatorship and anti-Europeanism. The immigration card will not have the same effect it had sixty years ago: the masses have lost political power, and Franco and the first PSOE governments could use immigrants as settlers; the people arriving now can only be used to provoke public disorder.

Sánchez makes Spain look like a democratic and European country because most of his political and propaganda support comes out of the Barcelona world, but buying off Catalan stooges only works when the population is too frightened to think. Castilian culture, like the demography of Castile, has been weakening in the wake of Madrid’s obsession with controlling Catalonia, and this, far from stabilising Spain, makes it weaker and more unstable. For the moment, Sánchez looks very clever because he feeds off everyone’s problems, even America’s, but geopolitics too will begin to push him against the ropes, as will the spread of the Catalan conflict to Valencia and Mallorca.

Madrid’s interests do not pass through Europe in the same way Barcelona’s do, and this contradiction will become increasingly difficult to conceal by polarising political debate between left and right. For Sánchez and the Madrid left, Europeanism is a strategy—sometimes a tactic for making the Catalans dance to its tune—whereas for Barcelona it is a structural reality. In that sense, it is rather sad to see the metropolitan left helping to engender monsters, repeating history as if it were Groundhog Day. Sánchez is bread for today and hunger for tomorrow. He encourages everyone to reduce what should be a great intellectual and political battle over Spain to a simple sectarian and miserable battle for Madrid.

Faced with 1 October, Spain has taken refuge in one of those quixotic flights that corrupt institutions and poison the disputes and problems of its peoples. Democracy is the only symbolic capital the state can still fossilise without seeming out of place in Europe. While in much of the continent the end of a political order is being managed, here the effort goes into recovering a historical continuity, into reconnecting with a forbidden past. Sánchez will not be able to conceal that in this respect too we are out of step with the dynamics of the Castilian world. If anywhere in Europe people are thinking outside the worn-out circuits of a declining world, it is among those who write and speak in Catalan.

The international system is collapsing faster than the values that once sustained it, and that strain clouds our reading of the past. As the film unfolds, it becomes hard to believe the script does not want you to sympathise with the Nazis. There is even a perverse irony in Göring being played by Russell Crowe, the star of Gladiator. In the end, Hitler’s deputy emerges as the film’s hero by default, the character who comes out of the farce most intact. The film sets out as a defence of the foundations of the liberal order and ends up sketching a kind of second Versailles: a landscape in which Germany is destroyed by the contradictions of a decomposing order that needs a total loser in order to begin again.

The film seems intent on recalling what Albert Speer wrote in Spandau prison: that Germany’s misfortune was not having an imagination capable of channelling the power of its technology and its army. What becomes clear, though, is that no country was prepared for the possibilities offered by modernity when the Second World War broke out. Germany simply let itself be carried along by the haste induced by fear and pain, and succumbed to the temptation to reorder—too forcefully—the world that oppressed it, before that world was ripe to fall. That, it seems to me, is the best lesson Europeans can draw from the film.

Nuremberg did not merely purport to judge criminals who were condemned in advance; above all, it fixed which European nations possessed the moral right to exist. I think Germany and Catalonia are the two nations on the continent most damaged by the geopolitics of Nuremberg. For that very reason, they can be decisive in a re-reading of the European past. In Catalonia things also unravelled a century ago, and it too has paid the price of the competing narratives shaped by the United States and Russia. Spain’s political crisis derives from the difficulty a decomposing order has in containing Catalonia’s voice. In Spanish media, Sílvia Orriols is widely described as the leader of a far-right party, yet her speeches echo what Lluís Companys said in his last address before going into exile: that even the name “Catalans” would be erased by the fascist army that was coming.

No politician in the country has exposed herself to Spanish repression since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War as Orriols has done. In the October 2017 referendum, Catalonia still tried to fit itself into the liberal framework born of Nuremberg. Orriols’s speeches in parliament have travelled so far—and circulate so widely on WhatsApp—because hers is the only voice that does not appear resigned to letting Catalonia die, trapped inside a decrepit system of values incapable of renewal. The Germans, too, are slowly—more slowly than Catalonia—abandoning their silent leadership of the continent.

Counterintuitive as it may sound, when the seams of an old order begin to split, that is precisely when one must tread most carefully. The hardest part always comes when everything collapses and the absence of a system of balances causes opportunists to lose all sense of limits. Sílvia Orriols has carried forward the momentum of the Catalan referendum, but she will not be able to save the country on her own. Her rhetoric on immigration has broken taboos inherited from Francoism. It has helped make Catalans aware that Europe did not begin in 1945, and that Catalonia—just as Lluís Companys said before the Gestapo arrested him—does not have to die for the world to be a better place. But the language of “sense and order” will soon hit its ceiling and will be easy to instrumentalise.

The country will only find a way out if Sílvia Orriols’s incorruptible Catalanism spreads organically across different political sensibilities. One thing Oriol Junqueras did well, for example, when the Catalan left was on the rise, was not to try to wrest Barcelona’s mayoralty from Junts per Catalunya, Carles Puigdemont’s political home. The decision cost him his party’s momentum, but it helped shield the exiled president. It also pushed the PSC closer to choosing between Franco’s heirs and Catalonia — a choice it has long tried to avoid. The pressure to remove Pedro Sánchez from La Moncloa is not, by chance, so different from the pressure unionism applied to prevent Xavier Trias from becoming mayor of Barcelona.

As Enric Juliana explained very recently, Spain is being left alone with its ghosts in a Europe in crisis. The state is looking for ways to start again from zero at Catalonia’s expense, as it did with the civil war and Francoism. Pedro Sánchez and Carles Puigdemont are the last two obstacles, and Aliança Catalana should not help to bring them down. Trying to replace Junts per Catalunya in Barcelona, as Sílvia Orriols appears to want to do, would be a mistake. In the capital, what is needed is a discourse—and a team—that unequivocally challenges the butchery that Nuremberg’s moral order has inflicted on Catalan identity. Failing that, it is better to work inland and let the order collapse under its own weight.

We should be careful not to move from the old “Saint Pancras, Health and Work” mindset—half Catholic talisman, half social-democratic common sense—to today’s “Saint Pancras, Health and Deportations”, now fashionable across Europe. What has been done in the name of security and immigration under cover of Article 155, after the Catalan referendum, needs to be properly explained. Carles Puigdemont should in no way be made to pay for it. As the old order gives way, Barcelona’s PSC will drift closer to Junts per Catalunya, just as Pedro Sánchez did in Madrid. Spain will try every possible combination, and none will work without Catalan consent. As in Europe with the Germans, Catalonia is the key to Spain. And that key will grow in value, opening doors not yet visible as complications multiply.

Rosalia’s case is a difficult one, because her problems are not merely emotional: she’s a Catalan in a Spain still wounded by the independence movement, and she’s operating in a world seemingly destined for inner conflict. The idea of exploring her personal crisis through the crisis of the West was a piercing one. I, at least, can relate to that—I’ve spent my life chasing the same theme in my books, though keeping the world limited to Catalonia. Her decision to narrate her small dramas through a series of saints, using Baroque imagery, strikes me as brilliant. As brilliant as what Springsteen did when he locked himself in a room to confront his fears — and the dark side of the American dream — through a gallery of outcasts, drifters, and loners.

The problem, it seems to me, is that Rosalia didn’t dare carry her intuition to the end, because she felt that her roots were an obstacle. Instead of making the record in Montserrat — right next to her home — or in Granada’s Alhambra — if she wanted to play with multiculturalism and flamenco — she made it in Madrid. The disappointment some of her fans have felt, I think, stems from that. In seeking a base that would guarantee international resonance, Rosalia abandoned the epic of purity and fragility she had set out to explore halfway. Without her interviews explaining the concept, and the visual world built around it, the album would be even harder to understand or value.

A radio critic said that Rosalia has made a record of ‘coplas’ — an Andalusian form refined in Bourbon Madrid — filtered through Björk in thirteen languages, as if she were a 21st-century Rocío Jurado. I cannot claim to be an expert on Spanish music, but the songs lack the melodic hook and precise detachment of Motomami. The lyrics are weak, and the song in Catalan, Divinize, sounds as if it were written with Google Translate: it lacks the clever simplicity of ‘Milionària’ or the emotional depth of ‘G3N15’. The whole album hangs halfway between confession and performance. Its sense of transcendence recalls that affected dramatism which, in Franco’s day, Catalans dismissed as an ‘espanyolada’ [an unsophisticated display of Spanishness]. The most genuine things to emerge from the record are its Baroque imagery — and the self-serving praise of The Guardian, The Times and La Vanguardia.”

I’m not sure Rosalia realised the ghosts she was summoning when she placed Baroque aesthetics at the album’s centre. The Counter-Reformation is convenient for selling Spanishness abroad, especially now that the West is going through a moral crisis. But inwardly, it represents the Castilian attempt to cover the fractured soul of the empire with the gold of the Americas. It’s no coincidence that Charles V went to Montserrat whenever he faced trouble, or that he spent more time in Barcelona than in any other city on the Peninsula. The Hispanic empire, built on the patterns of the Catalan one and later seized by Castile, is now trying to reinvent itself as a nation to save face. That’s why Rosalia’s album has provoked such unanimous, faintly oily enthusiasm among the guardians of order.

Rosalia doesn’t need to know all this, but she does need to treat her intuitions more sincerely if she wants to avoid being drawn into a political conflict she will never escape. Without meaning to — or without the inner strength to rise above opportunists — she has allowed herself to be carried along by a Spain that always reinvents itself out of its own decay. Rosalia, who wanted to enlighten us by speaking of her fragility, has ended up adding to the confusion of a world constantly putting on make-up to avoid looking in the mirror. Instead of testing herself against the raw elements, as Springsteen did in Nebraska, she has chosen to sing from the temple of appearance and merchandising — without becoming Michael Jackson, who never let himself be used politically.

We live surrounded by recycled images and myths, seeking redemption in the very light that blinds us. Lux, tellingly, is a mirror of our times: a mass without much faith, a void without enough silence, a fluttering beauty sinking under the weight of the gold so many clever people hope to get for free.

Until quite recently, it seemed that the only European politician unafraid of being a nationalist was the Catalan Jordi Pujol. Even today, there are times when it feels like the only nationalism to have truly believed in Europe—sometimes even in the idea of plurinational states—has been the Catalan one. In Catalonia, nationalism was not propped up by the blackmail of an ETA-style insurgency, as in the Basque Country, nor could it hide behind the idealism of extractive policies cloaked in the grandeur of old imperial metropolises. Catalans have no state—beyond Andorra—and this has often made it easier for state-funded pundits to label us Nazis.

Had the regional political class not filled up with well-fed yes-men, we might say that the 1st of October was a missed chance to redefine Europe. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Catalan referendum may well be the single political event that has most forcefully challenged the institutions—and mental limits—of the continent. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc reconnected us to history through the East, and expired the narcotic heroism of Hollywood cinema. October 1st, in its own way, made clear that the European Union’s moral superiority is little more than a propaganda trick—one designed to mask the decadent impulses of the old empires that compose it.

It’s no coincidence that, since 2017, the EU has become a club of states increasingly easy to manipulate—and divide—by external powers. After the Second World War, the US and Russia turned nationalism into a stigma, and Europeans embraced all kinds of progressive ideologies that betrayed the thread of their own history. Now, when I see Italy and Hungary aligning to support Vox, I can’t help thinking the pendulum is swinging to the other extreme. Italy is a state, but it’s never truly been a nation. Hungary is a nation, even if its state does not match its national borders.

Though it’s convenient to forget, Vox was born as a reactionary response to the events of October 1st. Sooner or later, Castile—and Europe—will have to choose which path to follow. Both the United States and Russia prefer a Europe fragmented into states—preferably authoritarian and aggressively nationalist. Nations, for all their particularisms, can share a mystique: democracy, Christianity. The interests of states, as Richelieu once said, respect nothing. In that sense, Vox is a party fed by both American and Russian imperialism, much like Cold War-era Francoism and the relativism that paved the way for Podemos and its micro-ideologies.

October 1st, by contrast, draws on a thousand years of history and links up with the bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth century that made Europe the mould for the modern world. It’s no surprise that the idea of a democratic European empire made up of seasoned old nations holds no appeal in Washington or Moscow. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t appeal to us. Soon enough, Spain will run into a contradiction that Castilians didn’t see coming. Just as in the sixteenth century Catalans lacked the strength to go anywhere without them, now they will find they can’t go anywhere without us. Europe will once again be redefined in Spain—or rather, in the Hispanic March, which is where it all began.

To put it in the smallest and most concrete of terms: without Catalan—which is still not an official EU language—Spain will drift ever closer to Morocco and Mexico. And without the Iberian puzzle, Italy and France too will be absorbed into the global currents of the Arab and Latin American worlds. This might sound hyperbolic. But Spain’s complexity has always been a tragic mirror of Europe’s diversity. The old nations of Europe must learn to relate to one another—and to respect one another—beyond the clumsy machinery of states. Otherwise, once again, it will be foreign powers who turn us into a battlefield.

While Morocco sharpens both its military and its nationalism, Spain has disarmed itself demographically and spiritually, in order to paper over the reality that Catalans remain second-class citizens. Eighty years ago, a Castilian had more in common—culturally and economically—with a Moroccan than with a Catalan. Today, Castilians and Catalans are more alike than ever. But this only leaves Spain dangerously exposed to the growing power of North Africa.

Like France, Spain has gradually worn down the values that once made it impregnable, simply to avoid facing the question of its internal diversity. Europe may have traded Christianity for democracy, but in the southern part of the continent, democratic values have served more as a wrecking ball for history and tradition than a foundation to strengthen them. All the weaknesses that threaten Europe reach their deepest point in its south.

Algeria and Morocco are at each other’s throats, locked in an arms race fed by both Russia and the United States. But the Cold War is now receding, and Washington and Moscow are likely to draw closer together as they move to contain China. Just as France and Britain allied against Germany in two wars—after centuries of bloodshed between them—Russians and Americans may find themselves united in the end to hold the Chinese at bay.

The Poles—often likened to the Catalans during Hitler’s era—have built the most formidable army in Europe, fearing they might be sold out once again. But Spain is not Poland. It has weakened its Christian core and never achieved linguistic unity—not even under Franco, nor under the generals of the nineteenth century. More importantly, the true civilizational frontier of the European Union is not in the north, but in the south however the traumas of the last century, and the propaganda that clings to them, may obscure it.

Spain ought to embrace its internal diversity and strengthen it. Castile cannot hold off North Africa on its own. Its interior has been hollowed out to feed Madrid and dilute the Catalan Countries with its own population; the demographic tables on Wikipedia are enough to confirm this. Spain could become a true geopolitical unit if the Spanish deep state—and Barcelona’s grown-up leaders—were to realise that the Catalan independence movement, setting aside the lies, cheap propaganda, and folklorism of the past twenty years, was a step in that direction. Such a geopolitical union, in fact, could even serve as a template for the future of the European Union.

Impoverishing Catalonia, with all the weight of history that it carries, will prevent Spain from becoming the mid-sized power it could be—capable of defending itself and safeguarding the EU’s Mediterranean flank. For now, the north of the continent may find this amusing, as it always has looked down on Catholic nations, but in time, European unity won’t be able to afford it. Without a strong frontier facing the Muslim world, Europe will end up sold and carved up between the Russians and the Americans—who already have their hands full with China.

Instead of hurling insults at Trump, Spanish newspapers might do well to understand that Aznar is no different from Bush or Obama. His Madrid-centred project belongs to yesterday’s world, just like Zapatero, who now lobbies for China. As for Catalonia, President Illa should be more concerned about Morocco’s fighter jet purchases than about Sílvia Orriols’ speeches. Puigdemont’s exile is misleading: it’s become a pathetic circus in which everyone—Brussels included—is taking part. But we should be asking ourselves why the discourse of Aliança Catalana came out of Ripoll, and not from Covadonga.

Catalonia has always been the Achilles’ heel of the Spanish state—and it will be of Europe too, if the continent tries to rearm while trampling the Catalans. Language separates men from beasts, and that’s why it is an irreplaceable lever for any army intending to defend a territory. If the Catalan language doesn’t play some role in Europe’s defence, it will wither away—there is no question about that. But the void it leaves won’t be merely cultural or folkloric. It will become a strategic threat to the entire continent. Even the French ought to see that.

As Cutillas says, Italy is Europe’s great failed state. It is a marvellous but defenceless country that has lived exposed for five centuries, and into which half the continent has gone looting without scruple. Much as Bernat Metge did a century earlier in Barcelona, Machiavelli sees the collapse coming and tries to avert it by sharpening his pen –or, at the very least, by sounding the alarm. In the end, the famous author of The Prince will triumph as a writer. But as an Italian and as a politician he is the cuckold left to pay for the drinks.

The foreword makes clear that most of the relevant Spaniards Machiavelli knew spoke Catalan. It also underlines that the great inspiration for his political thought was Cesare Borgia. Cutillas has read Mediterranean historians such as Alan Ryder and David Abulafia, and he knows that the Catalans not only tried to save Italy but also helped to sink it, as they attempted to sort out their own affairs through its wealth. As Cutillas stresses, The Prince cannot be read without understanding Cesare Borgia. The problem is that to explain his figure—without ending up writing novels—would require academics to delve more deeply into the relationship between Italy and Catalonia.

Although the introductory study does not say so, I cannot help venturing that the Borgias’ political culture was tied to the Compromise of Caspe and to the traumatic lessons that flowed from it. It is not only that the papal family began its ascent under King Martin and then operated with its own agenda under the Trastámara kings. As Cutillas observes, it is significant that the reproaches Machiavelli directs at the Florentine elites are the same ones some Catalan historians have levelled at Barcelona’s ruling classes a century earlier. It is also striking how Italy’s perennial drama echoes Catalonia’s.

According to Cutillas, the strongest idea in The Prince is that without popular support there is no way to establish a stable government. The claim is simple and may sound a little soft-hearted, but seen up close it has subversive consequences, in the sense that it works both ways. If the prince can be more or less cynical, more or less ruthless, yet still needs the support of the people to perpetuate his rule, this means that the people are never entirely defenceless—and that they can never be considered entirely free of blame either. Seen this way, the scepticism of Mediterranean peoples falls into better context, and so does Machiavelli’s thinking.

Now that the European Union says it wants to enter the arms race, it would not hurt to reread Machiavelli. The Mediterranean gave birth to the modern world, but the monsters it created trampled over its own legacy, and we are still feeling the effects. The bellicosity of Brussels politicians reminds me of the Vienna of The Radetzky March and the Madrid of the Cuban War. I am not yet sure whether these twilight delusions will open the doors to a new Europe or merely bring more ignominy for Italy and Spain. Even so, although Meloni is bound by state debt and Silvia Orriols by Madrid’s grip on Catalonia, both seem to have understood—like Donald Trump—that the best way forward is to trust in the nation and bind oneself to its wisdom and its strength

The most illuminating moment of the foreword comes when Cutillas recalls that Cesare Borgia’s citizen militias wore the colours of the senyera. The prologue’s author and translator explains the impact this had on Machiavelli, who was used to foreign mercenary armies hired by the Florentine elites. Perhaps it would have been interesting to recall that Cesare was eliminated by Ferdinand II of Aragon, another Catalan who also appears in The Prince and who did not quite come out on top either. The first king of Spain and the son of the last Borgia pope are the purest expression of the two schools of power that emerged from premodern Barcelona, split between Italy and Castile. Reading Cutillas, I find myself seeing them re-emerge within the West in the confrontation between the United States and Europe. But that would be another matter altogether.

While the media showers Fainé with praise, it’s essential to understand the deeper reasons behind this tribute. Fainé, though seemingly untouchable, is a figure shaped by a history of caution and control—one that comes with its own shadow of decline. No one can fully feel secure within the Spanish state, and Fainé, above all, understands the importance of maintaining order, ensuring that no one steps out of line. But the recent wave of praise feels less like a celebration of his power and more like the remnants of a system in decline. To me, it feels like the wreckage left behind by a world dissolving.

The president of the La Caixa Foundation is not merely the last influential figure from a crumbling regime. He represents the final vestiges of a century-and-a-half-old pact between the bourgeoisie of Barcelona and the Spanish monarchy. This agreement, forged in the wake of failed revolutions, saw Catalonia give up on leading Spanish politics in exchange for dominance over its economy. The metaphors of Catalonia as Spain’s “locomotive” or “ship” stem from this forgotten pact.

If the independence referendum arose from an attempt to prolong political Catalanism through sentimental exaltation disguised as audacity, then the praise showered on Fainé suggests we are witnessing yet another headlong rush—this time disguised as economic management. Just as political Catalanism never renounced independence but never took the steps to achieve it, Catalonia’s economic elite has never relinquished its ambition to dominate Spain—even at the cost of abandoning its own sovereignty. Fainé, and the shadow he casts, cannot be understood without considering the void left by the failed Gas Natural takeover of Iberdrola. That failure, quashed with a phone call from Minister Rato after Pujol handed Aznar the presidency, epitomizes the limits of Catalonia’s power.

Fear of reopening the wound of the independence referendum has given Catalonia’s economic establishment the leeway to go on the offensive through the PSOE. As I write this, I see a news alert: Pedro Sánchez and Salvador Illa want to strip Madrid of “power” to make Barcelona Spain’s economic capital. Pasqual Maragall’s decentralization obsession is back, but this time stripped of its cultural and democratic pretense. The plan is to inject money into Barcelona to offset the fiscal deficit, in exchange for dissolving the independence movement. At a time when developed nations are turning protectionist and cutting foreign aid, it’s hardly surprising that the Spanish press portrays Fainé as a protector of the poor.

As one of the flatterers pointed out in an ABC column, Fainé is now over eighty and has no heirs. He is a man of the 20th century, doing business in the way it was done in that era, and he represents a Catalonia still stuck in the 20th century. Just as political Catalanism began producing rhetorical monstrosities after Pujol’s retirement, the spirit of the old bourgeoisie now gives rise to its own economic processism. After a century and a half of dragging itself through coups, dictatorships, and civil wars, Catalonia finds itself bound to Madrid in an absurd union—especially as Spain’s capital aspires to be the geopolitical bridge between Brussels and China.

The recent Gattopardo adaptation on Netflix, though it feels more like a Pretty Woman knockoff, might serve as a wake-up call for Catalans: do we want to be fleeced again in the name of money? If we let ourselves be lulled by this old comedy, we will soon find ourselves in the same position as we were with the independence referendum. Only this time, with the PSC in power, the excuses will be the same. We will once again be told that we almost succeeded, that a masterstroke was within reach, but that Spanish fanaticism and Catalan disunity doomed the “new country”—inclusive and antifascist—that was just within our grasp.

With exquisite artistic cruelty, the screenwriter has the crowd chant the song’s chorus, oblivious to the irony, while our hero transforms before their eyes, fuelled by the adrenaline of the moment. From here, it becomes clear that the film can be read as a political manifesto against Europe and the Europeans. The hints are there earlier, when Elle Fanning, playing Suze Rotolo, complains that Dylan never talks about his past. Or when Dylan visits Woody Guthrie in the run-down sanatorium where activists have abandoned the white legend of the blues—only to find Pete Seeger there.

For all his greatness, Seeger can't help but play the good guy, trying to win the artistic approval of a broken man who can no longer even wipe himself. Seeger still belongs to an America influenced by Europe. He is married to a Japanese woman and lives between the rhetorical cotton wool of the Enlightenment and the utopian dreams of 19th-century idealists, who ended up either on the scaffold or in exile. Like Dylan, Guthrie is a child of the Wild West, from a brutal, self-sufficient world where few can afford to have a past or an ideology. Dylan’s real name was Zimmerman, and he was the son of German Jews—but the film doesn’t even mention it.

"A Complete Unknown" is the classic American tale of the lone man who moves the world forward by confronting general stupidity. Americans have a sharper instinct for the transformative power of creative destruction than Europeans. That’s why they can make films like "Civil War," where the people tear their own country apart in an attempt to save it. That’s why they can mock the folk movement and expose the miseries of their own equivalents of Lluís Llach, Jaume Sisa, and Maria del Mar Bonet. Dylan knows he must abandon a sinking ship, while his activist friends, paralyzed by doubt and self-congratulation, cling to him like desperate castaways.

The film’s ending hit me hard—perhaps because I saw it on the same day Donald Trump shredded the diplomatic protocol of 18th-century "salonières" and the Europe of the Congress of Vienna at his summit with Zelensky. To fit the story into the screenplay, Dylan breaks the folk festival’s unwritten rules and plays an electric set, including "Like a Rolling Stone." Heard an hour after "The Times They Are A-Changin'," it’s like reliving the last 20 years of European history—the Catalan and the Ukrainian alike. Just consider these lines: "Now you don’t seem so proud / About having to be scrounging your next meal."

The moment the first electric guitar sounds, the audience erupts in outrage. People boo, and someone shouts over the crowd: "Judas!" Dylan turns and delivers that legendary response: "I don’t believe you." It’s as if Trump were replying to Macron in a tweet after brushing off Zelensky for turning up at the White House demanding the moon. If I were French or German, I’d go see "A Complete Unknown" and take a hard look at what’s happening in Catalonia before applauding Brussels’ militarisation plans. An army needs a strong, mature nation behind it, just as any artist needs an audience connected to reality—lest fame consume him.

In Catalonia, we have a president who wouldn’t have been elected without the crackdown on independence and who invokes Zelensky in the name of democracy while ignoring the fact that Trump actually won a mandate at the ballot box. His party, and the bourgeoisie backing him, hope to enrich themselves with minor contracts—the same way they’ve profited from Barcelona’s new garbage trucks. The leading print newspaper has even gone so far as to twist the words of an author persecuted by Franco to justify the government’s new EU-funded economic plans. If this happens in Barcelona, what might happen in Paris, Madrid, or Berlin with the money the arms industry is about to pour in?

Dylan’s biopic champions truth and a knowledge of one’s roots as the foundation of progress and collective intelligence. It reminds us that America is now doing with politics what it did with culture over half a century ago: breaking free from Europe. The U.S. no longer looks so much to its old alliance with France—the one that helped it win independence from Britain—but rather to the 19th century and the conquest of the West. Europe, meanwhile, finds its roots in the Middle Ages, not in the 19th-century world to which the old colonial states huddling together in Brussels want to drag us, offended by the United States.

Catalans know where to look because our patriotism predates the nation-state. We can say that Dylan is the greatest troubadour since the time of Ramon Llull. But much of Europe will struggle to break free from the politicians’ propaganda and say, as Dylan did: "I don’t believe you." And that will be a shame, because the continent’s accelerated militarisation will only encourage reckless gambits and further damage democracy. Just watch the film and pay attention to what’s happening in Catalonia after years of grand speeches and strumming the guitar like Dylan’s old friends. No need to go to Ukraine to get yourself killed.

It’s no surprise that Partenophe has caused discomfort and, to some extent, disappointment, because its underlying message is brutally harsh, difficult to stomach. Critics focus on the beauty of the protagonist, but the true protagonist of the film is not the beautiful actress whom Sorrentino obsessively follows up and down with his morbid, perfectionist camera, so skilled at making stones speak. The real protagonist is the sterility of a world that infects everything it touches, a world that no longer knows how to move forward—trapped, after years of scorning love, between superstition and calculation.

“Italy, and by extension, all of Europe, has never been closer to this Naples I once thought I had escaped from,” Sorrentino seems to think as he lingers over every scene. The entire film is a reminder of how impossible it is to break free from the past and of the radioactive force of history’s black holes. Greta Cool, the actress who supposedly made it big in northern Italy, is a wretched woman who hides her baldness with a wig. The speech she gives about Neapolitans could just as easily be made about the Catalans, the French, and soon enough, the English and Americans too.

The film serves as a warning to the entire Western world, which is growing more homogeneous in its miseries. It is no coincidence that Partenophe is not only the name of the protagonist but also the name the Greeks gave to Naples long before Rome founded the myths that sustain the Italian state. There’s a reason why the protagonist is a modern-day princess who sleeps in an 18th-century carriage converted into a bedroom; a sleeping beauty who cannot find a man to wake her with a kiss and pull her out of her shell. Aside from John Cheever, the most improbable of flirts, the only people who truly touch Partenophe’s heart are a middle-aged cardinal who tenderly insists on making love to her once she has parted her legs, and a cross-eyed anthropology professor who takes her on as his disciple.

The academic hides in a back room of his house a monstrous son—a tragicomic caricature of this generation of frivolous, spoiled children, entertained by the inane drivel of TikTok. The film’s tedious pace is so in tune with the feeling of stagnation that it feels like Sorrentino’s own confession about the limitations of his genius and his career. The tricks that worked in La Grande Bellezza now have a stale glow, leaving a sense of impotence, of a dead end. Real love is expressed through action, but in an exhausted society where everyone is trapped in comedy, even action is tainted from the start.

Partenophe’s brother, weak because he sees everything too clearly, kills himself when he realizes that he cannot even live in love with his own sister. There is one scene that perfectly encapsulates how love is condemned in a world so ritualized that it has lost the strength to be genuine, to distinguish spontaneity from performance. In a poor Naples neighborhood, a teenage couple consummates their marriage under the watchful eyes of tribal elders. The camera lingers on the murky gazes of the old men, who grow aroused as they oversee the creation of a future already born dead—without mystery, without love. Suddenly, the film’s exuberant opening scene, which depicts the conception and birth of Partenophe, no longer seems so luminous.

Myths and works of art are the source of a people’s existence and power, but they have become consumer objects—like Sorrentino’s own film, which laments this even as it profits from it. The filmmaker does not believe in Italy, but he does not believe in Naples either. Much like what happens to Albert Serra or Rosalía with Catalonia, the filmmaker has managed to create a personal mythology from the wreckage of a collective shipwreck. The problem is that, whether from a lack of genius or courage, he cannot connect his creations to the history of his people, and so he sells his mythology with a growing sense of guilt and stagnation, like a souvenir on La Rambla.

In the end, the girl grows old, her beauty fades, while the statues remain eternally splendid—ever more orphaned of meaning in a dying world.

There’s a way of asking for forgiveness that is almost a way of saying goodbye. I’ve come across it before. I’ve seen it at university, in bars and restaurants, even in my own bed.

There comes a moment when people hit their limit and are left exposed, defenseless before what they believe themselves to be. You canʼt ask a zebra to act like a tiger or a hen to fly like a bird of prey.

A lizard canʼt bite like a crocodile. Man has infinite potential for transformation because he is a creative being, but overcoming obstacles requires mastering fear and maintaining strength of spirit—the engine of both genius and talent.

Under stress, most people lose hope and become more docile and obedient than animals. Pigs, when slaughtered, scream, resist, try to escape. Victims of mass executions disconnect and wait peacefully for their turn.

I greeted Carles Campuzano, leader of PDCat, the centre-right party of the so-called moderate independence movement. Unlike the ERC boys, he was lively. I also noticed one of Artur Masʼs men, from Junts pel Sí, the governing party. It amused me to see him striding around with the self-confidence of a turkey in December, just before the Christmas feast.

Former minister Rigau spotted me and called out. "Enric!" She had dressed up for the occasion—an elegant but flashy outfit, like a modern Tory, which made her look younger. "Donʼt make the mistake of your life," I told her. But she didnʼt listen. She hugged me like a teenager bumping into a friend at a nightclub.

I saw that Minister Ponsatí was dragging herself around like a lost soul. The night before, she had been the only one left defending an American-style declaration of independence—solemn, immediate in effect, something that would bring people onto the streets to celebrate and protect it. "You all know there will be no dialogue, and in a few months, at best, weʼll be exactly where we are now but weaker," she had warned at the last government meeting.

Even she hadnʼt expected the PDeCAT leadership to water down, with Junquerasʼs acquiescence, the text the government had agreed on with the CUP. By the time the parliamentary session was about to begin, we learned that Anna Gabrielʼs people had just been informed that President Puigdemont had no intention whatsoever of declaring independence—not even as an insinuation.

The session was postponed. Once youʼve given in on the fundamentals, they can make you swallow anything, I thought, recalling some CUP membersʼ tweets from the day before. We stepped outside to smoke in the courtyard bar.

"I donʼt get it," a friend said. "What do they gain from this maneuver?" "Going back to the old ‘deal and compromiseʼ game, or dying trying."

"But why? Itʼs so stupid. Even my grandmother will vote for the CUP now!"

"It has nothing to do with intelligence. Itʼs just their nature—they donʼt know how to do anything else. Just as ERC only knows how to complain about Mas and bow to his strategies, they only know how to do this. Independence is too big for them, so theyʼd rather endure a long march through the desert, even if it means some of their own getting disqualified, fined, or arrested, so they can keep playing the victim, like they always have."

Itʼs no coincidence that many Jews who survived the concentration camps ended up committing suicide after they were liberated. Behaviors that seem reasonable within a certain context take on a different meaning when circumstances change. Thatʼs why some people cling to the past and reject freedom, even when itʼs handed to them on a silver platter.

Little by little, I realized that the famous Article 155 was the same as Puigdemontʼs discourse. Spain cannot exercise violence clearly and directly against Catalonia without exposing that Catalonia is, in fact, a nation—an occupied and repressed one at that. It needs some Catalans to do its dirty work, to muddy the waters of the conflict with contradictions and Byzantine arguments.

Thatʼs what failed in the referendum. If not for the police intervention, Catalans would have realized just how improvised the governmentʼs organization had been, and Junts pel Sí would have fallen into crisis. But the police paralyzed the entire autonomous government structure and forced Catalans to choose: stay home or go out and defend the country.

A referendum that was meant to be a folkloric mobilization turned into a national revolt. The success was so overwhelming that the autonomists had to spend a week dwelling on police violence, showing images of bloodied heads, reviving the ghosts of Francoism and the Civil War, creating an atmosphere that would push Puigdemont into giving in to pressure.

When we walked into the auditorium to listen to the speech, I got a message: "In the end, it didnʼt turn out so bad." I ignored it. I already knew that part of the political class had committed suicide, no matter what happened. My phone exploded with messages. Friends I hadnʼt heard from in years were writing, furious. They called the government insane, incompetent, and treacherous.

"Between Barcelona and Madrid, the conditions for a perfect storm are brewing," a friend told me.

"Theyʼre steering us toward a major collapse—not for Cataloniaʼs freedom, but in a way that makes it look like itʼs the Catalansʼ fault. Just like in 1936," I replied. "At least this time, we see it coming."

On my way home, Víctor Puig texted me: "@KRLS is a genius." "And Catalonia is surreal," I shot back, smiling.

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Let’s not forget that Catalonia was the first nation in the European Union to attempt to reassert its place in history since World War II. October 1st was chaotic—built on lies and naivety—but it was also the first time a European people had tried to break the balance of power established by the Americans after the defeat of Nazism and the consolidation of Franco’s regime. In different ways, both Catalonia and Germany have worked hard—and paid a steep price—to uphold the European order that is now beginning to fracture.

Trump isn’t crazy, nor has he capitulated to Russia. Like past U.S. presidents who bent the law—Jackson, Roosevelt—he’s trying to reposition the United States before the world order turns against it. American leaders have found in Russian militarism the perfect excuse to jolt Germany awake and transform NATO into a web of bilateral agreements. Elon Musk’s support for Alternative for Germany isn’t about ideology; it’s a signal to Berlin’s elites: you have permission to move beyond the shadow of Nazism and the humiliation of World War I.

The U.S. needs Germany to build a real army and provide economic and moral leadership for Europe. The European Union is still far from functioning as a unified bloc. Talk of a European army is laughable when Puigdemont is still receiving Spanish politicians and businessmen in his Brussels exile. Europe will never have a coherent foreign policy—let alone a military—if it can’t even agree on the political significance of October 1st. Catalonia may be a small cog in the continental machine, but it has an uncanny ability to jam the gears, even unintentionally.

Orriols, with her direct rhetoric, connects with the Catalonia of the pre-Civil War era and is paving the way for Catalan-based parties to participate in the resurgence of European nationalism—much like Alternative for Germany is doing. It’s pathetic to watch the leaders of pro-independence parties cling to a crumbling political order that has left Catalonia weakened. At this point, it’s not even about achieving an independent state—it’s about whether Catalans will have their own national politics and a say in shaping the new European order.

Orriols is a political disruptor because she’d rather strike a deal with the CUP radicals who insult her daily than with the PSC of Article 155. Since Joan Fuster wrote Nosaltres, els valencians, Spain has worked hard to equate questioning military centralism with excessive Catalanism—to being synonymous with fascism. Castilians are not part of Carolingian Europe, and they will continue looking toward Miami and South America. But Catalonia is a Mediterranean nation, deeply connected to Italy and the Franco-Germanic world. And Barcelona risks being sidelined from key trade routes, trapped in an increasingly Africanized Iberian Peninsula, if it continues to let Madrid drag it down.

A century ago, Catalonia and Germany were two of the wealthiest, most dynamic nations in Europe. The defeats of Berlin and Barcelona provided the U.S. with lucrative business opportunities while also stabilizing the continent and turning it into a single market. Decades of peace have made Europeans complacent, dulling the drive and resilience needed to modernize the economy and maintain global relevance. As Germany reenters history, Europe’s balance will shift—and if Catalonia doesn’t wake up, it risks being left behind.

Orriols’ rise is a powerful expression of a reawakening Europe, occurring in the least Europeanized state of all. Yet Junts, ERC, and the CUP continue to embody a French-style Europe—one that never tires of making grand speeches with other people’s money and effort. Orriols cannot succeed alone. And Catalonia is doomed if nationalist parties believe they can afford to dismiss her as a mere fascist. The overwhelming success of this week’s interviews suggests that something is about to change.