Ane

useless-catalanfacts:

Perpinyà is the capital city of Northern Catalonia (Catalunya Nord), which is in the state of France. It’s now part of an administrative unit named “Occitanie” (because the French government is shitty to its national minorities), but it’s NOT part of the nation of Occitania.

Here’s a map of the Catalan Countries:

Between the years 1790 and 2016, Northern Catalonia was included in the administrative region known as the department of Pyrénées-Orientales (Eastern Pyrenees). These regions were created during the French Revolution with the purpose of breaking the historical and cultural areas, dividing the same peoples in different regions and uniting in the same region peoples from different cultures and languages; all of this with the purpose of “diluting” national identities and languages and imposing the French identity and the French language.

This is a map of the nations in the State of France and their languages. (Note: Catalan, of course, continues under the border in Southern Catalonia even though it’s not painted in the map)

And this is a part of the departments. As you can see, it’s divided according to natural barriers and has absolutely no consideration for keeping the historical-cultural units together. Only Northern Catalonia more or less matches with its department (though not exactly).

In 2016, the French government restructured the regions system to simplify it. Now it looks like this:

When it was time to name the new regions, they used historical names. However (because the French government couldn’t possibly have any sort of respect towards the peoples whose land it took!) the borders of the regions are still not respecting historical-cultural nations.

Let’s zoom into the region the French government named “Occitanie”:

The red line is the borders of the nation of Occitania (that is, the historical nation that has Occitan culture and speaks the Occitan language). And now compare it to that purple part that is included in the modern region named Occitanie.

The nation Occitania is much bigger and includes all the Provence, part of Auvergne, Aquitaine, and a small part of what has been included in Centre-Val de Loire. But it does NOT include Northern Catalonia, which (as you can tell by the name, the language spoken, and its history) is part of the Catalan nation.

But the region “Occitanie” includes only a small part of Occitania and all of Northern Catalonia.

Northern Catalans protested a lot when the French government made these new regions. The name Pyrénées-Orientales was bad, because it’s a way to mask and eliminate the real name of the territory, which is “Northern Catalonia” (or “the north of Catalonia”). But Occitanie is seen as worse, because no longer we are defined by the natural landscape (Eastern Pyrenees) but are put under the name of a whole different nation. Northern Catalans asked that the name of the region should be “Occitanie-Pays Catalan” (Occitania-Catalan Country).

I will leave a link to the post I made in 2016 with an article where Northern Catalans talk about why they opposed being absorved by the “Occitanie” region:

'Don't Erase Us': French Catalans Fear Losing More Than a Region's Name

What’s in a name? A lot apparently, at least if you ask French Catalans who live in the country’s southwest corner, here around Perpignan. W

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