Nationalism within Spain in mid-late 1700's

Hey Guys,

Just a general OTL question, how Nationalist were nations within Spain around the 1760's? Such as the Catalan and Basque nations. If pushed would they revolt on nationalist grounds do you think?

Thanks,

TNB.
 
Nationalism did not even exist until after the French Revolution.

This said, basque nationalism is a 19th century invention. Prior to that, the Basque Country was only an autonomous region of the Crown of Castile whose nobles were proud of being more spanish than anyone else due to their traditional isolation and lack of moorish blood.

Catalonia is a little trickier. There had been two major catalan insurrections, in 1640-1652, and the final years of the War of Spanish succession culminating with the siege of Barcelona in 1714. These have often been reclaimed by catalan nationalists as proto-nationalist insurrections, but that is false. The 1640 war began as your usual run of the mill peasant rebellion, and the rebel leaders actually wanted to be annexed by France. The 1714 war began as a reaction against the centralization imposed by Philip V from 1707 on, but there was nothing nationalistic about it: Catalonia and Aragon revolted because they had recognized Charles of Hapsburg as king of Spain, and continued the revolt because they wanted to keep the separate existance of the Crown of Aragon within Spain instead of submitting to Philip's centralization plans, but that does not mean the catalans felt like a different nation -that is a notion that would not appear until the 19th century.
 
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