Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Sir John Elliott: an appreciation
- Introduction
- PART I Power and propaganda: the world of the court
- PART II The pattern of society: community and identity in Habsburg Spain
- 4 Toledanos and the kingdom of Granada, 1492–1560s
- 5 Castile, Spain and the monarchy: the political community from patria natural to patria nacional
- 6 Aragonese constitutionalism and Habsburg rule: the varying meanings of liberty
- 7 Patriotism in early modern Valencia
- 8 The mental world of Jeroni Pujades
- 9 Centring the periphery: the Cerdanya between France and Spain
- PART III Spain and its empire
- Index
9 - Centring the periphery: the Cerdanya between France and Spain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Sir John Elliott: an appreciation
- Introduction
- PART I Power and propaganda: the world of the court
- PART II The pattern of society: community and identity in Habsburg Spain
- 4 Toledanos and the kingdom of Granada, 1492–1560s
- 5 Castile, Spain and the monarchy: the political community from patria natural to patria nacional
- 6 Aragonese constitutionalism and Habsburg rule: the varying meanings of liberty
- 7 Patriotism in early modern Valencia
- 8 The mental world of Jeroni Pujades
- 9 Centring the periphery: the Cerdanya between France and Spain
- PART III Spain and its empire
- Index
Summary
In the early 1830s, the intrepid English traveller Richard Ford, wandering in the central Pyrenees between France and Spain, was struck by the animosity Spanish peasants expressed toward the French:
The [Spaniards'] hatred of the Frenchman … seems to increase in intensity in proportion to vicinity, for as they touch, so they fret and rub each other: here is the antipathy of the antithesis; the incompatibility of the saturnine against the vain, the fickle, and the sensual; of the enemy of innovation and change, and the lover of variety and novelty; and however tyrants and tricksters may assert in the gilded galleries of Versailles that Il n'y a plus de Pyrénées, this party-wall of Alps, this barrier of snow and hurricane, does and will exist forever.
More than a transparent description of social life in the borderland, Ford's revealing observation evokes an entire corpus of mythic representations and literary tropes from both sides of the Pyrenees. Indeed, the image of the Pyrenees as a natural frontier separating France and Spain has been part of a shifting repertoire in French and Spanish political and literary cultures since the eleventh-century Chanson de Roland. During the first half of the seventeenth-century, at the height of the dynastic competition between the Bourbon and Habsburg monarchies, apologists and pamphleteers from both political centres produced a number of texts which compared the national and natural differences of Frenchmen and Spaniards, drawing often on contemporary and ancient theories of humours.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Spain, Europe and the AtlanticEssays in Honour of John H. Elliott, pp. 227 - 242Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995