Boundaries

The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees

Peter Sahlins

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520065383
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520911215
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book is an account of two dimension of state and nation building in France and Spain since the seventeenth century--the invention of a national boundary line and the making of Frenchmen and Spaniards. It is also a history of Catalan rural society in the Cerdanya, a valley in the eastern Pyrenees divided between Spain and France in 1659. This study shuttles between two levels, between the center and the periphery. It connects the "macroscopic" political and diplomatic history of France and Spain, from the Old Regime monarchies to the national territorial states of the later nineteenth century; and the "molecular" history--the historical ethnography--of Catalan village communities, rural nobles, and peasants in the borderland. On the frontier, these two histories come together, and they can be told as one.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures, Tables, Maps, and Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Note
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Treaty of the Pyrenees and the Division of the Cerdanya
• 2. The Frontiers of the Old Regime Sate
• 3. Resistance and Identity under the Old Regime
• 4. Community, Class, and Nation in the Eighteenth-Century Borderland
• 5. The French Revolution
• 6. Territory and Identity During the Spanish Crises (1808-1840)
• 7. The Treaties of Bayonne and the Delimitation of the Boundary
• 8. Conclusion: Identity and Counter-Identity
• Epilogue: States and Nations since 1868
• Appendix A. Texts of the Division of the Cerdanya, 1659-1660 and 1868
• Appendix B. Population, Marriage, and Property between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• Bibliography
• Index