The Catalan historian independence supporters love to hate: Jordi Amat and the political uses of modern history

On the evening of 17 June 2026, Spain's El País published a long-form interview in its "before bed" culture strand with the philologist and historian Jordi Amat, in which the author of La conjura de los ignorantes and Las vidas interiores made a claim that has been quietly annoying Catalan separatists for the better part of a decade. Independence supporters, Amat said, "are very nervous about my books because they construct a story of Catalan modernity that is foreign to them." The remark, easily glossed in a one-line headline, opens onto a much larger argument about who has the right to define a nation's past — and about what happens to a political project when the historians on which it relied start publishing inconvenient conclusions.

Amat is not a peripheral figure in that argument. He is one of the most widely read essayists in contemporary Catalonia, and his work sits at the seam between literary biography and political history. His central contention, which the El País interview reprises, is that the canonical narrative of modern Catalonia — a long, dignified march from the 1714 fall of Barcelona to the 2017 independence crisis — flattens too much. The real story, in his telling, includes industrialists who made peace with authoritarian Spain, a bourgeoisie that preferred the peseta to the flag, and a clerical-political culture whose priorities often diverged from the country's poorer half. The implication, never quite stated as a manifesto, is that the independence movement of the last fifteen years rests on a curated version of the past, and that curating has been the work of institutions — Òmnium Cultural, the Catalan public media, a clutch of aligned publishers — that have done the work of canonisation rather than scholarship.

The reaction from the independence ecosystem, when it surfaces, is rarely the academic rejoinder one might expect. Critics inside the movement tend to frame Amat as a Spanish-unionist operative in intellectual clothing, or as a useful idiot of the constitucionalistas. That is a familiar pattern in societies where history is live politics: the historian becomes a soldier in someone else's trench war, and the question of whether the scholarship is sound is replaced by the question of who benefits. The Spanish national press, for its part, tends to do the opposite — read Amat as a courageous voice of "the real Catalonia" against a provincial separatist consensus. Both gestures flatter the work. The books are more interesting, and more uncomfortable, than either frame allows.

What makes the Amat case worth sitting with is not the biography of a single writer but the structural pattern it exposes. Across Europe, separatist and autonomy movements — Scottish, Flemish, Basque, Northern Irish, Lombard, Silesian, Crimean before 2014 — have always needed a usable past. The usable past is rarely the most accurate one. It tends to be the one that compresses a region's history into a single moral direction, replaces contingency with destiny, and seals off the periods — co-option, accommodation, collaboration, defeat — that complicate the claim. Catalonia, where the regional government between 2015 and 2017 actively tried to detach from Spain and where the Supreme Court in 2019 sentenced nine political leaders to long prison terms, has had more reason than most to need such a past. The independence movement built cultural infrastructure to deliver it: foundation presses, aligned broadcasters, a curated museum sector, a dense civil-society network. Amat is one of the writers who has pointed out, in print, that the resulting story of Catalonia is narrower than the history.

The stakes of that argument are not academic. Catalonia is still, as of 2026, governed by a coalition that includes the two pro-independence parties that tried to push the 2017 declaration and have not been forgiven for it in Madrid. The Catalan public broadcaster, 3Cat, reports routinely on a polling landscape in which support for independence hovers between 40 and 45 percent, well short of a majority but well above the level at which Spanish politics can safely ignore it. Any writer who publicly complicates the nationalist narrative inside Catalonia is, in practical terms, intervening in a live constitutional fight. The personal pressure Amat has described in interviews — social-media pile-ons, book-event cancellations, a sustained campaign of denunciation from Òmnium-adjacent commentators — is the cost of writing in that space.

A second, less-noticed fault line runs through the Amat reception: the relationship between the Catalan middle class and the Catalan working class. Amat's historical work consistently returns to the period between 1898 and 1939, when the Lliga Regionalista, the Catalan industrial bourgeoisie, and the Catholic church constructed a regionalist political project that protected manufacturers' interests and was deeply suspicious of working-class self-organisation. That history is uncomfortable for an independence left that sees itself as the natural inheritor of Catalan republicanism, because the regionalist right was, in this account, the more successful moderniser — and because the Esquerra Republicana tradition that produced the 2017 leaders is, in Amat's framing, a different and in some ways more fragile plant. The implication that the present independence project is a coalition of convenience between post-Franco civil society and a 19th-century regionalist residue is the kind of thesis that gets a writer invited onto fewer television panels.

The interesting question is not whether Amat is right about any particular period. Some of his readings will hold up better than others, and his detractors can point to specific chapters where the source base is thinner than the rhetoric. The interesting question is what a society does with a historian who is also a citizen. Catalonia has answered that question, in Amat's case, by treating his books as political acts — a response that is partly understandable, given the stakes, and partly corrosive of the very scholarly culture the region claims to prize. El País, itself a unionist-leaning paper, will inevitably be read as having published the interview in order to deploy Amat against his critics. That is the bind he lives in: a historian whose work is always being instrumentalised, and whose defence against the instrumentalisation is, by definition, the next book.

What the El País interview crystallises, more than any single claim, is the realisation that the Catalan question has moved, for the moment, out of the streets and the courts and into the archive. The car-crash politics of 2017 have been settled, in the narrow sense, by court verdicts and by the exhaustion of the unilateral road. What has not been settled is the prior question: what story Catalonia tells about itself in the twentieth century, and on what evidence. Jordi Amat has spent the last ten years insisting that the evidence is richer, and less flattering, than the story. Independence supporters are nervous about that, as he says, because a less heroic past makes a less automatic future. It is, in the end, a perfectly ordinary argument between a historian and a movement that wanted its history the other way around — and that, in Catalonia as elsewhere, is the kind of argument only democracies can afford to have.

Desk note: Monexus has framed this piece around the El País interview rather than around the Madrid-Barcelona institutional standoff, on the view that the political question of the moment is no longer the constitutional one but the cultural one — who gets to write the history a political project will need.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordi_Amat
• https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjura_de_los_ignorantes
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_independence_movement
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Catalan_independence_referendum