The town hall of Elne, governed by the far right, is organising an event this Saturday to celebrate the partition of Catalonia resulting from the Treaty of the Pyrenees. The initiative has provoked a response from Catalanist entities.
The poster for the event, which the town hall of Elne is organising for this Saturday, features the flag of France alongside the Catalan flag. According to the newspaper Ara, the event celebrates "the union of Elna and the Roussillon with the Kingdom of France" and includes a speech by the mayor, Steve Fortel, and a conference titled "The contributions of the treaty to Elna and the Roussillon".
The event is framed within the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659, signed after the Catalan defeat in the War of the Reapers. That pact left the Roussillon, Capcir, Upper Cerdanya, Vallespir, and Conflent under the Kingdom of France. According to the former mayor of Elne Nicolas Garcia, current vice president of the department corresponding to Northern Catalonia, no local government had ever celebrated that date before.
"It has never happened before, it is a provocation, they want to humiliate and punish, they are anti-Catalans who have a hatred for Catalan history"
Garcia also denounces that the new executive has created a memory commission to review French resistance and exclude Elne's relationship with Catalan history. He also reproaches them for trying to undo what the previous government did, considering that the measure is a form of revenge, as the memory councillor, Gilles Glin, was the head of the opposition when the use of Catalan in council meetings was approved. That regulation was eventually annulled following a complaint to the prefect.
For his part, the leader of Yes to Catalonia and former councillor in the town, Jordi Vera, argues that the event seeks to humiliate Catalans. Vera recalls that in 1959, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the treaty, the then mayor of Perpignan, Paul Alduy, announced a celebration and later cancelled it.
"No one had dared to do it, there is an unapologetically anti-Catalan will, they want to humiliate and insult Catalans and all our dead against the French troops"
For the residents of the region, the controversy also reaches their institutional life. Garcia wants to ask the mayor of Castelló d'Empúries, Anna Massot, to suspend the twinning with Elne, after her town hall met with the new far-right executive in mid-October. Meanwhile, various Catalanist entities have called for an alternative event for the same Saturday.
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