The mid-19th century saw the revival of the Barcelona Floral Games. Historically attested as a late-medieval literary contest, the Jocs Florals had, ever since the advent of Romanticism, preoccupied Catalan writers, academics and scholars with a medievalist interest, as representative of the age of Catalan splendour. After several attempts, and partly inspired by the revived Jeux Floraux of Toulouse, the Games were finally reinstituted in 1859 and immediately became a cultural-symbolical trump card for the emerging local elites.
In May 1859 the ceremony of the first “revived” Barcelona Floral Games, claiming to be a continuation of the tradition of the medieval contests, was conducted with great solemnity in the Gothic Saló de Cent of the city council (which had decided to sponsor them in perpetuity). The Games reflected the vogue for the troubadour period and troubadour poetry, which had been fostered by a generation of Romantic philologists, historians and writers in the wake of Walter Scott: Sismondi, Raynouard, Fauriel and, within Catalonia, Milà i Fontanals. The vogue had likewise been bolstered by the Romantic history play El trovador (1836) by Antonio García Gutiérrez, a long-standing success which would form the basis of Verdi’s opera Il trovatore, first performed at Barcelona’s Liceu in 1854.
The atmosphere in which the Games flourished was shaped by a generation of professionals and publicists (among them Bofarull and Balaguer) emerging as Barcelona was undergoing a social and economic transformation. Expanding beyond its medieval city walls, Barcelona’s urban landscape was transformed by the spectacular urban development of the Pla Cerdà, approved in the same year 1859. In this context, and with the transnational backup of the Gothic revival everywhere in Europe, the Floral Games came to cater not merely for scholars and writers, but for a generally felt urban sociability and cultural identity-project linked to the concept of Renaixença or renaissance, both at the metropolitan (Barcelona) and at the national (Catalan) level. The Games accordingly provided a culture-historical backdrop to an ambitious agenda of progress and modernization, suffusing the new urban and social landscape with art, and the scenes and celebrations of collective life as recalled from tradition. Artists and intellectuals had the task of idealizing and exalting their city, fostering literary and cultural tradition and innovation in a medievalist liturgical and ceremonial framework, which in turn lent a symbolical and historicist justification to contemporary identity politics.
Accordingly, from 1859 onwards, the “revived” Floral Games brought together highly diverse personalities with widely diverging attitudes, ranging from those who regarded them as having a merely ceremonial value (Manuel Milà) to those who felt that they could be used quite explicitly to propagate the “idea of the restoration of nationality” (Victor Balaguer). Whatever else the Games might have been, they were an attempt to negotiate the fundamental diglossia of the Catalan bourgeoisie in its ambition to become a ruling force in a new, modern Spain. In any event, the Games quickly became the veritable focus of Catalan literary life. For the late 19th century and much of the 20th, they inspired imitations throughout Spain, and played a decisive role in making cultivated Catalan literature visible and prestigious. As a literary forum, they made it possible for writers to exchange views and debate the major literary and civic questions, while their yearbook became the mainstay of Catalan culture in the 1860s and 1870s. They were also a platform for continual, albeit cautious, protest. In short, the Games were to define a developing and noticeable frontier of literary progress, and made literature the central element in the Renaixença. In the process, they also formed an interface with the literary world north of the Pyrenees: at the festival of 1859, Bofarull called for Catalan literature to emulate Mistral’s Mirèio (publicly hailed by Alphonse de Lamartine as a great modern epic in, again, that same year, 1859).
Indeed, the Games’ tightly regulated competition encouraged an atmosphere of emulation, excellence and social projection. The event was highly appealing to the new generations of writers and offered them ample scope for their literary ambitions, making it possible for them to gain prestige in a vibrant literary system, albeit only an incipient one. Thus the “Catalanist writers of the Renaixença” (Panyella) took shape as a generation born between the 1840s and the middle to late 1850s. They interiorized the strict framework of the Renaixença and the linguistic and literary paradigms sanctioned by the Games, and they regarded their Catalan patriotism to be sufficient justification for their dedication to writing. La Jove Catalunya (1868-75), a society deeply preoccupied with literature, for which it considered the Games an indispensable platform, crystallized this generation, to which the great authors belong who dominated the last third of the century: the poet Jacint Verdaguer, the playwright Àngel Guimerà and the novelist Narcís Oller. All three were born in 1845-46 and had a personal link with the Floral Games. Verdaguer’s long epic poems, L’Atlàntida (1875) and Canigó (1885), aimed to fulfil a demand, engendered by the Renaixença mentality, for Catalan foundational texts. In addition, the literature of the Floral Games created a repertoire of traditionalist, rural-idyllic imagery counterbalancing the modern complexities of the world. The Games thereby provided the Catalan “imagined community” with its cultural (literary, historical) capital as well as a thriving practical engagement. Poets, folklorists, grammarians, artists, publicists, etc. could use the Floral Games as a platform for disseminating ideas for a literary culture and create a cultural cohesion, expressed in Catalan and disseminated in a Catalan print culture.
The flourish of the Barcelona Games turned them into the Renaixença’s figurehead and the key instrument for spreading Catalanism. In 1868 the journal Lo Gay Saber (its title being an invocation of the Games’ remit) proposed an extension to other parts of the Catalan lands so as to create nuclei of Catalanist activism and mobilize new poets to proclaim the Renaixença. These nuclei gradually took root in the wake of the Catalanist congresses (1880, 1883) and the foundation of the Centre Català (1882). Indeed, the literary vogue of the troubadours had prompted Floral Games in other Catalan places besides Barcelona. In 1859, the Games were organized in Valencia by the Liceu Valencià (Literary Society of Valencia) under the guidance of Marià Aguiló, then librarian at the University of Valencia, with the help of Teodor Llorente and other students. This remained a one-off initiative, and afterwards Valencian writers would attend the Barcelona Games – a crucial development towards a transregional sense of Catalan culture, also including Valencia and Majorca. Formative events in this development were the tenth anniversary of the Barcelona Floral Games in 1868; the literary competition in honour of James I, held in Valencia in 1876; and the first Latin festivals organized in 1878 by the Félibrige in Montpellier. In this widening territorial scope, Barcelona’s hub position remained pronounced. The Barcelona Games became the model for the Valencian literary events that were held later on: in 1878, the society that organized these events (Lo Rat Penat) was founded by Constantí Llombart on the express premise that it should follow the Barcelona example.
Over time, the Floral Games became more important for their symbolic value (as liturgical assertions of Catalanism) than for their literary merit. In the 20th century, they became a popular festival, a civic-patriotic celebration: a communal act of “love for the land and the language that gushes forth from it, in communion with the past and the future that form the homeland”, as Joan Maragall put it in his speech marking the Games’ 50th anniversary in 1908. Above and beyond the current state of the literary market and literary tastes, the Floral Games maintained a characteristic repertoire of medievalizing rituals and references (the flower-derived names of the individual prizes, the elevation of multiple-prize laureates to the status of “Master of Gay Saber”), and turned them into an entrenched identity-affirming tradition.
This foundational link of the Floral Games with medievalizing antiquarianism always exposed them to the risk of becoming an anachronism. At the outset, medievalism was championed by the authoritative Rubió i Ors, writing as the Gaiter del Llobregat and one of the members of the 1859 jury. Five years later, another member of the initial jury, Balaguer, already called for a “new muse”, an alternative to the obsolete literary genres, stimulating a popular, progressive and topical poetry. The liberal period of 1868-74 reinforced this anti-historicist, progressive and modernity-oriented preference, which stood at odds with the Floral Games formula.
Between the 1870s and 1880s, critics such as Josep Yxart gathered into a movement (known in Catalan as Modernisme) to modernize the Renaixença. They championed “truth” in art and literature; against Catalan literary exceptionalism they argued that writers of international stature and inspiration, like Oller, Verdaguer and Guimerà, had taken Catalan literature out of the nursery and away from the need for condescending and conservative fosterage. The Floral Games were accordingly denounced as a baleful influence, rewarding provincial and introspective mediocrity.
Nevertheless, despite this literary dispute, the Games continued to be held; they had succeeded in establishing a cognitive framework and rituals that gave meaning and social value to the cultivated practice of Catalan literature. They were even adopted into Spanish “official nationalism”: the 1888 Games were held within the framework of the Universal Exhibition in Barcelona in the presence of Queen Regent Maria Christina of Austria, the head of the Spanish government and the polymath scholar Menéndez Pelayo. At the same time the Games attracted adherents of Catalanist popular linguistic nationalism (also expressing itself in excursionism and musical activities), was a response to the mainstream Spanish version.
The endurance of the Floral Games was ensured by men like Marià Aguiló and Francesc Matheu, one of the leading modern Catalan publishers and an efficient troubleshooter. Matheu proved himself particularly useful during the fraught 50th-anniversary celebrations of 1908, or when the government forbade the Barcelona Games from being held north of the French border at Saint-Martin-du-Canigou (at the invitation of the Catalan-friendly bishop of Perpignan). Nonetheless, after 1900 the Games became increasingly a thing of the past, failing to attract the younger generation, often grouped under the appellation of Noucentisme. This generational conflict was exacerbated by the fact that the Games refused to accept the 1913 Catalan spelling reforms. The new century and its orthography were acknowledged only in 1933, by which time Games had become marginal in an autonomous and officially Catalan-speaking Catalonia: the octogenarian Francesc Matheu offered the spelling-reformer Pompeu Fabra the presidency of the Games, and the new language norms were finally accepted.
