The celebration of Sant Isidre in Catalonia
On this day like today in the year 1717, 307 years ago, the Catalan peasantry celebrated, for the first time and by force, the feast of their new patron saint, Sant Isidre, imposed by the Bourbon regime after the occupation of 1714. Sant Isidre , patron saint of the Castilian peasantry, was imposed to supplant the figure of Sant Galderic, patron saint of the Catalan peasantry since the end of the 10th century. This supplantation also involved a change in the date of the celebration. Traditionally, the Catalan peasantry celebrated the feast of their patron saint on October 16, coinciding with the end of the annual agricultural tasks; unlike the new date, which was located at the beginning of the campaign.
The impersonation of Sant Galderic
The imposition of Sant Isidre was part of a wide battery of measures that had the objective of destroying Catalan culture, and that were part of the Bourbon strategy to reduce Catalonia to the category of a simple province of a Castile turned into the matrix of the new and imposed Spanish nation. And with that imposition, a far-reaching impact was pursued. In Catalonia at the beginning of the 18th century – as in all European countries at the time – the agro-livestock socio-economic sector concentrated 2/3 of the country’s population, and that society – also like all European societies of the ‘epoka— an era of spiritual thought.
Sant Isidre and Sant Galderic
Isidre el Llaurador, the person who inspires the figure of Saint Isidre, is at the antipodes of the Catalan tradition. He had been a personage of the lower nobility – a wealthy agricultural owner – who had been born and lived in Madrid between the 11th and 12th centuries, and to whom several miracles were attributed (that of the water in the well that had risen in level to float the child who had fallen there, or that of the angels who plowed the field while he was praying). He had been canonized in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV at the behest of the Spanish king Felipe IV and had been proclaimed patron of Madrid and elevated from the category of patron of the Castilian peasantry to that of patron of the peasantry of the Spanish monarchy as a whole.
The tradition of Sant Galderic
That proclamation had not had the expected effect. In Catalonia, the peasantry had preserved the avocation to Sant Galderic. This tradition started in the 10th century (one hundred years before the existence of Isidre the Farmer), and said that Galderic, the person who inspired the figure of Sant Galderic, had been born in a small town close to Carcassonne. His fame, as a worker of several miracles, had spread throughout the Marca de Gòtia (the Carolingian region located on the Mediterranean arc between Nîmes and Barcelona) and after his death he had been buried in the monastery of Sant Martí del Canigó, in the county of Conflent. For this reason, he was the patron saint of the Languedoc and Catalan peasantry.
