Prize Prat de la Riba 2007 of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans

This book is a thorough analysis of the constituent period of the pan-belief in Catalan autonomy as a cultural, political and social movement between 1931 and 1939. Conceived throughout the Renaixença, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the term «Països Catalans» strengthened in the 1930s and had the Statute of Autonomy achieved by the Principality, which was the promoter and the referent for the rest of the territories, as the expansion motive. The government of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the political parties, such as ERC, the Lliga or UCD, and the associative and nationalist movements, such as Palestra or the FNEC, were the model of relations with the pan-supporters of Catalan autonomy sectors of the País Valencià and Illes Balears, minority but strong movements. The links among the different territories were not easy and provoked controversies that had arrived almost identical to nowadays: the unity of the language, the Catalan imperialism or the term used to define all the lands with the Catalan language. From a thorough research on the nationalist press with roots in the Païssos Catalans, on private files and on a broad bibliography, one can conclude that the pan-belief in Catalan autonomy in the republican time established the first theoretical and political stone of a movement that stopped suddenly in 1939 due to the setting-up of the Franco dictatorship. The growing use and acceptation of the term «Països Catalans» put it little by little in a remarkable place in the ideology of the pan-Catalan nationalism and, in the 1960s, it recovered prominence thanks to intellectuals such as Joan Fuster.