DECREES OF NEW PLANT, ENDING CATALAN SOVEREIGNTY

Today, The Grandma has been reading about the Nueva Planta decrees promulgated, on a day like today in 1716, by King Philip V of Spain over the Principality of Catalonia, abolishing the Catalan institutions and most of its legislation, being replaced by those of the Castile, thus putting an end to Catalonia as a separate political entity and becoming a province of the new French-style Kingdom of Spain.

The Nueva Planta decrees, in Spanish Decretos de Nueva Planta, were a number of decrees signed between 1707 and 1716 by Philip V, the first Bourbon King of Spain, during and shortly after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession by the Treaty of Utrecht.

The Decrees put an end to the existence of the realms of the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia and Majorca) and the Crown of Castile. The laws of the Crown of Castile were applied in all Spain, essentially establishing the Kingdom of Spain as a French-style absolute monarchy.

Angered by what he saw as sedition by the realms of the Crown of Aragon, who had supported the claim of Charles of Austria to the Spanish thrones during the war and taking his native France as a model of a centralised state, Philip V suppressed the institutions, privileges, and the ancient charters (in Catalan furs) of almost all the areas that were formerly part of the Crown of Aragon (Kingdom of Aragon, Principality of Catalonia, Kingdom of Valencia, and the Kingdom of Majorca).

The decrees ruled that all the territories in the Crown of Aragon except the Aran Valley were to be ruled by the laws of Castile (the most praiseworthy in all the Universe according to the 1707 decree), embedding those regions into a new and nearly uniformly administered, centralised Spain.

The other historic territories (Navarre and the other Basque territories) supported Philip V initially, whom they saw as belonging to the lineage of Henry III of Navarre, but after Philip V's military campaign to crush the Basque uprising, he backed down on his intent to suppress home rule.

The acts abolishing the charters were promulgated in 1707 in Valencia and Aragon, in 1715 in Majorca and the other Balearic Islands, with the exception of Menorca, then a possession of the Kingdom of Great Britain, and on and off during the 18th century till it was returned to Spain in 1802, and in 1716 in Catalonia.

More information: GenCat

There is no greater tyranny than that
which is perpetrated under the shield of the law
and in the name of justice.

Montesquieu