Exploring the Pyrenees, Part I:A Wall

By James T. Carney

In 1710 – oops, you can tell this will be a long story – after King Louis XIV of France’s grandson had been named King of Spain, potentially uniting the two countries and ending a rivalry that had dominated Europe for two centuries, Louis declared, “Il y’na plus de Pyrenees,” or “There are no more Pyrenees,” referring to the mountain chain that separated France from Spain. Well, I have news for his departed Majesty, “Il y’a plus de Pyrenees,” and I have climbed them – stumbled, crawled, and fallen across them.
    When we were learning about geography in grammar school, we were always taught that mountain chains and rivers constituted natural boundaries decisively separating one country from another, or one region from another. The reality is far different. Natural boundaries may be great for cartographers and statesmen drawing lines between countries, but they do not make sense in terms of people. It is better to think of natural boundaries as uniting into one society those who live near them, separate from the two societies distant from the boundary.
    Thus, the Rhine River, which was supposed to be a boundary between the Roman Empire and the Germanic tribes (and was guarded by the Roman limes, or fortifications), was actually a means of uniting those who lived near it, on either side, so that a special society – half Roman and half German – grew up within a 50-mile area around the Rhine. This society was quite distinct from the purely Roman society found in the rest of Gaul or the purely German civilization found in the rest of Germany (as we know it today). When I traveled in the Big Bend area of Texas a couple of years ago, I saw the same phenomenon along one part of the Rio Grande River, which was so low that one could walk across it in some places. People moved back and forth between Mexico and the United States somewhat interchangeably, and both Anglos and Mexicans identified far more with their real, local society than with the rest of the United States or Mexico.

Looking ahead to Part III

    So it was with the Pyrenees. In the early Middle Ages, a number of states – Navarre and Aragon, to name two – straddled the mountain chain, including territories that are regarded today as belonging either to France or to Spain. The only relic of separate countries in the Pyrenees is Andorra, which is bordered by France on the North and Spain on the South. Certain ethnic groups are now separated by the artificial border drawn through the Pyrenees. In the north, the Basques in Spain have far more in common with the French Basques than they do with the Castilian Spanish, while the French Basques have far more in common with their Spanish cousins then they do with ordinary Frenchmen. The Basques in France are far fewer in number than the Basques in Spain and are more reconciled to being part of France than the Basques in Spain are to being part of Spain; the Basques in Spain have always sought autonomy and, in some cases, almost total independence. The Basque language is not an Indo-European language, so the Basques are particularly unique. Nevertheless, for them, the Pyrenees are a unifying rather than a separating barrier.
    At the other end of the Pyrenees, some nine million citizens of the Catalonia region of Spain speak Catalan – a separate Romance language – which is also spoken in the French province of Rousillion. This state of affairs reflects the existence of a Catalan society that existed on both sides of the Pyrenees. In the Middle Ages, Catalonia included much of the French province of Languedoc, which spoke the language d’oc, which closely resembled Catalan. One sees on both sides of the Pyrenees the same Romanesque churches from the early Middle Ages. Indeed, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees is an exact duplicate of the Romanesque church in Mérens-les-Vals found on the French side.

Copyright © 2019 by James T. Carney