Perpignan 🇫🇷 The Largest Catalan City in France

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 39: Perpignan

Perpignan has been French for 366 years. Perpignan was Catalan for the five centuries before that. The capital of the medieval Kingdom of Mallorca is now a French sub-prefecture. The flag on the town hall is the same gold-and-red striped Senyera that flies over Barcelona.

The foundational fact about Perpignan

In the year 1276, on the death of King James I of Aragon — Jaume el Conqueridor, the Catalan-speaking warrior king who had spent his sixty-year reign expanding the Aragonese crown into one of the most powerful Mediterranean states of the thirteenth century — the lands he had ruled were divided between his two sons. The elder, Peter, inherited the principal Aragonese-Catalan crown, with its capital at Barcelona. The younger, James, inherited a new and unusual kingdom — the Kingdom of Mallorca — which consisted of the Balearic Islands (Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza), the two Catalan-speaking counties on the northern side of the Pyrenees (Roussillon and Cerdanya), the County of Montpellier in southern France, and a few smaller seigneuries. The new kingdom had no contiguous territory — it was a scattered Mediterranean enterprise held together by ships, trade, and the personal authority of the king. The capital was Perpignan. The royal palace — the Palau dels Reis de Mallorca, the Palace of the Kings of Mallorca — was built between 1276 and 1309 on the highest point of the city, with a Gothic chapel inside its central courtyard and royal apartments looking out over the Roussillon plain toward the Mediterranean. The kingdom lasted seventy-three years. In 1349, the last king of Mallorca, James III, was killed at the Battle of Llucmajor on the island of Mallorca itself, fighting his cousin Peter IV of Aragon, who reincorporated the kingdom into the Aragonese crown. The Palace at Perpignan continued to be used by Aragonese viceroys, then Spanish governors, then French marshals. It is still standing. The Gothic chapel still has its original ribbed vaulting. The royal throne room still has its original window frames. A visitor in 2026 can walk into the building and stand in rooms that were occupied by a king of Mallorca seven hundred and fifty years ago.

This is the foundational fact about Perpignan, and the one most foreign visitors do not carry: that France contains a thirteenth-century Catalan royal palace in active and intact condition, in the centre of a city that was the capital of a Mediterranean kingdom for the better part of a century, and that the city has been French for less than four hundred years out of its documented thousand-year existence as an urban settlement. The transfer to France came in 1659, in the Treaty of the Pyrenees that ended the Franco-Spanish War of 1635–1659. The treaty redrew the border between France and Spain at the mountain crest of the Pyrenees, transferring the historic Catalan counties of Roussillon and northern Cerdanya from the Spanish crown to the French crown. The population was not consulted. The Catalan-speaking inhabitants of Roussillon — perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand people, the great majority of them Catalan as their first language and Catalan-speaking as their only language — became French citizens by treaty in November 1659. The French crown moved quickly to integrate the territory: French became the sole language of administration, of courts, of higher education, and (over the following two centuries) of primary schooling. Catalan was tolerated as a domestic and rural language but excluded from public life. The 1700 Edict of Louis XIV on the use of French in the courts of Roussillon was particularly strict. The 1881 Jules Ferry laws on free, compulsory, secular primary education completed the linguistic transformation by making French the only language of the schoolroom for two generations. By the early twentieth century, Catalan was substantially restricted to the kitchen, the market, the family, and the village — a domestic language excluded from public visibility. The Third Republic’s project of linguistic unification — the same project that worked to eliminate Breton in Brittany, Occitan in the south, Alsatian in the east, Basque in the southwest, and Corsican on the island — was substantially successful in Roussillon over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the language did not die. Catalan continued to be spoken at home, in the markets, in the songs, in the local literature, and in the names of streets and people. The official suppression was administrative, not affectionate. When the constraints loosened, Catalan re-emerged.

The contemporary visibility of Catalan identity in Perpignan dates substantially from the 1960s and 1970s. The decolonisation of France’s external empire, the post-1968 liberalisation of French regional policy, the foundation of the Universitat Catalana d’Estiu (the Catalan Summer University) in Prada in 1968 by Catalan exiles from Franco’s Spain who used the French side of the border to organise the cultural resistance Franco was suppressing, the formation of regional Catalan cultural associations, and the slow rehabilitation of regional languages in French education and public life all contributed to a Catalan revival in Roussillon. The Bressola schools — bilingual French-Catalan immersion primary and secondary schools — were founded in 1976 and now educate approximately a thousand students across multiple sites in Roussillon, including Perpignan itself. The Catalan flag, the Senyera — gold with four red horizontal stripes, identical to the flag flown over Barcelona — was officially adopted as the regional emblem of Catalunya Nord (Northern Catalonia, the contemporary Catalan name for Roussillon) and is now flown alongside the French tricolour and the European Union flag on many public buildings in Perpignan, including the Hôtel de Ville (the town hall) under specific local political agreements. The Catalan name of the city — Perpinyà — appears on most public signage alongside the French Perpignan. The annual Sant Jordi festival in April, when book vendors and rose sellers fill the streets in the same configuration as in Barcelona, draws large crowds. The summer castellers — the human towers of stacked individuals, sometimes nine levels high, that are one of the most distinctive Catalan cultural performances — are performed in the Place de la Loge in front of the medieval Loge de Mer. The sardana, the traditional Catalan circle dance, is danced on summer evenings in the squares. None of this is imported folklore. It is the city’s continuous identity, surfacing again into public visibility after a long twentieth century in which official France worked actively to suppress it.

The architectural inheritance of medieval Catalan Perpignan, beyond the royal palace, includes some of the most distinctive late Gothic civic and religious buildings in southern France. The Loge de Mer — the maritime trading exchange, built between 1397 and 1540 — was the financial and commercial heart of the medieval city’s Mediterranean trade, with its distinctive bell tower (the Castillet, completed in the late fifteenth century in red brick with the city’s iconic crenellations) one of the city’s principal landmarks. The Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste — the city’s Gothic cathedral, begun in 1324 — has an unusual single-aisled nave 16 metres wide, one of the widest single-aisle Gothic naves in Europe, and a retaule (altarpiece) of carved and painted wood from 1620, one of the most spectacular late Gothic-early Baroque altarpieces in southern Europe. The Hôtel Pams and the Hôtel Lazerme are seventeenth and eighteenth-century private mansions that show how the city’s elites adapted to French rule while preserving their distinctive Catalan architectural vocabulary. The fortifications of Vauban — built between 1671 and 1697 after the French annexation, when Louis XIV’s military engineer Sébastien Vauban (the same engineer who would later design Brest’s defences) was ordered to convert Perpignan into a frontier garrison city — surround the medieval centre with star-shaped bastions that still partly survive. The city’s medieval Jewish quarter, the Call, was one of the largest medieval Jewish communities in southern France, with continuous Jewish presence from at least the eleventh century until the expulsion of 1394. The Jewish baths of medieval Perpignan, partially excavated, are among the few surviving medieval Jewish ritual baths (mikvaot) in southern France. The cuisine is Catalan — botifarra (Catalan sausage), escalivada (roasted summer vegetables), escudella i carn d’olla (the Catalan winter meat-and-vegetable stew), crema catalana (the burnt-cream dessert that the French claim as crème brûlée but the Catalans claim as their own with the earlier documented date), anchovies de Collioure from the nearby fishing port, banyuls and maury sweet fortified wines from the surrounding hills, and the local vi de tapís — table wines that French connoisseurs sometimes describe as Spanish in style because they are, in cultural terms, made by the same Catalan winemaking tradition that produces wines on the Spanish side of the mountains, with no border in the grapes.

The contemporary city is small — population approximately 120,000 in the commune, with a metropolitan area of about 260,000, the seventeenth-largest urban area in France. The economy is mixed: tourism (the Côte Vermeille just south of the city, with the small fishing port of Collioure that drew Matisse, Derain, and the Fauvist painters in 1905, is one of France’s most picturesque Mediterranean coastlines), agriculture (the Roussillon plain is one of France’s major wine, fruit, and vegetable producing regions), services, and a small but growing border economy with Catalonia and Spain. The city is one of the principal French Mediterranean stations on the high-speed rail line from Paris to Barcelona — the LGV (Ligne à Grande Vitesse) Sud-Europe-Atlantique completed in 2013, which now makes Barcelona reachable from Perpignan in under an hour. The proximity to the Catalan capital across the border is no longer the obstacle it was in the twentieth century; in many ways, contemporary Perpignan is integrated with Catalonia more than with the rest of southern France. The city has a complex contemporary political identity that mixes French national politics, regional Catalan politics, southern French populism (the city’s mayor since 2020, Louis Aliot of the Rassemblement National, has been one of the most prominent far-right politicians in France, which sits uneasily with the city’s Catalan-leftist cultural revival movements), and a long-standing tradition of European border-region cosmopolitanism. None of these tensions cancel each other. They coexist, the way the Catalan flag coexists with the French tricolour on the same town-hall flagpole, the way Perpignan and Perpinyà coexist on the same street sign, the way the seventeenth-century French annexation coexists with the seven-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Catalan royal palace at the centre of the city.

The French arc closes here, on a Catalan city that France has spent three and a half centuries managing without quite assimilating. The pattern across the nine French articles in this series has been consistent. Corsica was sold to France in 1768 and has been arguing with the receipt ever since. Nice was bought from Savoy in 1860 in a plebiscite widely regarded as rigged. Avignon belonged to the Pope until 1791 and was an Italian-administered enclave on French soil for four centuries. Paris was substantially rebuilt by Haussmann between 1853 and 1870. Brest was destroyed in 1944 and reconstructed in concrete between 1948 and 1961. La Rochelle was starved into submission by Cardinal Richelieu in 1628 to break the Protestant resistance to French centralisation. Bordeaux was financed by the slave trade and has been negotiating with that fact for the past two decades. Toulouse was crushed by a Catholic crusade in the thirteenth century to suppress its Occitan civilisation. And Perpignan was transferred to France from Spain in 1659 and has continued, quietly, to speak Catalan ever since. The French arc has been about the diversity inside French unity — the regional, linguistic, religious, and cultural identities that the centralising French state has been managing, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, for the past four centuries. France is not a single cultural nation. France is a federation of regions, languages, and historical memories that the French state has held together with great administrative skill and considerable cultural cost. Perpignan is the last article in the arc because Perpignan is the cleanest demonstration of what the arc has been about. The French state is real. The Catalan city of Perpignan is also real. Both have been in continuous operation in the same place for more than three centuries. Neither has displaced the other.

Some cities are part of one country. This one is part of one country and is part of another country in everything but the passport, and has been doing both at once for three hundred and sixty-six years.

Nine regions. One hundred and twenty destinations. Three hundred and twenty-two weeks remaining.

The journey continues south, across the mountains. The next shore is Spanish, and starts in a city whose name nobody in Catalonia spells the French way.

---