L'alba dels matiners. El procés dels trabucaires (Perpinyà, 1845

ISBN:

2008, 304 pp. Prologue by Josep Pich i Mitjana

The "matiners'" dawn is the answer to an initial legal curiosity. How was it possible than the French estate, during the Louis-Philippe monarchy, judged some Catalans, who were Spanish subjects, by crimes comitted against other Spanish people in the Spanish territory? It is clear that appropriation of foreign jurisdiction, in a time when the establishment of international justice wasn't yet imagined, can only be reasonned from the French desire of obtaining political objectives. Another thing is the legal cunning employed in order to hide the meddling in foreing sovereignty and the consequent use ot its legal power, with fraudulent aims, by the executive power of a country that boasted about its liberal regime. But the author's aim isn't to reveal legal mechanisms of the process but rather to discover real objectives and to tell the circonstances that lead French authorities to represent, with great row of the press, a bloody punishment on the very person of foreigners. That's the reason why, at the end, the book is not a legal study but a historical research that investigates social, political, collective and even personal situations of the Catalans in both sides of the border as well as in the relationships maintained by both kingdoms in this period. In order to do this, the authorr takes, as the main point of the research, the adventure of the so called "trabucaires de les illes" and the premeditate script of the legal process to which these guys were submitted, half bandit, half guerrilla fighters, just before the outbreak of the Catalan episode of the 1848 European nationalist revolutions, known as the "guerra dels matiners".