PAU History (Catalonia) cheat sheet

Ancien Régime society was legally stratified into three estates (nobility, clergy, Third Estate); privilege in taxation and office-holding, not wealth alone, defined the first two.

The French fiscal crisis of 1788 forced Louis XVI to convene the Estates-General for May 1789; the Third Estate declared itself a National Assembly on 17 June 1789 after the tennis-court oath.

Key revolutionary phases: constitutional monarchy (1789-92), the Convention and Terror (1792-94), the Directory (1795-99); the 1793 execution of Louis XVI and the levée en masse marked radicalisation.

The 1804 Napoleonic Code established legal equality, property rights and secular civil registration; it was exported to conquered and allied states and outlasted the Empire.

Napoleon's Continental System (Berlin Decree 1806) aimed to blockade Britain; the 1812 Russian campaign and the 1813 Battle of Leipzig destroyed the Grande Armée's dominance.

The Congress of Vienna (1814-15) restored a balance of power, reinstated Bourbon monarchs and created buffer states; its settlement held until the 1850s.

Industrial Revolution began in Britain c. 1760 with textiles, coal and iron; the steam engine (Watt, 1769) and railways (Stockton-Darlington 1825) transformed transport and production.

Enclosure acts and rural migration supplied urban labour; the factory system created a new industrial working class and early trade unionism (Luddism, 1811-16).

Spain's Ancien Régime crisis: the 1808 Aranjuez mutiny and abdications, the Dos de Mayo uprising and the Bayonne constitution imposed by Napoleon triggered the War of Independence (1808-14).

The Restoration order (1815 onward) combined legitimacy of monarchs, Holy Alliance interventionism and congress diplomacy; the 1820s liberal revolutions (Spain 1820, Naples, Greece) challenged it.

Spain: the 1812 Cádiz Constitution established national sovereignty, unicameral Cortes and universal male suffrage; Ferdinand VII abolished it in 1814 and again in 1823 after the Liberal Triennium.

Isabeline Spain alternated between moderado and progresista governments; the 1837 and 1845 constitutions and the 1841 desamortización of church lands reshaped property and the treasury.

Carlism (1833-76) defended dynastic legitimacy, Catholic tradition and fueros against liberal centralisation; the Carlist Wars were strongest in the Basque Country, Navarre and rural Catalonia.

1848 revolutions spread from Paris across Europe demanding constitutional government and national unification; they failed militarily but entrenched liberal and national ideas.

Italian unification (Risorgimento) and German unification under Prussia (1866-71) exemplify state-building nationalism; by contrast, the 1867 Austro-Hungarian Compromise recognised dual monarchy.

Spain's Sexenio Democrático (1868-74): the Glorious Revolution of September 1868 expelled Isabella II; the 1869 Constitution introduced universal male suffrage for the first time.

The First Republic (February 1873-January 1874) was federalist in aspiration but faced cantonal revolts, Carlist war and Cuban insurrection; it lasted eleven months.

The Sexenio also produced the 1869 Catalan and 1873 draft federal constitutions and the emergence of organised labour (FRE-AIT, 1870).

The Berlin Conference (1884-85) formalised the 'scramble for Africa'; by 1914 European powers controlled almost the entire continent, with Britain and France holding the largest shares.

Imperial expansion motives combined economic investment, strategic coaling stations, nationalist prestige and missionary and civilising ideologies; the 'white man's burden' justified colonial rule.

The 1898 Spanish-American War ended Spain's overseas empire (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines); the 'Disaster of 98' fuelled regenerationist thought and Catalan and Basque nationalism.

Rival alliance blocs: Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, 1882) and Triple Entente (France, Russia, Britain, 1907).

The 1914 Sarajevo assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered the July Crisis; mobilisation cascades and the Schlieffen Plan turned a Balkan conflict into a world war.

Total war features: trench warfare on the Western Front, industrialised casualties (Verdun, Somme), submarine warfare, blockade and state-directed economies.

1917 turning points: US entry (April) and the Russian Revolutions (February and October) removed Russia from the war via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918).

The Armistice of 11 November 1918 ended fighting; the 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed reparations, territorial losses and the war-guilt clause on Germany.

Spain remained neutral in 1916-18 but suffered inflation and the 1917 crisis (military juntas, Assembly of Parliamentarians, general strike); neutrality boosted industrial exports.

February 1917 revolution ended the Romanov autocracy; the October 1917 Bolshevik coup under Lenin established Soviet power, followed by civil war (1918-21) and War Communism.

The New Economic Policy (1921) allowed limited market activity; Stalin's 1928 Five-Year Plans imposed collectivisation and rapid industrialisation at enormous human cost.

The USSR was formally created in 1922; Stalin consolidated power by the late 1920s and the Great Purges (1936-38) eliminated political rivals.

The 1929 Wall Street Crash and Great Depression undermined confidence in liberal capitalism; mass unemployment and deflation hit Germany hardest.

Fascism in Italy (March on Rome, 1922) and Nazism in Germany (Hitler chancellor, January 1933) built on nationalism, anti-communism, leader cults and paramilitary violence.

The Weimar Republic's fragility (proportional representation, Article 48, hyperinflation of 1923) facilitated the Nazi seizure of power and the 1933 Enabling Act.

Appeasement failed at Munich (1938); the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939) divided Poland and enabled the German invasion on 1 September 1939.

WWII turning points: Stalingrad (1942-43), El Alamein, Kursk (1943) and Normandy (1944); the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945) defined the war's end.

Spain's Second Republic (1931-36) introduced agrarian reform, secular schooling and Catalan autonomy (1932 Statute); the 1936 military rising began the Civil War.

Cold War bipolarity rested on US-Soviet rivalry, nuclear deterrence (MAD) and ideological competition; the 1947 Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan drew the line in Europe.

The 1949 NATO founding and the 1955 Warsaw Pact formalised military blocs; Berlin (1948-49, 1961) and Cuba (1962) were the main flashpoints.

Decolonisation after 1945: Indian independence (1947), Indonesian (1949), Ghana (1957) and the 1960 'Year of Africa' created dozens of new states; the 1955 Bandung Conference launched non-alignment.

The Non-Aligned Movement (Belgrade, 1961) sought a third path between the blocs; the 1956 Suez crisis exposed declining European imperial power.

Détente in the 1970s produced the Helsinki Accords (1975); a second Cold War in 1979-85 followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and NATO missile deployment.

Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost (1985 onward), the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall (9 November 1989) preceded the USSR's dissolution in December 1991.

Spain under Franco was excluded from the UN until 1955 and from the EEC; the 1953 Madrid Pacts with the US and 1955 UN entry marked partial reintegration.

The 1975 Helsinki process and Spain's 1986 EEC accession anchored the democratic transition in Western institutions; NATO membership followed in 1982 (confirmed by referendum 1986).

The Restoration system (1876-1923) rested on the 1876 Constitution, the turno pacífico (alternating Liberal and Conservative governments) and electoral caciquismo; universal male suffrage came in 1890.

Primo de Rivera's dictatorship (1923-30) suspended the constitution, created the Unión Patriótica and pursued corporatist and public-works policies; it fell in January 1930.

The Second Republic (1931-36): 1931 Constitution introduced female suffrage (1931), agrarian reform, secular state and regional autonomy statutes (Catalonia 1932, Basque Country 1936).

The Civil War (July 1936-April 1939) pitted the rebel Nationalists (Franco, army, Falange, Carlists, aided by Germany and Italy) against Republicans (aided by USSR and International Brigades).

The 1939 victory led to Franco's personal dictatorship: single-party Falange, censorship, autarky, and the 1939 Law of Political Responsibilities; repression continued through the 1940s.

Francoism's phases: autarky (1939-59), desarrollismo with the 1959 Stabilisation Plan, and late Francoism with the 1967 Organic Law and growing opposition and terrorism (ETA from 1959).

The transition (1975-82): Juan Carlos I's 1975 accession, Adolfo Suárez as PM (1976), the 1977 Political Reform Law and amnesty, and the 1978 Constitution approved by referendum.

The 1978 Constitution established a parliamentary monarchy, territorial autonomy and the State of Autonomies; the 1981 attempted coup (23-F) tested the system.

Spain joined the EEC in 1986; the 1979 and 1982 statutes of autonomy, and the 1979 Catalan Statute, shaped the modern territorial order.

Catalonia industrialised earlier than most of Spain: cotton textiles in the 1830s-60s, the 1866 railway network and later metallurgy and chemicals concentrated in Barcelona and its rivers.

The Renaixença (1830s onward) revived Catalan language and literature; the 1859 Jocs Florals and the 1861 founding of the Catalan-language press promoted cultural identity.

Political Catalanism emerged with the 1892 Bases de Manresa, the 1901 Lliga Regionalista and the 1906 Solidaritat Catalana; the 1914 Mancomunitat was the first common administrative institution.

The 1931-32 Catalan Republic and the 1932 Statute of Autonomy under the Generalitat (president Francesc Macià, then Lluís Companys) established self-government.

The 6 October 1934 proclamation of the Catalan State led to the suspension of the Statute; the 1936 military rising left Catalonia in Republican hands until January 1939.

Francoist repression in Catalonia included the 1939 abolition of the Statute, the banning of Catalan in public life and schools, executions (Companys in 1940) and mass exile.

Anti-Francoist Catalan opposition included the 1940s guerrilla, the 1951 tram boycott, the 1966 Nova Cançó and the 1971 Assemblea de Catalunya.

The 1979 Statute of Sau restored the Generalitat (president Jordi Pujol from 1980); the 2006 Statute and the 2010 Constitutional Court ruling reshaped the autonomy debate.

Catalan industry's 19th-century protectionism and the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition symbolised the link between economic power and regional political demands.