Pau Claris i Casademunt (Catalan pronunciation: [ˈpaw ˈkɫaɾis]; January 1, 1586 – February 27, 1641) was a Catalan lawyer, clergyman and 94th President of Catalonia at the beginning of the Catalan Revolt. On January 16, 1641, he proclaimed the Catalan Republic under the protection of France.
While it is possible that his education may have been more extensive, it is only clear that Claris received a doctorate in civil law and canon law from the University of Barcelona, and studied the course during the period between 1604 and 1612.
On August 28, 1612, Pau Claris was appointed to work in La Seu d'Urgell, the seat of the Bishop of Catalonia. On September 25 of the same year, he was appointed canon, and was assigned to the Diocese of Urgell.
In 1626, Claris was elected as a representative of the church at the Parliament of Catalonia (Corts catalanes), which opened on March 28 amid a troublesome political situation after the new king of Spain, Philip IV, would not ratify the Catalan constitutions, due to tax reasons and the question if royal officers had to follow the Catalan law. The Catalan church had been exhausted by the royal taxes and was against the practice of nominating bishops from Castile to Catalan dioceses. The refusal to pay a tax of 3,300,000 ducats, caused the immediate departure of the king to Madrid.
It was not until 1632 that the Parliament resumed, although with the same members as in 1626. On this occasion, the rebellion against the Spanish crown was evident, led by a brilliant generation of lawyers, such as Catalan Joan Pere Fontanella, who was the legal adviser of the Generalitat and the Consell de Cent, and played a role in the crisis in relations between Catalonia and the Crown, which ended with the secession of 1640.
In 1632, Claris was appointed by his arm to treat the subject of an election and on July 15, the estate appointed eighteen people-the Divuitena-that would form the role of the Executive Board.
The most remarkable political episode of this period of Claris' life were the riots of Vic. As a result of a papal concession that granted the king of Spain a tenth of the revenues of the Church in Spain that served as a subsidy to the Crown, popular unrest virulently erupted in the diocese of Vic under the guidance of the archdeacon, Melcior Palau i Boscà, and the impassioned support of two canons of Urgell, Jaume Ferran and Pau Claris.
The kidnapping of ecclesiastical property in Vic by the Royal Court caused revolutionary demonstrations, with defamatory libel and threats of subversion in the field during the spring and summer of 1634. Despite pressure from the bishop of Girona, the Council of Aragon only dared to imprison a dissident deacon, Pau Capfort. Finally, the conflict delayed the payment of the tenth until the end of November.
In 1630 and 1636, Claris attended the Councils of Tarragona. In the year 1636, in spite of the neutralizing efforts of the archbishop of Tarragona, the Spaniard Antonio Pérez, he achieved approval of a provision whereby all sermons in the Principality were in Catalan.
On July 22 in 1638, Pau Claris was elected ecclesiastical deputy of the Diputació del General. The other members chosen with Claris were: Jaume Ferran (also canon of Urgell), Rafael Ancient and Rafael Cerdà as auditors of the Ecclesiastical Arm, Military and Royal, respectively, and Francesc of Tamarit and Josep Miquel Quintana as deputies of the Military and Royal Arms.
As a church member, Claris went on to preside over meetings of the Government. According to Elliott, the Viceroy in Santa Coloma tried in vain to bribe Claris and Tamarit, people uncomfortable about their role in the service of the king.
Claris found a Generalitat with very grave economic problems, resulting from years of mismanagement, and conflict that opened with the Spanish Crown accusing the generality of smuggling, due to a breach of the edicts of 1635 and 1638, which prohibited any kind of trade with France because of the Thirty Years' War. The intervention of the sheriff Montrodón, commissioned by the Viceroy of Santa Coloma, to the warehouses of Mataró and Salses, triggered the conflict, in which the lawyer Joan Pere Fontanella again played a prominent role in favor of the theses of the Members of the Government. Although the city of Barcelona was initially reluctant, it sided with the Members in 1639, especially because of the decision of the Crown to establish a general recovery from Catalonia for the years 1639 and 1640, of 50,000 pounds annually.
Behind this new effort was the eagerness of Philip IV, and the Count-Duke of Olivares to add all the lands of the Spanish Crown to the effort to contribute financially to the expenses incurred in the Thirty Years War, that already had devastated Castella. Catalonia had never felt this conflict of expansionist roots to be its own, as the Catalans never had expected anything. Olivares, to counterbalance this situation, wanted to move the conflict (or at least, it already seemed it) and so on July 19, 1639, the French besieged and took the Fort de Salses in the Roussillon. This initiated a very severe struggle between the Count-Duke and the Generality to increase its efforts in the war. Finally, the deputies agreed to send Francesc de Tamarit to the front of a new draft of soldiers to recover the castle of Salses, which was achieved on the day of Epiphany in 1640. However, the cost in human lives and in money for the country had been so great that the situation became explosive.
In spite of the actual date that contacts with France began, it would end with the formation of a Catalan-French alliance that confronted the Spanish Crown and gave rise to the so-called Catalan Revolt or War of the Reapers. Although it remains a controversial issue among historians, it seems that they could have already started in the month of May 1640. Pau Claris had summoned the general court on September 10 of 1640, but simultaneously and without consulting to the cities, would have begun the contacts with the French.
On September 7 of 1640, the representatives of the Generality of Catalonia, Francesc de Tamarit, Ramon de Guimerà, and Francesc de Vilaplana, nephew of Claris, signed the first Pact of Céret with Bernard Du Plessis-Besançon,[2] delegated by Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu on behalf of Louis XIII of France, for which Catalonia had received military support aimed at facing the Castilian offensive commanded by the Count-Duke of Olivares, who had already decided to intervene in Catalonia. It is believed that in front of the Castilian military pressure, Claris was seen to be progressively driven to accept a counter-course to French pressure, in which Catalonia would separate itself from the Spanish Monarchy and would take the form of a Free Republic under the protection of the French king.
The personal assumption of power by Claris' staff from September 1640, appeared to be total. The Junta General de Braços was summoned and set up as the ruling institution of the new situation, the commitments with France and the secession were made official, and public debt was issued for funding the military expenses.
On October 20 of 1640, Du Plessis-Besançon went to Barcelona, and some days afterwards, he signed the first pact of Confraternity and military aid from France to Catalonia, by which France was engaged to defend the Principality.
On November 24, the Spanish army under Pedro Fajardo, the Marquis of Los Vélez, invaded Catalonia from the south. On December 23, Pau Claris raised the alarm and declared war against Philip IV of Spain. The victorious advance of the Castilian troops for Tortosa, Cambrils, Tarragona, and Martorell forced the Board of Arms and Consell de Cent to yield to the French pressures, and on January 16 and January 17, the board accepted the proposal to constitute Catalonia into a republic under the protection of France.
But again the pressure of the Castilians who approached Barcelona, and the French pretensions brought Claris to have to liquidate the republican project and proclaim Louis XIII the Count of Barcelona on January 23 in 1641, three days before the Battle of Montjuïc that noisily defeated the Castilian forces and stopped the attack in Barcelona on January 26 of 1641.
On February 20, 1641, Philippe de La Mothe-Houdancourt, a substitute of Du Plessis, came to Barcelona with powers of Captain General of all the armies fighting in Catalonia. That same day, Claris fell gravely ill, and the following day received the last rites.
Pau Claris died the night of February 27 in 1641. In spite of the fact that he acted less than a year that presented problems of health, the theory of a possible poisoning circulated since the first moment (the letter from Roger de Bossost to Cardinal Richelieu) and modern investigations support this possibility.
Claris was placed in the family crypt of the chapel of Christ Church of Sant Joan de Jerusalem in Barcelona. Unfortunately, in 1888, in the context of reforms for the Universal Exhibition of Barcelona, the church was demolished.
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