PART VI
Catalonia: Saint George's Cross
The senyera with bars corresponded logically to the king. Civic institutions had others emblems. We have seen that Bishop Berenguer of Palou conceded red insignia with silver cross. These colors inverted were used by the military arm of Barcelona, and the flag with the Saint George's cross was in use in Barcelona and in many places (even remote) that were considered dependencies of Barcelona. The Generalitat, a counter-power established against the king, adopted this flag in 1359 for "being the ancient arms of Barcelona" but never supplanted the royal insignia while Catalonia had kings of its own. The royal insignia fell in disuse since the 16th century, logically increasing the use of the flag with the Saint George's cross, representative of national institutions, as compared to absent alien kings.
Saint George's Cross according to a drawing in the Dietari de la Generalitat
Ricardo García Moya states that in the 19th century the Catalans adopted (that is, re-adopted) the four bars flag, facing the need to forget Saint Eulalia's senyera and the other banner that in the Middle Ages had represented Catalonia , quartered with crosses and bars (the fusion of the royal symbol with the symbol of the Generalitat, this one becoming exclusively the city's flag. In fact, the process of adoption of the national symbols, little used since the 16th century and forbidden since 1714 (with the New Plant Decree that established that Catalonia was a country conquered by weapons and had no rights), was slow. In the 19th century the four bars ceased being a royal symbol to be transformed into a national symbol of Catalonia; logically the substitutes used, emerged in the previous centuries as representations of a territorial power centered in the capital, had to return to their place.
The newspaper "Las Provincias" says: "the current Generalitat of Catalonia rejected this symbology (is talking about the flag with San George's cross and Saint Eulalia's flag) taking the Aragonese flag as its own". All the sentence is near to stupidity: first because it never was suggested the possibility of adopting another symbol (the Generalitat was re-established in 1976 and at that time nobody in Catalonia knew the existence of Saint Eulalia's flag or the flag with Saint George' s cross, that, if had been adopted, would have been identical to England's), and secondly because the flag was not Aragonese, either historically (since it was brought from Catalonia to Aragon, where Saint George' s Cross was their own symbol) neither most recently, since the flag of four bars had already been adopted by the Generalitat of Catalonia in 1931, a time when Aragon had not yet adopted a flag of its own.
It is also cited in the newspaper a statement of Armand de Fluviā i Escorsa, maliciously brought out of context. In his statement Fluviā refers to the fact that the local coats of arms should not contain the four bars since they are a national symbol that should not be used to represent local entities. The newspaper deliberately misconstrue it as if what is said is that the four bars should not be in the local coats of arms of Catalonia because they are not a represe ntative symbol of Catalonia. Since the author of the article had access to the complete statement of Fluviā, one must suppose that he knew the falsehood that he was writing.
