THE PRESS OF THE LIBERAL TRIENNIUM IN CATALONIA (1820-1823)

During the Liberal Triennium there is a real explosion of the press throughout Spain that includes various formats, typologies and political cultures. Freedom of the press and intense political debate stimulate the publication of newspapers in towns and cities where they had not previously been published and their multiplication in the country's large cities. The press, in addition, has a fundamental role in the formulation and diffusion of the diverse political cultures grouped around the revolution and the counter-revolution. In Catalonia, the Triennium press presents a great typological diversity: number of pages and periodicity, and ideological: constitutional, exalted, moderate, realistic and cultural; and a considerable territorial distribution, despite the concentration in the city of Barcelona and, to a lesser extent, in that of Tarragona, since newspapers are edited and printed in a total of ten Catalan cities and six of them are not provincial capitals. The chronology of the Catalan press is closely related to political life. The moments of maximum constitutional journalistic effervescence coincide with the revolution of March 1820, the street confrontation between exalted and moderate in late 1821 and early 1822, and the realistic war of the summer-autumn of 1822. While the effervescence of the realistic press coincides with the realistic war of the autumn of 1822 and with the French occupation of some cities in the spring and summer of 1823.