During the 19th century, the national feeling excited by the romanticism, began to push towards the unit big nations divided in several states by historical reasons -Germany, Italy, Poland- and also towards the independence small nations included in bigger states -Ireland, Bohemia, Hungary, the Baltic ones, etc. In May, 1848, Pius IX had consulted to Balmes: "What we have to think of the rights of nationality and of independence, that it is said that they are inalienable; and, supposing that we had to admit this, when and how they might exercise". Balmes died suddenly and could not answer. In any case, he, as any observer of the social reality, was stating in Catalonia -in the carlists, the moderate ones, the local conservatives and the progressives- a clear arouses of that the Spanish state was imposing a national Castilian identity identified with the Castilian language, the history, the artistic tradition and the literature, excluding any other one, in a regime of extreme centralism. The Catalans were keeping alive the recollection of the military defeat of 1714, when Philip V completed the program of Isabel the Catholic: the military conquest of Catalonia. Since then, the Spanish state -like already it was coming doing the French state in Catalonia's part placed to the north of the Pyrenees- had tried for all the means to erase the language and Catalonia's history, and to replace in the Catalans the love to their missing nation with the absolute submission the Spanish power. The architectural symbol was the Citadel ordered to construct for Philip V to control militarily Barcelona and where the enemies of the Spanish monarchy were shutting. Nevertheless, the action against the love to Catalonia of the Spanish state was finding strong resistances in the people, which was trying to support clandestinely the collective Catalan personality, based on the language, the history, the right and the proper art. Because of it, the Catalan nationalism arose as a reaction to the centralist action from the State. And it was not basically a fruit of the subjective romanticism transplanted collectively to the people for the liberalism, but close to this progressive root it had other one, more powerful: the traditionalist. In 1833, the poem "the Patria" of Aribau had initiated a cultural movement: the "Renaixença" (the Renaissance). The love to Catalonia was expressing for the first time from the military defeat of 1714, across the poetry and the historical studies. In 1836, Pròsper de Bofarull published "The Counts of Barcelona vindicated". In 1841, Joaquim Rubió i Ors, in the prologue of his "Poems" was supporting Catalonia's literary independence. In 1850, Víctor Balaguer published a "History of Catalonia and of the Crown of Aragon". And in 1859 -when Gaudí was going to expire 7 years- there were restored the "Floral Games", the classic contest of the Catalan poetry.