BARCELONA, Spain — Agustí Colomines, a Catalan civil servant, held up a copy of the decree from Madrid that had fired his boss and all the other leaders in the Catalan regional government.

“This is only words,” Mr. Colomines said on Sunday afternoon. “It’s not a real thing.”

As the Spanish government tries to restore constitutional order in Catalonia, after the Catalan Parliament’s declaration of independence on Friday, a question is whether the Catalan administration — its ministers, lawmakers, judges, teachers, policemen and civil servants — will fall in line on Monday and take their orders from the new caretaker administration installed on Friday by Madrid.

Or will they, like Mr. Colomines, resist?

On Saturday, Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan president who was ousted by Madrid after the declaration, hinted he hoped for the latter. His sacked government intended, he said in a televised speech, “to continue to work to meet our democratic mandates,” in effect creating two rival administrations: his own breakaway cabinet, and the central government.

In Catalonia now, “there are two parallel realities,” said Oriol Bartomeus, a politics professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.