Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s-1870s: In the Name of the King (War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850) 3031295102, 9783031295102

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WAR, CULTURE AND SOCIETY, 1750–1850

Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s In the Name of the King Edited by Andoni Artola · Álvaro París

War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 Series Editors

Rafe Blaufarb Florida State University Tallahassee, FL, USA Alan Forrest University of York York, UK Karen Hagemann University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC, USA

The series aims to the analysis of the military and war by combining political, social, cultural, art and gender history with military history. It wants to extend the scope of traditional histories of the period by discussing war and revolution across the Atlantic as well as within Europe, thereby contributing to a new global history of conflict in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. For more information see: wscseries.web.unc.edu

Andoni Artola  •  Álvaro París Editors

Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s In the Name of the King

Editors Andoni Artola University of the Basque Country Bilbao/Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

Álvaro París University of Salamanca Salamanca, Spain

ISSN 2634-6699     ISSN 2634-6702 (electronic) War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 ISBN 978-3-031-29510-2    ISBN 978-3-031-29511-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Historic Images / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Álvaro París and Andoni Artola Part I Royalism and Royalists in Transnational Perspective: Comparative Approaches from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic  15 2 Royalist  Commitment in the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions (1770s–1820s): Some Initial Definitions and Guidelines for Future Research 17 Paul Chopelin 3 Popular  Royalism in Scandinavia and Spanish America Before 1814 39 Steinar A. Sæther 4 King,  War and Bread: Popular Royalism in Southern Europe (1789–1830) 61 Álvaro París

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5 Spanish  Royalism in a European Perspective (1820–23) 89 Ramon Arnabat Mata Part II Dynamics of Royalist Mobilization: War, Patronage Networks and Community 107 6 Counterrevolutionaries?  Underground Struggles and Gender Relations During the French Revolution (Brittany, 1793–99)109 Solenn Mabo 7 Militias  and Popular Royalism During the War of Independence of New Spain127 Rodrigo Moreno Gutiérrez 8 Between  Discipline and Rebellion: Popular Participation in Basque Royalism (1814–33)147 Andoni Artola 9 Revolts,  Brigandage and Popular Royalism in Southern Italy in the Aftermath of National Unification169 Simon Sarlin Part III Visions of the Royalist People: Discursive Construction of Reactionary Mass Politics 189 10 ‘The  True Language of the Spanish People’ and Discourses of Early Ecclesiastical Antiliberalism191 Josep Escrig Rosa 11 A  Kingdom of This World: Ultramontanism and the Mobilization of the Masses During the Papacy of Pius IX (1846–78)213 Francisco Javier Ramón Solans

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12 A  Kingless People is a Dangerous Crowd: An Examination of French Far-right Demophobia in Pierre Gaxotte’s La révolution française (1928)233 Baptiste Roger-Lacan 13 Epilogue:  Emancipation and Popular Politics—An Aporia of Liberalism249 José M. Portillo Index255

Notes on Contributors

Ramon  Arnabat  Mata  is Professor of Contemporary History at the Rovira i Virgili University (Catalonia, Spain). Andoni  Artola  is Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). He holds a PhD from the University of the Basque Country (2012). He has been a researcher at the Clermont-Auvergne University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institut d’Histoire de la Révolution Française-­Paris I Panthéon University. His current research focuses on the breakdown of the Spanish empire and its consequences in the Basque region. Paul  Chopelin  is Lecturer in Early Modern History at Jean MoulinLyon 3 University. He currently works on the religious and political history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France. Josep Escrig Rosa  is an assistant professor at the University of Valencia, Spain. His research focuses on Latin American independence and counterrevolutionary and royalist movements in the early nineteenth century. Solenn Mabo  is a lecturer at the University of Rennes 2 and a member of the Tempora laboratory. Her PhD (2019) tackled the political practices of Breton women in the French Revolution and continues her research on gender relations at the intersection of religious and political life. Rodrigo  Moreno  Gutiérrez  is a research professor at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IIH-UNAM). He specializes in the independence processes of Latin ix

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America and cultivates the history of political languages and the social and cultural history of war. Álvaro  París is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Salamanca (Spain). He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the universities of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, ClermontAuvergne and Zaragoza. His research focuses on popular politics, counterrevolutionary movements and royalist militias in Southern Europe during the Age of Revolutions (1789–1848). José M. Portillo  is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of the Basque Country. His present research is on the processes of ‘deimperialization’ in nineteenth-century Spain. Baptiste Roger-Lacan  has just finished his PhD in History (Université d’Avignon/Université Paris 1). He is currently a member of the Groupe d’études géopolitiques, a think-tank and a staff-editor at Le Grand Continent, a Paris-­based review. Steinar  A.  Sæther is Professor of History at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo. Simon Sarlin  is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Paris Nanterre (France). His research focuses on Southern Europe, 1780–1900, with interests in comparative and transnational politics. Francisco  Javier  Ramón  Solans  is Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. He received his PhD in History from the University of Zaragoza and the University of Paris 8. He has been a research fellow in EHESS (Paris), New York University, University of Paris I and University of Münster. His current research is on the relationships between Latin American and European Catholicism and the role they played in the making of a centralized and globalized Catholic Church.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Álvaro París and Andoni Artola

In 1827, the Venezuelan royalist guerrilla leader Dionisio Cisneros allegedly declared that ‘the Spanish King [Ferdinand VII] did not want any other kind of people than the Indians and blacks, since the whites were all his enemies’.1 This very same year, in Catalonia, ultra-royalists at odds with the absolutist ministers rose in arms, claiming that Ferdinand VII and his government were surrounded by blacks, a derogatory nickname without racial connotations used to refer to the liberals.2 A Spanish American royalist associating the king’s cause with the interests of coloured and indigenous people and a royalist insurrection accusing the absolutist government of colluding with the revolution were not oddities at the time. Royalism was a heterogeneous and diverse movement that served both to enforce the social order and to rise against it in the name of the king.

Á. París (*) University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain e-mail: [email protected] A. Artola University of the Basque Country, Bilbao/Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_1

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Nevertheless, royalism has traditionally been the poor relation in nineteenth-century political history.3 It has been mostly understood as a reaction driven by ancien régime elites in order to defend their privileges. Consequently, the popular support for royalist and counterrevolutionary movements has often been portrayed as the result of manipulation and false consciousness. Both liberal and Marxist narratives have deprived popular royalists of agency, presenting them as ‘primitive rebels’ who invoked the name of the king to defend the traditional values threatened by economic modernization or oppose the unfolding of the nation-state on their local communities. In recent years, however, royalist, counterrevolutionary and antiliberal movements have received increasing attention by historians. This growing interest is at least partially motivated by the rise of present-day conservative populism and far-right movements which have challenged the narratives linking historical progress to the spread of liberal and progressive values. This recent phenomenon has drawn historian’s attention to those forms of popular political participation which were opposed to revolution and liberalism in the past. In Europe, to cite a few examples, there are works by Jean-Clement Martin, Roger Dupuy, Pierre Triomphe, Alexandre Dupont, Paul Chopelin, Bernard Rulof, Pedro Rújula, Jean-Phillipe Luis, Carmine Pinto, Massimo Cattaneo, Fátima Sa e Melo and Alexandra Lousada, some of whom have taken part in this volume, while others, without being present here, have been essential to its development.4 In this sense, several recent collective publications resulting from transnational research projects and networks, illustrate the current debates and the work still remaining to be done.5 Some of the most stimulating and original contributions on popular royalism have come out of South America. The wars of independence have been revisited from the perspective of political participation on the part of popular sectors, underscoring the role of indigenous people, slaves and commoners that fought for the monarchist side. In this regard, we could mention, among others, the works of Marcela Echeverri, Cecilia Méndez, Sergio Serulnikov, Raúl Fradkin and Steinar Saether.6 The first conclusion we can draw from this new wave of studies is that royalist and counterrevolutionary movements did not propose a mere return to the past, nor necessarily a restoration of the ancien régime social order. Their political plans drew their legitimacy from the past but, at the same time, they were able to provide novel responses to a troubled present

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marked by a sense of uncertainty and dislocation. Counterrevolution was a reaction to the revolution, but it was more than a mere defensive response. It also gave birth to an alternative path of politicization throughout the Age of Revolution, which contributed to the rise of new models of political intervention in the political arena. Royalists and counterrevolutionaries reassessed and adapted familiar discourses and images (such as the God, King and Homeland trinity) to address an unprecedented political scenario marked by the revolutionary challenge to the traditional monarchy. This was a monarchy that not only represented a particular state-form, but also a transcendent order providing the principles and references by which people made sense of the world. While revolutionaries introduced new principles for organizing society (based on abstract rational ideas), those who opposed them tried to appropriate and monopolize the customary sources of political legitimacy, such as religion, monarchy and tradition. This does not mean, however, that they clung on to the old ideas as if they were trapped in the past, but rather that they re-elaborated these pre-existing tools (which had largely proved their effectiveness) to provide updated solutions to the challenges of their present. Therefore, those demands raised in the name of the king could be conservative as well as innovative, since the understandings of monarchy were flexible enough to cover the contradictory expectations of various social groups. The second conclusion arising from recent scholarship on this topic concerns the difficulty in establishing a comprehensive definition of the terms ‘royalist’ and ‘royalism’. The problem arises from the self-perception of the social actors themselves. Royalists largely presented their political positions as a result of common sense and broadly shared intuitions. Since these truths were self-evident for everyone, they barely required further definition.7 Royalists did not need to elaborate a systematic political programme in the way we currently understand it. In fact, from their perspective, the revolutionaries were those who had to clarify their political blueprint, since they sought to overthrow the traditional foundations of society—developed over centuries of experience—based on theoretical abstractions. Taking these issues into account, a royalist could be broadly defined in our view as a person who supported a ruling king or queen, who believed that a king should rule and who considered the monarch as the keystone of the social order. The emergence of a partisan royalism, however, required a violent challenge to the monarchy that drove people to take

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sides with the king, often by taking up arms. Prior to 1789, the term ‘royalist’ in most European languages referred to the English Civil War of 1642, therefore evoking a troubled time when the very survival of the monarchy was at stake. The term, however, only proliferated from the French Revolution onwards, when the European monarchies as a whole were put in serious jeopardy. Since this pivotal moment, monarchical rule was not taken for granted anymore, so that the king’s cause needed partisans. The last point of discussion emerging from recent literature is whether royalism should be necessarily associated with counterrevolution, reaction and conservatism. Paul Chopelin concludes in his contribution to this volume that ‘the systematic association between royalism and counterrevolution should be abandoned’, stressing the role played by constitutional and reformists royalists. This remark aligns with the suggestions of Spanish American historians who have largely shown how popular sectors—from Indians and slaves to urban and rural commoners— embraced popular royalism as a way to express radical and emancipatory goals. In this way, Steinar Saether concludes in his chapter that popular royalism was not necessarily ‘conservative, traditionalist or reactionary’, because those demands raised in the name of the king could be ‘innovative and radical’, although ‘couched in a language of a return to a just and utopian past’. In contrast to this vision, other historiographical traditions tend to characterize royalism as a counterrevolutionary and antiliberal movement. Some examples of this approach can be found in this volume, particularly in Chaps. 4, 5, 8 and 10. This apparent contradiction does not result from an aprioristic historiographical position, but instead from the specific historical and chronological backgrounds addressed by the authors therein. In order to illustrate this issue, we can draw on the example of the Spanish Monarchy. In Peninsular Spain, royalism progressively emerged— from the Liberal Triennium (1820–23) onwards—as an antiliberal and absolutist movement, implying a complete rejection of any form of constitutional government. Although liberals supported a constitutional monarchy, they were never called royalists, since absolutists had successfully appropriated the term. In conclusion, a Spanish liberal ‘monarchist’ would never define himself as a royalist. In contrast, in Spanish America, being a royalist largely meant being loyal to the Spanish Monarchy and opposed to insurgency and independence. Therefore, many Spanish American royalists embraced the Constitution as a means of enforcing Spanish rule.

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While in Peninsular Spain the idea of a ‘constitutional royalist’ was almost an oxymoron, in Spanish America both liberals and absolutists could be referred to as ‘royalists’ as long as they supported the Spanish monarchy.8 In short, ‘royalism’ and ‘royalist’ meant different things at different times and in different regions during the Age of Revolution. In some places, the term became inexorably associated with counterrevolution, while in others the existence of a ‘constitutional royalism’ was a real alternative. This diversity, however, should not constitute an obstacle when it comes to drawing comparative conclusions. The same goes for the different chronological approaches to our topic. Royalism was not created out of nothing as a response to revolution. Steinar Saether’s chapter on the 1765 riots in Bergen and Quito shows how, before the French Revolution, popular attitudes towards monarchy allowed people to raise innovative demands. Under the motto ‘Long live the King, death to bad government!’, rioters resorted to a traditional language to express radical claims, without calling into question the monarchical system itself. All things considered, we suggest that royalism could be defined as a political commitment to the king’s rule in a context in which the monarchy was actively challenged. Although royalism in a broader sense could be used to define any form of attachment to the monarchy—dating back to the Middle Ages—a narrower use of the term allows us to specifically address the particular context provided by the Age of Revolution. This was a period during which the traditional monarchical order was globally challenged, to an extent that it should be explicitly defended. In this sense, royalism during the Age of Revolution emerged from three intertwined dynamics. In the first place, it was grounded in the traditional ‘monarchical imaginary’ of the ancien régime, under which the relationship between the king and his subjects was based on a reciprocal pact to be respected by both sides. This framework was updated during the revolutionary era, so that that ordinary royalists felt entitled to ask the king to address their demands in reward for their services. Secondly, royalism was a result of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, during which European monarchies mobilized large contingents of the population through armies, militias and irregular forces. Military service enabled combatants from diverse backgrounds to establish a direct link with the king and gave them specific compensation in return for their sacrifice to the royalist cause. Popular participation in war led to a reassessment of the bond between the king and his subjects, providing an alternative route for politicization.

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Lastly, royalism was attached to the experience of the civil war between revolution and counterrevolution, which created a political landscape divided between two irreconcilable worldviews. In this context, politics did not ‘descend’ to the mases, but was shaped from below. Ordinary people learnt how to express their grievances in political terms, appropriating, adapting and crafting old and new political ideas and practices, thus making them their own. In any event, to address the popular dimension of royalism we must abandon the dichotomies between elites and common people in order to stress, instead, the interactions and reciprocities between them. By popular royalism we understand the engagement of unprivileged social groups— those excluded from formal politics—with the royalist cause. The precise definition of ‘unprivileged’, ‘popular’ or ‘subaltern’ may differ from one historiographical tradition to another. Regardless of the definition provided, however, the key issue remains to overcome the assumption that ordinary people should necessarily have embraced revolutionary ideals unless they were fighting against their own interests. As this volume extensively illustrates, popular sectors engaged in royalist politics by addressing their own demands, values and hopes. Everyday concerns, material grievances and community-oriented goals became entangled in a large-scale transnational conflict between revolution and counterrevolution. Thus, tensions, expectations and desires originated outside the political field, yet were transferred there in order to gain legitimacy.9 This is the first collective book in English which addresses royalism and its popular dimension as a specific object of study, offering a comparative gaze in different parts of Europe and the Americas. It meets the need for a reference work on an object of study which has been discredited by teleological interpretations of history, but which in recent decades has given rise to diffuse publications in different languages. In this sense, it should be noted, as is clear from a glance at the table of contents, that this is not a systematic approach to every case or every region studied to date. Rather, the book seeks to offer a broad interpretative framework in order to provide tools for future research on the subject. To do so, it brings together a group of scholars with demonstrated international experience whose prior collaboration has facilitated establishing a comparative dialogue in the work. This plurality of voices offers the reader a great variety of perspectives which—in our opinion—enrich the value of the volume as a whole.

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The book is organized into three themed sections. The first (‘Royalism and Royalists in Transnational Perspective: Comparative Approaches from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic’) takes a comparative approach to royalism using case studies from southern Europe to Spanish America and from the Kingdom of Naples to Scandinavia. This section also provides important theoretical and conceptual clarification with respect to the term royalism, its popular component, its relationship with the counterrevolution and its links with other forms of popular protest, providing a theoretical reflection which is the basis for understanding the rest of the work. In the opening chapter of the volume, Paul Chopelin sets out the conceptual framework and the academic approach to royalism—a term with complex and changing meanings. In his view, royalism can be studied as a specific phenomenon, free from any suspected sympathies with the counterrevolution or with extreme-right movements, but the current scholarship has still not come up with a common definition of the term. This chapter attempts to provide a typology by drawing on a variety of regional contexts. Chopelin’s comparative approach poses a conceptual challenge, although it does at least contribute a lowest common denominator for royalist political culture, namely that of a group or individual’s loyalty to a dynasty. As in other parts of the book, he considers it ineffective to differentiate between a popular royalist culture and another pertaining to the elites. In this sense, royalism is considered a multiclass movement. This claim does not deny the role of labourers, the peasantry, artisans and the poor but, rather, places these groups within specific local or regional social contexts that would have generated a multiclass, pro-­monarchy community of interest. In Chap. 3, Steinar A. Sæther tackles theoretical matters starting with a comparative study of Spanish America and the various political entities in Scandinavia towards the end of the ancien régime. Sæther’s core idea is that eighteenth-century absolutism performed a similar function in both regions, in that it bypassed the traditional intermediary powers to create a new communication channel with the people. In other words, absolutism’s need for popular support for its military and imperial exploits gave rise to a new political culture that was frequently harnessed by the popular classes as a means of confronting the abuses of the nobility or of religious powers, backed by the king. Álvaro París provides in his chapter an overall analysis of popular royalism in Southern Europe, using case studies from three Bourbon monarchies: Spain, France and the Kingdom of Naples. Through the concepts of

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king, war and bread, París demonstrates how popular participation in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars forged a new relationship between the king and his subjects. Royalist combatants felt entitled to ask for specific rewards in return for their service, thus opening the way for expressing their social and economic demands. Popular royalism provided an original means of political participation through which working people intervened in the transformation of the traditional monarchies during the Age of Revolution. Closing the first section, Ramón Arnabat looks, in Chap. 5, at Spanish royalism during the Liberal Triennium (1820–23) through a comparative approach. Arnabat sets the Spanish case against the backdrop of the so-called European Civil War that pitted revolution against counterrevolution, which during the period analysed here took the form of royalists taking up arms against the liberal regime. The chapter begins with a detailed study of the Spanish case and primarily seeks to place it within the European context by comparing it with the Italian Sanfedisti or Viva Maria movements, with resistance of the Vendée against the French Revolution, with the Chouannerie and with Miguelism in Portugal. The second section (‘Dynamics of Royalist Mobilization: War, Patronage Networks and Community’) focuses on various case studies to conduct a detailed analysis of specific mechanisms of royalist mobilization, ranging from war and weapons to the role of the elites, hierarchical connections and communitarian relationships. Solenn Mabo homes in on the civil war in western France during the French Revolution to examine the role of women in the Breton anti-­ revolutionary resistance. Specifically, she makes extensive use of new sources from departmental archives, particularly judicial documentation. Mabo examines the activities undertaken by women in support of priests who opposed the 1791 Civil Constitution of the Clergy in order to illustrate the role of women in organizing clandestine resistance to the French Revolution. She highlights the fact that this activity was not the result of counterrevolutionary militancy, as the republican historiography would have us believe. Rather, it was an extension of the role of women in running domestic life in traditional communities. Her chapter, furthermore, provides clear evidence of the relationship between royalism and religion as well as with the patronage, family and clientelist connections around which rural communities were structured in the ancien regime. Popular royalism is thus couched in broader terms, but within a specific culture and context.

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Rodrigo Moreno’s chapter—and the section as a whole—is closely linked to the question of war. Rather than examining armed conflicts, battles or specific events, however, it looks at popular royalism in the militias that resisted the pro-independence revolution in New Spain. Moreno positions the culture of war within political culture. These dimensions are intertwined to define an emerging space in which the majority of the population—although not the elite—learnt about modern politics. Moreno takes a clear bottom-up approach and examines the practices, repertoires and political action used by the popular classes who were involved in the royalist militias, all with the goal of questioning the widespread assumption that royalism was simply an elitist, reactionary, conservative and counterrevolutionary political theory. Andoni Artola focuses on the Spanish Basque Country, one of the most important regions in the nineteenth-century European counterrevolution, together with those of the Vendée and Brittany (France), Mezzogiorno (Italy), Catalonia (Spain) and Tras-os-Montes (Portugal). Evidence of this dates back to the First Carlist War (1833–39), when the region became one of the most important centres of antiliberal resistance in southern Europe. The chapter draws on extensive archival research rather than pre-­ established theories or premises. It analyses popular participation in royalist activities from within its own context. His examination of the documentation suggests that the ties between the royalist elite and popular sectors were evident in the patronage, clientelist and family connections around which communities were structured in the ancien régime. In other words, the vertical structure of popular royalism aligned with that context. However, this does not contradict the clearly popular component of royalist resistance against the Spanish Liberal Revolution. In Chap. 9, Simon Sarlin looks at armed resistance to Italian unification and strikes an excellent balance between the use of empirical material and theoretical reflection. The theme is addressed in the context of the persistent protests during the ancien régime and, in particular, banditry and popular uprisings. The text masterfully describes the move from popular protests following the 1860 plebiscite for unification to the formation of armed groups or guerrilla bands which, with the support of important legitimist property owners, enabled the uprising in southern Italy to persist. It demonstrates, in general terms, the transition from a few isolated revolts with no clear demands—triggered by the liberal threat to the mechanisms that protected the traditional way of life—towards a dynastic, legitimist movement organized at the regional level. Nevertheless,

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Sarlin does not consider popular royalism to be a form of banditry driven by primitive motivations. Rather, the roots of popular legitimism should be identified in interventions by the monarchy from the eighteenth century on to protect rural communities against barons. The third and final section (‘Visions of the Royalist People: Discursive Construction of Reactionary Mass Politics’) examines discourses around the relationship between the popular classes and royalism. From the Age of Revolutions through to the twentieth century, publicists, clergymen and reactionary historians linked the defence of the monarchy with the counterrevolution in an attempt to appropriate popular legitimation, thus connecting popular royalism with reactionary ideologies. Josep Escrig studies the image of the people carved out by the Spanish reactionary clergy between 1810 and 1825 and contrasts this with the image promoted by the Liberal Revolution following the proclamation of national sovereignty. The text draws on the political battles that arose in the Spanish Empire during the Peninsular War. Escrig illustrates various attempts by Spanish reactionaries to appropriate the populace for their own purposes. Their goal was to legitimize this bond based on the rallying cry of the ‘God, Homeland, King’ triad to prevent popular sovereignty as sought by the revolutionaries. This countered the liberal image of the people with one of a counterrevolutionary movement in which the masses would defend the privileges of the Church, the rights of the monarch, and a homeland whose essence was being destroyed by a group of foreign agents and Spanish liberals. The subject of this chapter constitutes, together with war, one of the main themes of the volume and ties in with other chapters in that regard (especially those of Sarlin, Ramón and Mabo). The new conception of national politics, in which fundamental political ties were established based on the free association of citizens, broke away from the hierarchical model upon which the relationship with the monarchy was built. To combat the political nation, royalists did not propose a return to the past and to the monarchy of the ancien régime but, instead, underscored the popular legitimacy of traditional institutions. In this sense, the monarchy was granted a new form of popular legitimation which was evident not in representative institutions but in organic connections with traditional corporations. One unique aspect of this book on popular royalism is the inclusion of a chapter on the papacy. Francisco Javier Ramón shows how the Capture of Rome by Italian troops in 1870 marked the end of the Papal States and,

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in turn, of the papal monarchy, an institution that is seldom considered an object of royalist devotion in the historiography. This chapter reinterprets the pontifical cause from a legitimist perspective and analyses its similarities with other European legitimist movements in addition to its popular dimension. The Holy See used modern communication methods—the press, or more generally the widespread dissemination of images of the pope among popular sectors—to facilitate transnational popular mobilization in defence of its rights. In the last chapter, Baptiste Roger-Lacan encompasses the counterrevolutionary and/or royalist appropriation of the populace for their own ends by reactionary publicists and examines historiography with ties to the extreme right. Roger-Lacan shows how this appropriation has influenced historiography and contributed to the formation of images of the general populace which have pervaded down to the present day. His analysis draws on a specific example: the images of the people in La Révolution française (1928) by Pierre Gaxotte, a member of the royalist and extremely conservative Action française movement. The populace in the aforementioned work is systematically bestialized and presented as a collection of unthinking bandits, the goal being to show how political changes transformed ordinary people into a violent mob. This clear case of historiographical demophobia went hand in hand, paradoxically, with an attempt to gain popular legitimation. This project would have been impossible without the generous collaboration of numerous colleagues and institutions. The editors would like to express their gratitude to all of them. Firstly, to those colleagues who took part in two conferences on popular royalism held in Paris and the Basque Country in 2018, and which are at the root of this book. For different reasons, some of them do not feature among the list of contributors here, although they all made import ant contributions to the debate that, we believe, have been reflected in the final result. In this sense, we must mention Clément Weiss (who formed part of the organization), Jean-Clément Martin, Karine Rance, Pierre Triomphe, Pedro Rújula, Marcela Echeverri, Maria Alexandre Lousada, Juan Bosco Amores and Pierre Serna, who offered though-provoking interpretative pointers in his conclusions. Likewise, the editors want to make public their gratitude to the heads of the research projects which have financed the project in its different stages: to José Ramón Díaz de Durana, head of the Basque Government research group (IT1465-22) Sociedades, Procesos, Culturas (siglos VIII–XVIII); to José María Imízcoz, joint head of the research project funded by Spanish

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Ministry for Science and Innovation (PID2020-114496RB-I00), titled Disrupciones y continuidades en el proceso de la modernidad, siglos XVI– XIX and to Pedro Rújula, head of the research project funded by Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (PID2019-105071GB-100) La dimensión popular de la política en la Europa meridional y América Latina, 1789–1898. They all generously provided resources for the successful completion of the project. Finally, the book was supported by a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral grant IJC2019-041711-I funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 And, last but not least, the editors wish to give thanks for the trust placed in them by the editors of the Palgrave Macmillan Series ‘War, Culture & Society, 1750–1850’ (Rafael Blaubarb, Alan Forrest and Karen Hagemann), as well as thank Emily Russell, commissioning editor in history for the publishing house, for her diligent and efficient communication. Finally, we would like to thank Cameron Watson for his help in preparing the text and translation of certain passages in the work.

Notes 1. Quoted in Tomás Straka, La voz de los vencidos: ideas del partido realista de Caracas, 1810–1821 (Caracas, 2000), 186. 2. Jaume Torras, La guerra de los Agraviados (Barcelona, 1967). 3. Alexandre Dupont, ‘Le légitimisme, parent pauvre de l’historiographie ?’, Revue historique 672 (2014): 889–911. 4. To cite just a few examples here without any pretence to being an exhaustive list, see: Pedro Rújula and Francisco Javier Ramón Solans (eds), El desafío de la revolución: Reaccionarios, antiliberales y contrarrevolucionarios (siglos XVIII y XIX) (Granada, 2017); Jean-Clément Martin (ed.), La Contre Révolution en Europe (Rennes, 2001); Bruno Dumons and Hilaire Multon (eds), “Blancs” et contre-révolutionnaires en Europe: Espaces, réseaux, cultures et mémoires (fin XVIIIe–début XXe siècles) (Rome, 2011); Pierre Triomphe, 1815: La Terreur blanche, Toulouse (Toulouse, 2017); Roger Dupuy, La politique du people: Racines, permanences et ambiguïtés du populisme (Paris, 2002); Alexandre Dupont, Une internationale blanche: histoire d’une mobilisation royaliste entre France et Espagne dans les années 1870 (Paris, 2020); Bernard Rulof, Popular Legitimism and the Monarchy in France: Mass Politics without Parties, 1830–1880 (Cham, 2021); Carmine Pinto, La guerra per il Mezzogiorno: Italiani, borbonici, briganti (Rome and Bari, 2019); Massimo Cattaneo, La sponda sbagliata del Tevere: Mito e realtà di un’identità popolare tra antico regime e rivoluzione (Naples, 2004); Maria

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Alexandre Lousada and Maria de de Fátima Sá e Melo Ferreira, Dom Miguel, (Lisbon, 2009). 5. Pedro Rújula and Laura di Fiore (eds), ‘The Counter-revolutionary Response in Nineteenth-century Europe’, special issue of Contemporanea 24/4 (2021) ; Paul Chopelin (ed.), ‘Royalisme et royalistes dans la France révolutionnaire’, special issue of the Annales historique de la Révolution française 403 (2021) ; Emilio Gin and Silvia Sonetti (eds), Re i Briganti : Monarchia borbonica, controrivoluzione e brigantaggio politico nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia (1799–1895) (Soveria Mannelli, 2021). 6. Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 (New York, 2016); Marcela Echeverri (ed.), ‘Monarchy, Empire and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions’, special issue of Varia Historia 35/67 (2019); Cecilia Méndez, The Plebeian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820–1850 (Durham, 2005); Steinar Saether, Identidades e independencia en Santa Marta y Riohacha. 1750–1850 (Bogota, 2005), Sergio Serulnikov, ‘Lo que invocar la figura del Rey y la justicia regia significaba (y lo que no): monarquismo popular en Charcas tardocolonial’, Varia Historia 35/67 (2019): 37–82; Raúl Fradkin, ‘Realistas rebeldes en el último pueblo del mundo: conspiraciones y sublevaciones en Carmen de Patagones, 1812-1817’ Claves. Revista de Historia 6/11 (2020), 75–103. 7. Pedro Rújula ‘El antiliberalismo reaccionario’, in La España liberal, 1833–1874, eds Mª Cruz Romeo and María Sierra (Madrid and Saragossa, 2014), 386; Jordi Canal, El carlismo: Dos siglos de contrarrevolución en España (Madrid, 2000), 19–22. 8. A.  Martínez Riaza, ‘Todos eran realistas: liberalismo y absolutismo en el gobierno del Virreinato del Perú, 1820–1824’, in Visiones y revisiones de la independencia americana, eds Izaskun Álvarez and Julio Sánchez (Salamanca, 2014), 121–144. 9. Haim Burstin, Révolutionnaires : Pour une anthropologie politique de la Révolution française (Paris, 2013).

PART I

Royalism and Royalists in Transnational Perspective: Comparative Approaches from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic

CHAPTER 2

Royalist Commitment in the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions (1770s–1820s): Some Initial Definitions and Guidelines for Future Research Paul Chopelin

While counterrevolution is today an object of study in its own right, there is still much doubt regarding the concept of royalism when it comes to defining a specific political position during the ‘Age of Revolutions’.1 In the French case in particular, royalists are rarely defined as such and are often considered, more generally, as counterrevolutionaries. The Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, edited by Albert Soboul, offers an entry on ‘Royalisme/Royalistes’ by Claude Petitfrère, who describes the phenomenon as a series of acts of resistance against the republican regime, without really defining the modalities of this commitment.2 In the historiography of the twentieth century, royalists have

P. Chopelin (*) Lyon III-Jean Moulin University, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_2

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remained secondary actors in the syntheses devoted to the history of the French Revolution: rarely named, other than under the label of counterrevolutionaries, they are confined to their role as opponents, and their political culture not being the subject of any particular study. For Paul Bois and Claude Petifrère, who have studied the peasant revolts in western France from a social history perspective, the question of popular royalism should not even be raised.3 Although the American historian Donald Sutherland uses the term ‘popular royalism’ in the introduction to his thesis on the Chouannerie, he devotes only two pages to studying the attachment to the king shown by the Breton rebels.4 Roger Dupuy develops a similar approach based on social conflicts and not on political culture in his works on the Chouannerie, which leads him, with François Lebrun, to distinguish anti-revolution, as a popular form of contestation of the legal and institutional order resulting from the Revolution, from the counterrevolution, which was carried by nobles and by priests.5 The study of royalism has developed, especially in the last twenty years on the American continent, within the framework of subaltern studies. This approach deconstructs the founding myths of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century independence movements by giving voice to the defeated in the civil wars in order to better question their relationship with the metropolitan royal power base.6 The subject is also of growing interest to Spanish and Italian researchers interested in the permanence of monarchical regimes in the Iberian and Italian peninsulas throughout the nineteenth century. Long at the forefront of research into the history of the late eighteenth-­ century revolutions, with their prestigious review, the Annales historiques de la Révolution française, French scholars appear to have made less progress in the study of royalism. The republican teleology inherited from the Third Republic made it inconceivable to consider the existence of popular royalism, which if it did, would necessarily be the mask of social antagonism or priestly manipulation. In addition to this ideological reticence, there is the moral devaluation of royalism, associated, after 1945, solely with the thought of Charles Maurras. As such, for a long time there was a delegitimization and even suspicion of the study of royalism and royalist political thought. French royalism, as a doctrine, was of great interest to foreign researchers: Robert Griffiths and Vladislava Sergienko worked on the ‘monarchiens’ and James L.  Osen on the frameworks of royalist political thought during the Revolution.7 In France, the study of royalist political commitment has mainly revolved around two different but

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connected lines of enquiry: the study of subversive networks and the study of the press.8 It is, above all, the notion of ‘counterrevolution’ or Counterrevolution with capital letters to speak of this movement as a constituted party, (which is itself debatable), that attracted the attention of French researchers, under the main impulse of Jacques Godechot, and then of Jean-Clément Martin. The latter wrote a history of this political category and its openness to various interpretations, before studying French counterrevolutionary commitments within a transnational perspective, giving rise to several decisive publications that facilitated a transition away from the previous hemiplegic vision of the period.9 The colloquia of Lyon and Rome (2008 and 2009), devoted to ‘white’ (royalist) political cultures, addressed the question over the long period from 1770 to 1914 and defined a number of lines of research based on places, networks and certain emblematic personalities.10 In 2016, the international colloquium ‘Popular Royalism in the Revolutionary Atlantic World’, held at Yale University, directly addressed the question of royalism and royalist commitment by departing from the counterrevolutionary prism. The various case studies presented there made it possible to give a sense of agency back to actors who explicitly fought in the name of the rights of a fallen or contested sovereign, which in turn facilitated a comparison of the different forms of royalist political ‘protagonism’.11 Although this colloquium made it possible to identify a common research subject and to assess the extent of the phenomenon, it did not lead to an overall definition because of the compartmentalization of historiographies and the difficulty of drawing up a typology based on very disparate examples.12

Royalisms and Royalists in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: An Attempt at Definitions In the eighteenth century, before the French Revolution, in everyday French vocabulary the term ‘royaliste’ was associated with the English Civil War (1642–1651) and referred to the supporters of King Charles I.13 The French also used the term to refer to the supporters of Henry IV who were opposed to the Leaguers at the end of the Wars of Religion in the 1590s.14 In England, the term ‘royalist’ has three synonyms: ‘loyalist’ (or ‘loyal-man’), ‘cavalier’ and ‘Tory’.15 The term ‘royalist’ can thus be used to designate, any time after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a supporter of the Stuarts, a Jacobite, or someone nostalgic for the monarchical regime

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before the Bill of Rights, that is, a regime in which the power of the king would prevail over that of parliament.16 From this perspective, a royalist is understood either as someone who is loyal to the king and opposed to a republican parliamentary regime or a follower of one dynasty ousted by another. Although the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert uses a similar definition in its ‘Royaliste’ entry, its author nevertheless specifies that the term can also be used to designate the king’s agents, magistrates and soldiers. This is the meaning used, for example, by the Marquis d’Argenson in his diary, dated 8 January 1755, to describe the soldiers engaged in the fight against the bandit Mandrin: The latest news that a friend of mine who has a command against the smugglers gives me is that they are sending him a reinforcement of troops, that they are very badly informed about the enemy, the country being against the royalists and for these rebels, that they say are waging war on the rich farmer-­ generals and not on the king.17

The term ‘royalists’ here is a convenience of language and does not mean a political position. D’Argenson is also careful to make it clear, and this is important, that while the royalists are the guarantors of the monarchical social order, the ‘rebels’ are not, for their part, enemies of the king. During the American Revolution of 1776, supporters of the English crown were generally described as ‘loyalists’, and it is under this name that they traditionally appear in historiography.18 However, should ‘royalists’ have been distinguished from their republican opponents? The answer is far from obvious, since their opponents, the ‘insurgents’, were not necessarily ardent republicans. In a work that has caused controversy among legal historians across the Atlantic, The Royalist Revolution (2014), Eric Nelson analyses a number of rebel satirical texts which reject the despotism of the British crown yet maintain a personal attachment to the monarchical system.19 Like the Northern Dutch who deposed Philip II in 1581 and initially wanted a sovereign before opting for republican rule, some of the insurgents were authentic royalists who only gradually abandoned their attachment to the royal form of authority in favour of an elected president, the father of the nation. While Nelson clearly goes a little too far in concluding that the legal foundations of the Republic of the United States of America are essentially monarchical, his work has the merit of reminding us that the opposition between pro-English royalists and

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republican rebels must be largely nuanced. There were royalists, stricto sensu, in both camps, at least at the beginning of the conflict. The term ‘royalist’ emerged as a political category in France in the autumn of 1789 to denote a political commitment to the king’s rights in the context of the French and Brabant Revolutions. In the press and in pamphlets published in the rebel states of the Austrian Netherlands, supporters of Habsburg sovereignty were often referred to as royalists.20 They were also referred to as imperialists, but the term royalist was probably used by analogy with the French situation. Indeed, in France, the term royalist appeared in September 1789 to designate the supporters of a strong royal power before the National Assembly.21 On 2 September 1789, in the context of the discussion about the royal veto—a key power in the decision-making structure—the Forez deputy Antoine-François Delandine denounced the risk of seeing France divided into ‘royalistes et anti-royalistes’.22 In June 1790, in a declaration addressed to the National Assembly to protest against suppression of the nobility, the Marquis de La Queuille denounced the use of the term ‘aristocrate’, which, according to him, was used to ‘persecute the royalists’.23 Henceforth, the royalists, or ‘amis du roi’, were opposed to the ‘patriotes’. The latter, although monarchists, defended the political preeminence of the National Assembly, the representative body of the sovereign people, over the king. It should be pointed out that not all royalists were opposed to the founding principles of the 1789 Revolution—the abolition of privileges and the Declaration of Human Rights—but they did contest the constitutional direction it took. The ‘monarchiens’ thus defended the principle of an English-style constitutional royalty, which they continued to defend in the press and later as émigrés.24 From 1792 onwards, those who opposed the uprising of 10 August would be defined as royalists. France became the scene of a civil war pitting royalists against republicans, but the royalist camp was divided between various tendencies and had no unity. The Count of Provence, regent of the kingdom, and the Count of Artois, lieutenant general, did not have the means to give either ideological or operational coherence to the French royalists. We must therefore distinguish between counterrevolutionary royalists, who sought to return to the situation before 1789 or, at least, to the absolutist compromise of the royal declaration of 23 June 1789, and constitutional royalists, who wanted to revitalize the 1791 constitution around a strong executive.25 Nor should we forget noninstitutional royalism, which was based simply on personal attachment to the royal family and its public image as the embodiment of a reassuring social

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order. There are multiple royalisms that need to be tackled on a case-by-­ case basis in order to understand the ideological and social plurality of this movement in the nineteenth century, from ultra-royalism to liberal and democratic royalism.26 In the Italian Peninsula, the supporters of the princes overthrown by the French Army from 1798 onwards can easily be considered royalists, whether they were supporters of the House of Savoy in the former Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, supporters of the Habsburgs in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (the Viva Maria), supporters of the Bourbons of Parma and Naples (Sanfedists) or, in a way, supporters of the pope, the sovereign of the Papal State.27 After 1800, if the term ‘royalist’ was still used in the French Empire—a monarchical state that thought of itself as an alternative to royalty and designated its royalist opponents as such—it was employed much less in the Napoleonic kingdoms. Since these kingdoms resembled the reformist royalties of the late eighteenth century, royalist opponents to these new dynasts were the supporters of the fallen princes, whom they deemed the only legitimate powers. This was the case, for example, in Naples and in the Kingdom of Westphalia. Beyond the nature of the regime, a consequence of the temporary disqualification of the republican regime, notions of legitimacy and legitimism began to be superimposed on that of royalism.28 In the Spanish Empire, historiography has become accustomed to describing as ‘royalists’ those who were in favour of obedience to the Regency Council and the Cortes of Cadiz (1810–14), as opposed to ‘patriots’, supporters of the local juntas, with a strong autonomist tendency and divided between the desire for independence and the maintenance of allegiance, under certain conditions, to the Spanish crown.29 As critical historians of nineteenth-century nationalist history point out, independence processes in the Spanish Empire were complex and far from inevitable. Royalists fought against the independentists in Venezuela and Paraguay. They were divided into ‘absolutists’, supporters of authoritarian reformism, and ‘liberals’, supporters of the 1812 constitution.30 After 1814, when Ferdinand VII abolished the constitution, the royalist commitment consisted of supporting the retaking of colonial territories according to absolutist principles: royalists fought the independentists until the final victory of the latter at the end of the 1820s.31 During the Liberal Triennium (1820–23), and then with the beginning of the Carlist Wars in 1833, there were two opposing royalisms: counterrevolutionary royalism and liberal royalism.32 The same pattern applies in Portugal to the

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‘Liberal Wars’ between liberals and Miguelists.33 The 1830s saw the royalist commitment gradually change form as a result of a key development: namely, the industrial revolution changed society and the return to the communitarian structures of the ancien régime became illusory, even in the countryside. Republicans, liberal royalists and legitimist traditionalist royalists clashed in a new political framework marked by the development of the press and the appearance of new forms of public mobilization.34 It should be noted that royalist commitment on both sides of the Atlantic was in no way uniform and stemmed from very different socio-­ institutional contexts. Nor was there a pattern of commitment that could serve as a common political reference. This makes the comparative approach extremely difficult to carry out. The only common point was personal loyalty to a prince, the holder of sovereignty (counterrevolutionary royalism) or guarantor of a constitution under popular sovereignty (liberal royalism). In all cases, royalism, like Bonapartism, was defined by the need to refer to a power embodied or represented by a dynasty and invested with a historical mission of guaranteeing social order.35 The dynastic principle was a guarantee of stability which assured the existence, as head of state, of a permanent interlocutor responsible for maintaining the political and social balance of the country or empire. A study of the ways in which the bond of loyalty of an individual or a group of individuals to a dynasty was formed and maintained facilitates an understanding of the royalist phenomenon as a specific political culture. This diversity invites us to think of royalism as an autonomous subject, before combining it with other motivations for commitment. For example, the systematic association between royalism and counterrevolution should be abandoned, since dynastic attachment can be reconciled with the principle of popular sovereignty or co-sovereignty in the context of a constitutional royalty resulting from a revolution. In the same way, a republic should not be considered as an automatic antonym of royalty: whenever a monarch was deposed, there was a subsequent period of institutional uncertainty which involved the emergence of alternative forms of dynastic loyalties—for example, allegiance to another prince deemed more conciliatory, such as the Duke of Orleans in France—or hybrid political convictions.36 Seen ‘from below’, regime change may have proven uncertain and allowed for circumstantial, legalistic republican positions, although this did not imply giving up hope of a monarchical restoration. On learning of the suspension of King Louis XVI after the Parisian uprising of 10 August 1792, François Guillaume Marillet, a notable from

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Saintes, expressed his satisfaction, while still hoping for a refoundation of royalty around another prince from the House of Bourbon: This day totally disgraced the king and made him look like a coward, a coward who did not deserve to reign. On the 9th, the whole of Paris had him on its hands and on the 10th there was not a citizen who had not signed his dismissal. He is an automaton, a big, thick machine that would surely not reign if things came back because he is not fit to reign…I love my country, I love my king, it is an innate feeling in the heart of all French people, but I have lost my illusions about Louis XVI. I would like another king of the same lineage who could govern his kingdom and support his subjects by protecting them.37

Tactical turnarounds should also be taken into account. Members of the Section de la Librairie in Paris, studied by Laurence Coudart, showed a high degree of royalism before 10 August 1792, and then did several U-turns in order to survive politically during the exception regime of Year II: the defence of the Girondins in 1793, and then the denunciation of ‘terrorists’ in 1795, could have served as a republican mask for solidly anchored royalist convictions.38 Out of self-interest, disappointment or fatalism, some royalists ended up joining the opposing camp. This was the case of the former Sanfedist militant Antonio Tavasso, who took an active part in the restoration of the Bourbons in Naples in 1799 before joining the republican opposition in 1803, considering himself insufficiently rewarded for his services by King Ferdinand IV.39 There was also an opportunistic royalism, which could be described as ‘last-minute royalism’: namely, actors embraced the cause of the legitimate prince when he was about to triumph in order to gain rewards and social prestige in the new political order to come. This was the case, for example, of the notables of Lyon who joined the ‘état-major’ of the Count de Précy during the Lyon revolt of 1793; and of some peasants in the western France who took up arms against Napoleon, in the name of Louis XVIII, during the Hundred Days.40 The most emblematic case of this opportunistic royalism was of course that of slaves in the American colonies who were promised liberation by the British authorities if they joined the loyalist militias.41 This opportunistic support can also be found in the Spanish American wars of independence.42 Similarly, royalism should not be associated with the extremely problematic notions of ‘reaction’, ‘far-right’ and ‘conservatism’, which are very

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often part of a global progressive teleology that does not take into account local contexts and individual points of view.43 Marcela Echeverri, in her thesis on the attachment of the Indians and slaves in the Popayán region of New Granada to the Bourbon royalty, skilfully demonstrates that absolutist reformism was one of the expressions, among others, of political modernity.44 This enlightened absolutism favoured the emergence of new forms of dialogue between local communities, intermediate powers and central powers, constituting in fact an alternative to the constitutional democratic model. In human societies deeply structured by religion, absolute royalty by divine right should not be considered merely as a regime of the past which one would seek to ‘preserve’. Rather, it was one possible way, among others, of reforming political organization.

How Can Royalist Commitment Be Assessed? The Question of Sources and Archives With these principles in place, the historian is confronted with a relative scarcity of sources which makes it impossible to grasp the range of royalist convictions among populations that have left disparate material traces. The term ‘popular royalism’ deserves to be defined at this stage. It cannot be understood as a form of political commitment and culture different from that of an elite, whether bourgeois, noble or clerical. It is, in my view, illusory to try to define a specific worker or peasant royalism, which does not, of course, preclude studying the action of royalist peasants and workers as a social category involved in defending the interests of royalty. People engaged politically for multiple reasons that were linked for the most part to strong local commitments rooted in family and community. In turn, these factors have to be integrated into wider regional dynamics such as land ownership structures or client networks. Popular royalism must be understood as the joint mobilization of individuals from different social backgrounds to preserve or restore a dynastic order that guaranteed a community of interest.45 This community of interest is difficult to grasp, as there are few statements of intent dating from this time. While the noble elite was able to leave testimonies and documents, the words of ‘humble’ people are often absent from the archives, forcing the historian to build hypotheses from a host of clues. Many of sources of the history of royalism during the ‘Age of Revolutions’ have already been discovered and examined in detail, but much remains to be done.

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The most obvious and immediately informative sources of documentation are the archives of royalists themselves. When the royal authority is still represented by a constituted administration, such as the British Crown during the American War of Independence, the archives of that administration are a valuable source. Official correspondence, rolls of Loyalist militias and lists of refugees are all ways of grasping the extent of the commitment to the Crown, even if this commitment followed very different personal strategies from one actor to another.46 When the prince was in exile or engaged in a civil war that disrupted the administrative fabric, resources tend to dry up, as it was obviously difficult to maintain archiving duties. For example, the archives of the exiled government of Louis XVIII (regent from 1793 to 1795, then king from 1795 onwards), kept in the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, are very incomplete and do not reflect all the activity of his chancellery, which is in any case reduced to its simplest expression. It is known, for example, that as regent, he issued certificates of ‘loyalty to the king and the monarchy’, but there is no register with a list of all the people who held such documents.47 The royalist rebels also produced administrative documents in the territories they controlled: appointments to civil or military posts, requisition orders, declarations and receipts. But here again, the hazards of conservation, in a context of a civil war in which the destruction (whether voluntary or not) of documents was commonplace, make it difficult to get an overall picture of a movement of adherence, particularly with regard to the lower social orders. Petitions and addresses of loyalty to the king addressed to the authorities, when the royal authority was contested, undoubtedly constitute one of the most obvious written traces of a royalist commitment. This was the case in France in July 1792. After the announcement of the eruption of a crowd of hostile demonstrators in the Tuileries Palace, the residence of the royal family in Paris, on 20 June 1792, royalists mobilized in the provinces to ask the National Assembly to take the necessary measures to ensure the monarch’s safety. They set up petitions, known as the ‘petitions of the 20,000’,48 which were then sent to the National Assembly. The royalists thus intended to make a show of force and create a favourable political dynamic by playing on the fear of disorder in a worrying military context. The recording and systematic study of these petitions remains to be carried out, but it is a delicate task: the signatures must be identified, or at least those that can be made out from other documents, and possible links existing between the signatories must be picked out from studying the

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proximity of the signatures between them. In the case of Lyon, it is thus possible to note that the ecclesiastical signatories belonged for the most part to the old chapters and their clientele, engaged in resistance to the civil constitution of the clergy: the defence of royalty thus blended with the defence of the Church.49 The overall study of these petitions, which can only be based on a network of researchers who are familiar with the various local areas, would provide a snapshot of the militant royalist movement on the eve of the suspension of Louis XVI. Even if it would obviously be impossible to know all the variations of commitment on the basis of these signatures alone, it would still thus be possible to assess the capacity of royalist mobilization on a city scale.50 Provided that they are used with caution, police and judicial records make it possible to measure royalist commitment by the yardstick of repression. In the French case, they constitute a mine of information that is largely under-exploited. The greatest methodological precautions are required for the study of police interrogations or reports, which can use stereotypical accusations of ‘royalism’ and ‘counterrevolution’ that can bias the analysis of the source. While some defendants developed avoidance strategies to save their own heads, others candidly or bluntly asserted their attachment to royalty in the face of their interrogator.51 The answers sometimes allow us to enter, at least in part, into the systems of political representation of ‘ordinary people’.52 These sources also point to material evidence that demonstrates an attachment to the ‘legitimate’ dynasty: for example, the possession of white cockades, royal images, brochures and relics.53 The circulation of rumours and prophecies related to the return of the king is also being investigated and is extremely interesting for understanding royalism as a political community, as it concerns all social strata. In France, the phenomenon has been well worked out for Bonapartism, but not so much for Royalism.54 The few works devoted to this question open up promising avenues, particularly because of the multiplicity of actors involved in such activities.55 Other public archives should be called upon to contribute to this general understanding. Civil status registers, particularly death certificates which may contain a description of the effects found on a combatant, should not be neglected, nor should notarial deeds, wills and post-mortem inventories. Good use of all these public documents can make it possible to study the role of women, who are often forgotten in the study of royalist popular mobilizations. Solenn Mabo’s work on the participation of Breton women in the Chouannerie thus

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opens up some very interesting perspectives, which would deserve to be extended to other spaces and periods.56 But administrative sources cannot provide us with all the necessary information, especially when an institution was in the habit of using only the inclusive qualifier of ‘counterrevolutionary’ and when the royalist commitment was combined with other interests. The case of banditry is exemplary. The phenomenon has been well studied in the Italian, Spanish and French contexts. 57 Significantly, in both cases, royalist brigandage is evoked, but is not studied as a specific form of political commitment. The source effect is fully in play here: robbery was mainly perceived through police and judicial sources who were concerned with stopping disorder and investigating crimes and offences, without necessarily questioning the deep motivations of the actors. Although the authorities denounced ‘royal brigands’ and it was possible to identify the names of leaders belonging to known royalist networks, it is difficult to go further and measure the political motivations of the phenomenon from the brigands’ point of view. As Stephen Clay and Nicolas Soulas point out, various reasons explain the phenomenon of the bands in the Midi, and they are very difficult to disentangle from one another: in short, royalism could be used to justify acts of common law delinquency, private revenge or simply the defence of a preeminent social status within the community.58 There is a similar problem of interpretation for the period of monarchical restorations, which saw the triumph of the royalist cause and thus the production of archives emanating from a constituted royal administration.59 Royal authority sought to reward past loyalties with pensions and symbolic gratuities. The royalist commitment gave rise to a twofold reformulation of memory: that of the authorities, who sought to overestimate the attachment of populations to royalty, and that of the individuals who sought gratification and who tended to give a monocausal and stereotypical interpretation of their commitment. In France, the reward files of veterans of the Catholic and Royal armies of the West thus make it possible to know their names and to analyse the rebellion on social grounds, but it is not possible to know their initial motivations, which have to be deduced from other sources.60 Similarly, the decorations awarded under the Restoration serve to define a standard of dynastic fidelity to the present and not to the past.61 As for the engagement in the royalist militias established in southern Europe in the 1810s and 1820s to defend the established order, it followed complex local strategies that were similar to those mentioned above for brigandage.62 Nevertheless, the utmost caution must

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be exercised when analysing these post-commitment sources. In Naples in 1799, after the return to the throne of Ferdinand IV, individuals did not hesitate to forge false certificates claiming their membership of royalist organizations during the republican period or to buy these certificates from former band chiefs in order to take advantage of the new order or to obtain the indulgence of the judges for those who were compromised in common law cases.63 Finally, the researcher should not confine their investigation to paper archives. The royalist commitment also manifested itself through the creation of partisan motifs on the most diverse objects, which testify to the will to defend the rights of a monarch deemed legitimate. Public and private collections contain numerous artefacts, the study of which can make it possible to retrace the conditions in which they were made, their circulation and their political significance. The study of Jacobite artefacts, for example, reveals the iconographic strategies which were disguised to some degree and employed by the Stuarts’ supporters to promote the cause of the pretender in eighteenth-century Britain.64 But the study of a material culture is not an easy task. It is often necessary to critically deconstruct in advance the discourses which prevailed on the constitution of the collection, and may have changed the original meaning of the object.65 Correctly placed in their initial context, flags, weapons, uniforms, insignia, scapulars and various utensils illustrate an everyday life political fidelity, in times of war as well as in times of peace.66

Conclusion It would appear that there is at present more need than ever to study royalist commitments, in order to go beyond republican and nationalist teleologies constructed in Europe and the Americas at the end of the nineteenth century. The label of ‘reactionaries’ or ‘conservatives’ attached to these movements reduces their field of interpretation. Royalism cannot be reduced to merely a refusal; it could also be a bearer of political modernity by participating in the construction of democratic space and modern citizenship. Without necessarily seeking to place the actors in a ‘Revolution’ or ‘counterrevolution’ box, we need to define as closely as possible the different forms of this commitment: namely, by identifying militant generations, reconstructing the family and community networks of commitment, giving full place to the beliefs and spiritualities that legitimized the monarchical form of power and, finally, drawing up a reasoned inventory

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of the different registers of action (without limiting ourselves to armed struggle), in order to define a royalist habitus, which will of course have to be explained in all its regional variants. Such a renewal can only be achieved through field studies, based on an in-depth knowledge of the archives, which follows the paths developed by the participants in this rich international collective volume.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Andoni Artola Renedo for his friendly proofreading and bibliographical suggestions. 2. Claude Petitfrère, ‘Royalisme/royalistes’, Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, ed. Albert Soboul (Paris, 1989), 941–942. 3. Paul Bois, Paysans de l’Ouest: Des structures économiques et sociales aux options politiques depuis l’époque révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (Paris and The Hague, 1960), 581; Claude Petifrère, Les Vendéens d’Anjou (1793): Analyse des structures militaires, sociales et mentales (Paris, 1981), 179–209. 4. Donald Sutherland, Les Chouans: Les origines sociales de la ContreRévolution populaire en Bretagne, 1770–1796 (Rennes, 1990), 21 and 268–269. 5. Roger Dupuy and François Lebrun (eds), Les résistances à la Révolution (Paris, 1987); Roger Dupuy, De la Révolution à la Chouannerie: Paysans en Bretagne, 1788–1796 (Paris, 1988). 6. Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 (Cambridge, 2016); Andréa Lisly Gonçalves, ‘O apoio popular à monarquia no contexto das revoluções liberais. Brasil e Portugal (1820 e 1834)’, Varia Historia 35/67 (2019): 241–272. 7. Robert Griffiths, Le Centre perdu: Malouet et les monarchiens dans la Révolution française (Grenoble, 1988); James L.  Osen, The Royalist Political Thought during the French Revolution (Westport-London, 1995); Vladislava Sergienko, ‘Monarchistes modérés à l’époque de la Révolution Française à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: le groupe de Mounier, Malouet et Mallet du Pan’, PhD thesis (State University of Moscow, 2005). 8. On royalist subversive networks, see Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, Le comte Ferdinand de Bertier et l’énigme de la Congrégation (Paris, 1948); Jacqueline Chaumié, Le réseau d’Antraigues et la Contre-Révolution, 1791–1793 (Paris, 1965); Jacques Godechot, Le comte d’Antraigues, un espion dans l’Europe des émigrés (Paris, 1986). On royalist journalists, see Hélène Maspero-Clerc, Un journaliste contre-révolutionnaire, Jean-Gabriel Peltier, 1760–1825 (Paris, 1973); Jean-Paul Bertaud, Les Amis du Roi.

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Journaux et journalistes royalistes en France de 1789 à 1792 (Paris, 1984); Laurence Coudart, La Gazette de Paris: Un journal royaliste pendant la Révolution française, 1789–1792 (Paris, 1995). 9. Jacques Godechot, La contre-révolution: Doctrine et action, 1789–1804 (Paris, 1961); Jean-Clément Martin, Contre-révolution, révolution et nation en France, 1789–1799 (Paris, 1998); Jean-Clément Martin (ed.), La ­Contre-­Révolution en Europe (XVIIIe–XIXe siècles): Réalités politiques et sociales, résonnances culturelles et idéologiques, ed. Jean-Clément Martin (Rennes, 2001); Dictionnaire de la Contre-Révolution (Paris, 2011). 10. Bruno Dumons and Hilaire Multon (eds), “Blancs” et contre-­révolutionnaires en Europe: Espaces, réseaux, cultures et mémoires (fin XVIIIe–début XXe siècles). France, Italie, Espagne, Portugal (Rome, 2011). There is an extensive bibliography on the notion of ‘political cultures’. 11. Marcela Echeverri (ed.), ‘Monarchy, Empire and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions’, special issue of Varia Historia 35/67 (2019). 12. The question of royalism was also addressed, albeit largely indirectly, at the Nijmegen symposium ‘Counter-Revolution and the making of conservatism(s): Transnationalism and the circulation of conservative ideas from the mid-seventeenth century to the First World War’ (June 2018). 13. Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994); Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge, 2007); Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, 2009); Barry Robertson, Royalists at War in Scotland and Ireland (1638–1650) (Abingdon, 2016); Andrew Hopper, ‘The Great Blow and the Politics of Popular Royalism in Civil War Norwich’, The English Historical Review 133 (2018): 32–64. 14. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defines the term as follows: ‘Qui tient, qui suit le parti du Roi. Cet homme est fort royaliste. Il ne se dit guère qu’en parlant des guerres de la Ligue. Les Royalistes et les Ligueurs; et en parlant des partis qui étoient en Angleterre, les Parlementaires et les Royalistes’ (Who holds, who follows the King’s party. This man is a strong royalist. He hardly ever says anything except to talk about the League wars. The Royalists and the Leaguers; and by speaking of the parties that are in England, the Parliamentarians and the Royalists). For a definition of French royalism, or rather royalisms, during the Revolution: Paul Chopelin, ‘Royalismes et royalistes dans la France révolutionnaire’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 403 (2021): 3–28. 15. Tory derives from the Gaelic word tórai or tóraidh, meaning robber. It was first used to refer to the Irish rebels allied with the English royalists during the military campaign of 1649–1650, before referring to the supporters of

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James II and the Stuarts from the 1680s onwards. The Tory dynastic attachment to the Stuarts gradually faded after the 1710s. 16. John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976); Linda Colley, In defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–1760 (New York, 1982); James C.  Stack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1993). 17. E. J. B. Rathery (ed.), Journal et mémoires du marquis d’Argenson, vol. 8 (Paris, 1866), 405. 18. Among the abundant bibliography on the subject, the following works should be mentioned (since 2010): Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New  York City during the Revolution (Charlottesville and London, 2011); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011); Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan (eds), The Loyal Atlantic. Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (Toronto, 2012); James S. Leamon, The Reverend Jacob Bailey, Maine Loyalist: For God, King, Country, and for Self (Amherst and Boston, 2012); Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago and London, 2012); Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (Oxford, 2013); Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York, 2014); Alan Blackstock and Frank O’Gorman (eds), Loyalism and the Formation of the British World, 1775–1914 (Woodbridge, 2014); Valerie H.  McKito, From Loyalists to Loyal Citizens: The De Peyster Family of New York (Albany, 2015); Rebecca Brannon, From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of the South Carolina Loyalists (Columbia, 2016). 19. Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Cambridge, 2014). 20. Geert Van den Bossche, ‘Political propaganda in the Brabant Revolution: Habsburg negligence versus Belgian nation-building’, History of European Ideas 28 (2002): 119–144. 21. This movement is only very partially the heir to the Parti du roi, which appeared at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI: Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘From the parti dévot to the parti du roi: Royalist Ideology, Foreign Policy, and the Recrystallization of Court Faction at the Accession of Louis XVI’, in Belief and Politics in Enlightenment France: Essays in Honor of Dale K. Van Kley, eds Mita Choudhury and Daniel J. Watkins (Liverpool, 2019), 177–194. 22. Archives parlementaires, vol. 8 (Paris, 1875), 547. 23. Ibid., vol. 16, 386.

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24. Robert Griffiths, Le Centre perdu (Grenoble, 1988); Sergienko, ‘Monarchistes modérés’. 25. Marc Belissa, Le moment thermidorien de Charles-François Dumouriez: Œuvres politiques, 1795 (Paris, 2019). 26. Corinne Doria, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (1763–1845): Un philosophe entre deux révolutions (Rennes, 2018). 27. Anna Maria Rao (ed.), Folle controrivoluzionarie: le insorgenze poplari nell’Italia giacobina e napoleonica (Rome, 1999); Gabriele Turi, Viva Maria: Riforme, rivoluzione e insorgenze in Toscana, 1790–1799 (Bologna, 1999). 28. Stéphane Rials, Le légitimisme (Paris, 1983); Alexandre Dupont, ‘Le légitimisme, parent pauvre de l’historiographie ?’, Revue historique 316/4 (2014): 889–911. 29. Jean-Philippe Luis, ‘La construcción inacabada de una cultura politíca realista’, in La creación de la cultura políticas modernas (1808–1833), eds Miguel Angel Cabrera Acosta and Juan Pro (Madrid and Saragossa, 2014), 321–414; and by the same author, ‘La représentation antirévolutionnaire du monde: le cas espagnol (1808–1833)’, Siècles 43 (2016), http://journals.openedition.org/siecles/3066; Francisco Javier Ramón Solans and Pedro Rújula López (eds), El desafío de la revolución. Reaccionarios, antiliberales y contrarrevolucionarios (siglos XVIII y XIX) (Saragossa, 2017). 30. Pedro Rújula López and Jordi Canal, eds, Guerra de ideas: Politica y cultura en la España de la Guerra de la Independencia (Saragossa, 2011). 31. Jorge Domínguez, Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire (Cambridge, 1980); Marco A. Landavazo, La máscara de Fernando VII: Discurso e imaginario monárquico en una época de crisis: Nueva España 1808–1822 (Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico, 2001); Jairo Gutiérrez, Los indios de Pasto contra la República, 1809–1824 (Bogota, 2007). 32. José Luis Comellas, Los realistas en el trienio constitucional, 1820–1823 (Pamplona, 1953); Jaime Torras, Liberalismo y relebldia campesina, 1820–1823 (Barcelona, 1976); Jordi Canal, El carlismo: Dos siglos de contrarevolución en España (Madrid, 2004); Ramon Arnabat, Visca el rei i la religió ! La primera guerra civil de la Catalunya contemporània, 1820–1823 (Lleida, 2006); Álvaro París Martín, ‘El degüello general de negros: Realismo exaltado y política popular en Madrid durante el verano de 1825’, in Homenatge al Doctor Pere Anguera (I). Història local: Recorreguts pel liberalisme i el carlisme (Catarroja, 2012), 410–420. 33. José Manuel Tengarrinha, Movimentos populares agrários em Portugal (Mem Martins, 1994); Maria Fátima Sá e Melo Ferreira, Rebeldes e insubmissos: resistências populares ao liberalismo, 1834–1844 (Oporto, 2002) and ‘Vencidos pero no convencidos: movilización, acción colectiva e identidad

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en el miguelismo’, Historia Social 49 (2004): 73–95; Antonio Monteiro Cardoso, A revolução liberal em Trás-os-Montes, 1820–1834: o povo e as elites (Oporto, 2007); José Manuel Tengarrinha, E o povo, onde está? Politica popular, contra revoluçao e reforma en Portugal (Lisbon, 2008); Gabriel Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-­ Brazilian World, c. 1770–1850 (New York, 2013). 34. Bernard Rulof, Popular Legitimism and the Monarchy in France: Mass Politics without Parties, 1830–1880 (Cham, 2020). 35. It should be pointed out here that, in the French case, Bonapartism cannot be defined as royalism because Bonapartists expressly wanted to distinguish themselves from royalists. They promoted a popular monarchism, based on military charisma and the defence of the legal gains of the Revolution. Bonapartism was a synthesis of royalism and loyalty to a republic. On Bonapartist ideology, see Juliette Glikman, La monarchie impériale: L’imaginaire politique sous Napoléon III (Paris, 2013). 36. Heraclio Bonilla, ‘Rey o República. El dilema de los Indios frente a la independencia’, in Independencia y transción a los estados nacionales en los países andinos. Nuevas perspectivas, ed. Armando Martinez (Bucaramanga and Bogota, 2005), 357–369. 37. Quoted by Richard Ballard, La Terreur imprévisible: La Révolution en Aunis et en Saintonges (Saintes, 2012), 183. This passage is taken from the memoirs of François Guillaume Mariellet, Histoire secrète de la ville de Saintes, the unpublished manuscript of which is kept in the Bibliothèque municipale of Saintes. 38. Laurence Coudart, ‘La Contre-Révolution parisienne: la section de la Bibliothèque (dite aussi section de 92 et de Le Peletier), 1792–1795’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 280 (1990): 198–206. 39. Luca di Mauro, ‘Les populations fidèles et valeureuses: Restauration de la monarchie et politisation populaire après la fin de la République napolitaine’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 402 (2020-4): 26. 40. Jean-Baptiste Guillemot, ‘Les nobles de l’état-major de Précy au siège de Lyon: “des loups déguisés en agneaux”?’, MA dissertation (Lyon 3-ENS, 2013); Aurélien Lignereux, Chouans et Vendéens contre l’Empire. 1815, l’autre guerre des Cent-Jours (Paris, 2015), 30–34. 41. Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (New York, 2006); Ruma Chopra, ‘The Royalist Maroons of Jamaica in the Atlantic World’, Varia Historia 35/67 (2019): 209–240. 42. Peter Blanchard, Under the Flags of Freedom. Slaves Soldiers and the War of Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburtgh, 2008). 43. Izaskun Álvarez Cuartero and Julio Sánchez (eds), Visiones y revisiones de la independencia americana. Realismo /pensamiento consevador: ¿una identificación equivocada? (Salamanca, 2014).

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44. Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists. 45. This reference to the community harmoniously ordered by the king is particularly evident in the interrogations noted by Sutherland, Les Chouans (Rennes, 1992), 268–269. 46. Jim Piecuch, Three People, one King: Loyalists, Indians and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782 (Columbia, 2008). 47. Certificate of ‘Fidélité au roi et à la monarchie’ issued to Jean-Louis de Barras (Verona, 15 October 1794). Document on sale on 23 November 2019 in Versailles (Ventes Osenat, no. 33). 48. A few weeks earlier, around 10 July, royalists had already circulated petitions against the holding of a federative camp in Paris for the festival of 14 July. These were known as the ‘Petitions of the 8,000’. 49. Paul Chopelin, Ville patriote et ville martyre: Lyon, l’Église et la Révolution, 1788–1805 (Paris, 2010), 194–195. 50. Pierre Triomphe, ‘Au nom de Dieu, du Roi et de tous les miens: Imaginaire, Sociabilité et expressions politiques des classes populaires royalistes dans la France méridionale 1800–1851’, Annales du Midi 123/274 (2011): 195–212. 51. Julien Paroisse, ‘Les royalistes et la rébellion lyonnaise de 1793: Étude des interrogatoires menés par les juridictions révolutionnaires’, MA Dissertation (Lyon 3, 2016). 52. See, for an earlier period, the example of Joan of Arc’s royalism that has been studied through the archives of her trial by Jacques Paul, ‘Émergence du sentiment national autour de Jeanne d’Arc’, in Conciliarismo, Stati nazionali, inizi dell’umanesimo (Spolète, 1990), 119–146. Thanks to Xavier Hélary. 53. Paul Chopelin, ‘Reliques princières et Contre-Révolution: La collecte des objets souvenirs du martyre des Bourbons et des Romanov’, in Reliques politiques, eds Albrecht Burkardt and Jérôme Grévy (Rennes, 2020), 265–278. 54. Sudhir Azareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon (London, 2004); Nathalie Pigault, Les faux Napoléon (1815–1823): Histoires d’imposteurs impériaux (Paris, 2015). 55. For France, see Philippe Boutry and Jacques Nassif, Martin l’Archange (Paris, 1985); Hélène Becquet, Louis XVII: L’enfant roi (Paris, 2017), 181–229. 56. Solenn Mabo, ‘Femmes engagées dans la chouannerie: Motivations, modalities d’actions et processus de reconnaissance (1794–1830)’, Genre & Histoire 19 (2017), https://journals.openedition.org/genrehistoire/2687; and by same author, ‘Les citoyennes, les contre-­révolutionnaires et les autres: Participations, engagements et rapports de genre dans la

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Révolution française en Bretagne’, PhD thesis (Rennes 2, 2019). See also her contribution to this volume. 57. Álvaro París Martín, ‘Bandolerismo, partidas y contrarrevolución: entre la delincuencia y la resistencia campesina’, in La historia como arma de reflexión. Jornadas de estudios en homenaje al profesor Santos Madrazo, eds Javier Hernando Ortego et al. (Madrid, 2012), 161–172. 58. Stephen Clay, ‘Les réactions du Midi: conflits, continuités et violences’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 345 (2006): 55–91 and ‘Justice, vengeance et passé révolutionnaire: les crimes de la Terreur blanche’, Ibid. 350 (2007): 109–133; Nicolas Soulas, Révolutionner les cultures politiques: L’exemple de la vallée du Rhône, 1750–1820 (Avignon, 2020). 59. Jean-Claude Caron and Jean-Philippe Luis (eds), Rien appris, rien oublié ? Les Restaurations dans l’Europe postnapoléonienne (1814–1830) (Rennes, 2015). 60. Petitfrère, Les Vendéens d’Anjou. 61. Andoni Artola Renedo, ‘L’Europe des honneurs: Décorations et légitimité à l’époque des restaurations. Un regard depuis l’Espagne’, Siècles 43 (2016), http://journals.openedition.org/siecles/3048; Steinar Andreas Saether, ‘Royalist Decorations in the Spanish American Wars of Independence: Cacique Núñez of Mamatoco and the Royal American Order of Isabel la Católica’, Varia Historia 35/67 (2019): 83–111. 62. Simon Sarlin, ‘Arming the People against Revolution: Royalist Popular Militias in Restoration Europe’, Varia Historia 35/67 (2019): 177–208; Álvaro París Martín, ‘Le peuple royaliste en armes: Milices et Terreur blanche pendant les Restaurations à Naples (1799), dans le Midi de la France (1815) et à Madrid (1823)’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 396 (2019): 95–120. 63. Luca di Mauro, ‘Le secret et le polichinelle. Cultures et pratiques de la clandestinité politique à Naples au début du XIXe siècle, 1799–1821’, PhD thesis (Paris I, 2015) and, by the same author, ‘Les populations fidèles’, 17–19. 64. Neil Guthrie, The Material Culture of the Jacobites (Cambridge, 2013); Murray G.  H. Pittock, Material Culture and Sedition, 1688–1760: Treacherous Objects, Secret Places (Basingstoke, 2013). 65. Jean-Jacques Lucas, ‘Les guerres de Vendée collectionnées’, in Transmettre une fidélité. La Contre-Révolution et les usages du passé (France, Espagne, Italie, XIXe–XXe siècles), eds Paul Chopelin and Bruno Dumons (BernBrussels, 2019), 141–165; and by the same author, ‘La poétique des reliques dans l’œuvre-collection: Collectionner la contre-révolution en

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Vendée au XIXe siècle’, in Reliques politiques, eds Albrecht Burkardt and Jérôme Grévy (Rennes, 2020), 233–244. 66. Álvaro París Martín, ‘Porque le olía a negro: vestimenta, costumbres y politización popular en Madrid (1750–1840)’, in Procesos de civilización: culturas de élites, culturas populares: Una historia de contrastes y tensiones (siglos XVI–XIX), eds José María Imízcoz et al. (Bilbao, 2019), 99–132.

CHAPTER 3

Popular Royalism in Scandinavia and Spanish America Before 1814 Steinar A. Sæther

On 18 April 1765 a major popular riot took place in the Atlantic port of Bergen, at the time the largest city in the Kingdom of Norway, which itself was an integral part of the Danish Oldenborg Monarchy that also included the Kingdom of Denmark, the Duchies of Schlewswig and Holstein, the former Norwegian territories of Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, and the more recently acquired possessions in the Caribbean, West Africa and India. Approximately two thousand angry people, mostly peasants and fishermen from villages and fjords north of the city, had gathered on the night before. Early in the morning, they congregated in front of the house of stiftamtmann (provincial governor) Ulrik Frederik Cicignon. Here they accused Cicignon and the tax collectors under his command for having continued to collect—often violently—the so-called extra tax, a poll tax instituted by the King of Denmark following the Seven Years’ War to cover war debts and the expenses involved in keeping a large army in

S. A. Sæther (*) University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_3

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southern Denmark. The peasants and fishermen were convinced (mistakenly as it turned out), that the king had either revoked the tax or made the poor exempt. When the governor and bailiff continued to collect the tax, confiscating properties and goods of people who were unable to pay, the rioters believed that the sums collected were not sent to the king at all, but retained by the allegedly corrupt officials. Despite the presence of a dozen soldiers, some violent episodes ensued when the governor initially did not give in to the demands of the protesters. Having been dragged through the city (without his hat and wig), Cicignon agreed to repay the taxes the next day. On 19 April Cicignon ordered the soldiers of Bergenshus fortress to reimburse the tax to more than two thousand subjects who were present during the disturbances. Thus ended the first phase of the Strile rebellion in Bergen.1 Just a few weeks later, on the other side of the globe, another popular rebellion took place in a city twice the size of Bergen. In Quito also, the rebellion was caused by new taxes and reforms in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. From Quito, the surplus of the royal exchequer was routinely forwarded to cover the military expenses of the city of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast of New Granada (present-day Colombia), one of the main Spanish fortified ports in the Circum-Caribbean along with Havana, Veracruz and Campeche. The need to recreate a surplus in Quito was occasioned by the decision to establish a standing regiment in Cartagena to defend Spanish America from expected assaults by the British. In order to improve royal revenues from Quito, the viceroy of New Granada had appointed Commissioner Juan Dìaz de Herrera to establish a royal monopoly of aguardiente (liquor). He was also ordered to replace the private tax farmers with royally appointed and salaried bailiffs and to modify the alcabala (sales tax) and some other taxes. At eight o’clock in the evening on 22 May 1765, the residents of the popular urban barrios of San Blas, San Roque and San Sebastián convened on the square of Santa Barbara and attacked both the royal excise office and the distillery. They burnt the records of the sales tax and spilled all the aguardiente into the streets. It would take several months before order was restored in Quito, and the reforms were eventually carried out.2 Admittedly, there were some important differences between the two rebellions. Most significant was the social composition of the rioters. In Bergen, peasants and fishermen from Strilalandet—the rural hinterland of the fjords north of the city—were with only very few (although important) exceptions the principal protagonists. In Quito, it was nearly the

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entire urban community, including some of the most influential patrician creole families and popular segments of the city including shopkeepers, artisans and labourers from the barrios who temporarily stood together in their opposition to the fiscal and administrative reforms of the Bourbon monarchy. The Quito rebellion took longer to quell and posed a greater threat to government control than Strilekrigen in Bergen, in great measure due to the defiant attitudes of the leading families of the city. The precise actions the urban crowds undertook were different in these two rebellions, although it is not difficult to imagine the quiteños doing what the striler did and vice versa. The 1765 rebellion of the barrios in Quito was much larger and may have had more apparent political implications than the one in Bergen. But there are some interesting parallels between the two. Both rebellions were caused by reactions to taxes or fiscal reforms intended to increase revenue in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. In both cities, the rebels consisted of large crowds that felt they had the right to use physical force to protest unjust tax requirements after legal channels of resistance had failed. The foreign-born, royal officials were in both Bergen and Quito suspected of corruption, while the rebels expressed absolute fidelity to the Kings of Denmark and Spain respectively. Indeed, while potential punishments against rebels were draconian in both the Bourbon and Oldenborg realms, in practice the rioters succeeded in halting and to some extent modifying the reforms, and in making taxations slightly less severe. Only the suspected leaders were punished, and in a milder way than what the laws prescribed. There appears to be at least one remarkable similarity across—not only these two—but all the major rebellions of the eighteenth century in both Scandinavia and Spanish America: the popular attitudes expressed towards king and monarchy. Like many other historians, I am interested in rebellions such as these in part for what they can tell us about popular political attitudes, beliefs and patterns of action. Large rebellions were by no means ordinary occurrences, and the nature of the subjects’ fidelity to the monarch may be studied more routinely through sermons, petitions to the crown, lawsuits and small-scale disturbances. But the eighteenth-century rebellions and uprisings in Scandinavia and Spanish America were expressed through the language of monarchism and in unusual times the depths and limits of popular royalism are more easily visible. In nearly all known cases, the rioters claimed to be the most loyal and obedient subjects of their respective monarchs. Even when they sometimes preferred a monarch

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from a different dynastic line, there were no public manifestations of popular support for any other system than that of a monarchy. Popular anger was typically directed towards local royal officials or the entourage that surrounded the kings. ‘Viva el Rey y muera el mal gobierno’ (Long live the King and Death to Bad Government) was the 1781 rallying cry of the comuneros in New Granada.3 During the bloody Russo-Swedish War, Swedish peasants from Dalarna organized a march on Stockholm to protest new taxes and excessive military conscription. In the course of the protest, they debated whether to use the Crown’s own ‘One God, one King’ as a motto, a not-so-hidden criticism against the thirteen-member aristocratic government council that ruled Sweden at the time, but also a public confirmation of their royalist outlook.4 ‘We are not rebels’, claimed the supporters of Kristian Lofthus, who organized a large and durable uprising in southern Norway in 1786 and 1787. The Lofthus uprising was directed against trade monopolies and the allegedly corrupt officials and merchants benefitting from the monopolies of the nearby coastal towns, and gave the royal authorities a great scare even though none of Lofthus’ letters and proclamations contained challenges to the monarchic system.5 In one phase of the bloody Tupac Amaru rebellion in the Southern Andes between 1780 and 1782, all Spaniards were to be killed because they were—among other abominations—traitors to the King of Spain.6 This, I will argue, illustrates that Spanish Americans and Scandinavians fundamentally had the same perspective of how a monarchy should function during the reforming enlightened absolutist monarchies of the eighteenth century. In this chapter, I attempt to lay out a simple but unfamiliar story. Absolutist monarchy functioned fundamentally in the same way in Spanish America and Scandinavia during the hundred years between 1715 and 1815. Absolutism engendered its own political culture. Scandinavians and Spanish Americans related to the monarch in a broadly similar fashion, attempting to use the absolutist system to their own advantage, pushing for greater local autonomy, and reacting—violently if necessary—against corrupt officials, excessive taxation and conscription and reforms affecting what the commoners perceived to be normal economic activities. Spanish Americans and Scandinavians in the eighteenth century frequently expressed loyalty to the monarch, but this popular monarchism was neither mystical, unconditional, naïve or irrational. Nor was it necessarily conservative, traditionalist or reactionary. Often the commoners’ demands were innovative and radical, although it was usually and successfully

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couched in a language of a return to a just and utopian past. The commoners displayed limited personal loyalty to particular kings, but they needed a strong monarch who could potentially overrule ill-informed bureaucratic decisions, remove corrupt officials and, in general, impart justice. The governments’ responses to popular demands were also broadly similar. Absolute obedience to the monarch was preached in sermons, formally required in all petitions to the king, enacted in proclamations and public displays of various sorts. Scandinavians and Spanish Americans reacted broadly in the same way to the French Revolution and to the Napoleonic Wars, which affected both regions directly, and which had a lasting effect on the type of political arrangements that would prevail during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How can we understand the common language of popular royalism? We are presumably dealing with a public, ritual transcript of absolute fidelity to the ruler. It does not need to be understood as the pure expression of popular sentiment. But is there a hidden—more real—transcript to be found? To what extent did common rebels and rioters express anything else regarding the monarch and the monarchy but what they had been told in eighteenth-century sermons, in the proclamations of new laws or in the theatrical official celebrations of royal grandeur? Did the language of royalism vary across regions, or did absolute monarchism everywhere produce its own common language of subordination and resistance?7 Did popular attitudes towards a monarchy in particular and political systems in general change radically even in somewhat peripheral places like Scandinavia and Spanish America as a result of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars? These questions, although perhaps not expressed in exactly these terms, have interested a large number of historians of both regions for several generations.8 It may therefore seem quixotic to explore questions that cover such a long period and compare regions that were both vast and internally heterogeneous. By default, this short essay cannot do justice to the very rich historiographic literature for both regions and each of the countries involved. Still, comparisons of this type may sometimes assist in creating a sounder base for claims of universality and uniqueness. And there are good reasons for comparing regions which broadly shared a similar type of monarchy with an absolutist bent rather than comparing them with the very special cases of England, France or the Habsburg Empire. The chapter is based on a selection of mostly recent research on the politics of the popular social sectors. Partly due to my own

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background, and partly in order for the comparisons to be pertinent, references to Norway and New Granada/Colombia are over-represented. Does it make sense to compare popular politics in Spanish America and Scandinavia in the eighteenth century? This chapter rests on the assumption that such a comparison may be useful because the political system of monarchic rule was broadly similar. The monarchies of Spain, Denmark and Sweden were all conglomerate states, encompassing a variety of different kingdoms, duchies, special territories and multiethnic populations where many different languages were spoken. Crucially, the Danish Oldenborgs after 1660 and the Spanish Bourbons after 1713 were among the most ardently absolutist dynasties pursuing broadly the same political programme. Admittedly, the Swedish kings were in a weaker position especially during the so-called Age of Liberty between 1719 and 1772, when the aristocratically dominated diet exercised power comparable to parliament in England. Nevertheless, both popular monarchism and royalist rhetoric were similar across Scandinavia.9 That all said, it is a difficult exercise in part because the historiographies on eighteenth-century monarchies have grown out of very different political situations since 1810. Although the monarchic rule of the Danish, Swedish and Spanish royal families shared many essential characteristics, the historians who have written about them have been inclined to interpret eighteenth-century regimes partly in light of the political contexts that followed them, broadly speaking republics in Spanish America and constitutional monarchies in Scandinavia. The overall tendency among Latin American historians of the twentieth century (in contrast to most Spanish historians) has tended towards seeing the Bourbon Monarchy as inherently old-fashioned, traditionalist and colonial, a moribund ancien régime political order that was unjust and based on irrational legal differences. This is a common thread running through the interpretations (although with numerous nuances and exceptions) in both the nationalist, Marxian and poststructuralist historiography on the late colonial period in Spanish America. In most of the literature, independence (between 1810 and 1826) marks a rupture from colony to nation, sometimes also from tradition to modernity.10 But also among those who emphasize continuity between the colonial and republican eras, the Spanish monarchic heritage is conventionally portrayed as malignant, one of the root causes of present-day corruption, social inequality, patrimonialism, elite privileges, and so on. Scandinavian historians, on the other hand, have generally (again there are many nuances and exceptions) treated the eighteenth-century monarchies much more benignly. A

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deep patriotism runs through much of the historiography. The implicit logic seems to be that the eighteenth-century monarchies cannot have been that bad if there were no revolutions that ended them and modern Scandinavian states have fared relatively well since.11 These biases in the description of early modern regimes in the historiography make real comparisons very difficult and attempts at categorizing pre-Napoleonic regimes hazardous. One influential, illustrative and useful example is Thomas Ertman’s taxonomy of states in early modern Europe. Ertman’s classification uses categorization along two axes, the absolutist-­ constitutional and the bureaucratic-patrimonial, creating a simple two-­ row, two-column table. Here, Spain along with the rest of ‘Latin’ Europe is placed in the ‘patrimonial absolutist’ box, Denmark-Norway and the German states are ‘bureaucratic absolutist’, while Sweden and Great Britain are ‘bureaucratic constitutional’.12 Of the two axes, the first is the least problematic as classifying regimes may be based on actual laws pertaining to the role of political institutions at the time. Ascribing Sweden as a constitutional monarchy is questionable, at least for the periods before 1719 and between 1772 and 1809. Clearly, the Swedish Diet had both a legal and practical standing that severely restrained the monarch’s room for manoeuvre as compared to states in which parliaments or courts had been outright abolished or had not been summoned for decades or even centuries, such as Denmark and Spain. Recent studies on the political culture of Sweden and Scandinavia in the eighteenth century, however, seem to downplay the contrast between the Danish and the Swedish monarchies in this regard.13 Most historians agree also that neither the Danish Oldenburgs nor the Spanish Bourbons were in practice absolutist, despite the heavy rhetoric to the contrary throughout the eighteenth century. Yet, by legal definition, the Danish realms were absolutist from the promulgation of the 1665 King’s Law and until 1848, and the Danish monarchs did not have to contend with parliaments or diets during this period. In Spain, after the succession of the Bourbons in 1713, all the cortes (parliaments) of the different realms were united, but only met three times during the eighteenth century, and had little to no impact on the actual government of the Spanish Monarchy at the time. Neither in Spain nor in Denmark did the old nobility form an independent political estate within the monarchy; most nobles had been awarded their titles by the monarch in lieu of services to the crown and were closely integrated into royal bureaucracies or military forces.

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But even in Spain and Denmark during the heyday of absolutist rhetoric, only very few monarchs were personally powerful enough to make full use of the absolutist legal framework. For most of the eighteenth century the Danish kings were either physically or mentally incapable, leaving government in the hands of crown princes, other close relatives or particularly crafty advisors, such as the royal physician Johann Friedrich Struensee, who ran Denmark for nearly two years as a curious example of enlightened despotism.14 The Spanish Bourbons were less afflicted by severe mental and physical illnesses, and Carlos III (1759–88) was recognized as one of the ablest monarchs of the eighteenth century. But his son, Carlos IV (1788–1808) was generally thought to prefer hunting to government, which he in practice delegated to his ‘universal minister’ and queen’s lover Manuel de Godoy. The personal power of particular monarchs has little bearing on degrees of absolutism. After all, royal interests were pushed not so much by particular monarchs themselves, as by the courts, the ministers, close advisors and, perhaps most importantly, by the increasingly connected royal dynastic families. As Ertman himself recognizes, whether particular monarchies were bureaucratic or patrimonial is much less evident.15 Although it clearly makes sense to view Habsburg Spain and Spanish America in the seventeenth century as patrimonial states, it is less obvious that Denmark and Sweden were not just as patrimonial at that time. And following the change of dynasty in Spain in 1713 and especially during the rule of Carlos III, both tax collection and the professionalization of the army and the bureaucracy weakened to a considerable extent the influence of the patrician families and enhanced the standing of the king.16 Even though it is difficult to evaluate degrees of patrimonialism across the three monarchies, it is indisputable that all three were moving in the direction of a more meritocratic bureaucracy towards the end of the eighteenth century. This was a change in large part directed by the upper echelons of the bureaucracy and the royal families themselves, perhaps also due to popular pressure. It is far from obvious that Denmark and Sweden were less patrimonial and more bureaucratic than Spain in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the Danish, Swedish and Spanish territories alike, at home and overseas, government attempted to limit the practice of selling offices and there were attempts to provide ordinary salaries to royal officials rather than having them rely on a surplus from the collection of fees (sportler in Scandinavia). Salaries were frequently too low to enable the kind of ostentatious spending that royal officials deemed respectable.

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Towards the end of the eighteenth century, there were common attempts at trying to make the bureaucracy more meritocratic, less patrimonial, and to make taxation more efficient and uniform, while there are numerous examples of course to demonstrate that the so-called absolute monarchs in practice fell short of their ambitious aims. Complaints against alleged corrupt officials were common.17 The modern divide between private and public funds was evidently not entrenched either in Scandinavia or in Spanish America in the eighteenth century, although all three monarchies attempted to discipline their officials by demanding accurate accounts and punishing those officials who most openly engaged in embezzlement, fraud or were prone to bribery. Indeed, in the more recent studies on corruption, the descriptions of how royal administration worked in practice in Spanish America and in Scandinavia are remarkably similar.18 Even with a simplified version of Ertman’s scheme, as used by Francis Fukuyama this type of classification does not necessarily help us much in coming to grips with the nature of neither Hispanic nor Scandinavian absolutism in the eighteenth century.19 For some purposes at least, Perry Anderson’s older take on absolutism seems to work better for Spain (including Spanish America), Sweden and Denmark-Norway, although he does not discuss the latter case.20 Anderson, contrary to most historians of the early modern era, does not regard European absolutism as the victory of the monarchy over the nobility, but rather (in a Marxian fashion) as the last phase of feudalism, an alliance between nobility and monarchy to limit the rise of the bourgeoisie. It is not necessary to accept the rather crude teleological vision of history inherent in this scheme to appreciate that Anderson’s way of conceptualizing eighteenth-century absolutism captures some of the more intriguing facets of political and juridical order in those states that most eagerly clung to a royalist rhetoric at the time. For while the nobility in both Spain and Denmark had lost most of their formal power at the top of the polity— their privileged positions in cortes and riksråd—they retained seigneurial jurisdiction in some of the most central parts of the kingdoms. In many of the rural areas closest to the royal courts, in Castile, La Rioja and Aragon, almost a third of the land was still divided into señoríos (seigneuries) in the mid-eighteenth century.21 And in Denmark proper (Jutland, Funen and Zealand), nobles maintained birkerett (the right to name the manorial judge and administer the manorial court) and hals-og håndsrett (literally the right of necks and hands), which implied the right to administer corporal punishments to their own workers and peasants, and in some

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instances to all inhabitants. However, in the overseas territories in Spanish America and in all of Norway (with two or three minor exceptions), royal jurisdiction was all-encompassing in the eighteenth century and manorial law largely irrelevant. In Sweden, on the other hand, where the nobility retained both a formal and real political power at the apex of the state, they had lost nearly all manorial jurisdiction after the 1670s.22 It is probably not a coincidence that all the major eighteenth-century rebellions in Spanish America and Scandinavia occurred in areas where the king had a virtual jurisdictional monopoly. For our purposes here, though, it is more important how the populations perceived the royal government than how it objectively functioned. The commoners’ room for manoeuvre within the nominal absolutist monarchies was not negligible. Local medieval political institutions such as the ting in Scandinavia and the cabildos in Spanish America remained, although their sphere of jurisdiction and autonomy had been severely restricted. The royal government’s effective control was limited especially in peripheral areas in part because of the sheer distance and time required for correspondence with the court, and in part because of military weakness. Royal officials were not always inflexible, however, and there did exist legal avenues for addressing grievances in writing. Although illegal, riots were—for reasons that will be explained towards the end of the chapter—tolerated to some extent. In Scandinavia as in Spanish America there was a delicate balance of power between the subjects, provincial royal officials and the monarchy. Obviously, the king needed his officials to control the population, but he also needed the population to inform on disloyal or corrupt officials, and this opened avenues of popular pressure far beyond the blind obedience in theory demanded by an absolute monarch. Historians of Spanish America and Scandinavia alike have interpreted the public manifestation of monarchic loyalty in different ways. One perspective—rarely promoted anymore—is to consider peasants politically ignorant and naïve supporters of whatever regime they were subjected to. This would imply that the majority of the population simply accepted at face value the official rhetoric at the time, for instance, that the monarchs’ authority emanated from God. Or it could mean that the absolutist states had succeeded in creating a Gramscian cultural hegemony. The supposition that peasants were naïve traditionalists, incapable of unmasking royalist rhetoric, and that they uncritically accepted the basis of official monarchic legitimation, was dominant in both older Marxist and conservative narratives. But it does not seem to be a commonly held perspective

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anymore among professional historians either in Spanish America or in Scandinavia. Rather, most historians now agree that the medieval mystique of royals had morphed into something else by the eighteenth century. In a recent article that draws on a wide array of theoretical approaches to both monarchism and popular politics, Sergio Serulnikov suggests that, by the second half of the eighteenth century, the king had become merely ‘an empty signifier’ in Spanish America.23 The name of the king could be invoked in support of the most radically progressive as well as the most reactionary ideas. Building on David M. Luebke’s work on monarchism in eighteenth-century Habsburg lands in Central Europe, Serulnikov sees popular monarchism as potentially subversive.24 In his explanation for the popular monarchism found in the Andean area, Serulnikov highlights the absence of feudal bonds between peasants and landlords like those which existed in parts of Europe at the time, and he also contends that the Spanish American apparatus was as modern as it could get at the time. He draws attention to a facet of early modern Hispanic society in which there may have been a difference with respect to the Scandinavian ones, although more in degree than in kind. The juridical order of Spanish and Spanish American society retained its traditional pluralist physiognomy. All the major social sectors or corporations such as the cities, the guilds, the pueblos de indios, the universities, the religious brotherhoods, the military and so on were governed to some extent autonomously and had their own rights and laws. The role of the king was foremost that of juggling the particular interests of these groups, to give to each what belonged to them. Commutative justice was the basis of power. The king was the maximum dispenser of justice in this metasystem. Even the smallest of conflicts tended to involucrate royal interests. Despite the pluralist physiognomy of the monarchic order in Spanish America, its commutative character implied that the position of the monarch even in the smallest issues was relevant and important. Although Serulnikov does an excellent job in demonstrating that the invocation of the king for a wide spectrum of different political stances from the most reactionary to most progressive, it is also possible to argue that there were certain limits to what could pass inside royalist rhetoric and some commonalities existed between the different movements acting in the name of the monarch. Luebke’s work on eighteenth-century monarchism has also inspired Scandinavian historians. Karen Sennefelt, in her study of the 1743 Dalecarlian Rebellion, explores how various crises that the Dalecarlian peasants experienced in the 1730s and 1740s were transformed into

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consensus first about the problems confronting them and then about how to mobilize.25 Sennefelt follows in detail the rumours circulating before the march on Stockholm and discusses the motivation behind the mobilization and popular political views on how a proper monarchy should function. Rather than focusing on the causes of the rebellion (which are quite straightforward and linked to tax reforms and forced conscription), Sennefelt is interested in precisely how the rebellion came about and was organized. Although the 1743 Rebellion is a unique event in Swedish eighteenth-century history, Sennefelt parts from the premise that it had to make sense for the participants and as such be a manifestation of what she calls political culture. Although the term ‘political culture’ may be debated, at least with Sennefelt it is not used to imply that the rebellion was an unmasking of a traditional hidden popular culture that manifested itself during a period of great distress.26 Rather, she argues that the forms of mobilization used by the Dalecarlian peasants were largely conditioned on what was possible within the political system of eighteenth-century Sweden. Sennefelt uses modern sociological theory on social movements to analyse four phases of the rebellion: the formation of consensus, mobilization, action and demobilization. In order for consensus to be formed and mobilization possible, Sennefelt argues that frames of interpretation used by the actors had to resonate with the political culture of the participants and with their lived experiences. Her interpretation of the Dalecarlian monarchism largely follows Luebke’s scheme. The peasants’ most immediate concerns were the new taxes and military conscription, but these problems were exasperated by what they perceived to be a political system in which there was no single supreme authority with whom they could negotiate and which could be held accountable. The king was not really a king when most of his powers were delegated to a thirteen-member government council dominated by aristocrats. According to Sennefelt, the Dalecarlians’ relationship with the monarch was thought to rest on a (mostly) unwritten contract or pact of mutual obligations between the monarch and his subjects. In their view, they had a moral right to protest and mobilize if the monarchic government did not fulfil its obligations towards the people.27 As one Dalecarlian put it: ‘what use is a King who does not rule nor helps the commoners’.28 Locally, the Dalecarlians complained among themselves that there were too many kings, that the aristocrats ‘do everything, and the King nothing’. When the Dalecarlians used the king’s own motto, ‘One God, One King’, in their march to Stockholm, it was a powerful way of using absolutist rhetoric against the government.

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Rather than naïve, this popular monarchism was both rational and astute, a pragmatic ideology for popular mobilization in dialogue and to some extent in opposition to the absolutist rhetoric as deployed by the monarchic bureaucracy. This idea of pactism is reminiscent of John Leddy Phelan’s 1977 study of the 1781 Comunero Rebellion in New Granada (Colombia). To Phelan, both commoners and the local notables in and around the town of Socorro saw legitimate monarchy as an unwritten contract between the people and the king. It was their right, according to Phelan, to organize a march to the capital, Santa Fe (the similarities to the Dalecarlians’ march to Stockholm is obvious), in order to force the king’s ministers to modify recent changes in taxation and the introduction of state monopolies. The leaders of the Comunero Rebellion, just like their Swedish counterparts, believed it was their right to protest (even violently if necessary) when the monarchy did not abide by the unwritten pact between king and people. But unlike Sennefelt, Phelan understands the idea of the pact as a tradition with a clear legal and philosophical pedigree. Phelan claims that the comuneros’ notion of monarchy was essentially a popular version of the classical Spanish sixteenth-century doctrine of kingship espoused by the Jesuit Francisco Suarez, combined with the memories of and traditions stemming from the decentralized Spanish Habsburg Monarchy. In Phelan’s view, the Comunero Rebellion was primarily a clash between the older, traditional pluralist and pactist Habsburg Monarchy on one hand and the newer, French-inspired, centralized, absolutist Bourbon Monarchy on the other.29 However, as Phelan himself admits, it is very difficult to show that any of the leaders or participants in the Comunero Rebellion were familiar with sixteenth-century Spanish philosophic and theological concepts of kingship. In the voluminous writings produced during the course of the rebellion, the most direct connection between the popular demands and sixteenth-century political theory were the political uses of the terms común and comunero (also used in the 1521 Rebellion in Castile) and the notion of a corpus mysticum politicum, which Phelan was able to read between the lines in some of the texts produced by the 1781 protesters. A more straightforward explanation for the rationale behind the Comunero Rebellion can be made without recourse to a hypothetical popular resurgence of a quaint Hispanic political tradition. In the pasquinades, letters and proclamations of the 1781 comuneros, the wrath is directed towards prominent royal officials, and especially a visiting peninsular regent with

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ample powers, Juan Francisco Gutierrez de Piñeres. He was portrayed as a tyrannical man, imposing unjust taxes. Time had come for the people of Socorro to free themselves and the rest of New Granada from the grips of this Pharaoh: ‘Long live our Catholic faith! Long live our Catholic King of Spain! Death to the Nero-like cruelties of those who would put us in bondage’.30 Although we cannot rule out a popular political tradition like that proposed by Phelan, it then becomes difficult to explain why Scandinavian and Spanish American rebellions in the eighteenth century seem so similar. Rather than a relic of the past, the popular demands of both Socorrans and Dalecarlians—I would argue—were conditioned more by the particular pressure peasants and commoners and to some extent provincial notables experienced in the eighteenth century. The way in which demands for justice and representation were put forward, the language used for those purposes, and calls for the rights to negotiate before taxation and to limit the arbitrariness of local royal officials were all expressed in a language of eighteenth-century absolutism. It may be contended that some of the largest Andean rebellions do not fit this description, that especially the ones lead by Tupac Amaru, Tomás Catari and Tupac Catari in the early 1780s displayed more profound grievances and a quest for a more radical break with the political regime than most of the other eighteenth-century rebellions discussed so far. Many scholars have argued that the eighteenth-century rebellions in Spanish America were backward-looking, traditional, utopian or even millenarian dreams coming to the forefront during a period of increased oppression.31 This is particularly true of the Andean revolts of the 1780s. When José Gabriel Condorcanqui took the name Tupac Amaru and launched a violent revolt against Spanish colonialism in Peru, it has often (but by no means exclusively) been interpreted as Inca revivalism. However, as shown convincingly by Alberto Flores Galindo and Charles F.  Walker, among others, it is highly questionable whether the leader ever envisioned a complete break with the Hispanic Monarchy.32 Inca symbolism came in many guises, and even the Spanish Bourbons themselves used it to foster popular support for the monarchy in the Andes. The call for a restoration of Incaic rule was usually ambiguous and vague, and although it was clearly confrontational and critical towards Spanish rule when used by the Andean rebels, it did not necessarily imply that they craved a different type of polity and certainly not a reversion to the pre-Hispanic Incaic empire. Rather, the rebels tended to see themselves as devout Catholics who had earned

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the right, both by birth in the Andes and by their loyal service to the king, to reject arbitrary despotism from corrupt officials and to enjoy more political autonomy. In fact, there are interesting parallels between the trajectories of Condorcanqui and Lofthus, whose rebellions both occurred in 1780s. Both Lofthus and Condorcanqui were social parvenus who aspired to a higher social status that was denied them in a series of humiliating lawsuits in the 1770s. Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui was frustrated by the Spanish justice system that did not recognize his quest to obtain the title of Marquisate of Oropesa and the concomitant mayorazgo, noble status and recognized lineage from both the last Incaic rulers and the first conquistadors of Peru.33 Although he was a kuraka of several small towns in a valley south of Cuzco, and as such both served some royal functions (tax collection at the village level) and seems to have been recognized locally as a member of a prominent family, he was never accepted into the circle of uppermost Inca nobility, either by the aristocratic cusqueño elites or by the Spanish authorities. Lofthus inherited a farm from his uncle near the small town of Lillesand in 1773, married the daughter of wealthy merchant and farmer, thereafter frequented wealthy circles, and won two prizes in 1779 and 1781 for the enlightened improvement of his farm that quickly became one of the largest in the area with between sixteen and forty sharecroppers and workers. For some years prior, he was also part owner of sawmill and several smaller ships, as was common on the southern coast at the time. Lofthus was engaged in a series of lawsuits between 1774 and 1786, mostly as a defendant from accusations of lack of payment for goods acquired, for purchase of stolen property, and a series of commercial disputes he maintained with local merchants. In all of these, which he mostly lost, he was reprimanded for his lack of respect for both the magistrates presiding over the court and for social superiors such as the local merchants and royal officials. His most crushing defeat in court was in 1784, when he was accused of violating the commercial privileges of the merchants of Arendal. On top of this came other debts and fines acquired over previous years, a fire on one of his ships and a bad harvest in 1782. Effectively ruined, he was forced to sell his farm to his own father-in-law for 1680 silver dollars.34 He was also sentenced to pay a small fine and a hefty social price for being a liar in 1783. Humiliated, in debt up to his ears and still living on the farm, which was no longer his own, he embarked on a large-scale mobilization against the royal officials and merchants who had dishonoured him and stolen his wealth.

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Both Tupac Amaru (he adopted the name although he failed to convince the courts that he was a descendant of the last Inca ruler) and Lofthus began to mobilize shortly after having suffered crushing legal defeats. Both movements had an element of personal revenge to them. But had both leaders not been able to connect their personal stories to widespread social grievances, their uprisings would not have had such a long-lasting impact. Clearly, the most visible actions were rather different in the two cases. Tupac Aramu organized an armed insurrection, took control of several villages, threatened to attack Cuzco (the second largest city in Peru at the time) and killed several royal officials and Spanish-born landowners. In November 1780, just three weeks after his decade-long juridical battle for the Oropesa marquisate had irreversibly ended, he organized an assault on the Spanish royal official corregidor, Antonio de Areche, having had lunch with him. After forcing Areche to write a letter asking for goods and reinforcements that Condorcanqui’s men ambushed, Areche was hanged by the rebels, who claimed that they acted on the orders of the King of Spain. From November 1780 to May 1781, the rebellion extended to many villages and valleys surrounding Cuzco, although the city itself was never taken.35 Before he and his family were captured and brutally executed, Tupac Amaru recruited thousands of supporters, attacked haciendas, ransacked textile workshops, expelled the hated corregidores (royal officials who administered tax collection above the level of the kurakas) and abolished draft labour (mita), all in the name of the King of Spain. Lofthus organized a secretive network of peasants in more than twenty parishes of the southern Nedenes Amt whose main immediate purpose was to collect signatures for a series of petitions to Crown Prince Fredrik in Copenhagen (who acted as regent from 1784 due to his father’s mental illness). They sought the establishment of a commission to investigate and punish royal officials (mostly bailiffs) for charging exorbitant taxes and fees and urban merchants for treating the population with disgrace and cheating the commoners into debt. In order to do this, Lofthus collected small contributions from the farmers to form a small armed guard to protect him from the local authorities and to pay for the necessary trips to collect signatures. The plan was to organize a peasant delegation that would travel to Copenhagen and personally deliver the petition to the crown prince on behalf of all commoners in southern Norway. He carried two small, concealed pistols, and avoided direct contact with local sheriffs. When Bailiff Dahl attempted to arrest him at Lofthus’ home in late

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September 1786 and Lofthus managed to escape to the woods, sympathy for Lofthus among the commoners only increased. In the aftermath of this incident, he was escorted by up to fifty men from the hilly interior parishes of the southern coast and was able to move around visiting the small farms and collecting further signatures for his petitions. The authorities had a hard time trying to get information on or arrest the Lofthus’ emissaries as people were unwilling to talk or be seen to assist the authorities. On 2 October Lofthus was present at the annual local Ting at Lillesand, where officials and commoners congregated for smaller legal affairs and for the computation of taxes. According to Bailiff Dahl, these assemblies normally lasted a couple of days and were cordial affairs, but this time several hundred peasants (called a peasant army by contemporaries) accompanied Lofthus and the situation was tense and confrontational. For the next several months, Lofthus’ support only increased and his ‘army’ comprised several hundred men. Both Condorcanqui and Lofthus died as a consequence of leading the revolts; Condorcanqui was executed and Lofthus died in prison ten years after his arrest in 1787. But aside from punishing the leaders in an exemplarily harsh way, both the Spanish and Danish authorities seriously investigated the roots of the social unrest that made the rebellions so threatening. Better control with local royal officials and modifications in taxation coupled with stricter surveillance and increased emphasis on the duty of subjects to obedience were the elements of the strategy in both Spanish America and Norway in the late 1780s and 1790s. One of the most intriguing aspects of the Tupac Amaru and Lofthus movements is how both leaders were able to convince their followers that they were acting on behalf of the king himself. Any madman could have claimed to be commanded by God or a distant absolute king. However, it is an essential and partly overlooked element of both these movements— and I believe an important reason for their relative success—that the followers really believed that their leaders had communicated with the head of the monarchy (Tupac Amaru indirectly and in writing, Lofthus by personally visiting the crown prince in Copenhagen) and thus represented the king’s will. If not through outright command, both leaders were perceived to have had a special understanding with the monarch, the king’s blessing in inspecting, gathering complaints and even punishing corrupt royal officials. This does not mean that their followers were naïve, and easily led astray by lunatics. But it suggests that the social leaders such as Condorcanqui and Lofthus could compete with appointed royal officials

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in the eyes of the people as legitimate envoys of the monarchy. This in turn underscores the fear and perplexity of the royal officials. The rebellions lay bare the officials’ tenuous position: they relied both on the authority of the king and some form of subordination locally in order to fulfil their role in the monarchic system. The Lofthus and Tupac Amaru Rebellions were doubly threatening to the royal officials. * * * In this chapter I have tried to argue that Scandinavians and Spanish Americans during the eighteenth century related to their monarchs in generally the same way. Within the monarchic system they sought to improve their position by playing the game of monarchy. Even in the largest eighteenth-century rebellions, the most important aim of the rebels was not to dismantle monarchism per se, but to reject or modify the practices of local officials and claim greater political autonomy at the local level. The arguments used were neither naïve, nor necessarily traditional or reactionary. Somewhat paradoxically, the language of absolutism could be used by the subjects to wedge a split between the king and his officials.

Notes 1. Thomas Ewen Daltveit Slettebø, ‘først, som rettfærdig Dommer at straffe, og siden, som en mild Fader, at forlade’: Det dansk-norske eneveldets håndtering av Strilekrigen i Bergen 1765’, MA dissertation (University of Bergen, 2007), https://hdl.handle.net/1956/4030. 2. Anthony McFarlane, ‘The “Rebellion of the Barrios”: Urban Insurrection in Bourbon Quito’, Hispanic American Historical Review 69/2 (1989). 3. John Leddy Phelan, The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison, 1978). 4. Karin Sennefelt, Den politiska sjukan: Dalupproret 1743 och frihetstida politisk kultur (Hedemora, 2001). 5. Ingrid Fiskaa, ‘Statsmakta og Lofthusreisinga: styresmaktene si handtering av allmugereisinga i Nedenes og Bratsberg 1786–87’, MA dissertation (University of Oslo, 2009). 6. Jan Szeminski, ‘Why Kill the Spaniard? New Perspectives on Andean Insurrectionary Ideology in the 18th Century’, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison, 1987). 7. Edward Palmer Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1993), 246–258.

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8. Hanni Jalil Paier, ‘Of Structures, Culture and Other Demons: A Review of Late Eighteenth-Century Andean Insurrections’, CS (2011), https://doi. org/10.18046/recs.i7.1045; Anthony McFarlane, ‘Rebellions in Late Colonial Spanish America: A Comparative Perspective’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 14/3 (1995). 9. Pasi Ihalainen et  al. (eds), Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution: Nordic Political Cultures, 1740–1820 (Farnham, 2011). 10. Both in the nationalist historiography produced in the nineteenth century, and in some of the post-1990 historiography, the notion exists that ‘independence was for Latin America what the revolution was for France’. François-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Mexico City, 1993). 11. Some notable exceptions to this trend are Ole Teige’s very interesting work on corruption in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Ola Teige, ‘Bureaucratic Corruption and Regime Change: The case of Denmark and Norway after 1814’, in Les coulisses du politique dans l’Europe contemporaine. Tome 3: Scandales et corruption à l’époque contemporaine (Paris, 2014). Øystein Rian has questioned in a series of studies the supposedly benign character of the Oldenburg Monarchy. See for instance Øystein Rian, ‘Hvorfor var det ikke nordmennene som forlot Fredrik 6’, Historisk tidsskrift 93/1 (2014), https://doi.org/10.18261/ ISSN1504-2944-2014-01-02. An interesting comment on this article is found in Finn Erhard Johannessen, ‘Nordmennene og det fjerne styret – replikk til Øystein Rian’, Historisk tidsskrift 93/3 (2014), https://doi. org/10.18261/ISSN1504-2944-2014-03-07. 12. Thomas Ertman, Birth of the leviathan: Building states and regimes in medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 10. 13. Michael Bregnsbo, ‘The Crisis and Renewal of the Monarchy: Introduction’, in Ihalainen et. al. (eds.), Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution. 14. For more on Struensee see Michael Bregnsbo ‘Struensee and the Political Culture of Absolutism’ in Ihalainen et. al. (eds.), Scandinavia in the Age of Revolution. Struensee’s predicament may fruitfully be compared to Esquilache’s in Spain, just six years prior. See for instance, Laura Rodríguez, ‘The Spanish Riots of 1766’, Past & Present, 59 (1973), 117–146. 15. Ertman, Birth of the leviathan, 7. 16. For the success of Bourbon tax collection in Spanish America after 1759, see for instance Alejandra Irigoin and Regina Grafe, ‘Response to Carlos Marichal and William Summerhill’, Hispanic American Historical Review 88/2 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-­2007-­159; Carlos Marichal, ‘Money, taxes, and finance’, The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America 1 (2006); Alejandra Irigoin and Regina Grafe, ‘Bargaining for Absolutism: A Spanish Path to Nation-State and Empire Building’,

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Hispanic American Historical Review 88/2 (2008), https://doi.org/ 10.1215/00182168-­2007-­117; J.  H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic world: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, 2006), 292–324; Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge, 1993), 202–227. 17. Examples from Norway on corruption, Jens Johan Hyvik, ‘Embetsstanden bak fasaden’, Heimen 55/4 (2018), https://doi.org/10.18261/issn. 1894-­3195-­2018-­04-­03. On the development of bureaucratic states in Scandinavia, see for instance: Frisk Jensen Mette, ‘The Building of the Scandinavian States: Establishing Weberian Bureaucracy and Curbing Corruption from the Mid-Seventeenth to the End of the Nineteenth Century’, in Bureaucracy and Society in Transition: Comparative Perspectives, eds Haldor Byrkjeflot and Frederik Engelstad (Bingley, 2018); Teige, ‘Bureaucratic Corruption and Regime Change’. 18. Teige, ‘Bureaucratic Corruption and Regime Change’; Anthony McFarlane, ‘Political corruption and reform in Bourbon Spanish America’, in Political corruption in Europe and Latin America, eds Walter Little and Eduardo Posada-Carbó (London, 1996); Christoph Rosenmüller (ed.), Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks (Albuquerque, 2017); Stephan Ruderer and Christoph Rosenmüller, ‘Introducción: la nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina’, in “Dádivas, dones y dineros”: aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad, eds Stephan Ruderer and Christoph Rosenmüller (Madrid and Frankfurt, 2016). 19. Francis Fukuyama relies on a modified version of Ertman’s categorization, and an argument can be made that all three monarchies (Spain, Denmark and Sweden) along with France prior to the revolution were ‘weak absolutisms’ to use his nomenclature. They had in theory a more or less absolute monarch, a nominally free peasantry at least in parts of the realms, and limited possibilities for the gentry and aristocracy through legal political means of limiting taxes imposed by the king. Yet, according to Fukuyama, the king could not in these weak absolutist states act as a despot because he was constrained by the interests of the bureaucracy and had to justify new measures in terms of law that was often a very cumbersome process. Francis Fukuyama, The origins of political order: From prehuman times to the French Revolution (1st edn, New York, 2011), 334–372; Francis Fukuyama, The origins of political order: From prehuman times to the French Revolution (London, 2012), 334–372. 20. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the absolutist state (London, 1979). 21. See for instance Santiago Ibáñez Rodríguez, Noemí Armas Lerena and José Luis Gómez Urdáñez, Los señoríos en La Rioja en el siglo XVIII (Logroño, 1996).

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22. For a short but useful introduction to this topic, see ‘Gårdsrätt’ in Bernhard Meijer et  al., Nordisk familjebok: konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi (Stockholm, 1904). 23. Sergio Serulnikov, ‘Lo que invocar la figura del Rey y la justicia regia significaba (y lo que no): Monarquismo popular en Charcas tardocolonial’, Varia Historia 35 (2019), https://doi. org/10.1590/0104-87752019000100003. 24. David Martin Luebke, His majesty’s rebels: Communities, factions, and rural revolt in the Black Forest, 1725–1745 (Ithaca, NY, 1997). 25. Sennefelt, Den politiska sjukan. 26. For an interesting sceptical critique of the term, see Alan Knight, ‘Is Political Culture Good to Think?’, in Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750–1950, eds Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada (Durham and London, 2005). 27. Sennefelt, Den politiska sjukan, 54–63. 28. Ibid., 61. 29. Phelan, The People and the King, 79–88. 30. Ibid., 73. 31. See for instance John H.  Rowe, ‘The Incas under Spanish Colonial Institutions’, Hispanic American Historical Review 37/2 (1957). 32. Charles F Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru (Durham, 1999); Alberto Flores Galindo et al., In search of an Inca: Identity and utopia in the Andes (Cambridge, 2010). 33. David Cahill, ‘First among Incas: The Marquesado de Oropesa Litigation (1741–1780) en route to the Great Rebellion’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 41 (2004). 34. Georg Sverdrup, Lofthusbevægelsen (Kristiania [Oslo], 1917), 66–85. 35. Ella Schmidt and Ward Stavig, The Tupac Amaru and Catarista Rebellions: An anthology of sources (Indianapolis, 2008), XXIII–XXX.

CHAPTER 4

King, War and Bread: Popular Royalism in Southern Europe (1789–1830) Álvaro París

In recent years, historians have called into question the teleological narratives of progress portraying politicization as a linear process leading to modern republicanism and democracy. Royalist, counterrevolutionary and antiliberal movements were neither relics of the past nor nostalgic attempts to resist the course of history, but political alternatives which gathered wide popular support. Those who opposed the French Revolution and its European aftermath deployed novel political repertoires and discourses to conquer the public sphere, such as the press, pamphlets, collective petitions, public demonstrations, street riots, electoral rallies and popular militias. Although they formulated their plans as a return to an imagined past, this past was reshaped to respond to the needs and expectations of their present. In sum, royalism had a popular dimension—as well as elite-driven dynamics—and contributed to the rise of new models of political participation in much the same way as the revolutionary political projects.1

Á. París (*) University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_4

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As discussed in the introduction, although a royalist could be broadly defined as a person who supports a ruling king (or who believes that a king should rule), the emergence of a partisan form of royalism implies an explicit challenge to the monarchical system. The French Revolution represented a major shift in the history of royalism precisely because it entailed the first real challenge to the legitimacy of the European monarchies as a whole. Thereafter, the king’s cause needed not only compliant subjects but active partisans. Old certainties collapsed, so that the people were called into action to defend what used to be taken for granted. For this reason, although many revolutionaries supported the monarchical form of government, the term ‘royalist’ acquired a counterrevolutionary sense in many European contexts.2 The supporters of the traditional monarchy raised the king’s flag as a universal framework of reference against revolution. Popular royalism was not a paradoxical or contradictory phenomenon, although our teleological assumptions might suggest otherwise. To effectively confront the revolutionary challenge, royalists needed to resort to the social and military mobilization of large sectors of the population.3 Far from being manipulated, however, those people who fought in the name of the king were pursuing what they perceived as their own interests and values.4 On this basis, we have to explain why unprivileged social groups identified themselves with the monarchical order and, more precisely, what conceptions of monarchy were at play. Common people participated in royalist politics not only to defend their worldviews, but also to address their everyday concerns. Therefore, royalism had to offer them effective tools to deal with their social problems, and not merely a utopian escape to the past. In order to explore this issue, I will focus on three southern European monarchies under the Bourbon dynasty—France, Spain and the Kingdom of Naples—between 1789 and 1830. Although these monarchies experienced very different circumstances during this period, they shared certain political features which explain the strength of royalist and legitimist movements and their persistence during the entire nineteenth century. The timespan covered by this chapter could be broadly divided in two periods. During the first of these (1789–1815), the three monarchies survived the challenge posed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, at the cost of undergoing some transformations, such as opening the Pandora’s box of popular mobilization. During the second period (1815–30), they enforced the restoration of the monarchy while dealing,

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on the one hand, with liberal and constitutional movements and, on the other, with a thriving ultra-royalist opposition.

The Bourbon Monarchies Facing and Surviving Revolution, 1789–1830 During our first period, between 1789 and 1815, the Bourbon Monarchies of France, Spain and the Kingdom of Naples collapsed in the midst of revolution, civil war and foreign invasion. Eventually, however, all three returned to power between 1814 and 1815, presenting the Restoration as a restitution of normality after a period of turmoil.5 The Restoration, however, did not imply a return to the past. Under the appearance of continuity, the three monarchies tried to learn from the experience of the revolutionary crisis in order to adapt and survive. The myth of the Restoration as a reestablishment of the natural order of things—sanctioned by an alliance between altar and throne—concealed the implementation of substantial changes.6 The three monarchies adopted some of the innovations of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, such as the centralization and modernization of the state, administrative reforms, the establishment of new police forces, an appeal to new kinds of ‘national’ identities and, more importantly for the purpose of this chapter, new sources of legitimacy based on popular consent.7 The war was a driving force for the emergence of new forms of popular political participation in the monarchical system. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815), the agents of the Bourbon Monarchies called for the mobilization of the masses in defence of the king, religion and the homeland. Henceforth, the survival and independence of the nation were merged with the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, giving rise to a new form of ‘monarchical patriotism’ by which the vassals became active players in the political arena.8 Their duty was to take up arms and rise against the intruder government and internal enemies, joining the royalist armies, guerrillas and militias, thus sacrificing their own lives and forging a direct bond with the absent king. Relinquishing their assigned role as obedient and passive subjects, the war transformed these fighters into protagonists in the defeat of Napoleon. Once the monarchy was restored, the relationship between the king and his subjects was consequently transformed, redefined and negotiated.9 Those who gave their lives in the name of the king assumed that he was duty bound to reward

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their services and respond to their demands. The Bourbon Monarchies survived the crisis by recognizing, encouraging and using to their advantage the new role played by the masses and national communities from 1789 onwards, both in political and military terms.10 Once the restoration was accomplished, the counterrevolutionary impulse was redirected towards a new enemy. From 1814 to 1830, the revolutionary menace took on a new form in southern Europe. The liberal revolutions of 1820 in Spain, Portugal and some Italian states (mainly in Naples, Sicily and Piedmont) advocated a political alternative which, distancing itself from the French Revolution to embrace monarchical and Catholic principles, gave rise to a revolutionary tradition anchored in the southern European context.11 This liberal political culture could not be portrayed as a foreign innovation as easily as republican and Napoleonic ideals. Ferdinand VII of Spain (1820) and Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies (1821) swore allegiance to their respective constitutions only reluctantly and, immediately thereafter, started plotting to overthrow the new liberal regimes. Once they relied on a foreign invasion to regain their absolute power—1821 in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and 1823 in Spain— their political objective became indissolubly attached to the rejection of any form of constitutional government as well as the violent persecution of those who supported it.12 Counterrevolutionary royalism was not, however, the only possible means of escaping the crisis. The association between monarchy and counterrevolution was neither natural nor inevitable. Constitutional Bourbonism remained an alternative despite the antiliberal path taken by the kings themselves. In France—under the Charter of 1814 and until the ascension to the throne of Louis-Philippe in 1830—constitutional royalists pushed for the adoption of liberal reforms.13 In Spain, after the death of Ferdinand VII in 1833, a civil war pitted two Bourbon candidates to the throne against one another: one increasingly affiliated with liberalism (Isabella II) and the other with antiliberalism (her uncle and pretender Charles V).14 In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the implementation of a Bourbon constitutional monarchy remained the goal of most Neapolitan liberals despite the defeat of the revolution of 1848.15 Henceforth, if royalism was perceived as counterrevolutionary, it was because antiliberal royalists tried to monopolize the figure of the king, presenting the royal cause as that of the counterrevolution. All this considered, at the beginning of 1830, the three Bourbon Monarchies seemed to have achieved their goal of surviving the

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revolutionary challenge. That said, two of them were on the brink of a major new crisis. In France, the revolution of 1830 put a new dynasty on the throne, pushing Bourbonists into opposition. In Spain, a civil war pitted the supporters of Queen Isabella II against the legitimist pretender Carlos María Isidro, thus driving antiliberal royalism into opposition.16 In both countries, counterrevolutionary royalists lost their former position of power within the state, while the ruling dynasty became indissolubly linked to constitutionalism. At this moment, then, legitimism emerged as a new stage in the history of royalism, thereby providing a suitable conclusion to the period under study here. This chapter aims to show that one way to understand the persistence of the three Bourbon Monarchies and their ability to adapt between 1789 and 1830 is to be found in the mass royalist and counterrevolutionary politicization of a significant part of society. This new political dynamic contributed to revitalizing the traditional imaginary of the monarchy. One of the driving forces of this process was the role played by civilians in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

King, War and Nation Since the figure of the king was at the core of royalist politics, we must clarify what kind of relationship popular royalists forged with their king.17 On the one hand, the legitimacy of the monarchy was rooted in tradition and experience, so the monarchical imaginary was vigorous enough to survive the challenge of the new models of political legitimacy based on abstract and rational principles which had yet to be proven. Tradition and custom, however, were not enough to confront the revolutionary challenge. Old formulas had to be updated to provide rhetorical and practical tools capable of sustaining the monarchy in an unprecedented period of turmoil. From 1792 on, the monarchies of Spain and Naples went to war with the French Republic. This was not a conventional war, but one in which the foundations of society and the monarchical principle were at stake. The French Republic raised a citizen army in which every man was a potential soldier, thus changing the rules of war.18 This unparalleled mobilization of human resources forced the Bourbon Monarchies to respond in similar terms.19 During the War of the Pyrenees (1793–95) in northern Spain, every male resident was called to enlist as a volunteer against the godless republic. The Church, ayuntamientos (town councils) and

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corporations raised militias and contributed with donations to the war effort.20 The practice of defending territory, religion and national independence was thus merged with the defence of the monarchy, forging a new relationship between the armed vassals and the king. The logic of loyalty, service and reward therefore took on a new meaning since ordinary people were enlisted to preserve an order that, for the first time since time immemorial, was at risk. The impact of this popular mobilization, however, was limited as long as the war was confined to national or even regional borders, so that the decisive change took place as a result of foreign invasion. In short, the French invasions of the Kingdom of Naples (1798) and the Iberian Peninsula (1807) provoked the sudden collapse of the Bourbon Monarchies. In December 1798, Ferdinand IV fled to Sicily while French troops easily occupied his kingdom.21 In April 1808, Ferdinand VII left Spain in the hope of reaching an agreement with Napoleon, but was forced instead to abdicate in favour of the accession of Joseph Bonaparte to the throne.22 The subsequent power vacuum and institutional collapse could have meant the end of the Bourbon Monarchies. Resistance, however, came from within society itself. The invaders had underestimated the ability of the body politic to ignite the resistance in the absence of its head (the king).23 The popular uprisings against the Parthenopean Republic backed by French armies (1799) and the Napoleonic troops in Spain (1808) were of course channelled by traditional elites who provided the infrastructure for the military and ideological resistance. Members of the aristocracy, local elites, former officers of the disbanded army and municipalities mobilized guerrilla forces and royalist militias.24 But the protagonism of the common people—both the rural peasantry and the urban populace of Naples and Madrid—gave an unprecedented social significance to the irregular war. In the Kingdom of Naples, Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo brought together a myriad of royalist bands to lead an army (known as the Army of the Holy Faith) which recaptured the capital. Ruffo himself mistrusted the role played by the Neapolitan lower classes, and warned the king that they were not ‘defenders of the throne’ but an unruly mob which would join any political faction as long as they could loot and plunder.25 Ruffo and the royal authorities tried to contain the ‘popular anarchy’ following the restoration by dissolving the royalist militias and establishing a new police force to take back the streets of Naples. In order to succeed, however, they

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had to negotiate and grant concessions to the plebe armata (armed plebeians), since ‘armed force was in the hands of the common people’.26 In Spain, some of the first uprisings against the Napoleonic army (1808) targeted the Spanish authorities, accused of collaborating with the invaders. In this context, rising up in the name of the king could led to disobeying the royal institutions and even the king himself. In fact, Ferdinand VII disapproved of the early stages of the anti-Napoleonic revolt from his ‘captivity’ in France, but he was meant to be deprived of liberty so his will was ignored.27 Although the first insurrection in Madrid was bloodily suppressed, it was followed by movements in other cities, leading to an irregular war in which the common people played a crucial role both in urban and rural areas (1808–14). The scale of popular mobilization shaped the political discourse in the aftermath of the Restoration. In 1799, the return of Ferdinand IV to Naples was marked by the establishment of a new kind of relationship between the king and his people. Ferdinand blamed the nobility and the traditional elites for the ‘treason’ while directly addressing the common people who had saved the throne, recognizing the role of the urban lower classes (the so called lazzaroni).28 In Luca di Mauro’s words, the restoration ‘opened up a new phase in the history of the kingdom based, at least in public speeches, on a direct link between the sovereign and the people’.29 Similarly, the first absolutist restoration of Ferdinand VII in Spain (1814) was the setting for the deployment of a new rhetoric stressing the direct, unmediated bond between the king and the people. As Pedro Rújula has extensively demonstrated, Ferdinand VII’s appeal to the masses in times of crisis contributed to building a ‘direct relationship between the king and the people above the institutions’.30 This privileged relationship, however, could be open to interpretation by the royalists themselves, to the extent that ‘even the king could be delegitimized for the purpose of defending the relationship between monarchy and people’.31 In short, the Bourbon Monarchies developed a public discourse by which the ‘people’ became the collective actor responsible for their restoration. In contrast to the ambivalence and hesitation shown by the majority of the elites, the common people were supposed to be the custodians of the pristine values of loyalty to the Crown. According to a famous observation attributed to the Neapolitan Queen Maria Carolina: ‘only the people [il popolo] were loyal, while the gentlemen of the kingdom were all Jacobins’.32

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This innovation fulfilled two goals: on the one hand, it served to spread the idea that the ‘true people’ were naturally inclined to be loyal to the monarchy, so that those who supported the intruder government were not a part of the community and must be excluded from it.33 On the other, it allowed the restored monarchs to undermine some of the privileges of the aristocracy, the clergy and the traditional institutions, in order to establish their own personal rule. In Naples, after 1799, the king eroded the autonomy of the nobility who controlled the capital. He dissolved the Consiglio di Città—a city council representing the main noble houses—and implemented centralizing reforms such as the creation of a new police force.34 Furthermore, some of the privileges and immunities of the nobility were abolished, not for the sake of equality, but to reinforce the undisputed primacy of royal jurisdiction.35 In Spain in 1814, meanwhile, Ferdinand VII also took advantage of the exceptional context to boost his personal power. He reinforced the king’s authority over ecclesiastical matters, reduced the jurisdictional autonomy of the Church and turned the Inquisition into a political tool at the service of the absolute power.36 Moreover, although the abolition of seigneurial jurisdictions undertaken during the first constitutional period (1812–14) was reversed, the king seized the opportunity to reinforce royal jurisdiction at the expense of feudal lords, incorporating some of their prerogatives into those of the Crown. In addition, the competences of the traditional courts (the royal councils and tribunals making up the polysynodial system) were reduced in favour of granting more authority to the secretaries of state, establishing a ‘ministerial’ practice of power. In order to limit the political influence held by the aristocracy and the bishops, Ferdinand VII promoted advisers from obscure origins who owed everything to his favour.37 With every nomination and dismissal, he publicly emphasized that all counsellors, ministers and officials depended directly on him. On the whole, the restoration of 1814 led to a concentration of power in the hands of the monarch and a progressive erosion of the traditional jurisdictional system. The king’s will (real voluntad) became the only ruling principle. Ferdinand VII no longer acted as an ancien régime-­ style monarch but established a new practice of government, which has been defined by historians as ‘tyrannical’ and ‘populist’.38 The direct and unmediated bond between the king and the people was the foundation for an authoritarian monarchy whose legitimacy came from old and new sources. It was of course anchored in tradition and

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portrayed as a return to the natural order of things. At the same time, however, it relied on the new political and ideological struggle brought about by the revolution and on the identification between the king and the independence of a nation whose awakening was depicted as the result of a struggle waged by the common people. The monarchy that rose from the ashes of its previous collapse was therefore ideologically prepared to confront liberalism and constitutionalism. It had successfully incorporated two of the defining features of the revolutionary ideology: national and popular legitimacy. The restoration was thus represented simultaneously as a return to the past and as the beginning of a new era in which loyal subjects had to remain vigilant and armed in order to fight for their king, their religion and their homeland.

Service and Reward While historians have largely discussed the popular dimension of post-­ revolutionary European monarchies, less attention has been paid to the other side of the equation. How was the new relationship between the king and the people understood by popular royalists themselves? The appeal to the common people was more than a rhetorical abstraction or a strategy ‘from above’. Those who fought for the king during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars felt like protagonists of the restoration and, therefore, entitled to ask for some compensation and obtain tangible returns. This logic was not merely instrumental, but a consequence of the ethics of service and reward which had served as the foundation of monarchies since medieval times. Traditionally, the common people had served the king primarily through their loyalty and allegiance, as well as, of course, by working, paying taxes and observing religious principles. As members of the body politic, ordinary subjects could be called to arms, but as soldiers in a hierarchical army led by their noble superiors. The impact of the French Revolution changed the rules of war. When the Spanish and Neapolitan monarchies collapsed, regular armies disbanded and bands of irregular guerrillas led the fight against French troops. Likewise, in France, royalist bands challenged the Republic and persisted during the Consulate and the Empire in the form of chronic political brigandage fuelled by resistance to conscription.39 When the Napoleonic Empire was on the edge of collapse (both in 1814 and 1815), battalions of royalist volunteers were recruited and

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funded locally to support the Coalition armies and carry out political retaliation against Bonapartists.40 In the midst of this irregular warfare, peasants from humble backgrounds and former brigands were promoted to the rank of brigade general in a matter of months, gaining the right to appoint their own officers.41 War became a social leveller and a tool of upward social mobility, giving rise to new leaderships, loyalties and clienteles. When career officers and aristocrats were put at the head of royalist irregular units, they often faced distrust among the ranks unless they had built their own reputation on the field.42 Civilians bearing arms were not always obedient soldiers but, rather, empowered fighters who had gained a new status in their communities and dared to challenge the authorities and the elites. Emerging military leaders in turn built their own patronage networks and loyalties, based on reciprocity and trust among their soldiers. Once the war ended, those who fought for the king felt responsible for his restoration to the throne. Both officers and rank-and-file soldiers felt entitled to ask the king to address their personal and social grievances. The most common claim concerned the provision of jobs and administrative posts in the new regime. Self-promoted working-class officers sought to have their rank and military status confirmed and thereby receive a permanent wage. Moreover, grass-roots guerrilla soldiers were not always keen to go back to their old occupations, since they had perceived the war as an opportunity to climb the social ladder. Consequently, a wave of applicants aspired to achieve a position in the restored administration or, at the very least, earn a decent living on behalf of their merits. They were confident that they had earned this right through their sacrifice and service for the Crown.43

Repression and Purification The search for public employment fuelled demands to intensify the repression against Bonapartists, republicans and liberals. Some royalists claimed that every official still in place should be removed because of their cooperation with the overthrown government. The administration and the army should thus be ‘purified’ in order to make way for ‘true royalists’ to get public employment.44 Some amnesty decrees and peace treaties established terms for reintegrating back into civil society those people who had held some form of public office in the previous regime. Those royalists who opposed these

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‘reconciliatory’ measures were not moved purely by fanaticism, but also by practical reasons. In France, many royalists criticized the ‘soft’ nature of the First Restoration (1814), which aspired to achieve reconciliation and put an end to political retaliation outside the law. During the Second Restoration (1815), royalist militias harassed and even massacred those officials accused of having a Napoleonic past.45 French ultra-royalists called themselves épurés (the purified) to distinguish themselves from the girouettes (the turncoats). In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Treaty of Casalanza (1815) tried to prevent a repeat of the popular anarchy of 1799 through a policy of moderation and reconciliation known as politica dell’amalgama.46 Some of the Bonapartist reforms were maintained and elites and bureaucrats promoted during the Napoleonic period were partially integrated into the new order.47 These measures were, however, resisted by Neapolitan ultra-royalists gathered around the Prince of Canosa and the secret society of the calderari.48 The second absolutist restoration in Spain (1823), meanwhile, led to an analogous conflict between ‘moderate’ royalists and ultra-royalists concerning the level of repression that should be applied against the liberals.49 In every context, ultra-royalists rallied around the idea that all those who had any link to the previous regime should be expelled from the community in order to purify the evil. This intransigence had quite practical implications. True royalists’ who had served the king deserved a reward and any officials or public servants who had not shown unswerving loyalty to the cause should be replaced. Many of these sectors embraced the restoration as a social opportunity, in which being appointed to public office should not be based on qualifications or connections, but on the political engagement and sacrifices made for the royalist cause. In other words, the public appointments and royal favours should be ‘politicized’, since loyalty and service had taken on political overtones. This politicization of the distribution of the king’s grace represented a major shift in the understanding of the merit and reward inherited from the ancien régime. It was therefore contested by ‘moderate’ royalists, who claimed that only the more educated and qualified should hold office, and accused the newcomers of being illiterate or unable to perform their duties. In 1825 Spain, military officers complained that many of the new sergeants were just kids ‘who could not even read’, ‘drank in the taverns with the soldiers’ and one of them had even been a butcher (considered an undignified trade).50 The promotion of ‘new men’ based on their royalist credentials was therefore perceived as a disruption of social hierarchies.

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Among those who hoped to make a living out of the restoration, we find people from all social classes, from notables who sought to become public servants to working-class militiamen and guerrilla fighters who wanted to ensure their livelihoods. The latter aspired both to material and reputational gains. Royalist combatants wielded their royalist credentials to claim their right to a job. In some cases, they were prioritized when it came to being hired as labourers in municipal public works and maintenance tasks.51 Moreover, they battled to preserve a special status within the community by keeping their right to bear weapons and wear uniforms. Both demands were sometimes addressed by creating royalist militias which provided these combatants with a position, a uniform and a salary, while establishing a civilian force to sustain the regime.52

Demobilization and Institutionalization In the aftermath of these restorations, royal authorities had to reintegrate former royalist troops into civil life. Demobilization was not an easy task, since the war had provided people of humble origins with an unprecedented social relevance. Furthermore, the proliferation of royalist irregular armies, volunteers and militias resulted in a wave of violence against the revolutionaries which, in many cases, overwhelmed the authorities. Once restoration was accomplished, disciplining these forces was a difficult task and required reaching certain compromises with the armed masses.53 In 1799 Naples, the restoration authorities first recognized the royalist militias and then incorporated them into a new police force to patrol the streets. In 1815 France, royalist volunteers who fought against Napoleon— spreading so-called White Terror through retaliation and plunder—joined the National Guard, initially preserving their autonomy and leaders. In 1823 Spain, a new militia of Royalist Volunteers was created through the institutionalization of the scattered royalist gangs which had fought in the war against the constitutional regime.54 The dissolution and subsequent institutionalization of irregular royalist military units was, however, not always peaceful. In Spain, some guerrilla officers were stripped of their military rank and discharged from duty. Feeling aggrieved by what they perceived as an ungrateful government, they immediately started to conspire, leading to several insurrections. One of them resulted in a civil war in Catalonia (1827), known as the ‘War of the Aggrieved’ or the Malcontents.55 In 1815 France, those battalions of the National Militia comprised of old royalist volunteers defied the authorities and kept

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causing havoc.56  They were finally reorganized, ‘purged’ and detached from their former leaders in order to subject them to greater discipline and a controlled hierarchy. In conclusion, those royalist fighters who found their way into the new regime saw their hopes realized and provided a solid base on which to preserve the status quo. By contrast, those who were not successfully integrated into the restored institutions were a permanent source of unrest and violence, fuelling an emerging ultra-royalist opposition.

Frustration and Ultra-royalism The frustration of the social expectations placed in the restoration led disappointed royalists to push the authorities and the king himself. The term ‘ultra-royalist’ was born in 1815 France to refer to those sectors that refused any degree of reform or compromise with the Napoleonic past. They were also known as épurés (the purified), purs (the pure), exclusifs (the exclusive), exagérés (the excessive) or exaltés (the enraged), and depicted in derogative terms as ‘more royalist that the king himself’.57 The term was adopted in Spain during the second absolutist restoration (1823–33), when extreme royalists were known as ultrarrealistas, ultras or exaltados (the enraged), although they presented themselves as puros, netos (pure) or just ‘the true royalists’.58 To a lesser extent, the term was also used in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from 1815 onwards (ultra-­ realisti), although the reactionary royalists were better known as calderari or reazionari.59 Discontented royalists felt betrayed by the government and the king himself. They spread the idea that restoration was unfinished, under the assumption that the king was not completely free because he was being misled and tricked by his evil advisers. This motto was familiar and reliable, since it drew on the traditional formula from the ancien régime: ‘long live the king, death to the bad government’. The authorities could be challenged and disobeyed, even by openly calling for insurrection, while still preserving an allegiance to the higher monarchical principle. Since the king was being deceived, the duty of the true royalist was to set him free by exposing the manoeuvres of his government and counsellors. Ultra-­ royalism was not, therefore, a mere fanatical desire to return to the past. On the contrary, it involved the idea that royalists had the right to interpret the meaning of the monarchy in their own terms and even to show the king the correct path to follow. In 1815 France, for example,

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according to a police report, the ‘exaltés … under the pretext of épuré royalism’, promoted a ‘continual denigration’ of royal power, leading to ‘vengeance, plunder and murder’.60 They managed to ‘mislead’ a ‘fraction of the people’, which they ‘excited’ and ‘attracted’ by the prospect of looting.61 Although ultra-royalist elites had, of course, a very different idea, working-class royalists appropriated this logic and dared to make demands of the king (even riotously) in order to fulfil their own expectations. There were many reasons for their disappointment, depending on each social group. Some members of the traditional elites and the Church felt displaced from power. Others saw their privileges eroded by the administrative reforms, which could be easily discredited by presenting them as based on Napoleonic and constitutional ideals. For many ordinary royalists, however, the reasons were more mundane. Many public servants who did not get a position in the new system or were even removed from one expressed their unrest in ultra-royalist terms. It was a similar case with the guerrilla officers who did not feel duly rewarded for their merits. It was not by a chance that these sectors identified themselves as the aggrieved (agraviados in Spanish) or malcontent (malcontents in Catalan, malcontenti in Italian). Ultra-royalism rested on the traditional principle of service and reward. In sum, people who considered themselves loyal subjects were asking the king to redress their grievances and properly reward them for the services they had rendered, even by the force of arms if necessary. The ultra-royalists’ sense of loyalty was more focused on the monarchy as an abstract principle than on the particular person who sat on the throne. At first, they exonerated the king and accused the government of being controlled by revolutionaries, freemasons and traitors, all of whom had manipulated the monarch. Later on, however, if the king persisted in his errors and failed to fulfil his reciprocal duty, he would eventually be made fully responsible for his acts. In Spain, from 1824 onwards, some ultra-royalists—believing the king to be unfit for office—began to call for Ferdinand VII to be dethroned and for his brother, Charles, to be crowned in his place. In conclusion, ultra-royalism was as an opposition strategy which used royalist principles as a weapon against the government and the king himself. The king as an individual could be the wrong person for the position, but the monarchy as a principle should be preserved, even if it required changing the titleholder of the Crown. How, though, could this discourse appeal to working-class royalists?

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Bread and Taxes The French Revolution and the reactions against it established a new scenario in which the foundations of the social order were openly discussed and questioned. The subsequent civil war, with its two opposing and seemingly irreconcilable worldviews, resulted in a polarized political landscape in which the ‘others’ were not considered legitimate contenders but, rather, ‘foreign’ elements which should be excluded from the community. In this new scenario, ordinary people learnt to express their grievances in the new political terms and frameworks established by the conflict. The emerging political arena provided novel opportunities with which to address the traditional concerns of working people, such as basic food prices, taxes, military conscription and unemployment. On both the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary side, these perennial claims were expressed politically to gain legitimacy and relevance in the new scenario. From this perspective, politicization could be defined as a process through which social actors appropriated and shaped political discourses and practices in order to pursue what they perceived as their own interests and values. Politics was an expression of abstract ideas which made sense of the world, but also an effective way of fulfilling demands and providing material justice for the people.62 Royalist elites understood that, in order to gain popular support, they should address these material issues. Although the notion of counterrevolution has traditionally been depicted as a desire to return to ancien régime society, it actually involved a promise to make amends for the abuses and wrongdoings of the rich and powerful prior to the onset of revolution. This so-called return to a golden age did not entail, then, the reestablishment of eighteenth-century economic, social and legal inequalities. Monarchical imaginaries shared by the common people were flexible and complex enough to include egalitarian, anti-feudal and utopian ideals. To give an example, some popular royalists refused to pay tithes and feudal taxes that had been in force during the ancien régime, while taking the lands of the aristocracy by force and defending the commons. Royalist elites took good note of these demands. Cardinal Ruffo, the leader of the insurrection against the Neapolitan Republic of 1799, promised to put an end to some of the abuses of the feudal regime. To mobilize the peasantry, Queen Maria Carolina instructed him to address their demands concerning feudal rights, tithes, taxes, access to land and the secular dispute over the commons (beni demaniali).63 The queen was very

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aware of the political implications of these social claims. She once wrote to Ruffo that ‘it is necessary to abolish feudality, the ius prohibitivi, in short, to anticipate all those operations that the French will do and by which they will make themselves agreeable to the population’.64 In order to ‘captivate the common people’, moreover, every measure should be taken, including the release of duties and taxes. In sum, royalists were aware that they had to ‘compete’ with the reformist promises of the revolutionaries in order to gain popular support. In 1814, the Count of Artois (brother of Louis XVIII and future Charles X) promised to abolish the droits réunis (indirect taxes) in order to raise an army of royalist volunteers to fight Napoleon.65 In doing so, he was thus appropriating one of the most urgent popular demands in order to stir up social unrest against the Napoleonic regime. In the subsequent popular protests against the Bonapartist authorities, royalist crowds often cheered what they believed to be the fact that they would not have to pay any more taxes once the restoration was implemented.66 In the mind of those people exhausted by the cost of the Napoleonic Empire (in terms of war, taxes, conscription and the effects of the commercial embargo), the restoration seemed like a potential return to a golden age in which peace would be restored all grievances amended. In Spain, many people who rose up in arms against the constitutional regime of the Liberal Triennium (1820–23) placed their social and economic hopes in the restoration as the reestablishment of the customary principles of the moral economy. Liberals were blamed for deregulating prices, introducing new taxes, selling Church lands to private owners who in turn raised rents, abolishing certain communitarian privileges, the general economic downturn and even the spread of epidemics.67 A religious worldview and eschatological interpretation of history that defined the mindset of the period provided them with the framework by which to attribute their sufferings to an upwardly mobile ‘new rich’ elite that had violated the customary natural order sanctioned by God. Any return to normality would thus require a purification of the community through the exclusion—or even the physical extermination—of those who had illegitimately disrupted the social order in order to get rich by profiting from the emerging free market economy. The social expectations of the common people in the restoration of the traditional monarchy have been traditionally considered a consequence of manipulation on the part of the elites and, more precisely, of the ideological power of the clergy. Yet this explanation deprives these popular sectors

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of any agency or initiative. In order to be effective, the discourses and promises pledged by the elites had to find common ground in the experience of ordinary people.

Constructing the Other Liberal and Marxist interpretations of this subject have generally assumed that counterrevolutionary workers failed to identify their ‘true’ enemies. According to these interpretations, the counterrevolutionary popular classes perceived revolutionaries as the scapegoats for their problems, and were therefore diverted from targeting aristocratic and clerical elites in order to overthrow what was a declining social order. However, the scenario was actually more complex. The labels used to define their political enemies (such as Bonapartists, liberals or Jacobins) were flexible enough to comprise almost any social group. In fact, popular royalists identified their traditional social enemies (such as wealthy merchants, speculators, gentlemen, landowners and the rich in general) as revolutionaries in order to legitimize their attacks against them. In Naples, during the events of 1799, royalist popular sectors identified the signure (lords), galantuomini (gentlemen) and giamberghe (those who wore frock coats) collectively as Jacobins and pro-French. During the uprising against the Republic and the ‘popular anarchy’ which followed, popular sectors unleashed their anger against any ‘respectable’ people who, by their appearance, could be branded galantuomini. The ‘enemy’ was thus identified more on the basis of social rather than purely political reasons.68 In Spain, liberals were known as blacks (negros), a derogatory term— without, it should be said, any specific racial connotations—used to exclude them from the community as heretics and ‘impure’.69 The label, however, was not only applied for ideological reasons. It was in fact used as a weapon against anyone who could be considered an enemy of the community. During the second absolutist restoration (1823–33), popular royalists claimed that ‘commerce was black’ or that ‘most blacks were rich’ so that they intentionally raised food prices.70 This ‘famine plot persuasion’ allowed customers to legitimize looting from and of the use of violence against shopkeepers and bakers under the pretext that they were ‘blacks’ (liberals). Moreover, those sectors of the elites and the middle classes who adopted foreign fashions and manners were also labelled ‘black’ and pro-French (afrancesados or Frenchified). Certain clothes and

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attire considered by the elites as symbols of cosmopolitism and civilization were despised by the common people who defended traditional ‘Spanish attire’ against foreign fashions and dandyism. As a result, any elegant person could be potentially labelled as a ‘black’ (liberal) to the point that ‘a decent suit’ was enough to denounce the wearers as political ‘suspects’.71 During the first (1814) and second (1823) absolutists restorations, well-­ to-­do people were harassed for wearing certain types of hats, ribbons and garments, while some businesses (such as elegant coffee houses in the European manner) were attacked because their owners and clients were supposed to be ‘blacks’ (liberals).72 In conclusion, these labels used to identify the political enemy were flexible enough to incorporate any person or group accused of harming the community’s interests. We should not assume that popular sectors passively adopted the categories shaped by the elites. Instead, they adapted and appropriated them in order to legitimize attacks against their perceived enemies. More importantly, these labels were used to target not only supposed revolutionaries, but also royal authorities, magistrates, police officers, and even the king himself. Ferdinand VII was accused by Spanish ultra-­royalists of colluding with the revolutionaries and being ‘more black than the blacks themselves’.73 In Naples, Cardinal Ruffo and the royal ministers were accused of being Jacobins when they deceived popular expectations. Working-class royalists demanded the right to take justice into their own hands, punishing the so-called Jacobins and the government which protected them.74 A placard hanging on the wall of a Neapolitan street in 1800 proclaimed that ‘the government did not punish the Jacobins severely enough, meanwhile sending those guilty of common crimes to the islands [as convicts]’.75 In the words attributed to a fisherman from Trani, ‘the king [Ferdinand IV] was a Pulcinella, allowing things to be governed like before, he should instead let the lower orders rule [far governare al popolo basso]’.76 In 1825 Madrid, working men and women gathered on the streets protesting that Ferdinand VII ‘did not govern well’ because he protected the liberals while some of the constitutional policies were still in place ‘albeit by a different name’.77 Popular royalists soon realized that they had been deceived when it came to their expectations regarding lower taxes, affordable food prices and the end of conscription. However, instead of blaming the absolutist system, some of them blamed the king and those who had betrayed the true ideals of the restoration. They therefore

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concluded that the best thing would be to put a different king upon throne, someone who knew how to properly punish the liberals and accomplish the unfinished restoration.78 Otherwise, royalist militiamen and ordinary people felt legitimized to ‘slaughter all the liberals’ by their own hands. These calls to violence were socially as well as politically motivated. Under the cry ‘death to the liberals’, they plundered shops, seized stocks of bread, refused military conscription and chased wealthy merchants, businessman and those wearing foreign clothes which transgressed working-class customs.

Conclusion Popular royalism in southern Europe was an original form of political participation through which working people found a way to intervene in the transformation of the traditional monarchies during the Age of Revolution. Instead of assuming that they should have been naturally inclined to embrace the revolutionary ideals, we must identify which particular benefits and opportunities they stood to gain by expressing their demands within the counterrevolutionary side. In the first place, the traditional monarchy provided a way of legitimizing a wide range of claims, as long as they were expressed in a familiar discourse of loyalty, service and reward. The monarchical culture provided a well-known frame of reference which was easy to deal with for the majority of the population, in contrast with those novel revolutionary ideas which could easily be perceived as foreign to common sense and, more importantly, which were championed by the educated middle-classes and the commercial and cultural elites. In fact, one recurring topic of royalist propaganda was the idea that revolutionaries were all ‘lawyers, notaries, doctors, apothecaries and usurer- merchants’.79 When we speculate why the popular sectors supported the so-called traditional elites, we often neglect the fact that they targeted primarily those ascending groups whose wealth was tied to new economic activities seen as ‘parasitic’. From their perspective, their ‘enemy next door’ could be the shopkeeper, the baker, the buyer of confiscated national lands or the elegant dandy dressed in a foreign style. However, popular royalists did not limit their attacks to ascending social groups linked to the market economy. The civil war between revolution and counterrevolution created a polarized landscape in which anyone could be suspicious of complicity with the enemy. This state of paranoia allowed common people to point to the upper classes in the pursuit of

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traitors. Aristocrats, ministers, magistrates, generals, Church dignitaries and even the king himself were labelled Bonapartists, Jacobins and liberals, therefore legitimizing the violence against them. As paradoxical as it may seem, these anti-elite discourses were sometimes instigated and fuelled by the monarchs themselves. The traditional elites who had hitherto been the pillar of the monarchy were sometimes identified as accomplices of the revolutionaries, thus presenting the common people as the only trustworthy class, due to their natural instinct of loyalty to their king. This discourse was extremely useful to enforce the personal authority of the king, by eroding the privileges and exemptions which set boundaries on his absolute power. The king appeared as the only one who could interpret the will and love of his ‘true people’. Meanwhile, the nobility, the civil servants and all those who had something to lose were presented as inclined to compromise with the enemy in order to preserve their interests. The idea that only the common people could be trusted meant that the king could potentially override any institution or intermediate power which interfered with his personal rule. Bourbon monarchs tried to steer the counterrevolutionary enthusiasm of the masses in their favour. They relied on popular royalism to defeat revolution, enforce their personal power, get rid of their enemies and establish a new kind of authoritarian monarchy which extended the limits of their power that had prevailed during the ancien régime. However, in some conflictive scenarios, the situation risked getting out of their control. During the popular anarchy in Naples (1799), the White Terror in France (1815) and the most turbulent period of the second absolutist restauration in Spain (1825–27), the kings and their officials were contested by popular royalists. All things considered, we should not overestimate the ability of popular royalist to achieve their goals. They sometimes put the monarchy in danger by disobeying the authorities and even challenging the throne. At the end of the day, however, they lacked the effective power to propose an alternative project to respond to the hopes and expectations which they had put in the restoration. Acknowledgements  This research was supported by the projects PID2019-105071GB-I00, PGC2018-094150-B-C22, PID2020-114496RB-I00 and a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral grant IJC2019-041711-I funded by MCIN/ AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033

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Notes 1. Pedro Rújula and Francisco Javier Ramón (eds), El desafío de la revolución. Reaccionarios, antiliberales y contrarrevolucionarios (siglos XVIII y XIX) (Saragossa, 2017); Bernard Rulof, Popular Legitimism and the Monarchy in France: Mass Politics without Parties, 1830–1880 (Cham, 2020); Marcela Echeverri (ed.), ‘Monarchy, Empire and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions’, special issue of Varia Historia 35/67 (2019). 2. On the semantics of the term ‘royalist’ see Paul Chopelin’s chapter in this volume. See also Paul Chopelin, ‘Royalisme et royalistes dans la France révolutionnaire’, Annales historique de la Révolution française 403 (2021): 3–28; Rodrigo Moreno ‘Los realistas: historiografía, semántica y milicia’, Historia Mexicana 263/66 (2017): 1077–1122; Pedro Rújula, ‘Realismo y contrarrevolución en la Guerra de la Independencia’, Ayer 86 (2012): 45–66; Jean-Philippe Luis, ‘La construcción inacabada de una cultura política realista’, in La creación de las culturas políticas modernas, 1808–1833, eds Miguel Ángel Cabrera and Juan Pro (Madrid and Saragossa, 2014), 319–346. 3. Charles Esdaile (ed.), Popular Resistance in the French Wars: Patriots, Partisans, and Land Pirates (London, 2005); Simon Sarlin, ‘Arming the People against Revolution: Royalist Popular Militias in Restoration Europe’, Varia Historia 35/67 (2019): 177–208; Álvaro París, ‘Popular Royalism in the Spanish Atlantic: War, Militias and Political Participation (1808–1826)’, Contemporanea 24/3 (2021): 381–411. 4. Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 (Cambridge, 2016). 5. Pedro Rújula, ‘El mito contrarrevolucionario de la “Restauración”’, Pasado y Memoria 13 (2014): 79–94; Rhys Jones, ‘Turning the Clock Back? The Politics of Time in Restoration Europe, 1815–30’, in A History of the European Restorations, eds Michael Broers et  al., vol. 2 (London, 2019), 15–27. 6. For a reassessment of the Restoration period see: Jean-Claude Caron and Jean-Philippe Luis (eds), Rien appris, rien oublié ? Les Restaurations dans l’Europe postnapoléonienne (1814–1830) (Rennes, 2015); Michael Broers and Ambrogio A. Caiani (eds), A History of the European Restorations, 2 vols. (London, 2019); Emmanuel Fureix and Judith Lyon-Caen (eds), ‘1814–1815: Expériences de la discontinuité’, special issue of the Revue d’Histoire du XIXème siècle, 49 (2014), https://doi.org/10.4000/ rh19.4739; Daniel Gutiérrez Ardila and Juan Luis Ossa Santa Cruz, ‘La Restauración como fenómeno extra-europeo, 1814–1826’, Revista

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Universitaria de Historia Militar 15 (2018), https://doi.org/10.53351/ ruhm.v7i15. 7. Marco Meriggi, ‘The Nineteenth Century: A Monarchical Century?’, Contemporanea 24/3 (2021): 553–563; Renata de Lorenzo and Rosa Ana Gutiérrez Lloret (eds), Las monarquías de la Europa meridional ante el desafío de la modernidad (siglos XIX y XX) (Saragossa, 2020). 8. Pedro Rújula, ‘El nacimiento de un patriotismo monárquico’, in Cuando todo era posible: liberalismo y antiliberalismo en España e Hispanoamérica, 1780–1842, eds Encarna García Monerris et  al. (Madrid, 2016), 73–94; Pedro Rújula, Religión, Rey y Patria. Los orígenes contrarrevolucionarios de la España contemporánea, 1793–1840 (Madrid, 2023). For a further discussion of the notion of ‘monarchical patriotism’ in a comparative perspective, see: Carmine Pinto and Pedro Rújula (eds), ‘La monarchia dopo la rivoluzione: Europa e America Latina tra restaurazione borbonica e guerre civili (1814–1867)’, special issue of Memoria e Ricerca 62/3 (2019): 395–490. 9. Rújula, ‘El nacimiento’, 86. 10. Álvaro París, ‘Le peuple royaliste en armes: Milices et Terreur blanche pendant les Restaurations à Naples (1799), le Midi de la France (1815) et Madrid (1823)’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 396 (2019): 95–120. 11. Maurizio Isabella,  Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions (Princeton, 2023); Maurizio Isabella  and Konstantina Zanou (eds), Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York, 2016); Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds), Re-imagining Democracy in The Mediterranean 1750–1860 (Oxford, 2018); Pierre-Marie Delpu, ‘Fraternités libérales et insurrections nationales: Naples et l’Espagne, 1820–1821’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 49 (2014): 193–211. 12. Carmine Pinto, ‘Borbonismo politico e rivoluzione permanente a Napoli: Un’interpretazione (1793–1894)’, Memoria e Ricerca 62 (2019): 437–451; Renata di Lorenzo, ‘España y el Reino de las Dos Sicilias: comunicación y competición de espacios simbólicos durante la restauración’, Historia Constitucional 20 (2019): 117–139. 13. Emmanuel de Waresquiel, Penser la Restauration, 1814–1830 (Paris, 2020); Olivier Tort, La droite française: Aux origines de ses divisions, 1814–1830 (Paris, 2013). 14. Jordi Canal, El Carlismo: dos siglos de contrarrevolución en España (Madrid, 2004). 15. Carmine Pinto, ‘Guerras europeas, conflictos civiles, proyectos nacionales: Una interpretación de las restauraciones napolitanas (1799–1866)’, Pasado y Memoria 13 (2014): 95–116; Viviana Mellone, Napoli 1848. Il movimento radicale e la rivoluzione (Milano, 2017); Pierre-Marie Delpu, Un

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autre Risorgimento: La formation du monde libéral dans le royaume des Deux-Siciles (1815–1856) (Rome, 2019); Margo Meriggi, La nazione populista. Il Mezzogiorno e i Borboni dal 1848 all’Unità (Bologna, 2021). 16. Pedro Rújula, ‘El antiliberalismo reaccionario’, in La España liberal, 1833–1874, eds Mª Cruz Romeo and María Sierra (Madrid and Saragossa, 2014), 377–410. 17. Jean-Philippe Luis, ‘La représentation antirévolutionnaire du monde: le cas espagnol (1808–1833)’, Siècles 43 (2016), http://journals.openedition.org/siecles/3066; Sergio Serulnikov, ‘Lo que invocar la figura del Rey y la justicia regia significaba (y lo que no): Monarquismo popular en Charcas tardocolonial’, Varia Historia 35/67 (2019): 37–82; Pierre Triomphe, ‘Au nom de Dieu, du Roi et de tous les miens: Imaginaire, sociabilité et expressions politiques des classes populaires royalistes dans la France méridionale (1800–1851)’, Annales du Midi 274 (2011): 195–212 ; Rulof, Popular Legitimism, 211–237. 18. David A.  Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Modern Warfare as We Know It (Boston and New York, 2007). 19. Carmine Pinto, ‘Sovranità, guerre e nazioni: La crisi del mondo borbonico e la formazione degli Stati moderni (1806–1920)’, Meridiana 81 (2014): 9–25; Pedro Rújula, ‘Las guerras civiles contrarrevolucionarias europeas en el siglo XIX’ Amnis (2015), https://journals.openedition.org/ amnis/2454. 20. Jean-René Aymes, La guerra de España contra la Revolución francesa (1793–1795) (Alicante, 1991). 21. John A.  Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780–1860 (Oxford, 2006); Anna Maria Rao, La Repubblica napoletana del 1799 (Naples, 2021); Antonino de Francesco, 1799: Una storia d’Italia (Milan, 2004). 22. Emilio La Parra, Fernando VII: Rey deseado y detestado (Barcelona, 2018). 23. Ronald Fraser, Napoleon’s Cursed War: Popular Resistance in the Spanish Peninsular War, 1808–1814 (London, 2008); Richard Hocquellet, Resistencia y revolución durante la Guerra de la Independencia. Del levantamiento patriótico a la soberanía nacional (Saragossa, 2008); Charles Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon. Guerrillas, Bandits and Adventurers in Spain, 1808–1814 (New Haven-London, 2004). 24. Emilio Gin, Santa Fede e congiura antirepubblicana (Naples, 1999); Anna Maria Rao (ed.), Folle controrivoluzionarie: Le insorgenze popolari nell’Italia giacobina e napoleonica (Rome, 2004); Anna Lisa Sannino, L’altro 1799, Cultura antidemocratica e pratica politica controrivoluzionaria nel tardo Settecento napoletano (Naples, 2001); Antonio Moliner Prada, ‘Popular Resistance in Catalonia: Somatens and Miquelets, 1808–14’ in Popular Resistance in the French Wars, ed. Esdaile, 91–114.

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25. Ruffo to Ferdinand IV, 28 June 1799, quoted in Giuseppe Galasso, Il Regno di Napoli: Il Mezzogiorno borbonico e napoleonico (1734–1815) (Turin, 2007), 925. 26. Pietro Abondio Drusco, Anarchia popolare di Napoli dal 21 dicembre 1788 al 23 gennaio 1799 (Naples, 1884), 23. See also Luca Addante, I cannibali dei Borbone: Antropofagia e politica nell’Europa moderna (Rome, 2021), 3–24, and the reports of Antonio della Rossa (director of the police) in Archivio di Stato di Napoli [ASN], Esteri, busta 3595. 27. Emilio La Parra, ‘Fernando VII: impulso y freno a la sublevación de los españoles contra Napoleón’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 38 (2008): 33–52. 28. Francesco Benigno, ‘Trasformazioni discorsive e identità sociali: il caso dei lazzari’, Storica 31 (2005): 7–44. 29. Luca Di Mauro, ‘Les populations fidèles et valeureuses: Restauration de la monarchie et politisation populaire après la fin de la république napolitaine’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 402 (2020): 96. On the privileged relationship between monarchy and masses, see also Galasso, Il Regno di Napoli, 909 and Paolo Macry, ‘Masse, rivoluzione e Risorgimento: Appunti critici su alcune tendenze storiografiche’, Contemporanea 17/4 (2014): 687. 30. Pedro Rújula, “Una monarchia populista? Potere assoluto e ricorso al popolo nella restaurazione spagnola di Ferdinando VII”, Memoria e ricerca 62 (2019): 434. 31. Ibid. 32. Quoted in Pietro Coletta, Storia del reame di Napoli, vol. 2 (Capolago, 1834), 42. 33. See Josep Escrig’s chapter in this volume. 34. Giorgia Alessi, Giustizia e polizia, il controllo di una capitale, Napoli 1779–1803 (Naples, 1992); Brigitte Marin, ‘Migliorare l’ordine pubblico: Idee e pratiche di polizia nei memoriali di inizio Ottocento (Napoli, 1800–1803)’, in Una storia di rigore e di passione: Saggi per Livio Antonielli, eds Stefano Levati and Simona Mori (Milan, 2018), 432–454; Ana Maria Rao, ‘Ordine e anarchia: Napoli nel 1799–1800’, in Corpi armati e ordine pubblico in Italia (XVI–XIX sec.), eds Livio Antonielli and Claudio Donati (Soveria Mannelli, 2003), 241–260. 35. Di Mauro, ‘Les populations fidèles’, 92–94. 36. The Vatican Nuncio stated that the Inquisition became a ‘political Inquisition of state’. See La Parra, Fernando VII, 297. The Church was also obliged to pay contributions and donations. Ibid., 301–302. See also: Andoni Artola, ‘La alianza imposible: Los obispos españoles y el Estado (1814–1833)’, Investigaciones históricas: Época moderna y contemporánea 34 (2014): 155–184.

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37. La Parra, Fernando VII, 309 and 514–518. 38. Emilio La Parra, ‘Breve léxico personal de Fernando VII’, in Haciendo historia: oficio, reflexión crítica y sociedad, eds Javier Ramón et al. (Teruel, 2020), 26–27; Rújula, ‘Una monarchia populista?’. 39. Gwynne Lewis, The Second Vendée: The Continuity of Counter-revolution: In the Department of the Gard (1789–1815) (Oxford, 1978); Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (Oxford, 1989); Valérie Sottocasa, Les Brigands et la Révolution: Violences Politiques et Criminalité dans le Midi (1789–1802) (Ceyzerieu, 2016). 40. Pierre Triomphe, 1815: La Terreur blanche (Toulouse, 2017). 41. Pedro Rújula, Contrarrevolución: Realismo y Carlismo en Aragón y el Maestrazgo, 1820–1840 (Saragossa, 1998), 125–131; Jacopo Lorenzini, ‘Ladri e guardie: da briganti a ufficiali del re, una ricognizione prosopografica”, in Re i Briganti: Monarchia borbonica, controrivoluzione e brigantaggio politico nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia (1799–1895), eds Emilio Gin and Silvia Sonetti (Soveria Mannelli, 2021), 69–92. 42. Roger Dupuy, Les Chouans (Paris 1997). 43. Nuria Sauch Cruz, Guerrillers i bàndols civils entre l’Ebre i el Maestrat: la formació d’un país carlista (1808–1844) (Barcelona, 2004), 211–215; Triomphe, La Terreur blanche, 158–167; Brian Fitzpatrick, Catholic Royalism in the Department of the Gard 1814–1852 (Cambridge, 1983), 35–54; Robert Alexander, Re-Writing the French Revolutionary Tradition: Liberal Opposition and the Fall of the Bourbon Monarchy (Cambridge, 2003), 45–47. 44. Jean-Philippe Luis, L’utopie réactionnaire: Épuration et modernisation de l’état dans l’Espagne de la fin de l’Ancien Régimen (1823–1834) (Madrid, 2002); De Lorenzo, ‘España y el Reino’, 132; Galasso, Il Regno di Napoli, 924–932; Triomphe, La Terreur Blanche, 257–259; Gwynne Lewis, ‘La terreur blanche et l’application de la loi Decazes dans le département du Gard (1815–1817)’, AHRF 176 (1964): 174–193. 45. Triomphe, La Terreur Blanche; Daniel Philip Resnick, The White Terror and the Political Reaction after Waterloo (Cambridge, 1966). 46. Galasso, Il Regno di Napoli, 3–42; Emilio Gin, Sanfedisti, carbonari, magistrati del Re: Il Regno delle Due Sicilie tra Restaurazione e Rivoluzione (Naples, 2003). 47. Pierre-Marie Delpu, Un autre Risorgimento, 55–59. 48. See note 59 below. 49. Gonzalo Butrón, ‘Franceses, ultras y moderados: pulsos y tensiones en los inicios de la segunda restauración absolutista española (1823–1824)’, Hispania Nova, 21 (2023): 364–393.

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50. Archivo Histórico Nacional [AHN], Consejos, leg. 12.312, police reports no. 41 (10 June 1825) and no. 43 (11 June 1825). 51. In Spain, town councils were required to prioritize Royalist Volunteers— especially day labourers—for any available job. ‘Reglamento para los cuerpos de Voluntarios Realistas del Reino’ (Madrid, 1826), art. 10. 52. In Spain, the liberal regime (1820–23) refused to fund uniforms for volunteers in the National Militia, thus excluding those who could not afford them. Royalists, however, removed social barriers by allowing the enlistment of day labourers and providing uniforms for the recruits. Juan Sisinio Pérez Garzón, Milicia nacional y revolución burguesa (Madrid, 1978); Álvaro París, ‘Los voluntarios realistas de Madrid: politización popular y violencia contrarrevolucionaria (1823–1833)’, in El desafío de la revolución eds Pedro Rújula and Francisco Javier Ramón, 89–106. 53. Pierre Triomphe, ‘Les sorties de la “Terreur blanche” dans le Midi’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 49 (2014): 51–63. 54. For a detailed analysis of the three cases, see París, ‘Le peuple royaliste’. 55. Jaume Torras Elias, La guerra de los Agraviados (Barcelona, 1967). 56. París, Le peuple royaliste, 115–118. 57. Tort, La droite française, 25–32. 58. Josep Fontana, De en medio del tiempo: La segunda restauración española, 1823–1834 (Barcelona, 2006); Álvaro París, ‘La Década Ominosa ante el bicentenario: nuevas miradas sobre la segunda restauración absolutista en España (1823–1833)’, Hispania Nova 21 (2023): 394–432. 59. Emilio Gin, L’aquila, il giglio e il compasso: Profili di lotta politica ed associazionismo settario nelle Due Sicilie (1806–1821) (Salerno, 2007); Nicola del Corno, ‘Una polemica controrivoluzionaria in Italia: Le sette segrete nelle riflessioni del Principe di Canosa’, Signos Históricos 46 (2021): 88–119; Francesco Murizio Di Giovine, ‘Il Principe di Canosa nella bufera della Restaurazione’, Aportes 87 (2015): 47–79; Gaetano Cingari, ‘Il brigantaggio nella prima metà dell’Ottocento, Archivio Storico per la Calabria e la Lucana 42 (1975): 51–97; Rosario Romeo, Mezzogiorno e Sicilia nel Risorgimento (Naples, 1963), 51–114. 60. Archives Nationales de France [ANF], F7, 9002, Police report, Marseille, 28 September 1815. 61. ANF, F7, 9002, Police report, Marseille, 13 November 1815. 62. Álvaro París, ‘Royalist Women in the Marketplace: Work, Gender and Popular Counter-Revolution in Southern Europe (1814–1830)’, in Popular Agency and Politicisation in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Beyond the Vote, eds Diego Palacios Cerezales and Oriol Luján (London, 2022), 55–77. 63. Galasso, Il Regno di Napoli, 836–837; Rodolico Niccolò, Il popolo agli inizi del Risorgimento nell’ Italia meridionale 1798–1801 (Firenze, 1925),

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238; John A. Davis, ‘Rivolte popolari e controrivoluzione nel Mezzogiorno continentale’, in Folle controrivoluzionarie, ed. Anna Maria Rao (Rome, 1999), 349–368; Antonio Puca, ‘Organizzazione e ideologia delle masse sanfediste: il caso pugliese’, in Patrioti e insorgenti in provincia: il 1799 in terra di Bari e Basilicata, ed. Angelo Massafra (Bari, 2002), 392–393. 64. Maria Carolina to Ruffo, February 1799. Quoted in Niccolò, Il popolo, 239. 65. Emmanuel de Waresquiel, Cent Jours: La tentation de l’impossible mars– juillet 1815 (Paris, 2008), 127. 66. ANF, F7, 9000, police reports, 9 May 1814 and 18 May 1814. 67. Ramón Arnabat, Visca el rei i la Religió: La primera guerra civil de la Catalunya contemporània (1820–1823) (Lleida, 2006). 68. Luca Di Mauro, ‘Le secret et polichinelle: Cultures et pratiques de la clandestinité politique à Naples au début du XIX siècle (1799–1821)’, PhD thesis (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2015), 176. See also Drusco, Anarchia popolare, 33; Giuseppe de Lorenzo, Nel furore della reazione del 1799 (Naples 1998). 69. Álvaro París, ‘Porque le olía a negro: vestimenta, costumbres y politización popular en Madrid (1750–1840)’, in Procesos de civilización: culturas de élites, culturas populares. Una historia de contrastes y tensiones (siglos XVI– XIX), eds José M. Imízcoz et al. (Bilbao, 2019), 99–132. 70. AHN, Consejos, leg. 12.335, police report, 10 December 1825, celador [secret agent] 8. See also París ‘Popular Royalism’, 399–406. 71. Dionisio Chaulié, Cosas de Madrid: Apuntes sociales de la Villa y Corte (Madrid, 1884), 212. 72. Álvaro París and Jordi Roca Vernet, ‘Green Ribbons and Red Berets: Political Objects and Clothing in Spain (1808–1843)’, in Political Objects in the Age of Revolutions: Material Culture, National Identities, Political Practices, eds Enrico Francia and Carlotta Sorba (Rome, 2021), 61–96. 73. AHN, Consejos, leg. 12.312, police report, 26 June 1825. 74. Carlo De Nicola, Diario Napoletano, vol. 1 (Naples, 1906), 295. 75. Archvio di Stato di Napoli [ASN], Esteri, 3595, Antonio della Rossa to Acton, 31 July 1800. 76. Niccolò, Il popolo, 233 and 263. 77. AHN, Consejos, leg. 12.335, police report, 29 December 1825, celador 6. 78. Some examples of the circulation of these discourses among the popular classes can be found in: AHN, Consejos, leg. 12.321, police report, 14 August 1827, no. 7; AHN, Consejos, leg. 12.312, police report, 19 June 1825, celador 3. 79. Tomas Bou, Quatre conversas entre dos personatges dits Abert y Pasqual (Barcelona, 1830 [1821]), 62. Discussed in Ramón Arnabat, ‘Revolució i Contrarevolució a Catalunya durant el Trienni Liberal (1820–1823)’, PhD thesis (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 1999), 807.

CHAPTER 5

Spanish Royalism in a European Perspective (1820–23) Ramon Arnabat Mata

In memoriam Josep Fontana

Historians of the liberal revolution and counterrevolution in Spain have paid scant attention to the counterrevolutionary and anti-revolutionary movement known as realismo (royalism), despite its historical importance. And often, when it has been analysed, it has been studied as a simple precursor of Carlismo (Carlism), the Spanish counterrevolutionary movement par excellence, about which abundant studies can be found.1 However, it is precisely the fact that it is not ‘contaminated’ by the later dynastic conflict that gives royalism immense historiographic potential. Therefore, it is necessary to examine its history within the framework of what it represented at that time, its ‘present’, and what came to represent during the period of the Liberal or Constitutional Triennium (Spain, 1820–23).

R. Arnabat Mata (*) ISOCAC – Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] 89 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_5

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Counterrevolutions and anti-revolutions must be analysed in parallel with revolutions, since they have a dialectical relationship and feed off one another. Nor should the international political context be forgotten. As Josep Fontana notes with respect to the first phase of Carlism, it must be analysed within the field of combat developed from 1789 to 1848 between, on the one side, the European powers that defended the continuity of the old order—generally known as the ancien régime—who formed a coalition for some years that was commonly defined as the Holy Alliance, and, on the other side, the forces of social change or, echoing the terms used by their enemies, the forces of revolution.2

In view of the aforesaid, there is also a need for comparative studies with other movements, such as the Santafede and Viva Maria movements in Italy, the Vendée and the Chouannerie in France, Miguelismo and María da Fonte in Portugal, and of course the Malcontents and the first phase of Carlismo in Spain.3

Royalism During the Liberal Triennium (1820–23)4 The liberal revolution in Spain in 1820 generated a wave of sympathy across Europe, but at the same time it created enormous distrust among the absolutist powers of the Holy Alliance, who mobilized to overthrow the constitutional system. Within the country as well, no sooner had the constitution been proclaimed than the counterrevolution began. It was centred on the royal palace and led by King Ferdinand VII, who was supported by the absolutists in exile in France, a large section of the clergy and those absolutists who continued in administrative positions and in the army.5 From 1821, liberal social and economic reforms aimed at ending the seigneurial regime and stimulating the development of the capitalist economy were applied in earnest. These measures contributed to the consolidation of capitalist social relations, but they also led to a short-term deterioration in the living conditions of most peasants, who were already suffering the effects of droughts and yellow fever. That same year, the division of the Liberals into moderados (moderates) and exaltados (hotheads) took effect; fierce conflict broke out between the constitutional regime and the Catholic Church and most of the clergy; meanwhile, pressure from the absolutist European powers increased.

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From the spring of 1821, the counterrevolution—understood as the set of political strategies implemented by the old reactionary elites to end the revolution and restore the ancien régime—connected with popular antiliberalism and with the anti-revolution, namely the set of responses from the popular classes who felt socially and culturally aggrieved by revolutionary praxis.6 Powerful contributing factors here may also be seen in the deployment of the French cordon on the border, which served as a rearguard for counterrevolutionary activity; the counterrevolutionary plans drawn up by the Cortes, which were increasingly embedded in international politics through an extensive network of secret ambassadors of Ferdinand VII to the European monarchs; and the strong support for the counterrevolution from most of the clergy, whose organizational network was instrumental in connecting the counterrevolutionary movement with the anti-revolutionary movement. Thus, although the counterrevolution was present from the beginning of the Triennium, popular support for the anti-revolution did not arrive until the second year of liberal praxis and amid highly critical socioeconomic circumstances, of which the counterrevolutionary leaders took suitable advantage to undermine the credibility of the constitutional regime and to extend their operations throughout Spain. In the spring of 1822, there was a royalist uprising organized by Bernardo Mozo de Rosales, the Marquis of Mataflorida, while he was in exile in France, and by other royalist leaders. Further uprisings spread across areas of Catalonia, Navarre, the Basque Country, Cantabria, Aragon and Valencia, and, to a more limited extent, Galicia, Andalusia and Castile. These uprisings owed their success to a variety of factors. On the one hand, there were factors related with the development of the new constitutional regime: political division, military weakness and economic praxis that coincided with the agricultural, commercial and industrial crises, exacerbating the poverty of a large sector of the rural and urban population and making it receptive to counterrevolutionary proposals.7 On the other hand, there were factors related with counterrevolutionary practice: conspiratorial work and economic support for the absolutist leaders; the rabble-rousing role played by many of the clergy, who controlled the dense counterrevolutionary network that stretched across the entire country; the activity of the leaders of the partidas (guerrilla bands), key to marrying counterrevolution with anti-revolution; the protection of some local governments and wealthy peasantry sectors that offered the guerrilla bands free movement and hindered the action of constitutionalists; the use

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of guerrilla warfare; and the mobilization of civic militiamen at specific points, leading to the integration of various social sectors into the anti-­ constitutional struggle. In the summer of 1822, the royalists, whose numbers varied from twenty-five to thirty thousand men, succeeded in taking the fort of Seo de Urgel (Catalonia) and established the Urgel Regency, consisting of the Marquis of Mataflorida, Bernardo Mozo de Rosales; the Baron of Eroles, Joaquín Ibáñez-Cuevas; and the Archbishop of Tarragona, Jaime Creus. The Urgel Regency brought the counterrevolution centralized leadership and a certain ideological coherence, and it gave considerable thrust to the military activity of the guerrilla bands, although some proved reluctant to accept their orders, against a backdrop of the disputes between the Marquis of Mataflorida and Francisco de Eguía over the leadership of the counterrevolution.8 The royalists proceeded to consolidate their control of north-east Catalonia, the Maestrazgo (Aragon and Valencia), the centre and north of Navarre and areas of the Basque Country, Galicia and Castile and Leon, establishing their own institutions to administer the territory under their power, the Juntas (administrative councils) of Catalonia, Navarre, Aragon, Sigüenza and Galicia, in addition to the Junta of Bayonne in France. Indeed, during the summer and autumn of 1822, Catalonia, Navarre and the Basque Country experienced a full-blown civil war in which it was impossible to remain on the sidelines; those who were not actually fighting suffered considerably as a result of reprisals, requisitions, war contributions, looting, and so on.9 In the course of the winter of 1823, and after a fierce campaign lasting six months, the constitutional army and the mobile militia units turned the situation around and drove the royalist guerrilla bands out of Catalonia, Navarre and the Basque Country towards France (some twelve thousand men), and out of Galicia, Extremadura and Castile and Leon towards Portugal (some one thousand five hundred men). Eguía (who had not moved from Bayonne) and his supporters (the Junta of Navarre) took advantage of the defeat of the royalists and the flight of the Urgel Regency to replace Mataflorida at the head of the counterrevolution. The constitutional success was based on reinforcing the army and creating mobile militia units so territory could be regained, without allowing the guerrilla bands to reform or reorganize themselves behind their lines. Further contributory factors were divisions in the counterrevolutionary leadership, its

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incapacity to turn the royalist guerrilla bands into an organized army, and the loss of popular support in the areas that it controlled. The failure of an absolutist coup attempt by the Royal Guard in Madrid at the end of June and the expulsion from Spain of the principal royalist guerrilla bands convinced the absolutist European powers and the leaders of the counterrevolution that the only way to put an end to the constitutional regime in Spain was through foreign intervention. This proposal materialized at the Congress of Verona (October–December 1822) and France acted on it in April 1823 through the army of occupation—the so-­ called Hundred Thousand Sons of St. Louis—and the collaboration of some eight thousand royalists who had taken refuge in France.10

Organization, Mobilization and Social Bases of Royalism11 Throughout Spain and in the course of the Triennium, the royalists mobilized some forty thousand men, and another twenty thousand—half of these in Catalonia, Navarre and the Basque Country—offered direct or indirect, temporary or structural support. This represented approximately 5 per cent of the adult male population, the same percentage mobilized by the French Chouannerie at the height of its influence (1796).12 The armed guerrilla bands were the cornerstone of royalist organization, and they were diverse in nature: both in terms of their numbers, as units were small and local (between 20 and 100), medium-sized and provincial (from 100 to 300), and large and regional (between 400 and 2000); and with respect to the circumstances of members’ enlistment, which was both predominantly voluntary and collective (spring and summer of 1822) and predominantly forced and individual (autumn and winter of 1822 to 1823). Analysis of the large guerrilla bands reveals two groups: one formed by people who enlisted on a permanent basis (agricultural and industrial day labourers and landless peasants); and another whose members participated sporadically (small owner-peasants and artisans and tradespeople). Royalist Volunteers also played an important role, acting on a local and provincial scale and always in collaboration with an armed guerrilla band. Controlled by the local dominant classes, they favoured vertical and popular mobilization, offering a community-focused and supportive platform for action, in which the participation of women was of note. Similar patterns of mobilization can be found through a comparative study of Portugal, France and Italy.13

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As I have indicated, the most important leader of the counterrevolution was King Ferdinand VII, who directed the counterrevolutionary strategy by playing several cards at once (impeding the constitutional process, preparing risings, contacting the absolutist European monarchs and supporting royalist agitation and the armed guerrilla bands with both materials and men).14 He did all this in collaboration with the absolutist group that had taken refuge in France, led by General Eguía and the Marquis of Mataflorida, as well as with the territorial leaders of the counterrevolution, members of the local and corregimiento (country subdivision), Juntas and guerrilla band leaders: clerics, landowners, lawyers, soldiers and ex-­soldiers, some nobles, peasants, artisans, agricultural day labourers and bandits, and, to a lesser extent, employees and students. But the key factor that explains the appearance of an armed and minimally organized counterrevolution was the counterrevolutionary network, composed of various nobles, members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, wealthy peasantry sectors and guerrilla band leaders, who were responsible for recruiting, arming and paying the royal faction, channelling needs and feelings. This network was instrumental in converting social and cultural unrest into counterrevolutionary political action, as we may also observe in the cases of Italy and France.15 Roger Dupuy notes that, although there was a situation that favoured armed anti-revolutionary rebellion, it was necessary for someone to channel and lead the rebellion for it to materialize: ‘taking action implied the existence of one or more leaders capable of convincing potential insurgents to take the somewhat dangerous step of actually taking up arms’.16 Particular mention should be made of the role played by the Catholic clergy in the counterrevolution, from the ecclesiastical hierarchy down to the village parish priest. As a group, the clergy was bound together by material, ideological and cultural interests, and with its hierarchical organization it enjoyed a position of ascendancy over large sections of the rural population, based more on their functions and usefulness in social and local spheres than on ideological factors. The local clergy controlled the principal focal points of formal social interaction throughout the country: churches, brotherhoods and popular festivities, and so besides their direct participation in the juntas and the guerrilla bands, we must consider their propagandistic function and their role as critics of the constitutional system, channelling social discontent towards royalism.17 This is, possibly, one of the most common denominators of the various counterrevolutionary movements in Europe.18 However, in the case of France, as Roger

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Dupuy points out, there was a particular point in time when the clergy separated the interests of the Church from those of the Bourbons, signing the Concordat.19 The nobility, on the other hand, was unequally represented in the territorial management of the counterrevolution. Thus, they had a low profile in Catalan royalism, but a high presence in Galician and Extremaduran royalism,20 as they did, in general, in the European counterrevolutions.21 The political and economic pre-eminence that the local wealthy classes had achieved in Catalonia, Navarre and the Basque Country is a key factor to take into account when analysing the counterrevolutionary mobilization, since they were active both in recruitment, through their patronage and family networks, and in funding and protecting the guerrilla bands, and even leading them. The local dominant sectors succeeded in mobilizing the rural community wherever strong vertical social structures and common areas of social interaction were still maintained, and where they were capable of forging common interests.22 The participation of wealthy peasants was another common aspect in the European counterrevolution, although the strength of this participation varied.23 As for the base support for royalism, the great majority of those who enlisted in the guerrilla bands had no property, or very small properties. In other words, they came from the poorest sections of society and earned their living working for others. Nevertheless, these guerrilla bands revealed an even representation of the popular classes, above all rural classes (not exclusively agricultural), but also urban classes in some cases, especially in small and medium-sized towns: day labourers, tenant farmers, smallholder farmers, artisans, weavers, handcrafters, and so on. Thus, although almost every social sector was represented in the royalist ranks, the great mass of royalists was made up of day labourers and poor peasants, and to a lesser extent, artisans and handcrafters.24 The social base of the Malcontents (between 1826 and 1828) and adherents of Carlism in its early phase (from 1833 to 1840) shared a similar profile;25 as did the Miguelismo movement in Portugal and the Vendée and Chouannerie in France.26 Royalism put down roots in the Basque Country and Navarre, in Catalonia and in the Maestrazgo (Aragon and Valencia). Even here, though, the royalist presence varied greatly according to the town, city or comarca (county), and in some towns and cities, the strength of support also varied from one neighbourhood to the next. In other regions, such as Galicia, Murcia, Castile and Leon and Castile-La Mancha, there were guerrilla bands, but the territory was not evenly occupied; and even less so

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in Andalusia and Extremadura. Royalism was particularly strong in some medium-sized towns and cities in which there was a predominance of the old professions associated with bureaucracy and the clergy, many of which were in decline. In my own study of Catalonia, it was found that two thirds of the royalists who had enlisted lived in towns of between 2500 and 5000 inhabitants, while other sizeable percentages lived in towns of between 1000 and 2500 inhabitants and of between 5000 and 10,000 inhabitants.27 In general, royalism found most support in regions and comarcas that had experienced economic and demographic growth during the second half of the eighteenth century and which had felt the effects of the early nineteenth-century crisis more keenly. Some had failed to survive this crisis, while others had found it very difficult to recover. Indeed, these areas were often the most politically divided and therefore the scene of the main political and military clashes between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries.28 A very similar situation occurred with the Carlismo, Miguelismo and Vendée movements.29 Nevertheless, a distinction should be drawn between areas of royalist recruitment and areas of confrontation, for these did not always coincide. There is no doubt that socioeconomic factors favoured enlistment in the royalist ranks, but we cannot overlook cultural, social and political aspects that turned this potential into a reality. One of these aspects was the ideological and political division of the wealthy classes and the local popular classes, and the patronage networks, as noted by Charles Tilly in the case of France: ‘Counter-revolution occurred not where everyone opposed the Revolution but where irreconcilable differences divided well-­ defined blocs of supporters and opponents on a large geographic scale’.30

The Political Culture of Royalism In order to understand royalism, we must look closely at its beliefs, its conception of the world, its values and its culture. As Josep Fontana writes: ‘if we do not understand how men of the past saw the world and society, if we do not find out about their illusory hopes, their foolish fears, their dreams and their nightmares, we will not be able to fully understand their actions’.31 Royalist groups in society drew on this outlook and its territorial differentiations to understand the world in which they lived and to formulate their hopes and dreams. It was also instrumental in uniting counterrevolution and anti-revolution. Consequently, if the set of

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economic, social and political changes caused by or attributed to liberal praxis that eroded the material and cultural living conditions of certain sectors of the rural and urban world were interpreted and/or felt on the basis of a particular political culture, then the distance between those responsible for these changes and those who suffered their negative effects became even greater. As Corey Robin points out, counterrevolutionary discourse is not simply a call to restore the past as such, but an attempt to reconfigure the past that maintains the power of the dominant classes and integrates the ‘people’, without renouncing the use of revolutionary means and systems of cultural diffusion.32 Royalism did not develop a political culture of its own, but through sacralization and simplification it adapted the counterrevolutionary political culture that had emerged in Europe during the final third of the eighteenth century in order to confront the Enlightenment and Liberalism, and the Revolution in general.33 It is within the context of this counterrevolutionary, reactionary tradition that the royalist political culture in Spain should be situated, characterized by a theological worldview whose predominant features were a pessimistic idea of humanity and historical providentialism in which both good (king, God and the Catholic Church) and evil (Freemasonry, Jansenism, the Enlightenment, liberalism) were represented; this worldview also denied any human or social agency. Furthermore, this culture contrasted a happy natural world—the past—in which protection was offered by the Catholic Church and the king and where ‘the social actors, through individual rights for each body and the supportive links between members of each one’ lived in happiness, with a sick and chaotic world— the present—based on the new ideas and in which the former protectors were removed, leaving the popular classes completely undefended.34 To outline the broad features of the counterrevolutionary political culture, let us take as an example the Manifiesto que los amantes de la Monarquía hacen a la Nación española, a las demás potencias y a sus soberanos (‘Manifesto issued by the lovers of the Monarchy to the Spanish Nation, the other powers and the Sovereigns’), written by the Marquis of Mataflorida in 1822, and considered to be one of the basic theoretical references of the counterrevolution of the Triennium.35 The Revolution is the target of the attacks made by the Manifesto, since it went against the nature of things, against the natural order represented by providentialism and legitimism. And if this natural (theocratic) order was modified by

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means of a revolution, anarchy set in, and those who suffered most in these circumstances were always the poor. Mataflorida insisted that the Spanish Revolution had begun, like every revolution, by attacking the two fundamental institutions of the natural order, the king and religion, since ‘without Religion, without a king, and without customs, men have never been able to live in peace’. Therefore, the absolute power of the king had to be restored, a king who was a protector: ‘The father of the peoples, preserving the provinces in their peaceful possession of their timeless customs and age-old privileges, rewarding virtue and merit, watching over the punctual and chaste observance of the laws, protecting our properties and people, and promoting by all the force of fear and with all his efforts the healthy and true prosperity of the Monarchy’.36 In fact, king and religion were the fundaments of European counterrevolutionary ideology between the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, and they can be found in the watchwords of the Vendée, Chouannerie, Brigantaggio and Viva María and Miguelismo movements, among others.37

Interpretative Proposals for Royalism Royalism was a heterogeneous movement, both in terms of its composition and its motivations and objectives; different oppositions to the implantation of the liberal and capitalist system in Spain found expression within the movement according to the demands of the moment. Therefore, when it is analysed, we must differentiate between the counterrevolutionary elements (the leaders with a reactionary project), together with their programme, and the anti-revolutionary or antiliberal elements (sectors of the popular classes that were resistant to change) and their actions, united by their opposition to the implantation of liberalism and by a partly shared culture.38 Thus royalism was also a movement in which peasants were politicized. It shares these characteristics with other European counterrevolutionary and anti-revolutionary movements.39 The movement was a response that spanned different social groups, united by their opposition to the practice of liberalism, which entailed, or so they interpreted, a deterioration in their material and cultural living conditions. Colin Lucas, in reference to the French counterrevolution, observes that it was,

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a very complex phenomenon, peasant resistance broke out through a convergence of a range of factors that need to be identified in each case… . one should not confuse this resistance made up more of dissent or non-­ cooperation, with the troubles and open resistance … between the troubles and prolonged open rebellion there is a giant step.40

And Roger Dupuy insists that the peasants ‘had taken up arms for very specific reasons which were not those of the aristocrats’.41 Anna María Rao also writes with reference to Italy: ‘But all its conflicts and all its antagonisms found in the confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution—with all its attendant oppositions between innovation and tradition, nation-state and communities, equality and privileges—a powerful means of politicization which, in transferring conflicts of interest to the political and ideological terrain, paved the way for modern politics’.42 This response was channelled, in part, by wealthy peasants, the clergy and extremist sectors, and it enjoyed the protection of the local authorities. In a similar way, perhaps, to how the bourgeoisie, professionals and the liberal bureaucracy in the towns and cities channelled a response in the opposite direction. What did the radicalized forms of expression in the constitutionalist towns and cities have in common with those in the royalist countryside? Were they two faces of a same disquiet—the crisis suffered by the popular sectors? I believe that they were. Josep Fontana takes this line when he states that ‘we need to explain why the peasant unrest, for which the motives are fairly similar on both sides, is associated in some places with Carlism, while in other places, such as Andalusia, it is associated with advanced democratic movements and republicanism’.43 He also voices the need to analyse the changes that took place in peasant mobilization in the same region over the course of time: ‘how is it that in the same places, for example in the Empordà [or the Penedès], there was a shift in the expression of peasant unrest from identification with Carlism to identification with republicanism?’44 And Yves-Marie Bercé adopts a similar approach when analysing the peasant movements in France: perhaps ‘the political flags that they each defended were just perilous labels, borrowed habits, which in reality would mask a profound originality of the armed peasant uprisings’.45 These are complex questions that demand complex answers, based on historical studies that analyse the medium and long-­ term changes and continuities in political cultures and in the ways in which the popular classes organized and mobilized themselves.

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Notes 1. Jordi Canal, El Carlismo: Dos siglos de contrarrevolución en España (Madrid, 2000) and ‘El carlismo en España: interpretaciones, problemas, propuestas’, in O liberalismo nos seus contextos: Un estado de la cuestión, ed. Xose R. Barreiro (Santiago de Compostela, 2008), 35–54. 2. Josep Fontana, ‘El primer carlismo en una perspectiva comparada’, unpublished text (2016) obtained by the author. See Paul W.  Schroeder, The transformation of European politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1996); Neil Davidson, Transformar el Mundo: Revoluciones burguesas y revolución social (Barcelona, 2013); Josep Fontana, Capitalismo y democracia: Cuando empezó este engaño (Barcelona, 2019). 3. Ramon Arnabat, ‘¿Campesinos contra la Constitución?: el realismo catalán, un ejemplo y un análisis global’, Historia Social 16 (1993): 33–49 and ‘Contrarrevolución y antirrevolución durante el Trienio Liberal: una perspectiva comparada’, in VII Congreso de la Asociación de Historia Contemporánea (Madrid and Vitoria, 2006), 351–381; Josep M. Fradera et al. (eds), Carlisme i moviments absolutistes (Girona, 1990). 4. The information in this section is drawn from Jaume Torras, Liberalismo y rebeldía campesina (Barcelona, 1976), 32–148; Ramon Arnabat, Visca el Rei i la Religió! La primera guerra civil de la Catalunya contemporània (1820–1823) (Lleida, 2006), 17–428; Manuel Ardit, Revolución liberal y revuelta campesina: Un ensayo sobre la desintegración del régimen feudal en el País Valenciano (1793–1840) (Barcelona, 1977), 219–298; Xose R. Barreiro, Liberales y absolutistas en Galicia (1808–1833) (Vigo, 1982), 61–132; Ramón del Río Aldaz, Orígenes de la guerra carlista en Navarra: 1820–1824 (Pamplona, 1987), 39–312; Gregorio Sánchez Romero, Revolución y reacción en el noroeste de la región de Murcia (1808–1833) (Murcia, 1991), 253–301; Juan Díaz-Pintado, Revolución liberal y neoabsolutismo en La Mancha (1820–1833) (Ciudad Real, 1998), 103–174; Félix LLanos, El Trienio Liberal en Guipúzcoa (1820–1823) (San Sebastian, 1998), 387–454; Pedro Rújula, Constitución o muerte: El Trienio Liberal y los levantamientos realistas en Aragón (1820–1823) (Saragossa, 2000); Ramón Guirao, El Altoaragón durante la guerra realista, 1821–1823 (Saragossa, 2001); Francisco Flores del Manzano, La contrarrevolución realista en Extremadura (Badajoz, 2002); Núria Sauch, Guerrillers i bàndols civils entre l’Ebre i  el Maestrat: la formació d’un país carlista (1808–1844) (Barcelona, 2004), 113–248; Antoni Sánchez Carcelén, Els defensors de Ferran VII a Lleida (Lleida, 2009); Francisco J. Salmerón, El Trienio Liberal en la provincia de Murcia (1820–1823) (Murcia, 2014), 313–486.

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5. Alberto Gil Novales, Las Sociedades Patrióticas, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1975) and El Trienio Liberal (Madrid, 1980); Ramon Arnabat, La revolució de 1820 i el Trienni Liberal a Catalunya (Vic, 2001). 6. I use the concepts of counterrevolution and anti-revolution in line with the contributions made by Claude Mazauric for the Vendée, ‘Autopsie d’un échec, la résistance à l’anti-révolution et la contre-révolution’, in Les résistences a la Révolution, eds François Lebrun and Roger Dupuy (Paris, 1987), 237–244; and Colin Lucas, ‘Résistances populaires à la Révolution dans le Sud-Est’, in Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, ed. Claude Langlois (Paris, 1985), 473–485. 7. On the liberal economic reforms see Ramon Arnabat, ‘Visca la Pepa!’ Les reformes econòmiques del Trienni Liberal (1820–1823), (Barcelona, 2002), 13–89. 8. Ramon Arnabat, ‘La Regència d’Urgell i el reialisme català’, Butlletí de la SCEH 13 (2002): 61–88. 9. Ramon Arnabat, ‘Violencia política y guerra civil durante el Trienio Liberal en Cataluña (1820–1823)’, Vasconia 26 (1998): 49–62. 10. François-René de Chateaubrind, Congreso de Verona: Guerra de España: Colonias españolas (Madrid, 2011 [1858]), 22–135; Ulrike Schmieder, Prusia y el Congreso de Verona: Estudio acerca de la política de la Santa Alianza en la cuestión española (Madrid, 2005); Gonzalo Butrón, La ocupación francesa de España (1823–1828) (Cadiz, 1997); Emilio La Parra, Los cien mil hijos de San Luis: El ocaso del primer impulso liberal en España (Madrid, 2007). 11. The data compiled in  this section that refer to  Catalonia are drawn from  Arnabat, Visca el Rei, 429–453; and  those for  Spain as  a  whole from the work cited in note 7. 12. Roger Dupuy, Les Chouans (Paris, 1997), 186. 13. Maria Alexandra Lousada and Nuno G. Monteiro, ‘Revoltas absolutistas e movimentaçâo camporese no Norte, 1826–1827: Algunas notas’, in O liberalismo na Peninsula Ibérica na primeira metade do seculo XIX, 2 vols., ed. Miriam Halpern Pereira (Lisbon, 1982), vol.1, 169–181; Maria Fatima Sá e Melo Ferreira, ‘Vencidos, pro no convencidos: movilización, acción colectiva e identidad en el miguelismo’, Historia Social 49 (2004): 86–87; Armando M. Barreiros, ‘O clero Regular e a : Subsídios para uma história sócio-política do Miguelismo’, Revista de História das Ideias 9 (1987): 529–630; Dupuy, Les Chouans, 199–205; Reynald Secher, Le génocide franco-français: La Vendée-vengé (Paris, 1986), 127–128; Donald M. G. Sutherland, Les chouans: Les origines sociales de la Contre-Révolution populaire en Bretagne, 1770–1796 (Rennes, 1990), 273 and ‘The social origins of counter-revolution in western France’, Past and Present 99 (1983): 65–87; Anne Rolland-Boulestreau, ‘Familles, réseaux et Contre-

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Révolution dans les Mauges’, in La Contre-Révolution en Europa XVIIIeXIXe siècles: Réalités politiques et sociales, résonances culturelles et idéologiques, ed. Jean-­ Clément Martin (Rennes, 2001), 20–24; André Bendjebbar, ‘Les problèmes des alliances politiques, sociales, et économiques dans la Contre-révolution angevine (1797–1799)’, in Les résistances, 87–96; Simon Sarlin, Le légitimisme en armes (Rome, 2013). 14. Emilio La Parra, Fernando VII: un rey deseado y detestado (Barcelona, 2018), 375–474. 15. Emilio Gin, Santa Fede e congiure antirrepublicana (Salerno, 1999); Anna Maria Rao, ‘Révolution et Contre-révolution pendant le Triennio italien (1796–1799)’, in La Contre-Révolution, 233–240; Sandro Guzzi, Logiche della rivolta rurale: Insurrezioni contro la Repubblica elvetiva nel Ticino meridionale (1798–1803) (Bologna, 1994); John A. Davis, ‘The Santafede and the crisis of the ancient regime in southern Italy’, in Society and Politics in the Age the Risorgimento, eds John A.  Davis and Paul Gisnborg (Cambridge, 1992), 21–33; Frédéric Le Floch, ‘Les auteurs et les acteurs de la contre-révolution dans le Puy-de-Dôme (1791–1801)’, PhD thesis (Université Blaise-Pascal, 1998); Charles Tilly, La Vendée: Révolution et contre-révolution (Paris, 1970), 330–332; Jacques Péret, La Terreur et la guerre: Poitevins, Charentais et vendéens de l’an II (Courlay, 1992). 16. Dupuy, Les Chouans, 177–181. 17. Pío Montoya, La intervención del clero vasco en las contiendas civiles (1820–1823) (San Sebastian, 1971); Gaspar Feliu, La clerecia catalana durant el Trienni liberal (Barcelona, 1972), 151–195. 18. Marcel Faucheux, L’insurrection vendéenne de 1793: aspects économiques et sociaux (Paris, 1964), 69–130; Donald M.  G. Sutherland, Révolution et Contre-Révolution en France (1789–1815) (Paris, 1991), 287–291; Roger Dupuy, De la Révolution a la Chouannerie: Paysans en Bretagne 1788–1794 (Paris, 1988), 327–335. For Portugal, Jose Tengarrinha, ‘Napoleón y la contrarrevolución en Portugal’, Trienio: Ilustración y Liberalismo 44 (2004): 37–61; Rui Graça De Castro, ‘Mobilizaçâo rural e urbana na ‘Maria a Fonte’, in O Liberalismo, vol.2, 183–193. For Italy, Massimo Cattaneo, Gli occhi di Maria sulla rivoluzione: ‘miracoli’ a Roma e nello Stato della Chiesa (1796–1797) (Rome, 1995); Gabriele Turi, Viva Maria: Riforme, rivoluzione e insorgenze in Toscana (1790–1799) (Bologna, 1999), 239–353; and Massino Viglione, Le insorgenze: Rivoluzione & controrivoluzione in Italia, 1792–1815 (Milan, 1999), 100–107. 19. Dupuy, Les Chouans, 205–214. 20. Barreiro, Liberales, 85; Flores del Manzano, La contrarevolución, 39–41. 21. Maria Alexandra Lousada, ‘D. Pedro ou D. Miguel? As opçoes políticas da nobreza titulada portuguesa’, Penélope: Fazer e desfacer História 4 (1989): 81–117; France, Dupuy, Les Chouans, 214–222; Jacques Le Goff and

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Donald Sutherland, ‘The social origins of counter-revolution in western France’, Past and Present 99 (1983): 65–87; Claudio Tosi, ‘Il marchese Albergotti colonello delle bande aretine del 1799’, in Folle Contro-­ rivoluzionarie: La insorgenze popolari nell’Italia giacobina e napoleónica, ed. Anna Maria Rao (Rome, 2000), 171–253; Rao, ‘Révolution’, 238–240. 22. Sauch, Guerrillers, 190–200 and 480–481; Ardit, Revolución, 284–186; Barreiros, Liberales, 76–78 and 84–87; Vicente Fernández Benítez, ‘Campesinos y revolución liberal en Cantabria (1820–1840)’, Trienio: Ilustración y Liberalismo 8 (1986): 127–156; Jesús Millán, ‘La resistència antiliberal a la revolució burgesa espanyola: ¿insurrecció popular o moviment subaltern?’, in Carlisme, 27–58. 23. Franco Della Peruta, ‘La rebellia camperola en la Itàlia del Risorgimento’, John Davis, ‘La Santafede al regne de Nàpols: guerra social o guerra civil?’ and Brian Fitzpatrick, ‘L’ultrarealisme francès del Midi i les seves contradiccions internes’, in Carlisme, 59–74, 75–90 and 91–126; Jean-Pierre Jessenne, Pouvoir au village et Révolution: Artois 1760–1848 (Paris, 1987); Peter M.  Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1988); Michel Vovelle, ‘Formes de Politisation de la Société Rurale en Provence sous la Révolutions Française: entre Jacobinisme et Contrerévolution au Village’, Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 89 (1982): 185–204; Michel Vovelle (ed), La Révolution Française et le monde rural (Paris, 1989), 381–441; Luc Dhont, ‘Les processus révolutionnaires et contre-­révolutionnaires en Belgique des reformes de Joseph II à la réunion à la France (1780–1798)’, in Les résistances, 273–283; Fred Stevens, ‘La résistance au Directoire dans les départements réunis: “La Guerre des paysans” (octobre–novembre 1798)’, in La République directoriale, 2 vols., eds Philippe Bourdin and Bernard Gainot (Moulins, 1998), vol. 2, 1025–1045. 24. Torras, Liberalismo, 119–123; Ardit, Revolución, 283–285; Del Río Aldaz, Orígenes, 294–312; Sauch, Guerrillers, 183–189 and 446–451; Arnabat, Visca el Rei, 453–473. 25. Jaume Torras, ‘Societat rural i moviments absolutists: Notes sobre la guerra dels Malcontents (1827)’, Recerques 1 (1970): 123–130; Pere Anguera, Els Malcontents del corregiment de Tarragona (Tarragona, 1993) and Rei i Fam: El primer carlisme a Catalunya (Barcelona, 1995), 199–327; Manuel Santirso, Revolució liberal i guerra civil a Cataluña (1833–1840) (Lleida, 1999), 373–385; Manel LLadonosa, Carlins i liberals a Lleida (1833–1840) (Lleida, 1993), 256–269; Antonio Caridad, El carlismo en las comarcas valencianas y en el sur de Aragón (1833–1840) (Valencia, 2017). 26. Jean Clénet, La Contre-Révolution (Paris, 1992), 61–63; Dupuy, Les Chouans, 188–192; Anne Bernet, Histoire générale de la Chouannerie (Paris, 1997); Jean Sentou (ed.), Révolution et contre-révolution dans la

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France du midi (1789–1799) (Toulouse, 1991); Tilly, La Vendée, 322–332; Claude Petitfrère, La Vendée et les vendéens (Paris, 1981); Jean-Clément Martin, La Vendée et la France (Paris, 1987) and Contre-Révolution, Révolution et Nation en France de 1789 a 1799 (Paris, 1998); Michel Gautier, Mémoire populaire des Vendéens (La Crèche, 2009); Lousada and Monteiro, ‘Revoltas’, 176–177; Maria Fatima Sá e Melo Ferreira, Rebeldes e insubmissos: resistencias populares ao liberalismo (1834–1844) (Oporto, 2002). 27. Arnabat, Visca el Rei, 453–470. 28. Ramon Arnabat, ‘Radiografia de la contrarevolució i l’antirevolució durant el Trienni Liberal a Catalunya’, Millars: Espai i Història 23 (2000): 77–97; Torras, Liberalismo, 99–148; Sauch, Guerrillers, 187–190; Josep Fontana, ‘Crisi camperola i revolta carlina’, Recerques 10 (1980): 7–16; Ardit, Revolución, 282; Vicente Fernández Benítez, Carlismo y rebeldía campesina (Madrid, 1988). 29. Lousada y Monteiro, ‘Revoltas’, 177; Oscar Di Simplicio, Las revueltas campesinas en Europa (Barcelona, 1989), 120–121; Antonio Caridad, ‘La desigual distribución espacial del primer carlismo’, Huarte de San Juan: Geografía e Historia 25 (2018): 79–107. 30. Charles Tilly, Las revoluciones europeas, 1492–1992 (Barcelona, 1995), 216–217. See also: Hilaire Multon, ‘Géographies et mémoires de la culture politique blanche dans la France du XIXe siècle’, in El carlismo en su tiempo: geografías de la contrarrevolución (Pamplona, 2008), 120–144; Michel Denis and Claude Geslin, La Bretagne des Blancs et des Bleus 1815–1880 (Rennes, 2003); Colin Lucas, ‘Aux sources du comportement politique de la paysannerie Beaujolaise’, in La Révolution Française et le monde rural, ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris, 1989), 345–365 (358–360). 31. Fontana, La fi de l’Antic Règim i la industrialització (1787–1868) (Barcelona, 1987), 270. 32. Corey Robin, La mente reaccionaria: El conservadurismo desde Edmund Burke hasta Donald Trump (Madrid, 2019), 63–83. See Luis Arias González and Francisco De Luis Martín, ‘La divulgación popular del antiliberalismo (1808–1823) a través del sermón’, Hispania, LIII-1-183 (1993): 213–235; Ramon Arnabat, ‘Propaganda antiliberal i lluita ideològica durant el Trienni Liberal a Catalunya (1820–1823)’, Recerques 34 (1996): 7–28. 33. Jacques Godechot, La contre-révolution. 1789–1804 (Paris, 1961), 5–147; Jean Tulard (ed.), La Contre-révolution: Origines, histoire, postérité (Paris, 1990), 15–34 and 286–309; François Lebrun and Roger Dupuy (eds), Les résistances à la Révolution (Paris, 1987), 331–395. 34. Javier Herrero, Los orígenes del pensamiento reaccionario español (Saragossa, 2020 [1971]).; Jorge Novella, El pensamiento reaccionario español

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(1812–1875): tradición y contrarrevolución en España (Madrid, 2006); Javier López Alós, Entre el trono y el escaño: El pensamiento reaccionario español frente a la revolución liberal (1808–1823) (Madrid, 2012); Pedro Rújula, ‘El antiliberalismo reaccionario’, in La España liberal, 1833–1874, 2 vols, eds Mª Cruz Romeo and María Sierra (Madrid and Saragossa, 2014), vol.2, 377–378; Francisco J. Ramón Solans, ‘Conjugando los tiempos presentes: figuras temporales e la contrarrevolución española, 1789–1814’, in Historia y Política: Ideas, procesos y movimientos sociales (Madrid, 2012), 215–243; Andoni Artola and Antonio Calvo, ‘Declinaciones de la reacción eclesiástica contra la Revolución francesa en España (1789–1808)’, Hispania 77/256 (2017): 437–469; Josep Escrig, ‘Pasión racional, razón apasionada: El primer antiliberalismo reaccionario en España’, Ayer, 111 (2018): 135–163; Jean-Philippe Luis, ‘La construcción inacabada de una cultura política realista’, in La creación de las culturas políticas modernas, 1808–1833, eds Miguel A. Cabrera and Juan Pro (Madrid and Saragossa, 2014), 319–345. 35. I have consulted the bound copy in [J. Hortet], El Testamento del rey mártir de la Francia Luis XVI y la última voluntad de la reina su esposa, con algunos otros documentos que acreditan la justa causa de la Santa Alianza en Europa (Tarragona, n.d.), 17–97. 36. Manifesto of the Regency of Urgell to the Catalans (Urgell, 25 October 1822) published in the Diario de Urgel, 10–14 from 18 to 22 October 1822. 37. Clément, La Contre-Révolution, 7–17 and 99–105; Franco Molfese, Storia del brigantaggio dopo l’Unità (Milan, 1983); Anna Maria Rao, ‘Controrivoluzione, resistenze alle repubbliche, insorgense’, in Napoleó i la contrarevolució a Europa (Bellaterra, 2004); R. de Lorenzo, ‘Mythes contre-­révolutionnaires dans les Révolutions en Italie (1796–1860)’, in La Contre-­Révolution, 255–276; Armando Barreiros Malheiro da Silva, Miguelismo: Ideologia e mito (Coimbra, 1993), 44–75 and 163–339; María Alexandra Lousada, ‘El miguelismo o la contrarrevolución en Portugal’, in Identidad y Nacionalismo en la España Contemporánea: El carlismo, 1833–1975, ed. Stanley G.  Payne (Madrid, 1996), 181–194; Sá e Melo Ferreira, ‘Vencidos’, 75–86; Tengarrinha, ‘Napoleón’, which highlights the triad Religión, Príncipe, Tradición. 38. Ramon Arnabat, ‘Contrarrevolución, antirrevolución y movimientos sociales’ in Estado, protesta y movimientos sociales, eds Santiago Castillo and José Mª Ortíz de Orruño (Vitoria, 1998), 249–262 and ‘La raó de la rebel⋅lió: Apunts per entendre els aixecaments reialistes durant el Trienni Liberal’, in El carlisme i la seva base social, ed. Josep M. Solé Sabaté (Barcelona, 1992), 15–56; Jaume Torras, ‘Peasant counter-revolution?’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 5/1 (1977): 66–78; Rújula, Constitución, 205–264; Ardit,

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Revolución, 300; Del Río Aldaz, ‘Rebellió’, 188–189; Pardo Gómez, Revolución, 477–486. 39. Maurice Agulhon et  al., La politisation des campagnes au XIXe siècle: France, Italie et Portugal (Rome, 2000); Gilles Pécout, ‘Cómo se escribe la historia de la politización rural: Reflexiones a partir del estudio del campo francés en el siglo XIX’, Historia Social 29 (1997): 89–110; Paul Bois, Paysans de l’ouest: Des structures économiques et sociales aux options politiques depuis l’époque révolutionnaire dans la Sarthe (Paris, 1984), 287–330; Martin, Contre-Révolution, 61–103; Michel Vovelle, La découverte de la politique: Géopolitique de la révolution française (Paris, 1993), 86–99; Lucas, ‘Résistances’, 473–486; Mazauric, ‘Autopsie’, 237–244 and Sur la Révolutión, 217–230; Dupuy, De la Révolution, 309–337 and Les Chouans, 259–269; Jose Tengarrinha, ‘Paysannerie et Contre-Révolution au Portugal’, La Contre-révolution, 279–290; Anna Maria Rao, ‘Introduzione: La questione delle insorgenze italiane’, Quaderni Storici 39/2 (1998): 343–344; Giovanni Assereto, ‘I ‘Viva Maria’ nella Repubblica Ligure’ and John A.  Davis ‘Rivolte popolari e contrarivoluzione nel Mezzogiorno continentale’, Quaderni Storici 39/2 (1998): 449–471 and 603–622; John A.  Davis, ‘Les sanfèdistes dans le Royaume de Naples (1799): guerre sociale ou guerre civile?’, in Les résistances, 310–320. 40. Lucas, ‘Aux sources ’, 360–361. Claude Petitfrére, Les Vendeens D’Anjou (1793): Analyse des structures militaires, sociales et mentales (Paris, 1981), 43–68. With reference to Portugal, Monteiro, ‘Societat rural’, 148, describes ‘an arena in which different social tensions could be expressed’, and José Tengarrinha’s observations are in a similar vein: ‘Movimentos camporeses em Portugal na transiçâo do Antigo Regime para a sociedade liberal’ in O Liberalismo, vol.2, 153–159. For Italy, Rao, ‘Introduzione’, 618–622 and Davis, ‘La Santafede’, 80, assert the same. 41. Dupuy, Les Chouans, 259–269. Mazauric, Sur la Révolutión, 210, observes that ‘La contre-révolution armée traduit effectivement le mécontentement social des paysans de l’Ouest’. 42. Rao, ‘Révolution’, 340. 43. Fontana, ‘El primer’, 7–8. In some particular contexts, there was a confluence between Carlism and republicanism in opposition to the moderate government, as was the case during the War of the Matiners in Catalonia (1846–49). 44. Fontana, ‘El primer’, 7–8. 45. Yves-Marie Bercé, Croquants et nu-pieds: Les soulèvements paysans en France du XVIè au XIXè siècle (Paris, 1990), 123.

PART II

Dynamics of Royalist Mobilization: War, Patronage Networks and Community

CHAPTER 6

Counterrevolutionaries? Underground Struggles and Gender Relations During the French Revolution (Brittany, 1793–99) Solenn Mabo The woman is the home, but above all the church and the confessional. This dark oaken box—where the woman, on her knees, between tears and prayers, receives and then returns, burning more brightly, the spark of fanaticism—is the true source of the civil war … In the Vendée, in most of Anjou, Maine and Brittany, the woman prevails, the woman and the priest closely united.1

As depicted through the pen of Jules Michelet, women from the regions of western France, where rejection of the Revolution was predominant, became the archetype of ‘the woman’, by nature a fanatic and a counterrevolutionary. This striking image contributed to creating the idea that women were a threat to the Republic and has been partly used to justify their long exclusion from political rights.2 It was particularly powerful in the ‘lands of rejection’ such as Brittany, characterized by the intensity of

S. Mabo (*) Rennes 2 University, Rennes, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_6

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resistance to the Revolution and the assertion of a conservative political profile throughout the following century. Field surveys reveal that beyond this construct, women were indeed clearly visible in the resistance to the Revolution and particularly in the religious conflicts.3 Classic interpretations explain this by the distribution of roles according to gender, in which women were mobilized to defend their priority areas of action, the sources of their social legitimacy—family and religion combined in the transmission of traditions. Beyond reasons for action, the counterrevolutionaries’ spaces and means of action seem to have been just as decisive for understanding the place of women in the resistance to the Revolution. They took part both in open conflicts and in the various components of underground resistance: royalist plots, providing refuge for refractory priests, deserters and insurgents from March 1793 onwards, secret Catholic worship, and as the support bases for the Chouan Rebellion (or Chouannerie). By considering the specific organization of the underground endeavours and the distribution of roles between men and women, I intend to look at the image of counterrevolutionary women in a new light and consider the place of ordinary women in the movements that were hostile to the Revolution.

The Counterrevolutionary Fanatic, a Construct Significant in the work of Jules Michelet, the image of women particularly opposed to the Revolution was shared by the republican writers of his time and was not refuted by royalist chroniclers. The former denounced women as the dangerous enemies of progress, while the latter praised their virtues and celebrated them as martyrs. This two-sided image— ‘counterrevolutionary fanatic’ versus ‘pious martyr’—did not have to wait for nineteenth-century historians in order to thrive.4 The men of the Revolution—administrators, club members and journalists—had never ceased to denounce the collusion between women and priests and the archives of the revolutionary period are brimming with such commentaries. This representation is rooted in a complex heritage that combines gender stereotypes and sociocultural practices created over a long period of time. Indeed, the most accessible sources in regard to women’s commitment during the period tend to sustain this view. Alienated from circles of power and kept away from the institutional spaces of political life, women who took part in the political game are first and foremost visible in the archives of repression. Those who rejected, denounced and

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challenged the new revolutionary order are therefore those most in the spotlight. This distorting prism related to the sources is accentuated in regions such as Brittany. There, the sectional or sans-culotte dynamic was weak and the revolutionary militants did not attract the attention of the authorities. In Brittany, there was no trace of the ‘tricoteuses’ detected by Dominique Godineau in Paris or by Jacques Guilhaumou and Martine Lapied in Provence.5 Of course, some women in Brittany supported the Revolution and mobilized to defend it. However, they did so by unassuming or ‘moderate’ patriotic actions, without distinguishing themselves through spectacular activism likely to trouble the authorities.6 The revolutionary women of Brittany have, therefore, been almost invisible, with the archives recording mainly male practices in the cause of patriotism: namely, serving in the national guard, enlisting as a volunteer with the army, being a member of a political club, taking part in elections, taking on public roles, and so on. The invisibility of patriot women therefore places those who challenged the Revolution more in the spotlight. Furthermore, the image of the counterrevolutionary fanatic is more than just a mirage conjured up by the prism of the sources and the influence of gender stereotypes. Women played an active part in the religious rebellions between 1791 and 1792 aimed at protecting refractory priests or driving out constitutional priests. Nonetheless, an attentive analysis of the administrative and legal documentation shows that the rebellions described as feminine also included numbers of men, especially in the campaigns.7 Women are placed in the foreground by the traditional distribution of roles in the revolt. As in the Subsistence Riots, they had the means to act effectively in the lightly armed disorders that took place in the heart of the parishes. For the authorities, highlighting the role of women was also a way to maintain the idea that the ‘campaign brothers’ were partisans of the Revolution and worthy of their status as citizens, while “the civil war in the family”,8 the prelude to a general civil war in the nation, was due to their wives who lacked political reasoning. When Jules Michelet stated that ‘the woman is the home’ and that as a whole she formed ‘the true source of the civil war’, he therefore perfectly captured the view of the men of the Revolution. He expressed essentialist conceptions that were to some extent politically motivated. Yet he also pointed the finger at the specificities of a counterrevolution that was unfolding underground and could not be maintained without the active support of locals who were acting precisely from their homes. Clandestine activity took on many different forms in Brittany. Here, mass rejection of

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the clerical oath in 1791 was followed by the emergence of a powerful religious resistance movement and a partial rebellion in March 1793 against military conscription. Later, in 1794, Brittany was further divided by a simmering civil war, the Chouan Rebellion. Out of the abovementioned multiple forms of clandestine activity, this chapter will address mainly the mobilization of lay people to protect refractory priests as a means of understanding this behaviour. Observing how men and women acted in favour of the refractory priests, by individual initiatives or on a very local level in the form of small networks, leads us to question the purpose of their mobilization and whether or not the labels of ‘counterrevolutionary’ or ‘royalist’ that were affixed to their engagement were actually valid. Furthermore, the Breton women involved in these resistance actions may seem dually marginalized in the Revolution, both as a political minority and as inhabitants of an outlying rural region. Examining their scope and motivations for acting invites us to question the links between defence of traditions, rejection of political innovations and personal and collective struggles to defend forms of autonomy.

Was Hiding Refractory Priests a Mainly Feminine Activity? There were large numbers of refractory priests in Brittany since over 80 per cent of the parish clergy in 1789 had refused to swear the oath of loyalty to the Nation.9 Faced with the repressive measures introduced in the period 1791 to 1792, they left the country or went underground. Some inhabitants then took on the responsibility of housing refractory priests, risking increasingly heavy punishments, which could even go as far as the death penalty in the subsequent 1793 to 1794 era. Women were considered the leading protagonists in the ‘concealment of priests’, to use the terminology of the authorities. They were denounced as such by the revolutionaries, and the collections of stories about the martyrs of the Revolution written in the nineteenth century also emphasize their driving role.10 In the field, were women really the first ones to mobilize to defend the refractory priests? My study on the mobilization of lay people to hide refractory priests is based on sixty-one legal proceedings against ‘concealers of priests’ brought before the criminal courts of the departments of Côtes-du-Nord, Finistère, Ille-et-Vilaine and Morbihan.11 This collection is supplemented by other

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documents from the revolutionary period: correspondence and administrative reports, police search reports and archives of surveillance committees. The cases brought to my knowledge mainly took place when repression was at its most active, in Year II and, to a lesser extent, immediately after the republican coup of 18 Fructidor Year V (4 September 1797). Such documented proceedings offer little more than a glimpse of this practice, while the situations that evaded pursuit remain outside our knowledge. Nonetheless, there are enough recorded cases to allow a comparative analysis of women and men’s involvement. Regarding the number of people prosecuted for hiding priests, men and women appear to have been involved in equal measure: 65 women and 66 men were prosecuted in the sixty-one legal proceedings in the criminal courts. This first finding has to be refined according to the urban or rural environment of the cases. The men arrested for this reason were mainly from rural areas, which may be explained by the more community dimension of the engagement in rural parishes and also by a greater lack of visibility when it came to women’s activity in the countryside. Indeed, in rural environments, when a refractory priest was discovered on a farm, in most cases only the head of the family was arrested.12 Furthermore, not all those arrested played an equivalent role and women may have been the minority among the accused despite having played the most active part. For example, in Languidic, Morbihan, 13 men and two women were arrested for hiding a refractory priest. The men had merely helped the priest to move his belongings while it was the two women who had really organized his accommodation.13 On observing who, men or women, played a driving role in each case, we find that women were more often on the front line, but not overwhelmingly.14 The division of roles was far from being fixed and, particularly in the countryside, hiding a priest was quite often a collective business, mobilizing men and women according to logics of community solidarity and defence. In towns, women’s commitment was more clearly visible: in the department of Ille-et-Vilaine, for example, cases of hiding priests in urban environments were more numerous and the difference between men and woman was greater (30 women were prosecuted compared to only 5 men from a total of 14 proceedings). Were women comparatively more active in towns or did the conditions of environment, police searches and arrests put them more firmly in the spotlight? Traditional explanations highlight the disengagement of male piety, which was more prevalent in towns, a link to an earlier process of secularization and de-Christianization.15

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However, other factors clearly came into play, particularly the role of single women: unmarried women, widows and also women who were separated from their husbands. Structurally, the towns contained a larger number of single women than the rural environment.16 Yet single women are greatly overrepresented among those who were arrested for hiding priests: widows and unmarried women, not to mention nuns (who also had little visibility), represented three quarters of the women prosecuted. The reasons for this overrepresentation can be found in the social practices and the sociability networks of single women, who were able to become more involved in a parish life that was likely to offer them a form of support and social legitimacy.17 Their pervasiveness is also related to the mechanisms of repression to which single women were much more exposed than wives. More prosaically, in urban accommodation marked by overcrowding, the home of a single woman may have seemed an easier place to hide than in a family with children incurring the risk of leaking the secret. The particularly distinct profile in towns of the single woman protecting refractory priests therefore played a key role in the creation of the figure of the fanatic. As historical works analysing underground religious struggles mainly rely on urban data, they participate in highlighting the mobilization of women, while resistance in the rural world reveals a greater diversity of engagement. 18

Were the ‘concealers of priests’ Counterrevolutionaries? For the revolutionary authorities, the receivers and concealers of priests were potential counterrevolutionaries. However, where the authorities talk about ‘concealing priests’, the protagonists use terms such as hospitality or refuge. How do we interpret the sense of engagement from the point of view of those who hid priests? Were their initiatives mainly acts of piety, gestures of humanity or a counterrevolutionary undertaking and how were these different concerns linked with each other? The legal sources that make up the core of the collection barely make it possible to detect the motivations behind the men and women hiding the priests. When questioned, the people prosecuted for receiving and concealing priests mainly said that they acted due to humanity. They housed a priest because he had nowhere to go, was ill or penniless. When Olive Yvon, a sixty-five-year-old unmarried shopkeeper, was questioned about

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hiding her former parish priest, she explained that he ‘arrived at her home, worn out with fatigue and soaked to the skin by rain and that through compassion and humanity she gave him refuge’.19 The argument was an easy one, perhaps, given to reduce the extent of the action, but it certainly fitted many situations. There were different reasons for helping priests, and these can be examined by analysing the variety of conditions under which they operated: such variables include whether they were hiding a priest for one or two nights or for several months, housing one’s brother, uncle, former master or even helping a priest unknown until then because he was being pursued as an enemy of the Nation. In over half of the cases, the priest was well known to those who were hiding him, whether as a relative, a master, a former tutor or even the parish priest, known and respected for years. A labourer who acted as a guide for a chaplain—who was also his neighbour—during his clandestine rounds thus stated ‘that he could not refuse the request of Servet, having received good deeds from him in the past’.20 Nonetheless, in the other half of the contexts, the refractory priests were hidden by individuals with whom they had no apparent link. Depending on the situations, the help given to the refractory priest was more or less clearly part of an act of mutual aid or religious or political resistance. When a police search revealed very elaborate hiding places, which had held several priests, this suggested a more organized reception, perhaps more broadly inserted in the networks of the counterrevolution. This structured form of refuge mainly involved rather wealthy single women, often connected to noble circles. Those who ostensibly expressed during questioning a militant piety associated with rejection of the Revolution also belonged to this profile and no man gave up such statements. Angélique Glatin, for example, a sixty-three-year-old spinster and former trusted servant of noble families who was arrested for receiving and concealing a priest in Saint-Malo, made no attempt to make light of her actions and stated ‘that she knew that it was forbidden by law but she did it because of her religion and would do so again if she had to’.21 Ursule Terrier, arrested when two priests were found hidden in her home, said clearly to the judges that she was happy to die for her king and her religion and that she wished for the restoration of the monarchy.22 Thirty-eight years old and the mother of five children, she lived in unusual circumstances because her husband, Pierre Taupin, had emigrated with his master, the former Bishop of Tréguier. This type of statement, exclusively from women, partly explains the much higher number of death penalties

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for receiving and concealing priests for women than for men (eighteen women and one man). How do we interpret the absence of this type of radical declaration among the men arrested for receiving and concealing priests? I believe that it is not only related to a difference in religious attitudes between men and women. The men who ostensibly rejected the established order were able to operate within a wider frame of action than the women: they were able to join the Army of the Émigrés or they took part in situ, bearing arms, in the underground conflict. For women, who were mainly excluded from fighting roles, giving refuge to the refractory priests was an accessible way of acting against the Revolution. Hiding priests could therefore constitute a political field of engagement for them, whereas the men who were most hostile to the Revolution would act primarily in other areas.23 This assumption begs the question of the degree of porousness between the refuge given to refractory priests and involvement in the networks of the Chouan Rebellion.

The Domestic Sphere at the Heart of Political Confrontations The existence of links of solidarity between priests in hiding and their hosts, as well as the length and the level of organization of their stay, are elements to be taken into account to detect the drivers and the challenges of action. Whether those involved in the ‘concealing of priests’ were driven by friendship, compassion, piety or a more militant religious commitment, their actions transformed their homes. The domestic sphere therefore abandoned a form of normality and became a place of risk, in touch with the political dynamic. This was true for houses that sheltered refractory priests, but also for those that held secret religious gatherings, those that housed deserters or Chouans or served as a drop-off place for the correspondence, arms and other goods necessary for the logistics of the Chouan Rebellion. The organization of clandestine life, whether it was related to maintaining religious worship or support for the armed conflicts, created a space that was favourable for the mobilization of women. A republican soldier, after a search in manor in Côtes-du-Nord, described the women of the house, owners and maids, as ‘housewives of the Chouan Rebellion’.24 The expression is illuminating and highlights the opportunities that

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underground life offered women both from privileged and from more ordinary backgrounds. They intervened in the Chouan Rebellion based on their traditional roles as housewives: feeding, laundering and caring. The conventional distribution of roles regarding the use of arms was barely subverted and women fighters remained quite an exception.25 However, women were involved in ‘paramilitary’ roles from the moment their homes became support bases absolutely essential to the survival of the armed struggle of the Chouans, and some also intervened outside the home, when they took messages, reported or acted as guides.26 From the time of the uprisings in March 1793, the networks of help for the refractory priests became mingled with those of the budding Chouan Rebellion. Some houses gave refuge to deserters or those on the run after the March rebellions, became connection points for fighting units or royalist agents and were also identified as safe havens by the refractory priests. Several cases suggest that women were hiding both priests and others on the run. For example, at the home of the widow Maubec, in the Redon region, in the autumn of 1794, a search revealed the presence of two refractory priests but also of a hiding place and arms as well as a Chouan leader escaping from the widow’s garden.27 In the Fougères region, Marie Haleux, a dressmaker and unmarried woman of around thirty years of age, was arrested in Year II for religious propaganda, then under the Directory for receiving and concealing a refractory priest. She produced under the Restoration a commendation from royalist officers describing her action as a messenger for the Chouans.28 Similarly, several women who had housed refractory priests in the Saint-Malo region were involved in the network of smugglers who provided the connection between the émigré royalists in Jersey and the Breton counterrevolution.29 This type of route only emerges occasionally in the archives, but it suggests that the help given to the refractory priests, underpinned by multiple motivations that often stemmed from reflexes of community solidarity, may have been the first step towards more engagement against the Revolution. Counterrevolutionaries in the eyes of the political and judicial authorities, the ‘concealers of priests’, therefore matched a diversity of profiles, with some also being involved in the networks of the Chouan Rebellion. Furthermore, irrespective of the drivers of their engagement, the women who helped the refractory priests or other enemies of the Revolution asserted themselves under the Restoration as fervent royalists driven by love ‘of the throne and the altar’.

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The Making of ‘the royalist’, at the Crossroads of the Processes of Repression and Recognition The help given to refractory priests took on an ideological dimension due to the over-politicized context of the Revolution and more particularly in Year II, when any form of support for the enemies of the Republic was understood to be an act of rebellion and disloyalty to the Nation. The repressive mechanism set up against ‘concealing priests’ from 1793 on, which was partially reactivated in the aftermath of Fructidor Year V, contributed to the making of counterrevolutionaries. Receivers and concealers of priests sentenced to imprisonment, deportation or death (depending on the time of the trial), were condemned as counterrevolutionaries for actions that they had not necessarily undertaken or experienced as such. The people who were suspected, prosecuted, judged or sentenced for counterrevolutionary activities were assigned this role, in the eyes of the authorities but also of their own environment. Once they had been released during Year III, thanks to the amnesty and pacification measures, the ‘concealers of priests’ of Year II probably continued to be identified as enemies of the Revolution. These assignment processes related to the reports of legal proceedings, in the short, medium or long term, would require a more in-depth study. The mechanisms of recognition that began under the Restoration then contributed to the qualification, after the fact, of actions from the time related to multiple motivations and issues. Initially, only former soldiers from the wars in western France or their widows were allocated pensions, which were initially funded from the civil list of the royal household before being moved to the war budget. In 1824, in a scenario of ultra-royalist pressures, the monarchy extended the pensions to noncombatants who had rendered services to the royal cause in the departments of western France.30 Among the applications filed from 1825 onwards by noncombatants, we find two 245 case files from women who mentioned the services rendered for the royal cause during the Revolution.31 These files have to be handled with caution because they were drawn up in the 1820s, many years after the events and for a self-interested purpose. However, women applying for a pension produced an affidavit, signed by former Chouan officers, which stated the nature of their mobilization. While there were certainly some exaggerations and excessive requests, it is likely that some form of social control took place in small towns in which everyone knew

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each other. Irrespective of the accuracy of the actions invoked by the women applying for a pension, their files reveal the recognition process. From reading their files, they all acted for the return of the throne and the altar. The distinction often becomes blurred between the help given to refractory priests and the support provided for other categories of enemies of the Revolution: deserters, insurgents from March 1793, Chouans, royalists and those returning from emigration. Some affidavits precisely establish the facts while others state with few details that the applicant ‘gave refuge and hospitality to royalists, both priests, and officers and soldiers’. Such phrasing questions the real engagement of the applicant. It also reveals that underground resistance activity was carried out in a scattered way and relied on the good intentions of anonymous people, acting in what could be termed unremarkable ways, such as housing and feeding the rebels. The mechanics of the pension application process therefore led to the presentation of all actions related to underground life as royalist engagements. The process of recognition stamped out differences in the reasons for acting and the actresses in the conflicts of the revolutionary period thus built themselves up into protagonists of the counterrevolution and the royalist cause.32

Conclusion: Acting in the Shadows and Coming Out of the Shadows Due to their mobilization in clandestine life, women are thus visible in the sources of the revolutionary period and they suddenly reappear under the Restoration in the archives of the pension allocations. The hidden networks and resources of clandestinity are partially revealed by this dual process of repression and recognition and become a component of public life. Beyond their emergence in the sources, the clandestine life that unfurled around refractory worship and the Chouan Rebellion created favourable conditions for the intervention of women in the political dynamic. In the underground movement, the private sphere of the home effectively became a strategic point and the groups organized around secret worship or the Chouan Rebellion became involved in local networks driven by village, parish and family solidarities. These characteristics opened up possibilities for action to women at a time when they were excluded both from institutional political life and from armed conflicts. The women who supported the Revolution had little space to exist politically and publicly and

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this was particularly true in territories such as Brittany, which were not affected by partisan combats between revolutionary factions.33 Faced with the counterrevolutionary threat, the partisans of the Revolution appeared to have closed ranks, leaving less space for internal conflicts in which feminine interventions might appear. The idea of women as prioritarily counter-­revolutionaries was therefore forged at the crossroads of these phenomena linking practices, prism of sources and representations: women had the means to act in clandestine life and were visible in the archives of the repression in the face of a republican political life that was essentially masculine. The organizations in the shadows therefore contributed to putting women in the spotlight in the documentation as well as in their own environment and some of them developed a capacity for action and influence there that would have been inaccessible to them in a normal context. Those who hid a refractory priest had a confessor in residence and quite often their homes were also a place for secret worship. They kept the religious vestments, played the role of godmother in secret baptisms and the local inhabitants, seeking the sacraments or confession, approached them for access to the priests in hiding. Initially motivated by their religious beliefs, they could then develop a position of authority over the people around them. In a game of concealment and exposure, they acquired a form of local fame, at the time, but also for posterity. The opening up of pensions to noncombatants who had served the royal cause, although belated, offered them the possibility of recalling their commitment to figures who would have been inaccessible to them in other circumstances. The names of those who perished for having helped refractory priests would also appear in the martyrologies drawn up by ecclesiastics in the nineteenth century, recalling in counter-relief the commitment of those who survived.34 Through their mobilization in clandestinity, the experience of repression and their steps under the Restoration to obtain a pension, women thus emerged from the shadows and were identified with the royalist camp. At the same time, however, their actions in clandestinity were mainly based on their usual social functions—housing, feeding, caring— which distanced them from the heroic figure of the fighter and contributed to depoliticizing their commitment. As in other contexts of underground or guerrilla resistance, the boundary remains blurred between what constituted gestures of mutual aid or strictly militant action. It is then difficult for women involvement to find a place in the memory

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and history of civil conflicts marked by an overvaluation of armed action.35 The ability to act of women mobilized in the counterrevolution and the political dimension of their interventions are then masked by the idea of women driven by faith or mobilized behind their male relatives. It is therefore a complex scenario that is built up between clandestinity and visibility, solidarity and political activism, community and family systems and individual initiatives, all participating in creating the lasting figure of devout and reactionary women, guardians of an immutable and closed world, for which the home has imposed itself as the appropriate metaphor.

Notes 1. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française (Paris, 1849), vol. 4, book 8, ch. 2, 183. 2. Anne-Sarah Bouglé Moalic, Le vote des Françaises, cent ans de débats, 1848–1944 (Rennes, 2012), 32–33 and 176; Anne Verjus, ‘Entre principes et pragmatism: Députés et sénateurs dans les premiers débats sur le suffrage des femmes en France (1919–1922)’, Politix: Revue des sciences sociales du politique 51 (2000): 55–80. 3. On the place of women in the religious conflicts of the Revolution, see among other works, Paul Chopelin, Ville patriote et ville martyre, Lyon, l’Église et la Révolution, 1788–1805 (Paris, 2010); Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Olwen H. Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto, 1992); Martine Lapied, ‘Les Comtadines et la Révolution française: une défense prioritaire de l’identité religieuse?’, in Religion et identité: Actes du colloque d’Aix-enProvence, ed. Gabriel Audisio (Aix-en-Provence, 1998), 169–175; Valérie Sottocasa, Mémoires affrontées: Protestants et catholiques face à la Révolution dans les montagnes du Languedoc (Rennes, 2005). 4. On the figure of the female fanatic, see Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred; Paul Choplein, ‘Une affaire de femmes? Les résistances laïques à la politique religieuse d’État sous la Révolution française’, in Genre et christianisme: Plaidoyers pour une histoire croisée, eds Matthieu Bréjon de Lavergnée and Magali della Sudda (Paris, 2014), 155–179; Hufton, Women and the Limits; Martine Lapied, ‘La fanatique contre-révolutionnaire: réalité ou représentations ?’, in Le genre face aux mutations: Masculin et féminin du Moyen Âge à nos jours, eds Luc Capdevila et al. (Rennes, 2003), 255–264. 5. Dominique Godineau, Citoyennes tricoteuses: Les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française (Aix-en-Provence, 1988); Jacques Guilhaumou, ‘Conduites politiques de Marseillaises pendant la Révolution

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française’, Provence historique 186 (1996): 471–489; Martine Lapied, ‘Les Provençales actrices de la Révolution: l’exemple des Arlésiennes’, in Pour la révolution française, recueil d’études en hommage à Claude Mazauric, eds Christine Le Bozec and Éric Wauters (Rouen, 1998), 157–161. 6. Solenn Mabo, ‘L’autre Bretonne: l’habituée des clubs et des fêtes révolutionnaires (1789–2015)’, Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Bretagne, Actes du congrès de Quimperlé 95 (2017): 263–288. 7. My analysis is based on the study of 60 open religious conflicts, recorded in series L of the departmental archives of Côtes-d’Armor, Finistère, Illeet-­ Vilaine and Morbihan (criminal and district court proceedings and administrative correspondence). 8. This expression is found several times from the pen of local administrators becoming alarmed at the religious conflicts in the period 1791 to 1792. 9. See Timothy Tackett, La Révolution, l’Église, la France: le serment de 1791 (Paris, 1986), 364, 371, 377 and 397. 10. Abbé Aimé Guillon, Les Martyrs de la foi pendant la Révolution française ou Martyrologe des pontifes, prêtres, religieux, religieuses, laïcs de l’un et l’autre sexe qui périrent alors pour leur foi (Paris, 1821), 4 vols.; Abbé Guy Toussaint Julien Caron, Les confesseurs de la foi dans l’Église gallicane à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, ouvrage rédigé sur des mémoires authentiques (Paris, 1820), 4 vols.; Abbé Guillotin de Corson, Les confesseurs de la foi pendant la grande Révolution sur le territoire de l’archidiocèse de Rennes (Rennes, 1900); Auguste Lemasson, Les actes des prêtres insermentés de l’Archidiocèse de Rennes guillotinés en 1794 publiés d’après les documents originaux (Rennes, 1927); Abbé Tresvaux de Fraval, Histoire de la persécution révolutionnaire en Bretagne à la fin du dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1845), 2 vols. For a critical approach to the martyrologies of the Revolution, see Stéphane Baciocchi and Philippe Boutry, ‘Les “victims” ecclésiastiques de la Terreur’, in Les politiques de la Terreur (1793–1794), ed. Michel Biard (Rennes, 2008), 447–460. 11. In the department of Finistère, the cases judged in Year II were heard before the Revolutionary Tribunal sitting in Brest. 12. This was in part due to patriarchal views, making men responsible for women’s actions, but also because they were responsible for the actions of their household—their wives but also their parents and servants of both sexes. 13. Morbihan departmental archives, Lz 501, A 19, proceedings from the Morbihan criminal court. 14. In half of the 61 cases of receiving and concealing priests in the collection, one or more women played the leading part. Men were on the front line in one quarter of the cases, while another quarter revealed a shared engagement between men and women.

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15. This process of feminization of practices of worship has been highlighted in the eighteenth century. See Jean Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et dieu dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1978); Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1978). However, it was above all documented for the contemporary period. See Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism (1789–1914) (London and New York, 1989) and, by the same author, ‘Le catholicisme et les femmes en France au XIXe siècle’, Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France 79/202 (1993): 63–93; Claude Langlois, ‘“Toujours plus pratiquantes”: La permanence du dimorphisme sexuel dans le catholicisme français contemporain’, Clio: Femmes, genre, Histoire 2 (1995): 229–260. The process is currently being reinvestigated, particularly in the field of studies on masculinity. See Bréjon and della Sudda, Genre et christianisme; Patrick Pasture et  al. (eds), Beyond the Feminisation Thesis: Gender and Christianity in Modern Europe (Leuven, 2012). 16. Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, ‘La femme seule à l’époque moderne: une histoire qui reste à écrire’, Annales de démographie historique (2000–2), Famille et parenté, 127–141. 17. Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, Être veuve sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 2001) and La solitude, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2008). 18. Chopelin, Ville patriote et ville martyre; Olwen Hufton, ‘The Reconstruction of a Church, 1796–1801’, in Beyond the Terror: Essays in French Regional and Social History, 1794–1815, eds Gwynne Lewis and Collin Lucas (Cambridge, 1983), 21–52; Claire Le Foll, ‘La crise religieuse à Rouen pendant la Révolution française: gestes, attitudes et comportements féminins’, in Pratiques religieuses dans l’Europe révolutionnaire (1770–1820), Actes du colloque de Chantilly (27–29 novembre 1990), ed. Bernard Plongeron (Turnhout, Belgium, 1988), 331–335. 19. Morbihan departmental archives, Lz 495, No. 549, case of receiving and concealing Rioux, former priest of the parish of Séglien, questioning of Olive Yvon, 5 Thermidor Year VII. 20. Morbihan departmental archives, Lz 444, No. 140, questioning of Joseph Brohan, 8 Pluviôse Year II, commune of Molac. 21. Ille-et-Vilaine departmental archives, L 2920, No. 261, questioning of Angélique Glatin, 15 Thermidor Year II. 22. Côtes-d’Armor departmental archives, 102 L 142, report on search and questioning, 11 Floréal Year II and 14 Floréal Year II. 23. This shared commitment of men and women, which took different forms according to gender, was found in other contexts of religious resistance: for example, in the War of the Camisards between 1702 and 1710 (a peasant revolt of French Protestants in the Cevennes after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes); in the Peasants War of 1798, in which Flemish peas-

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ants rebelled against French occupation and anti-Catholic laws; and, later, in the context of the Cristero Rebellion in Mexico between 1926 and 1929. The analysis of gender relations in these contexts is still in progress. For an initial approach, see : Philippe Joutard, Les Camisards, Paris, Gallimard, 1994 ; Jean Meyer, ‘La Christiade : le grand soulèvement catholique contre le gouvernement anti-clérical au Mexique, 1926–1929, 1932–1938’, in La guerre civile ed by Jean Baechler (Paris, 2018), 232–242 ; Xavier Rousseaux, ‘Rebelles ou brigands ? La « guerre des paysans » dans les départements ‘belges’ (octobre-décembre 1798)’, Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique, 94–95 (2005), 101–132. 24. Côtes-d’Armor departmental archives, Criminal court, 102 L 271, letter from a republican battalion leader to General Valletaux, Loudéac, 7 Germinal Year V. In the original version ‘ménagère de la chouannerie’. 25. On the maintenance of this distribution of roles in the combats of the French Revolution in Brittany, see Solenn Mabo, ‘Genre et armes dans les conflictualités locales en Bretagne’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 393 (July–September 2018), 77–98. I note that in the different context of the war in the Vendée, the participation of women in combat was more common or at least more was known about it, thanks to the existence of memoires written by women, a source that did not exist on the Chouan side. See Adélaïde Cron, ‘Les “Mémoires des Vendéennes”: un récit de guerre au féminin?’, Itinéraires (2011), [Online], http://itineraires.revues.org/1605; Jean-Clément Martin, ‘Femmes et guerre civile, l’exemple de la Vendée, 1793–1796’, Clio: Histoire, femmes et sociétés 5 (1997): 97–115. 26. For a more detailed approach to the methods of action of women in the Chouan Rebellion, see Solenn Mabo, ‘Femmes engagées dans la chouannerie: motivations, modalités d’actions et processus de reconnaissance (1794–1830)’, Genre & Histoire 19 (Spring 2017) [online], http://journals.openedition.org/genrehistoire/2687. 27. Ille-et-Vilaine departmental archives, L 2950, No. 302. 28. Ille-et-Vilaine departmental archives, L 1486, surveillance committee of Rennes, report on the arrest and questioning of Marie Haleux by the surveillance committee of Fougères, 1 and 2 Floréal Year II; L 486, report on search and arrest, 13 Floréal Year VII; 4R3, file containing a pension application from Marie Haleux. 29. Ille-et-Vilaine departmental archives, criminal court proceedings, L 2919, No. 255 and 4R8, file containing an application for a pension for services rendered to the royal army by Marie Couté. 30. Jean-Baptiste Duvergier, Collection complète des lois, décrets, ordonnances, règlements et avis du Conseil d’État (Paris, 1836), vol. 24, 657, royal order of 29 December 1824.

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31. The pension application files are classified in series R of the departmental archives. The summary statements of applicants for and beneficiaries of pensions are kept in Vincennes in series XU at the Department of History of Defence. Ten departmental commissions were set up to study the files from inhabitants of western France, and my corpus is based on the three Breton commissions of Côtes-du-Nord, Ille-et-Vilaine and Morbihan (the few files from inhabitants of Finistère were processed by the Morbihan commission). 32. Through use of the term ‘protagonists’, I intend to highlight the mechanisms of promotion of ordinary actors in favour of sociopolitical struggles, along the lines of Haim Burstin’s analyses. However, such mechanisms are much clearer in the Parisian revolutionary milieu explored by Haim Burstin in which official recognition was immediately possible and could offer men promotions and new positions. See Haim Burstin, Révolutionnaires: Pour une anthropologie politique de la Révolution française (Paris, 2013); Quentin Deluermoz and Boris Gobille (eds), Protagonisme et crises politiques, special issue of Politix, revue des sciences sociales du politique 112/4 (2015). 33. They were mainly visible, although to no great extent, in the world of the political clubs, with their closure in 1795 once again relegating them to the shadows. See Mabo, ‘L’autre Bretonne’. 34. See in note 10 above the references of the martyrologies that I have studied. 35. Regarding this manly approach to war concealing women involvement, see among other references, Luc Capdevila, ‘Identités de genre et événement Guerrier: Des expériences féminines du combat’, Femmes en guerres, eds Sophie Milquet and Madeleine Frédéric, special issue of Sextant 28 (2011): 11–25; Gabriella Gribaudi, ‘Le genre de la guerre: Mémoire et historiographie de la Seconde Guerre mondiale en Italie’, in Genre, femmes, histoire en Europe: France, Italie, Espagne, Autriche, eds Anna Bellavitis and Nicole Edelman (Nanterre, 2011), 365–382; Rita Thalmann, ‘L’oubli des femmes dans l’historiographie de la Résistance’, Résistances et libérations en France, special issue of Clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire 1 (1995): 21–36.

CHAPTER 7

Militias and Popular Royalism During the War of Independence of New Spain Rodrigo Moreno Gutiérrez

At the beginning of 1821, the viceroy of New Spain, Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, Count of Venadito, reported from Mexico City to the metropolitan government that, in addition to the regular corps, the kingdom had for its defence more than forty thousand militiamen classified as ‘urban royalists’.1 After ten years of a war that had killed more than 300,000 people in the richest viceroyalty of the Spanish Monarchy in America, an important militia structure had been established to contain and repress the rebellion. Is it possible to describe this militia multitude of urban royalists as an expression of popular royalism? In the following pages, I propose an approach to the militia that surfaced during the revolutionary civil war in New Spain as a representative case study to understand the impulses, characteristics and consequences of the counterrevolution in one of the most significant American territories. This

R. Moreno Gutiérrez (*) Institute of Historical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_7

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study seeks to review the historiographic assumptions that have obscured the examination of this phenomenon and its historical implications for the popular political culture and the culture of war generated not only in the context of the independence process in New Spain but in revolutions in general. As Marcela Echeverri contends, royalism is, on the one hand, a lens that allows us to rethink the temporal, spatial and conceptual frontiers that have conventionally structured the historical narratives about the period generally known as the ‘Age of Revolution’ and, on the other, as a very fertile ground for analysing the diversity, complexity and impact of politics and war on popular sectors.2 It is probable that, as Álvaro París Martín suggests, the implementation of categories and concepts such as ‘popular political participation’, ‘informal politicization’ and even ‘popular royalism’ results from the exhaustion of the traditional frameworks of political history.3 Consequently, it is a fruitful exercise to adopt approaches ‘from below’ and from the perspective of practices which seek to analyse repertoires of behaviour and political action in order to transcend the classical categories built around the apparently immovable, predefined and teleological causes (such as ‘independence’, ‘liberty’ and ‘progress’). This view from the perspective of popular royalism can contribute to understanding better the diverse narrative of conflicts such as the independence revolutions in Spanish America, as well as leading to the visibility of a much richer and more complex range of actors and political expressions. To that extent, it is necessary to question the most widespread interpretation that assumes that royalism is a kind of political theory that is necessarily elitist, reactionary, conservative and counterrevolutionary. Furthermore, it is useful to pay attention to concrete manifestations, experiences and practices that have usually been included within these categories without having analysed the interests and characteristics of the diverse groups that sustained them. The Hispanic American side of the ‘Age of Revolution’ and more specifically the conflict in New Spain seems particularly opportune for testing these concerns. For more than a century and a half, nationalist historiography related the independence revolutions with a strong moral dimension that ended up constructing detailed but monotonous chronicles in which amorphous groups led by charismatic leaders supported either liberty or tyranny. In these narratives, it was assumed that independence was won with people bearing arms (impulsive, unruly and determined) against an oppressive army (less in quantity, but superior in training and weaponry).4 The

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sense of independence as an epic war of national liberation was nuanced and even abandoned by the academic historiography of the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, the powerful historiographic regeneration of the 1990s that revitalized the study of independence processes dealt above all with political phenomena (representation, sovereignty, citizenship, and so on), with a consequence: the war and its implications were relegated to the background. In any case, by omission, confusion or prejudice (or a mixture of the three), royalism has not been a priority either for historiographic nationalism or for the vast majority of recent approaches to the independence period in Spanish America.5 It is true that there are studies on attitudes, actions and characters that we could consider ‘royalists’ or ‘loyalists’. Discourses, institutions, groups and individuals opposed to the insurgency have merited interesting studies, but the difficulty in alluding to very different expressions of this phenomenon has led to the widespread acceptance of the term ‘royalist’ as meaning ‘against independence’, despite the fact that during the revolution that word had a more concrete use in both a political and military sense.6 The indifference with which historiography treated, in the nineteenth century,7 ‘the Spanish party’, ‘Spanish cause’, ‘counterrevolution’, ‘servitude’, ‘dependence’, ‘tyranny’ or, from the second half of the twentieth century to the present day, the very useful neologism of ‘counterinsurgency’, has eclipsed the understanding of historical uses and manifestations of royalism during the revolutions in Spanish America, particularly in the armed sphere. These mostly anachronistic generalizations have been particularly prejudicial to the study of the impact of war on society and to the understanding of expressions and adaptations fostered by the constant exposure of communities to extreme violence and militarizing policies (both of them substantial components of any war). Like today, the plural term ‘insurgencies’ seems much more appropriate to refer to the diversity of tendencies and intentions that its singular form hid from view.8 It is also essential to question the image of a homogeneous ‘royalist army’ in order to problematize the intricate mix of military and militia corporations that was constructed to contain and repress the insurgencies. The previous paragraphs do not imply that there have been no efforts to explain this historical problem. In 1974, Hugh Hamill postulated that counterinsurgency, ‘defined as the gamut of techniques, military, political and psychological, employed to quell a guerrilla movement’, was the best option to understand the term ‘royalist activity’.9 Attentive to the viceregal

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government’s reactions to the uprising of the priest Miguel Hidalgo, Hamill sought ‘counterinsurgency’ in measures of control and assurance of internal order of towns and cities. In addition to printed propaganda and the promotion of certain religious practices, Hamill referred to ‘counterinsurgency practices’ (without going into detail) as mechanisms that combined coercion and persuasion (public executions, pardons, the destruction of villages). The article in question concluded that as the rebellion fragmented, the viceregal government elaborated a ‘complex counter-guerrilla program’. It is no coincidence that Hamill used these terms at the time he did—when there were so many arguments and theories regarding Cold War conflicts. Years later, authors such as Christon I. Archer, Brian Hamnett and Juan Ortiz Escamilla continued to explore in more depth some of the problems raised by Hamill in various publications that together offer a richer image of the Mexican Independence conflict: a destructive civil war that militarized politics and politicized the armed forces.10 However, one must consider the increased politicization brought about by militia-based counterinsurgency and how this came to articulate social relations, local identities and institutional frameworks. Consequently, this chapter sketches a broader research project on the royalists of New Spain with the dual intention of introducing the complexity of the debate on popular royalisms and bringing the popular royalisms of the New Spain revolution—rarely considered in Atlantic or global perspectives—closer to European and Anglophone historiography.11 In sum, of all the areas of royalism, the one that developed most systematically and decisively during the course of the War of Independence was that of the armed forces. Within the armed forces, the militias have not only been the least studied component, but also that in which, due to its characteristics, popular royalism was socially rooted and expressed itself in a variety of ways. This chapter is devoted to this peculiar phenomenon in the case of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.

Rise and Development of Militia in the New Spain Revolution I agree with Annick Lempérière when she says that by studying the militias it is possible to understand in what sense the independence revolutions in Spanish America were civil wars, as well as the shape of local order and the

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atomization of the armies.12 As I discuss in another text, the militia of New Spain evolved into a multiform, very complex entity; one that resembles the historical development of the conflict itself.13 In contrast with the regular or veteran military corps and the provincial army units, militias were scarcely implanted at the end of the eighteenth century. The War of Independence practically equated them with the army. This happened just as the figure of the voluntary, urban or rural militiaman was recovered and updated after the revolutionary outbreak of war in the Bajío in September 1810. This militia in particular was theoretically a reserve army for emergency situations. After news arrived of the political crisis of the monarchy and the abdications of Bayonne, the foundation of companies of Voluntary Patriots of Ferdinand VII was promoted in New Spain, precisely to show American loyalty to the deposed king. Once the civil war broke out, the dysfunctional corps of Voluntarios (Volunteers) or Distinguidos (Distinguished), made up mainly of members of the upper classes from the cities, were replaced by numerous militia units endowed with different regulations and different intentions. A revealing and early case is offered by the lancers from the indigenous barrios (neighbourhoods) of San Juan and Santiago in Mexico City: two companies endorsed by the viceregal government and commanded by their respective governors, who became colonel lieutenants.14 It is true that there was an old militia tradition which included the participation of Indian flecheros (archers) in some regions of New Spain.15 However, the new scenario, which combined the political crisis of the monarchy with the internal rebellion, created tensions between the viceroyalty’s desire to control any Indian political expression (especially if arms were involved) and their desire to participate actively in the defence of order and thereby open the negotiation of privileges or their place in the regime. The most famous and in many ways defining militia impulse was the one structured on the basis of the Military Political Rules dictated in 1811 by Félix Calleja,16 one of the main military commanders in New Spain at the time.17 The ‘Calleja Plan’ (as it is historiographically known) was designed to allow the divisions of regular armies to focus on the destruction of some of the most important contingents of rebels, as each city or village had to defend itself on its own. This was carried out through the formation of an ‘urban corps of cavalry or infantry’, composed of all the ‘honest’ neighbours, according to their class. These urban corps, allegedly led by military commanders and royal judges, would be armed with and supported

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by the provisional funds of the communities themselves or, where they did not exist, with forced contributions, agreed by a commission appointed by the local municipal council. This disposition would have given life to the so-called patriotic juntas (councils), whose functioning has been elusive for the historiography, but which would have served as the axis of local taxation which allowed the subsistence of these militia corps. In short, Calleja sought to involve the communities in their own defence, militarizing them both by enlistment and by the fusion of the political and the military government of the towns. It is worth mentioning that, in 1815, Calleja himself, by then viceroy, decreed that all the forces under the names of ‘patriots’, ‘urbans’ or ‘volunteers’ were to be called (urban or rural) ‘loyal royalists’: Fieles Realistas urbanos o rurales. Years later, in 1820, the reinstated liberal regime of the Cadiz Constitution promoted (with relative success) the dissolution or reform of these corps to become the National Militia in a process that would end up weakening the defensive structure of New Spain and influencing, in many ways, the triumph of the independence movement of 1821.18 Calleja’s regulations and their consequences have not gone unnoticed in historiography. Hamill found in this project ‘the basic blueprint for royalist counterinsurgency’ and interpreted it as a response to guerrilla warfare. He pointed out that the disposition entailed the imminent risk of arming villages, but was the only way to ensure their obedience and trust (fundamental elements of the counterinsurgency theory19 discussed at the time Hamill was writing). The Plan Calleja, according to Hamill, also sought to turn insurgents into ‘natural enemies’ of the people. The strategy was intended to protect cities and towns in view of the impossibility of controlling or stifling insurgent groups in rural areas. Experience and skill had to replace the number of regular troops. Hamill understood that ‘the plan also accelerated militarization of the society and encouraged the emergence of local caudillos’.20 For Brian Hamnett, this project—together with the organization of the pueblos—‘constituted the social dimension of royalist counterinsurgency strategy’, highlighting the popular character of these militias.21 Archer, on the other hand, noted the inefficiency of this ‘broad network of urban and rural defense forces’ or ‘second line of militias’ and their gradual dependence on extraordinary contributions. In his opinion, one of its most remarkable consequences was that military commanders manipulated local militias to control trade, communications and transportation in the regions.22 Juan Ortiz, who has devoted a lot of attention to this problem, interpreted the Plan Calleja as the cause of

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political ruptures within villages and the deepening of social conflict among community members.23 For Ortiz, three of the most important innovations introduced by this strategy were massive incorporation of the population regardless of racial or ethnic differences, a self-financing mechanism, and (although it is not explicit in the Reglamento) the possibility of ‘democratic’ election of officers within each militia unit. In spite of the aforementioned contributions, there is no real systematic study of the development of these militias between 1810 and 1821. In general, as I noted, they have been historiographically dissolved within the ample (but false) matrix of the ‘royalist army’. In this category, the royalists have been indiscriminately mixed with the regular military, the expeditionaries who arrived during the revolution, and the disciplined provincial militias (incorporated in many ways into the regulars during the war). For this reason, I believe it is opportune to offer at least a fragmentary landscape of the integration, composition and some of the main implications of the royalist militias. In numerical terms, Ortiz himself counted in the central provinces of the viceroyalty (Mexico, Puebla, Veracruz, Guanajuato, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosí, Guadalajara, Zacatecas) more than three hundred companies, mainly formed between 1811 and 1813. According to their records, there would be at least nominally in these corps more than 17,000 individuals.24 In addition, thanks to recent studies by Joaquín Espinosa and Anaximandro Pérez, we know about the sustained growth of the royalist corps in the following years as auxiliaries in the operation of the Guanajuato Command and in the South and Acapulco route Command.25 In 1816, 3500 royalists were distributed in more than thirteen towns and cities, with a considerable although variable rate of militarization. The second Command had, between 1814 and 1819, approximately two thousand troops, of which more than half were royalist (with the other half was composed of regulars and disciplined provincial militias). The militia growth in this jurisdiction is revealing: while there were only 29 officers in this corps in 1814, five years later there were 74. In the same period, the militia troop doubled: from 700 in 1814 to 1400 in 1819. A couple more cases can be useful in rounding out the image of the quantitative importance of these militias. First, the Tula Division in 1818 reported 5562 royalists (urban infantry, urban cavalry, rural infantry and rural cavalry) distributed across 35 internal military commands.26 New Galicia, that is to say, the Intendencia (administrative unit governed by an intendent) of Guadalajara, which achieved one of the best organized

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defensive structures very early on, was divided at the beginning of 1821 into six sections endowed with a total of just over 2600 regular army and disciplined provincial militia, and also the considerable amount of 9347 loyal royalists of the three arms (infantry, cavalry and artillery) distributed into 22 districts (partidos).27 Finally, the records indicate that in 1820 the Puebla intendancy was defended by 40 per cent regular troops and the rest (about 4600 troops) were loyal royalists.28 In terms of their composition, the royalist forces were made up of all classes (which, in line with the structure of the ancien régime, were more juridical than social or ethnic) in the society of New Spain. There is evidence of Spanish, mulatto and black companies in places such as Tehuantepec, the South Sea Coasts and Chiapas;29 but it is true that the majority of men enlisted were Indian or of marked Indian origin. This seems to correspond entirely to the demographic reality of New Spain but is striking in regard to the traditional reluctance to involve these communities to keep internal order. Although it is plausible that most of the officers were ‘Spanish’ (either European or American), there are cases in which the companies were led by Indian ‘caudillos’, as happened with the Chicontepec Indios Patriotas Zapadores.30 In terms of its composition, it featured one of the most important characteristics of the royalist militias and one of the most radical and interesting differences vis-à-vis the disciplined provincial militias—of which there were many attempts to create throughout Spanish America and with many difficulties during the last quarter of the eighteenth century yet that only came into force once the war really began—and the regular army. The plural composition of the royalist militias can be explained by the leeway left by the Reglamento on recruitment. It should be remembered that the plan foresaw that without exception ‘all honest neighbours, according to their class’ would be enlisted. Of that assembly, 100 or 150 would carry out the daily service; in practice, it is not clear that the daily rotation was observed and, on the other hand, the permanence of the same individuals in the service and the consequent regularization of the different units was notorious. This may have been due to the vagueness and difficulty of recruitment that used all kinds of mechanisms: voluntary enlistment, lottery, forced enlistment and other hybrid methods. This diversity corresponds to the various origins of the organization of the militia corps. In some cases, the initiative came from individuals ready to voluntarily enlist (for example, in the cities); other times it was the military commanders who organized the populations; sometimes it was the

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responsibility of intendentes (intendents) or municipalities; and finally, militias could also originate in the initiative of landowners, merchants or miners. Thus, for example, in 1811, the police and public order Junta of Mexico City formed lists of useful males to make up what at that time were called ‘Patriotic Battalions’. The Junta did not miss any opportunity to denounce the problem of the numerous exceptions that allowed many men not to be enlisted.31 Despite these efforts, everything indicates that neither the conscription nor the lottery were the most successful mechanisms for forming militias (at least in Mexico City), and that above all mestizos were attracted to armed service on account of the pay offered by merchants and owners.32 Mariana Terán observes that in Zacatecas the municipality, the intendente and the Junta de vecinos (residents’ council) promoted the creation of a battalion of Urban Loyalists. In villages like Sombrerete, though, the residents themselves, with the consent of the municipality, organized and payed for the troop.33 Another example is offered by John Tutino, who examines the case of the ‘La Griega’ hacienda in Querétaro, whose owners formed and financed a militia company made up of Spaniards from the property and a minority of mestizos and mulattoes. Later, with part of the seasonal labourers from the estate, they formed a division of Otomí Indians, but it was subordinate to that of the Spaniards. The maintenance of these forces tripled the operating costs of the hacienda, but it remained productive in one of the tensest regions in New Spain. As the threat of nearby rebellions faded and the years went by, the landowners of ‘La Griega’ paid their militia less and less.34 As can be seen, the diversity of origins and initiatives also reflected heterogeneity in the financing of royalist militias. Again, it was one thing what the Reglamento stipulated and another thing what actually happened. There is no doubt that in many towns patriotic juntas were formed, but the documentation shows great diversity in the origin of the resources that supported the militias: from cases in which the commanders attempted to make the militiamen fulfil the service free of charge, to bodies that were financed entirely by the Real Hacienda, without forgetting those that were paid for by their own commanders, as noted in Tutino’s case. It would then be necessary to nuance the belief that the regulations (that of Calleja or those approved by the Cadiz Cortes) were observed and effectively transferred the cost of the war to local instances. Nevertheless, it is true that as militias were established, so extraordinary contributions were rigorously collected from individuals and families of all kinds and

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from church, commercial, and union corporations. Many products were taxed for this purpose but the revenue was extremely irregular.35 Sometimes the amount collected was enough to pay the royalists, while on other occasions the funds were invested in repairing weapons or making uniforms. If the circumstances warranted it, the companies multiplied and so did the expenses.36 During the final years of the war, there were many complaints from towns that alleged a lack of funds due to the demanding contributions. Needless to say, there is still much to be researched regarding the internal management of these funds at the local level.

Political Culture, Culture of War In 1820, Viceroy Apodaca recognized how much the urban loyalists had contributed to the ‘pacification’ of the Viceroyalty.37 But for all that has been said in these pages, it is difficult to establish the real operative capabilities of these militias in the fight against the insurgency. In this sense, Cathal Nolan’s proposal to nuance the supposed Clausewitzian importance of battles as decisive in the course of wars and, instead, to evaluate the importance of the strategies employed in the medium and long term, should be given proper consideration.38 In fact, the nationalist tradition has emphasized the importance of great battles in the wars of independence in Latin America (Monte de las Cruces, Boyacá, Ayacucho, and so on), which has obstructed an evaluation of the incidence of militarization strategies such as the Calleja Plan. I suggest that the royalist militias were not nominal phenomena or fictitious listings (as the militias of Bourbon reformism are usually interpreted), but worked in counterinsurgency tasks in at least three senses. First, they had real effectiveness in the fight against insurgents. A systematic follow-up of the mentions of royalists in the infinite parts of war would clarify their role in military operations. Secondly, they were a genuine reserve army, as established in the eighteenth-century tradition. For example, in view of the imperative need to replace the numerous casualties of veterans and provincials, in 1818 the viceroy ordered that commanders ‘for no reason [should they] oppose the enlistment of royalists who voluntarily wish to serve His Majesty in line regiments or militias’.39 Of course, the links between the royalist militias and the structure of the rest of the armed forces were very problematic and complex; for instance, there is widespread evidence that the recruitment of the regular armies was occasionally gained through the royalist militias of the villages.40 And third, the royalist militias

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acted as deterrents. As Clément Thibaud has contended for Venezuela and New Granada, the revitalization of the militias was a mechanism to appease the communities.41 In this sense, Marshal Joaquín de Arredondo, one of the main military chiefs in northern New Spain, rejected the proposal of one of his subordinates on the extinction of patriotic companies (with the argument of saving money for the Royal Treasury). Arredondo did not trust the loyalty of the Indians and, on the contrary, he believed that they were willing to rebel and that if they had not yet done so it was precisely because of the existence of the militias. According to the marshal, the Indians believed that the militias were ready to repress, so that the fear these forces infused was reason enough to preserve them and even to strengthen and professionalize them.42 Let us now consider the political significance and collective organization of the royalists. The historiographic agenda of the subject of the militias during the independence period has been considerably enriched by the study of problems such as the rupture of territorial hierarchies, jurisdictional militarization, mobilization practices, justice administration, incorporation of pardoned persons, composition of bodies, funding mechanisms, resistance (desertion and riots), methods of election to the officers, the pulverization of the aristocratic impulse of the militias created by Bourbon reformism and, finally, how weapons in the hands of militiamen enabled diverse ways of gaining and expressing citizenship. As Peter Guardino observes for the case of Oaxaca, internalization of the search for equality (a genuinely corrosive principle of a hierarchical and corporate society) was perhaps more readily carried out in ‘royalist’ spheres than in those of the rebels.43 The idea of ‘popular royalism’ sought to exhibit behaviours, gestures, experiences, sociabilities and practices that had gone unnoticed in the counterrevolution. París suggests that the process of politicization of the popular sectors of society was not constructed exclusively on the basis of the revolutionary or liberal path and of those who rejected the revolution (or were forced to do so).44 As proposed by Echeverri, the royalism of the communities involved a deliberate political positioning and a framework of decisions that enabled practical, immediate and profitable negotiations in the short term.45 In this way, royalism in New Spain opened up social mobility and keen political awareness to groups that were previously excluded in social terms. It is therefore very important to consider the political culture of this new popular armed citizenry.

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In demographic terms, the 40,000 royalists did not represent a striking index of militarization—not even with the other 40,000 regulars and disciplined provincials—but at the local level, their presence was one of the most transcendent novelties of the Age of Revolutions in Spanish America. The appearance of royalist militias in countless towns altered political organization, authority, legitimacy, justice and solidarity. As has already been done for the insurgencies,46 a more attentive reading of popular royalism could help explain the political culture of the communities that contributed to the construction of the national state. It is not only a question of observing the vertical implementation of militarizing measures, but also of evaluating their assimilation, rejection, adjustment or adaptation in the communities themselves, in a dimension that goes beyond the strictly military. Authors such as Antonio Annino have suggested very interesting links between the militias which emanated from the Plan Calleja and the ‘ruralization of the political’ that contributed to the observance of the Cadiz regime. Militias and the territorial institutions forged many political and fiscal links that propitiated a wide margin of autonomy of the rural space vis-à-vis its urban counterpart.47 There were practices, experiences and representations that were moulded during the conflict and constituted a visible ‘culture of war’, through which groups and individuals gave meaning to the war they were waging.48 Two expressions of the culture of war materialized by the royalists were jurisdiction and tax exemptions. Regarding the former, militia proliferation allowed not only for the search for and manipulation of military jurisdiction (the fuero), but also the emergence of a network for the administration of justice. Annino speaks of a ‘new and dense territorial jurisdiction’ propitiated by the generalized extension of military jurisdiction to these popular militias.49 Yet it is not entirely clear what the extension of military jurisdiction was for the royalists. While some authorities claimed that the fuero should only be granted while on duty, there is evidence that in 1820 it was limited to those royalists who had served more than four years.50 In any case, it is evident that the fuero was employed as a strategy of community organization which was particularly sought by the Indians to evade the ordinary justices appointed by the king.51 Regarding the latter, tax exemptions, the importance of royalism in indigenous communities was evident, since their conscription exempted them from their most significant fiscal charge: the tribute. Like the case of

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Popayán studied by Echeverri, the armed mobilization of communities does not necessarily have to be understood in coercive terms but as a product of negotiations and political decisions.52 The constitutional order of Cadiz had abolished the tribute by eliminating the juridical figure of the Indian and creating an equality among all citizens. However, when Ferdinand VII’s return in 1814 sought its reestablishment, in New Spain the voices of intendentes and commanders were raised against this pretension with the argument that the Indians enlisted in the militias were literally the most ‘loyal royalists’. A more detailed study of the language used in royalist demands and petitions would reveal the gradual construction of collective identities from practices and experiences of war (or preparation for war). The mere structuring of these militias at the local level created hierarchies, defined priorities, assigned tasks and materialized legality and legitimacy. Where they arose, the royalists influenced the decision-making process of the political management of the communities. The militia thus appeared as a relatively unprecedented way of popular participation in Spanish America. This popular participation modelled the configuration of local and regional leaderships nurtured by a new generation and fostered by the conflict that developed its own clientele. During the war, the power of arms accompanied and not infrequently monopolized political power. Chiefs, officers and militia troops became agents of a political order exercised through what could be called ‘the management of violence’. We need to understand better how these practices of the mobilized communities impacted the local architecture of the power with which the independent state was born. The war experience shaped a common memory from which individuals and collectivities managed resentments, revenge, anguish and empathy. This militia pedagogy, if I may use this term, accompanied the practice of citizenship at the local level. The involvement of individuals and communities in the militias was not posed in terms of rights, but their simultaneity with the discussions regarding liberal principles made popular royalism in New Spain move more naturally into the political culture of national sovereignty and egalitarian republicanism. The network of symbolic references that constituted popular royalism did not dissolve with the fall of the Spanish Monarchy in America, but instead adapted to the independent order. Its survival was present in the national militias and civil guards of the new state, but also in some way in the constitutional culture of citizen obligations and rights. However, as

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Federica Morelli has stated, the practices inherited from the experience of the royalist militias did not consolidate the link between citizen and nation, but rather the stronger identification between the citizen and his local community.53

Conclusion As E.P.  Thompson demonstrated decades ago regarding the workers’ movement, social movements cannot be studied without seriously considering those who built them through their mechanisms of action, their representations and their ambiguous attitudes. In the same way, royalism during the Hispanic American revolutions in general and during Mexico’s independence movement in particular is visible in those who shaped it with their intentions, their practices and their associations. Raúl Fradkin argues that the revolutions led to a form of local self-­ defence war that also destabilized the dominant social cores.54 In this sense and because of its local nature, I believe that the emergence, development and implications of the royalist militias help explain—in tandem with many other historical factors in the Mexican case—territorial fragmentation and, therefore, the difficulty of achieving a cohesive national state. From this perspective, the popular royalism of New Spain could be interpreted in a similar way to that in which Van Young explained insurgency as the defence of communitarian interests The militia’s structure and popular royalism, together with other political phenomena generated during the war (such as municipalism) facilitated the autonomy of the communities regarding the ‘great causes’ (revolution, fidelity, independence). The vast majority of patriotic, urban and royalist bodies (finally transmuted into the national militias or simply assimilated with the independence achieved in 1821) mobilized during the revolutionary cycle were driven by local interests that were sometimes in tune with fidelity, sometimes with the insurgency and, at the end of the independence process, with the Iturbide movement. In this order of ideas it is necessary to banish, in the first place, the binary and monolithic depiction of armed mobilization (the royalists always as royalists versus the insurgents always as insurgents), and secondly, to invert the traditional lens of analysis and instead of focusing on the orders and intentions of the superiors (whatever side they may belong to), to focus on gradually more armed, politically conscious and effectively organized communities and regions.

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The problem of popular royalism is important not only for rethinking the caricaturized people-elite relationship but also for blurring the militia-­ military, governing-governed and civil-military borders, but also for looking at the many faces of the ‘pacification’ processes. The armed forces in general and the militias in particular that led the independence revolutions reveal particular aspects of the protracted process of state formation through the articulation of social relations, local identities and fragile institutional frameworks. Having dismantled the narrative of patriotic heroism that favoured homogeneous monolithic images of the opposing forces, the armed forces and the militias now appear as complex vehicles of diverse interests whose relationship with the society that produced them and in which they acted was always multidirectional and conflictive. It is interesting to suggest that among the royalists of New Spain resound the echoes of all the Spanish America in revolution, but also those of the sometents and miquelets in the Peninsular War (or Spanish War of Independence) and the montoneras of South America in the following decades. In the royalist militias there are also evocations of the ancient Hispanic tradition of local or urban militias that, as volunteers, carried out functions of defence and surveillance of their own town or city. Issues like the foundations of solidarity, distribution of privileges, administration of justice and enlistment, but also evasion and desertion and even enrichment of groups or individuals, would be better understood if they were studied in Hispanic or Atlantic terms. Agents of a particular political order, the military and the militia embodied (in their own communities) the monarchical order, first, and the revolution and the national state, later. Forgers of vertical and horizontal political solidarity, royalist militias not only explain administrative evolutions or government plans, but also struggles for the control of violence, local agreements and pacts, claims for rights of an armed population, the motives and systems of exclusion (and inclusion) and, finally, a political culture that was born during the war.

Notes 1. Report of the Count of Venadito to the Secretary of State, Mexico City, 8 January 1821, in Archivo General de Indias (AGI), México, leg. 1680, n.d. 2. Marcela Echeverri, Esclavos e indígenas realistas en la Era de la Revolución: Reforma, revolución y realismo en los Andes septentrionales, 1780–1825 (Bogota, 2018), xxi–xxii.

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3. Álvaro París Martín, ‘Politización popular contrarrevolucionaria en la Europa meridional: reflexiones cruzadas entre Madrid, el Midi de Francia y Nápoles (1789–1850)’, in Palacios, plazas, patíbulos: La sociedad española moderna entre el cambio y las resistencias, eds James S.  Amelang et  al. (Valladolid, 2018), 314. 4. Antonio Annino and Rafael Rojas, La Independencia: Los libros de la patria (Mexico City, 2008), 27–96. 5. In addition to Echeverri, another exception who seeks to discuss popular royalism is Tomás Straka, ‘Las razones de Don Braulio, o el realismo popular venezolano como problema historiográfico’, Varia Historia 35/67 (2019): 113–139. 6. Rodrigo Moreno Gutiérrez, ‘Los realistas: historiografía, semántica y milicia’, Historia Mexicana 263/66 (2017), 1077–1122. 7. Andrea Rodríguez Tapia, Realistas contra insurgentes: La construcción de un consenso historiográfico en el México independiente (1810–1852) (Bilbao, 2019). 8. John Tutino, ‘Soberanía quebrada, insurgencias populares y la independencia de México: la guerra de independencias, 1808–1821’, Historia Mexicana 233/59 (2009): 16–17. 9. Hugh M. Hamill, Jr., ‘Royalist Counterinsurgency in the Mexican War for Independence: The Lessons of 1811’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 153/3 (August 1973): 474. 10. For example, by Christon Archer: ‘“La Causa Buena”: The Counterinsurgency Army of New Spain and the Ten Years’ War’, in The Independence of Mexico and the Creation of the New Nation, ed. Jaime E.  Rodríguez O. (Los Angeles and Irvine, 1989), 85–108; ‘The Politicization of the Army of New Spain during the War of Independence, 1810–1821’, in The Evolution of the Mexican Political System, ed. Jaime E.  Rodríguez O. (Wilmington, 1993) 17–45; ‘Insurrection-ReactionRevolution-­ Fragmentation: Reconstructing the Choreography of Meltdown in New Spain during the Independence Era’, Mexican Studies/ Estudios Mexicanos 10/1 (1994): 63–98; ‘La militarización de la política mexicana: el papel del ejército. 1815–1821’, in Soldados del Rey: el ejército borbónico en América colonial en vísperas de la Independencia, eds Allan J. Kuethe and Juan Marchena F. (Castelló de la Plana, 2005), 253–277; and ‘Soldados en la escena continental: los expedicionarios españoles y la guerra de la Nueva España, 1810–1825’, in Fuerzas militares en Iberoamérica, siglos XVIII y XIX, ed. Juan Ortiz Escamilla (Mexico City, 2005), 139–156. By Brian R. Hamnett: ‘Royalist Counterinsurgency and the Continuity of Rebellion: Guanajuato and Michoacán, 1813–20’, Hispanic American Historical Review 62/1 (1982): 19–48; ‘Mexico’s Royalist Coalition: The Response to Revolution 1808–1821’, Journal of

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Latin American Studies 12/1 (1980): 55–86. And by Juan Ortiz Escamilla: Guerra y Gobierno: Los pueblos y la independencia de México (Mexico City, 2014); ‘La guerra de independencia y la autonomía de los pueblos’, in Interpretaciones sobre la Independencia de México (Mexico City, 1997), 177–207; ‘Identidad y privilegio: fuerzas armadas y transición política en México, 1750–1825’, in Conceptualizar lo que se ve: François-Xavier Guerra: homenaje, eds. Erika Pani and Alicia Salmerón (Mexico City, 2004), 323–249; ‘La nacionalización de las fuerzas armadas en México, 1750–1867’, in Las armas de la nación: Independencia y ciudadanía en Hispanoamérica (1750–1850), eds. Manuel Chust and Juan Marchena (Madrid, 2007), 291–324. 11. See, respectively, Pedro Rújula and Francisco Javier Ramón Solans (eds.), El desafío de la revolución: Reaccionarios, antiliberales y contrarrevolucionarios (siglos XVIII y XIX) (Granada, 2017); and Jane Errington, ‘Loyalists and Loyalism in the American Revolution and Beyond’, Acadiensis 41/2 (2012): 164–173. 12. Annick Lempérière, ‘Revolución, guerra civil, guerra de independencia en el mundo hispánico, 1808–1825’, Ayer 55 (2004): 15–36. 13. Moreno, ‘Los realistas’. 14. Virginia Guedea, ‘Los indios voluntarios de Fernando VII’, Estudios de Historia Novohispana 10 (1986): 11–83. 15. Raquel E. Güereca, Milicias indígenas: Reflexiones del derecho indiano sobre los derechos de guerra (Mexico City, 2016). 16. Félix María Calleja, ‘Reglamento político-militar’, Aguascalientes, 8 June 1811, in AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, c. 1695, exp. 5. Published in Juan E.  Hernández y Dávalos, Colección de documentos para la historia de la Guerra de Independencia de México de 1808 a 1821, eds. Alfredo Ávila and Virginia Guedea (Mexico City, 2010), vol. 3, no. 44. Calleja republished the Reglamento with minimal additions in 1813 when he was designated Viceroy. 17. Juan Ortiz Escamilla, Calleja: guerra, botín y fortuna (Zamora, 2017). 18. Rodrigo Moreno Gutiérrez, La trigarancia: fuerzas armadas en la consumación de la independencia. Nueva España, 1820–1821 (Mexico City, 2016), 89–137. 19. Jeremy Black, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: A Global History (Lanham, 2016), 4. 20. Hamill, ‘Royalist’, 479–480. 21. Hamnett, ‘Royalist’, 25. 22. Archer, ‘La Militarización’, 261–263. 23. Ortiz Escamilla, Guerra y gobierno, 133–136. 24. Ibid., 144–156.

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25. Joaquín Edgardo Espinosa Aguirre, ‘Defensa y militarización contrainsurgente en la comandancia de Guanajuato (1813–1816)’, MA thesis (UNAM, Mexico, 2018); Anaximandro Pérez Espinoza, ‘Contrainsurgencia en el sur y rumbo de Acapulco (1814–1820)’, MA thesis (UNAM, Mexico, 2018). 26. Pedro de Antoneli, ‘Estado que manifiesta la fuerza de infantería y caballería urbana y rural de realistas de la demarcación…’, Cuautitlán, 25 April 1818, in AGN, Operaciones de Guerra, vol. 35, fo. 141. 27. José de la Cruz, ‘Estado que demuestra la fuerza que hasta esta fecha tienen las Compañías de Realistas Fieles…’, Guadalajara, 12 January 1821, in AGN, Operaciones de Guerra, vol. 148, fo. 110–113. 28. Jesús Barbosa Ramírez, Súbditos ¡a las armas! La respuesta del ejército realista al movimiento de Independencia en la región Puebla-Tlaxcala, 1808–1821 (Puebla, 2009), 44–45. 29. Laura Olivia Machuca Gallegos, ‘Actores sociales en el proceso de independencia en la región de Tehuantepec, Oaxaca’, in La Guerra de Independencia en Oaxaca: Nuevas perspectivas, ed. Carlos Sánchez Silva (Oaxaca, 2011), 197–226. 30. Lieutenant Colonel Alexandro Álvarez de Güitian, ‘Lista que manifiesta los nombres de los caudillos…’, Huejutla, 12 January 1814, in AGN, Operaciones de Guerra, vol. 66, fo. 28. 31. Representation of the Police Junta to the Viceroy, Mexico, 31 December 1811, in Hernández y Dávalos, Colección, vol. 4, doc. 192, 17–29. 32. Ana Lilia Pérez Márquez, ‘Milicia urbana: los patriotas voluntarios distinguidos de Fernando VII de la ciudad de México (1808–1820)’, MA thesis (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico, 2004), 32–37. 33. Mariana Terán, ‘Acciones para la defensa realista en una ciudad novohispana: Zacatecas, 1808–1814’, Historia y Sociedad 30 (2016): 212–226. 34. John Tutino, ‘Querétaro y los orígenes de la nación mexicana: las políticas étnicas de soberanía, contrainsurgencia e independencia, 1808–1821’, in México a la luz de sus revoluciones, eds Laura Rojas and Susan Deeds (Mexico City, 2014), vol. 1, 44–45. Tutino studies the social composition of ‘La Griega’ before the revolutionary uprising of 1810 in chapter 7 of his book Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham, 2011), 352–402. 35. Case file on contributions, tax juntas and royalist funds of the Tula division, 1818, in AGN, Operaciones de Guerra, vol. 31, 91–110. 36. Arrioja Díaz Viruell, Luis Alberto, ‘La experiencia absolutista en una subdelegación novohispana: Villa Alta (Oaxaca)’, in El Sexenio absolutista. Los últimos años insurgents: Nueva España (1814–1820), ed. José Antonio Serrano (Zamora, 2014), 312–313.

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37. Letter of the Count of Venadito to the Minister of War, Mexico, 31 October 1820, in Archivo General Militar de Madrid, Ultramar, c. 5385, exp. 30, 10–11. 38. Cathal Nolan, The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (New York, 2017). 39. Note from Viceroy, in Gaceta del Gobierno de México, 19 December 1818. 40. Timo Schaefer, ‘Soldiers and Civilians: The War of Independence in Oaxaca, 1814–1815’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 29/1 (2013): 149–174. 41. Clément Thibaud, Repúblicas en armas: los ejércitos bolivarianos en la guerra de independencia en Colombia y Venezuela (Bogota, 2003), 52. 42. Letter of Joaquín de Arredondo to Alexandro Álvarez, Aguayo, 2 April 1811, AGN, Operaciones de Guerra, vol. 21, 23. 43. Peter Guardino, El tiempo de la Libertad: La cultura política popular en Oaxaca, 1750–1850 (Oaxaca, 2009), 247. 44. París Martín, ‘Politización’, 315. 45. Echeverri, Esclavos e indígenas, 112. 46. For instance, Eric Van Young, La otra rebelión: La lucha por la independencia de México. 1810–1821 (Mexico City, 2006). 47. Antonio Annino, ‘La ruralización de lo político’, in La revolución novohispana, 1808–1821, ed. Antonio Annino (Mexico City, 2010), 436–439. 48. Eduardo González Calleja, ‘La cultura de guerra como propuesta historiográfica: una reflexión general desde el contemporaneísmo español’, Historia Social 61 (2008): 71. 49. Annino, ‘La ruralización’, 437. 50. Count of Venadito to Minister of War, México, 31 October 1820, AGM Madrid, Ultramar, c. 5385, exp. 30, fo. 11. 51. José Antonio Serrano Ortega, ‘Las herencias ilustradas y gaditanas en tiempos del absolutism: Nueva España (1814–1819)’, in El Sexenio absolutista, ed. Serrano, 201. 52. Echeverri, Esclavos e indígenas, 116–125. 53. Federica Morelli, ‘¿Disciplinadas o republicanas? El modelo ilustrado de milicias y su aplicación en los territorios americanos (1750–1826)’, in Las milicias del rey de España: Sociedad, política e identidad en las Monarquías Ibéricas, ed. José Javier Ruiz Ibáñez (Madrid, 2009), 433–436. 54. Raúl O. Fradkin, ‘Los actores de la revolución y el orden social’, Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y American Dr. Emilio Ravignani 33 (2010): 79–99.

CHAPTER 8

Between Discipline and Rebellion: Popular Participation in Basque Royalism (1814–33) Andoni Artola

The Basque Provinces and the Kingdom of Navarre were, from the 1830s on, the organizational epicentre of the most important resistance to the liberal revolution in Spain. There has been long and intense debate over the fundamental reasons for this marked opposition to the constitutional system. In general terms, scholars have agreed that the collapse of the old economic, institutional and social structures which had guaranteed the prosperous integration of the region into the Spanish empire since the sixteenth century, would result in a violent insurrectional response in the face of the modernization of socioeconomic structures.1 The corollary of

I would like to thank Ane Miren Pablos Ormaza for her insightful comments on the typescript and the archival material that generously she offered to accomplish this chapter.

A. Artola (*) University of the Basque Country, Bilbao/Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_8

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this crisis has typically been situated in the First Carlist War (1833–39), one of the bloodiest civil confrontations of the century.2 The importance of this war in the Basque Country and, above all, the extended continuity of Carlism as a mass movement, have relegated to a secondary level the study of its origin as a royalist movement. Yet it was undeniably connected to previous struggles against Napoleonic occupation (between 1808 and 1813) and the war of 1820 to 1823 against the constitutionalists, as acknowledged by historical actors themselves.3 Since the very nineteenth century, the strong resistance to liberalism in these provinces has been attributed to a supposedly massive popular support for the royalist cause on the part of the Basque society. Accordingly, people would have risen up in defence of their traditional institutions against the Spanish liberal revolution on the basis of some primitive atavism that would push them to join in the counterrevolution in a massive and spontaneous way. Subsequently, Basque nationalist historiography (which considered the 1833 insurrection to be the first rejection of the Spanish national project), Carlist traditionalism (which, for its part, thought of the uprising as a spontaneous popular defence of tradition, religion and the monarchy) and historical materialism or annaliste history have qualified this thesis, without casting any doubt on the mostly voluntary nature of the mobilization.4 Recently, some studies have questioned the level of willingness within this royalist mobilization and, therefore, the popular nature of the antiliberal reaction in the Basque Country. In reality, according to these analyses, it would have been the notables who had most to lose from the liberal revolution that encouraged, organized and framed popular mobilization by means of economic incentives or coercion.5 In this chapter, I propose revisiting this ideological controversy by focusing especially on those phases prior to the Carlist counterrevolution. I consider it essential to underscore the role of ancien régime social structures in shaping early royalism. In my view, both voluntary and forced mobilization are best understood within the relations that those in power maintained with the subaltern classes. Therefore, I will begin this study with a synthetic explanation of social frameworks in the region and then move on to outlining the elements which made up the initial royalist creed. Thereafter, I will analyse the structure of the mobilization during the Constitutional Triennium (1820–23). And, lastly, I will address certain popular attitudes to the absolutist restoration of 1823, before concluding with some considerations in regard to the participation of plebeian sectors within royalist activity.

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A Brief Definition of the Socioeconomic Context The three Basque Provinces formed a special entity within the Hispanic Monarchy. Biscay and Guipúzcoa, especially, and to a lesser extent Álava too, enjoyed a particular legal status. This consisted of the recognition of their fueros, that is, special common-law rights which guaranteed them a degree of fiscal, economic and administrative autonomy. This legal status included privileges with respect to other territories of the Spanish Monarchy, such as the theoretical inexistence of compulsory military service or collective nobility. Moreover, these territories in effect enjoyed the status of free trade zones, inasmuch as they could import the consumer goods they required duty free.6 The growth of the economy in the region had been driven during the Early Modern Era by sectors closely tied to the imperial economy such as shipbuilding, the export of iron that was produced in the region, arms manufacturing and the export of Castilian wool. The participation of the Basque Provinces in foreign trade of the empire reached a level of between 20 and 30 per cent in the eighteenth century, with Bilbao and San Sebastián functioning as intermediaries between markets in America and northern Europe.7 Such close ties with the structures of the empire possibly meant that its collapse from the late eighteenth century on had an especially intense impact in altering the regional economy. Iron production, which in previous eras had involved (directly and indirectly) up to 30 per cent of the population in some areas, had entered into a crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The structural instability which had been taking place since the late eighteenth century and, especially, since the war against the French Republic (1793–95), provoked popular unrest, increasing marginalization and, linked to this, banditry.8 During the initial decades of the nineteenth century the Basque Country was shaped by a hierarchical social structure although dominant groups were nonetheless divided. Schematically speaking, there was, on the one hand, a very small reformist commercial elite, linked to the Crown and enlightened ideas, which in the early nineteenth century displayed clearly a tendency towards moderate liberalism.9 On the other, there were property-owning patricians who were economically less important but who exerted great social influence, controlled extensive client networks and took on the form of a group of natural community leaders. They controlled certain productive resources like mills and foundries, held important positions in  local government and, based on the available

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evidence, the regional clergy—the principal agent in recruiting people to royalism and exerting ideological influence—also came from this group. These notables sought to control traditional institutions in the provinces of Biscay, Álava and Guipúzcoa as well as preferably maintaining the system intact. Especially following the experience of the Constitutional Triennium (1820–23), the interests of these local notables coincided on occasion with those of the subaltern classes, for whom the privileged institutions of the Basque Provinces meant less taxes, an exemption from military service and cheap access to certain foreign consumer goods due to the absence of customs duties. These notables and plebeian sectors were opposed to that section of the elite which was more reformist and enlightened and favourable to the constitutional state, since it encouraged their own ambitious commercial and industrial enterprises.10

Royalism in the Basque Country: A Political Culture? (After 1814) One must set popular participation in royalism within this social framework. The vertical relations of dependence, patronage, clientelism and loyalty that the dominant groups maintained with subaltern sectors influenced the nature of popular participation in royalism, as well as in early Carlism. The exchange of favours from the powerful for the service and loyalty of dependents certainly guaranteed social integration, yet it could also lead to punishment or coercion when the consensus was broken.11 Yet the argument that relations of routine domination by notables are important in understanding popular royalism does not imply denying coercion and the use of force on the part of dominant groups when they thought it convenient to do so. It does, though, allow us to reinterpret popular mobilization during this period within the frame of a series of links that cannot be considered strictly political according to their current meaning. Early royalism was, then, not disassociated from the communitarian culture; it was integrated into it. The few testimonies that can be recovered from archived documents on royalism among the plebeian classes point to a conception shaped by the communitarian experience. For example, in 1822, when questioned about the anti-constitutional cause, a young farmer from Biscay said that the royalists ‘were going to defend religion, but I do not know if they were going against the constitution because I

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cannot get my head around that’.12 Fifteen years later, the mayor of a small village sent the Carlist authorities a significant analysis of the reasons why its inhabitants flocked to the side of Don Carlos against his niece Isabella: all of them are in general Carlists; as to the causes which influence this, it is not so simple to distinguish, there being several means by which reason can be called on to stir will; yet nevertheless, scouring the truth … a most obvious reason is found and akin to the simplicity and naturalness of the inhabitants in its jurisdiction which must imperiously influence their spirits, in accordance with the common sense of this country: and it is that one learns as repugnant to good reason that females should aspire to the empire, this being so … common sense teaches them as born to be subjects; and by the prevailing influence of this common sense they are spontaneously induced to esteem the party of our King and Lord, looking on with horror at the ambitions of Isabel.13

In other words, the head of a small village community believed that his neighbours were inclined towards a certain political and ideological option guided by the common sense of the country. In doing so, he was most likely referring to community practice, in which males normally inherited property. They thus became the heads of rural dwellings and, therefore, enjoyed local political representation as patres familias. As a result, at least in the rural environment, the locals transformed a domestic consideration into a political option. There was no perception here of any separation between political matters and local cultural features but, rather, that politics was conceived on the basis of the particular domestic environment, without any distinction between the private realm and the public sphere. Parallel to this assumption of royalist beliefs as elements consistent with the communitarian culture, since the evacuation of Napoleon’s forces and the return of Ferdinand VII in 1814, a royalist creed with local particularities took shape which blended the counterrevolutionary ideology with the popular anti-revolutionary reaction. The Basque Provinces were occupied permanently by the Napoleonic armies since 1808, yet resistance in the Basque Provinces did not intensify until 1810, when these territories were incorporated in to the French imperial orbit with the creation of the new Government of Biscay, which implied the elimination of the institutional particularities of each province. It is true that the Napoleonic faction had been able to attract to its plan an important group of families with an imperial outlook who had dominated the country previously, and that had

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been in close contact with enlightened tendencies and with Bourbon reformism since the eighteenth century. The Napoleonic civilization plan seemed an almost natural continuation option for this elite after the collapse of the Spanish Empire.14 Nonetheless, although hegemonic, those who made up the Napoleonic faction were few in number. From 1810 onwards, General Pierre Thouvenot deployed an enlightened programme for the country, yet the growing dissatisfaction among the population, as well as the proliferation and strengthening of local brigands, hindered its development. The Napoleonic administration had to concentrate on obtaining resources to sustain its occupation, leading to severe fiscal pressure for the popular classes that, in the end, contributed to opposing it.15 In 1814, the Basque Country regained its traditional institutions, but the postwar economic imbalances, loss of imperial domains, growth of domestic inequality, positioning of a section of the elites in favour of the Napoleonic plan, formation of an alternative class of notables of a reactionary nature, and the impoverishment of municipal treasuries, among other factors, hindered a return to the pre-1808 socioeconomic model. Within this context, the intermediate notable class that, although far from being popular, was in close contact with the masses, began to put together the first draft of a royalist ideology. From 1814 on, in this vein, there was a significant upsurge in Basque-language publications aimed, ultimately, at a popular readership. Half of these texts were Christmas carols published annually in Bilbao under the patronage of the Franciscan friars of the city. Alongside these carols, certain texts about religion, doctrine and/or customs, as well as anti-constitutional writings, were also published. The list of authors was notoriously short. It was made up of closely related people who in total accounted for two thirds of all these publications: Vicenta Moguel, her brother, the priest Juan José Moguel, their acquaintance Friar Pedro José Astarloa and the farrier José Pablo Ulíbarri.16 These writers did not reflect the aspirations of the postwar popular classes but, rather, those of that intermediate class. In any event, I believe that their literature reveals the essential features of early royalism in the region. Socially, it maintained the importance of obedience in family relations, extolled moral strictness and subjection to the doctrinal orthodoxy of Catholicism. The guiding role of the lower clergy and local notables, who formed a natural hierarchy, was legitimized. According to the historical interpretation that was derived from this literature, since the

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French Revolution the communitarian order had been corrupt—even in rural areas, in which peasant isolation should, in theory, contribute to the innocence of their inhabitants. The enlightened elites had been, to a large extent, responsible for this disturbance, since their social distinction destroyed communitarian harmony by breaking the moral language shared by members of the community. Luxuries, fashions, superficial adornments and French taste were elements of communitarian instability. In political matters, the approaches of these writers were far from being original: they can be found in several counterrevolutionary authors who, in turn, drew on the so-called European reactionary myth.17 In this sense, they do not reveal anything about the thought of the common classes. But they do allow us to detect their motives for grievance, which the authors of these publications could use to hook them into their ideological project. There are copious references to a certain moral economy: namely, a condemnation of fraud, the raising of rents and loans with excessive interest rates; there was criticism of figures who were detested by the popular sectors, such as lawyers, merchants, liberals and moneylenders as well as the elite taste for French fashion.

Royalist Mobilization in the Constitutional Triennium (1821–23) Therefore, there was an underlying layer of social, political and economic opposition to any potential changes that a liberal revolution could undertake against the traditional communitarian complex and provincial privileges. As can be read in some anti-constitutional verses of 1823, the revolution meant the elimination of protective mechanisms such as exemption from military service and the duty free import of consumer goods.18 In any event, though, this opposition would need a structure through which it could be channelled; and these conditions were met during the Constitutional Triennium of 1820 to 1823, which coincided with the first uses of the term royalist. The political transformation that could not be carried out during the previous constitutional period (1812–14) would eventually take place during this new phase, with the institutions of the Basque Provinces brought into line officially with the rest of the state. On the fiscal level, these territories lost their free trade zone status and their autonomy when it came to collecting taxes and this, in turn, led to the collapse of smuggling

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in the region and, moreover, a widespread popular opposition to taxes. The obligation to do military service, which was never formally carried out, also generated a degree of discontent among the population.19 Around 1821, according to the constitutional political head (jefe politico) of Biscay, the people were dissatisfied with the new institutions.20 Louis Pêche’s mission for the French government, consisting of gauging the opinion of these territories for an eventual intervention against the constitutional system, describes this early ferment of opposition.21 Already in February 1821, he pointed out that, in the Basque Provinces, public opinion had started to turn against the constitution: political matters remained in general alien to the peasants, who could be nevertheless mobilized by notables; sometimes by the ascendant hierarchy therein and on other occasions through payment of money, tobacco or bread. There was growing disapproval of the constitutional system because it was disrupting their privileges, and some notable families were starting to exploit this discontent through priests, whom the peasants saw as ‘members of their own families and speakers of the Basque language’.22 The popular classes remained, for Pêche, in a kind of proto-political state: the liberal press had hardly any influence and measures to create a liberal public sphere through the so-called patriotic societies (sociedades patrióticas) were not producing the desired effects, in contrast to those used by priests and notables, with whom they were more familiar. At the same time, a broader movement was developing which the author of the correspondence kept pointing out when he said that the provinces were ‘in the midst of an insurrection, if not de facto, at least intentionally’.23 Indeed, some rather significant royalist plots had already been carried out: for example, that of Salvatierra (Álava), in April 1821, which was copied in other towns throughout the provinces. It is not my goal to describe these plots in detail but, rather, to analyse how they functioned on the basis of a few examples. The royalist uprising that began in Guipúzcoa in May 1822 reveals, thanks to the testimony of its very leaders, the basic stages of the royalist mobilization.24 Firstly, a small group of notables opposed to the constitutional system—in this case, a surgeon (Francisco Ignacio Gorostidi) and a priest (Francisco José Eceiza)—evaluated the possibility of organizing a royalist plot. More specifically, it was necessary to check the willingness of young people to get involved. They believed many would do so ‘if at the head of this enterprise a subject were placed who knew how to carry it out’, that is, if a leader were found who was able to articulate their

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discontent. The person chosen was a relative of both conspirators, the priest Francisco Eceiza, the son of a noble house, a subject ‘of great popularity throughout the district’.25 Having confirmed that ‘aversion to the constitutional system was widespread’, they could move on to the next stage: the use of their social influence to achieve the necessary force. They managed to round up 400 young men to, in their words, ‘defend Religion’ which they believed to be under threat, and grant ‘the full liberty of the King in the exercise of his sovereignty’, which they deemed annulled by the liberals, and the ‘privileges of the province’.26 These goals, however, did not appear to coincide with those of the young men who had joined the movement: following the first wave of repression on the part of constitutionalist troops, only six people remained. Clearly, any success depended on integrating these guerrillas into a structure that would provide the necessary logistics to endure. These plots involved heterogeneous people and interests in a kind of temporary alliance which comprised peasants, artisans, marginal elements, smugglers and clerics. At the top, an elite related to the monarch himself gave a degree of unity to the group and provided it with the necessary logistics to guarantee its prevalence. One of the most important actors in all this activity was General Francisco Eguía, a refugee in Bayonne since March 1821 with the financial support of the Count of Artois (the future Charles X of France), and tasked with putting together a royalist junta (council) by Ferdinand VII. His reputation, wealth and influence in the Basque Country made him a fearsome enemy of the constitutional system.27 Hence, after several failures, some notable conspirators in Guipúzcoa attempted to contact him in order to gain ‘supreme leadership in their operations’.28 Alongside figures like him, there were some bureaucrats and grandees such as the Marquis of Valdespina, who contributed his status, connections and economic resources to aiding the insurrection.29 This pyramidal structure can be seen in a royalist plot in 1821, in which individuals of different social backgrounds, professional status and personal interests took part.30 Therein, a tailor from Bilbao and one of the main leaders, José Ramón de Arrien, acted as an intermediary between the popular mobilization and the higher leadership. On the one hand, he oversaw some younger tailors within his professional circle. Moreover, he was in contact with royalist leaders whom he had met in guerrilla groups during the Peninsular War, such as the priests Ramón de Aguirre and Domingo de Guezala.31 José Ramón de Arrien boasted that here were

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important people involved, in a chain of command which reached the king himself. He also spread rumours about the financial and logistical aid that the Kings of France and Naples were going to provide.32 The royalist leader Fernando de Zabala had spoken in similar terms some months earlier when he stated that there were more than 50 very rich and powerful people willing to contribute plenty of money.33 The recruitment of forces was carried out through the use of prior relations of dependency, patronage and clientelism. Yet, as had also happened before, force was employed when the mechanisms of consensus failed. Ramón de Aguirre, Domingo de Guezala and Miguel de Echevarría (also a priest) travelled around districts in which they had influence to amass armed men, and committed abuses when young men or villages were not willing to cooperate.34 In 1822, the royalist guerrillas managed to gradually form part of a coordinating centre which had been set up in France.35 Until then, those which operated in the region had occasionally collaborated, joining forces to carry out specific acts and providing logistical support, but this strategy had proven to be of little use in dealing with enemy columns. Therefore, in August 1822 the heads of each province decided to create a government which ‘would be set up to lead them’, link up with the royalist elite and, indirectly, with the monarch himself. More than 1500 people, among whom ‘Priests, Soldiers, Lawyers, Gentlemen, Rich Men, Nobles’ stood out, met secretly in order to appoint a Governing Council of the Basque Provinces and designate military heads to act ‘in favour of Religion and the King’.36 The confrontation had entered into a distinctly militarized phase, since the constitutional government had declared a state of war in northern Spain that very same month, on 12 August.37 The project was in all likelihood linked to the recent creation of the Urgel Regency, a body charged with coordinating the royalist insurrection. The regency was created with the blessing of King Ferdinand VII himself and the French government, and set up by the Marquis of Mataflorida, in the only territory controlled by the royalists. However, the regency was swiftly discredited by the monarch himself, who instead promoted the figure of General Francisco Eguía. In his place of exile, Bayonne, some of the most important anti-constitutionalist leaders had been meeting since 1821.38 They set up a new Basque Government which granted the royalist General Francisco Longa the necessary means to coordinate the royalist guerrillas in the region, under the express condition that provincial privileges were respected.39

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One can define a last level in which popular mobilization was framed: the international order created by the absolutist powers following the Congress of Vienna. In November 1822, France, Russia, Prussia and Austria agreed in Verona to destroy the constitutional systems, which they considered to be contrary to the monarchical principle, and they pointed out as objectives Spain and Portugal. It is true that, during 1821 and 1822, there were constant royalist uprisings, yet the constitutional state had managed to put them down. It was the military intervention of the so-called Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis (Cien Mil Hijos de San Luis) which paved the way for the restoration of absolutism in Spain, rather than the action of the local population. When, on 7 April, an army led by the Duke of Angouleme and made up of 56,000 Frenchmen and 35,000 Spaniards crossed the border, locals did not greet them with any special enthusiasm, although nor did they offer any resistance.40 Anti-constitutional guerrillas in the Basque Country would, then, be part of a chain of hierarchies, loyalties and patronage, fuelled by the logistics supplied by the counterrevolutionary elite. However, the conduct of combatants from a humble social background revealed, on more than one occasion, a lack of synergy between leaders and the popular classes they mobilized. Eventually, a popular tradition of protest would coincide with militant royalism; but the absence of a perfect interclass overlap was obvious from the beginning. For example, in 1822, the leaders of some guerrillas could not prevent their subordinates from looting private homes; the rank and file angrily demanded greater violence against liberal prisoners and, imposing themselves on their superiors, decided collectively to kill prisoners in the face of impotence on the part of officers who could not control them.41

Restoration, Popular Frustration, White Terror (1823–25) This lack of synergy would be a source of disagreement in the restoration of the absolutist system in 1823. The intervention of the French Monarchy from 1823 onwards was motivated by a wish to see what the restoration was capable of achieving: namely, stabilizing the continent in the face of what were considered revolutionary excesses, while maintaining its post-­ imperial plans for territorial expansion and colonial commerce.42 Ferdinand VII was forced to count of the help of French troops because he still

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lacked a fully formed army. For their part, the French were interested in controlling the situation in Spain, the former centre of a vast empire which, in spite of the break with its old dominions, still maintained close relations with them. The French authorities had intended to establish a charte octroyée (granted charter) system with a moderate government aimed at avoiding any extreme reaction against the administration, whether of a republican or ultra-royalist nature.43 Nevertheless, both the French who sent part of their army to Spain and that section of the elite which sought to establish the new system on moderate political foundations came across a panorama that was difficult to control. The excesses of those who were now considered ultra-royalists alarmed the authorities from the outset. Behind their actions was, in many cases, a frustration of expectations which royalists of a more humble background had cherished in their struggle against the constitutional system. The royalist leader Fernando de Zabala promised one young man that, if he got involved in a plot which he was devising, he would reward him with the position of an official or sergeant.44 Such promises were common, but on most occasions they were not fulfilled, in spite of the pressure exerted on royalist notables from below by those who had taken an active part in defending the absolutist monarchy.45 Since the institutions of the absolutist monarchy had been restored, there were clear difficulties in involving popular sectors. For example, in Vitoria, from July 1823 onwards, orders were sent out to resolve the problems of an excess of unemployed people, public profanity, the proliferation of women leading bad lifestyles and the persecution of liberals.46 The supposed alliance of the plebs with the elites during the Constitutional Triennium had its limits. The absolutist restoration of 1823 was characterized by the use of repressive measures against constitutionalists, who were frequently persecuted by the general public and who had to go into exile, suffer imprisonment or banishment. Many of them had been members of families that, through their connections to the Crown, commerce or property, had controlled the provincial power structures. In a letter of June 1823, the daughter of the well-known liberal Count of Villafuertes described the persecutions and threats inflicted by popular royalists in Vitoria.47 In Biscay, her relatives suffered a similar persecution: in a letter to the brother-­ in-­law of the Count of Villafuertes, the merchant Guillermo Uhagón complained about ‘the miserable existence’ that liberals were leading there in Bilbao.48 These families were hoping that, through the pressure of the French, there would be an end to such ‘distress and that order may begin’,

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since ‘they torment and humiliate [us]’.49 An order of the Duke of Angouleme, on 8 August 1823, by which the more moderate French authorities took over control of repression of the constitutionalists, gave them some hope, although they were aware that ‘there are many and big wounds that must be healed’.50 Additionally, during this period provincial versions (called Armed Civilians or Armed Locals) of the royalist militia of the kingdom (Royalist Volunteers) were created. This service was unpaid, but its members could expect military privileges, preference when it came to attaining administrative positions and the right to bear arms. Socially, this militia was imbued with a class dimension: it was made up almost exclusively by poor farm workers, day labourers, servants and workers, although its leaders were drawn from among notables.51 Rather than theft, extortion and abuse on the part of the troops disappearing on account of the discipline, though, in some cases such practices were legitimized by the institutional protection they now enjoyed. Such discipline, moreover, had clear limits. Be that as it may, around 1825, the ultra-royalist sectors began to come together around Prince Don Carlos as a reaction against the authority that moderate ministers would acquire in the government.52 One ultra plot in the summer of 1825 had ramifications in the Basque Country. According to what was stated in reports that reached the royal police in Madrid in July 1825, liberals in Vitoria were being subjected to severe harassment with insults, death threats and physical violence. The ‘low people’ did not spare ‘insults, humiliations and abuses’ when it came to ‘landowners, merchants and wealthy people of the Basque Provinces’.53 Ultra-royalist ferment in the province of Guipúzcoa was also noticeable, and it managed to lead to disorder in several towns which concerned the French authorities.54 At the same time, a confidential report sent to the General Superintendence of Police in Madrid informed of the alarming situation in Biscay, due to the suspicion that a strong ultra-royalist movement was taking shape there. Particular mention was made of the influential clientele of the Marquis of Mataflorida, who had managed to put the Government (Diputación) of Biscay together with individuals opposed to any form of moderate policies. Sectors which questioned the government and, more seriously, the king himself, enjoyed an increasingly developed infrastructure and a significant armed force, and they emphasized their obsession with ‘cutting the throats of those who were at the very least branded liberals’.55

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In sum, a split was emerging within the bloc which had coincided in the opposition to the constitutional system. In the years that followed, each of the factions into which the royalism of the Constitutional Triennium had disintegrated would attempt to foster loyalty and, if necessary, mobilize a popular mass which had become indispensable in the political struggle, even though controlling this mass would prove problematic on account of the persistent lack of coherence between the interests of the parties involved.

Epilogue: The Lower Order, Between Hierarchical Loyalty and Autonomy, from the Split Within Royalism Toward Civil War (1825–33) In the following years, and up to the Carlist insurgency of 1833, this split between moderate sectors, constitutionalists and royalists would grow even wider. Within the radicalization process of the factions involved, notables or provincial leaders, community figureheads, continued to be key actors in recruiting popular sectors. This politicization was not carried out, though, in a solely royalist or conservative direction. Far from the counterrevolutionary unanimity that the more traditional historiography has attributed to the Basque Country, there was different behaviour or positioning, often in line with the relationship that local notables maintained with the elites that aspired to control the Spanish state.56 The insertion of the community into a new political paradigm took place through traditional connections, participation in war, or both ways. In this sense, one cannot perhaps speak of a popular royalism but, rather, different forms of joining royalist action groups. In the county of Oñate, for example, in 1837, most residents were of a ‘well-known loyalty’ to the struggle against the constitution. This was due in good measure to the fact that, since the ancien régime, the valley had been divided into two factions: the ‘Alzintas and Zarristas, because their heads had been since time immemorial the Houses of Zarria and that of Alzaa’. While elsewhere it was normal for such factions to become ‘the Royalist and Liberal denominations’, in this case both heads opted for the antiliberal faction and they led, through the use of coercion, the Carlist uprising in their area of influence.57 Meanwhile, in the district of Munguía, family members of the royalist leader Fernando de Zabala would play a key role in influencing the royalist orientation of residents there.58 And in Ermua, which was

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controlled by the Marquis of Valdespina, there were almost no constitutionalists.59 In contrast, areas dominated by constitutionalist leaders offered up a different political landscape. For example, in several towns in the Deva Valley, there were many constitutionalists, which was attributed to the leadership of the liberal general, Gaspar de Jáuregui. According to a report of 1836, in this area ‘the passion of compatriots for some, the level of friendship for others, and the relationship of several to Don Gaspar Jáuregui, a native of this town … has pulled them along based on the same way of thinking’. If this man ‘had followed another path … there is no doubt that in Villareal the whole population’ would have been royalist.60 In a similar way, it was thought that the town of Éibar, which was mostly constitutionalist, had acquired its liberal and ‘anarchical ideas’ through the overriding influence of the arms manufacturer Gabriel Ibarzábal.61 In other words, the form which the political participation of the lower classes took on during this time and, most notably in rural areas, was inseparable from the traditional forms of the ancien régime. In short, relations of dependency, loyalty and patronage were clearly important in local politicization up to the First Carlist War. This does not mean, far from it, that the popular sectors maintained perfect or harmonious relations with the notables. The discrepancy between their respective aspirations continued to be commonplace. From the point of view of enlightened liberals in the Basque Country, the lower classes formed an easily influenced yet uncontrollable mass. According to the constitutional patrician Cayetano Oxangoiti, at the start of the Carlist insurrection, in October 1833, there was seemingly huge popular momentum, yet they were not exactly moved by the counterrevolutionary slogan of God, Homeland and King. Instead, the people had a taste for ‘perennial revolts and wars’ which allowed them to steal and expropriate from the rich. Peasants showed their masters a fabricated deference, but they did not really respect them. Hence they joined in the violent insurrection of 1833, the result of which they hoped would be favourable to their material interests. However, when the revolt became militarized with the arrival of constitutionalist troops, ‘almost all of them lay down their arms’, and at that moment the Carlist leaders violently forced them out onto the battlefield.62 And this was not an isolated analysis. According to the constitutional patrician Juan José de Mugartegui, the same material motive, namely hatred of landowners, brought the popular masses out to fight in 1833, convinced that it would not last very long. Later, being

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subject to military discipline led to widespread rejection of the cause on their part, as did the lack of respect on the part of the Carlists towards the Basque traditional institutions. And, of course, this refusal to serve was answered with forced recruitment.63

Conclusion Until a few years ago, coercion or a lack of willingness on the part of lower class royalists or Carlists was a recurring argument of progressive and liberal scholars. In contrast, a (more successful) argument, namely that of a hugely voluntary involvement within the same ranks served to delegitimize the formation of the Spanish liberal state. On the basis of the Basque example, I have attempted to demonstrate that, in both cases, the very social characteristics of the historical context have been neglected in favour of certain ideological prejudices. It is difficult to know what royalist militants from a humble background thought. First-hand testimonies are scarce and, almost always, manipulated by people belonging to dominant groups. Nevertheless, early nineteenth-­ century Basque counterrevolutionary literature reveals two important things: on the one hand, that a strand of royalist notables sought to establish, from the end of the Peninsular War on, an interclass alliance against any potential revolution; and on the other, that this fraction of the dominant group understood the reasons for grievance on the part of the popular classes, as well as the social structure of the community, and it was able to make use of this knowledge to create this synergy. The formation of a militant royalism in the Basque Country came about during the Constitutional Triennium. One can observe, in the opposition to the liberals, in the guerrillas and in the plots that were devised during that period, how popular participation took place through the activation of pre-existing links of dependence or patronage, through the gathering of former combatants in the Peninsular War or, when the royalist notables did not manage to convince their inferiors, by force. This does not imply a rejection of any autonomy on the part of the lower social orders within royalism. As would be demonstrated by the restoration of absolutism in 1823, for example, the radical expectations of many combatants from humble backgrounds were frustrated, in that they did not coincide with the objectives of the royalist leaders. The popular reaction against liberal reformist elites, against whom there existed prior

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social and economic grievances, was especially harsh, but nor were royalist notables spared from popular anger either. In fact, behind popular involvement in royalism there frequently hid an earlier subversive tradition which found it difficult to adapt to the demands of any discipline. In this sense, the participation of plebeian sectors moved between a hidden anti-elitism and deference towards their superiors, until the definitive militarization of the confrontation with the liberals, during the First Carlist War, altered the conditions of popular involvement in the struggle against the constitutional system. Funding: Work undertaken within the research project funded by Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation [PID2020-114496RB-I00], titled Disrupciones y continuidades en el proceso de la modernidad, siglos XVI–XIX. Un análisis multidisciplinar (Historia, Arte, Literatura), and the Research Group of the Basque University System IT1465-22, titled Sociedades, Procesos, Culturas (siglos VIII–XVIII).

Notes 1. Joseba Agirreazkuenaga, ‘La vía armada como método de intervención política: análisis del pronunciamiento carlista (1833)’, in 150 años del Convenio de Vergara y de la Ley del 25-X-1839, eds Joseba Agirreazkuenaga and José Ramón Urquijo (Vitoria, 1990), 177–226; Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, La crisis del Antiguo Régimen en Guipúzcoa, 1766–1833 (Madrid, 1975); Emiliano Fernández de Pinedo, Crecimiento económico y transformaciones sociales en el País Vasco, 1100–1850 (Madrid, 1976). From different starting positions, a similar conclusion is drawn by John Coverdale, The Basque Phase of Spain’s First Carlist War (Princeton, 1984), who contends that this massive response was not due to any crisis but, rather, the wish to preserve still strong socioeconomic structures which suited most of the population. 2. According to John Coverdale, the number of victims on the government side (deaths, injuries, disappearances, prisoners who did not return home) rose to around 175,000. He estimates the total number of deaths (not including civilian casualties) at 2.5 per cent of the Spanish population. See Coverdale, The Basque Phase, 3. The Correlates of War Project calculates the number of mortal victims at just over 135,000. The Correlates of War Project, COW War Data, 1816–2007 (v4.0) at http://www. correlatesofwar.org/data-­s ets/COW-­w ar/intra-­s tate-­w ar-­d ata-­v 4-­0 (consulted 19 July 2017).

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3. It was believed that there had been a single cycle of conflict against revolution and liberalism from the Napoleonic occupation of the country in 1808 to the Carlist War. For example, police reports on political affiliation filed during the First Carlist War indicated as a counterrevolutionary merit having been loyal to the cause at “all times”; in other words, in the war against Napoleon, the war of 1820–23 against the constitutionalists and the Carlist War itself. See, as an example, Archivo Histórico Provincial de Álava (Provincial Historical Archive of Álava), Diputación, file 1863, 2. 4. For an impeccable historiographical synthesis, see Julio Aróstegui et  al., Las guerras carlistas: Hechos, hombres e ideas (Madrid, 2003), 143–149. 5. José Ramón Urquijo, ‘¿Voluntarios o quintos? Reclutamiento y deserción en la Primera Guerra Carlista’, in Violencias fratricidas: carlistas y liberales en el siglo (Pamplona, 2009), 99–186. In similar terms, Rosa María Lázaro, La otra cara del carlismo vasconavarro (Vizcaya bajo los carlistas, 1833–1839) (2nd rev edn, Saragossa, 1991). See also Ramón del Río, Revolución liberal, expolios y desastres en la primera guerra carlista en Navarra y en el frente norte (Pamplona, 2000), 19–20, 34. 6. See, in general, José María Portillo, Monarquía y gobierno provincial: Poder y constitución en las provincias vascas (Madrid, 1991). 7. Álvaro Aragón and Alberto Angulo, ‘The Spanish Basque Country in Global Trade Networks in the Eighteenth Century’, International Journal of Maritime History 25/1 (2013): 149–172. 8. Juan Gracia Cárcamo, Mendigos y vagabundos en Vizcaya (1766–1833) (Bilbao, 1993), 156–160; David Zapirain, Gizarte kontrolaren aldaketak: Poliziaren sorrera Gipuzkoan (1688–1796) (San Sebastian, 2008), 255–264. 9. José María Imízcoz and Rafael Guerrero, ‘Familias en la Monarquía: La política familiar de las elites vascas y navarras en el Imperio de los Borbones’, in Casa, familia y sociedad: País Vasco, España y América, siglos XV–XIX, ed. José María Imízcoz (Bilbao, 2004), 177–238; Daniel Bermejo, La caída de una clase política: Los reformistas vascos en la crisis del Antiguo Régimen (Bilbao, 2022). 10. Joseba Agirreazkuenaga and José María Ortiz de Orruño, ‘Algunes puntualitzacions sobre la insurrecció carlina al País Basc: l’actitud dels notables rurals’, in Carlisme i moviments absolutistes, eds Josep Maria Fradera et  al. (Vic, 1990), 169–186; José María Orruño, ‘Fueros, identidades sociales y guerras carlistas’, in La autonomía vasca en la España contemporánea (1808–2008), eds Luis Castells and Arturo Cajal (Madrid, 2009), 25–52. 11. On this, see Ignacio Atienza, ‘Pater familias, Señor y Patrón: oeconomica, clientelismo y patronato en el Antiguo Régimen’, in Relaciones de

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producción, poder y parentesco en la Edad Media y Moderna, ed. Reyna Pastor (Madrid, 1990), 411–458, esp. 417. 12. Archivo Foral de Vizcaya (Provincial Archive of Biscay, hereafter, AFB) JCR1195/9. 13. AFB, AQ1441/50, political description of the village of Guizaburuaga, 17 February 1837. 14. Javier Esteban and Daniel Bermejo, ‘¿De ilustrados a afrancesados? Un acercamiento social a los ex socios de número de la Bascongada durante la ocupación francesa’, in Familias, experiencias de cambio y movilidad social en España, siglos XVI–XIX, eds Francisco García and Francisco Chacón (Cuenca, 2020), 161–183. 15. Gildas Lepetit, Saisir l’insaissisable: Gendarmerie et contre-guérilla en Espagne au temps de Napoléon (Rennes, 2015), 130–135, 138; see, too, with due ideological precaution, Juan José Sánchez, Vascos contra Napoleón (Madrid, 2010), 130–135, 138. 16. Xabier Altzibar, ‘Bizenta Mogelen gabon kantak eta 1828ko bertsoak’, Bidebarrieta 19 (2008): 20–31 and ‘Bizkaiko euskal idazaleen gizarte ikusmoldea (1800–1833)’, Bidebarrieta 24 (2013): 25–104; Andoni Artola and Javier Esteban, ‘El discurso reaccionario en Vizcaya: De la antiilustración a la contrarrevolución. Carácter, productores, agentes, difusores’, in Discursos y contradiscursos en el proceso de la modernidad, eds José Ángel Achón and José María Imízcoz (Madrid, 2019), 511–542. 17. Javier Herrero, Los orígenes del pensamiento reaccionario español (Saragossa, 2020 [1971]). 18. Marquina, Xemein ta Echevarric irurac bat agur deutse eguiten constitucinoeco damiari (Bilbao, 1823). 19. Javier Pérez, La Diputación Foral de Vizcaya: el régimen foral en la construcción del Estado liberal (1808–1868) (Madrid, 1996), 87–114; Coro Rubio, Revolución y tradición: El País Vasco ante la Revolución liberal y la construcción del Estado español, 1808–1868 (Madrid, 1996), 16–27; Félix Llanos Aramburu, El Trienio Liberal en Guipúzcoa (1820–1823): Antecedentes de las Guerras Carlistas en el País Vasco (San Sebastián, 1998); Renato Barahona, Vizcaya on the Eve of Carlism: Politics and Society, 1800–1833 (Reno and Las Vegas, 1989), 48–60. 20. Quoted in Barahona, Vizcaya on the Eve, 58. 21. These interesting letters can be found in Archives Nationales (French National Archives, hereafter, AN), Police Générale F7, 6644. The source was first cited by Jean-René Aymes, ‘Un témoignage inédit sur l’Espagne libérale en 1821: la misión de l’agent français Louis Pêche’, in Hommage des hispanistes français à Noël Salomon (Barcelona, 1979), 91–101. It is also mentioned in Barahona, Vizcaya on the Eve, and, more ercently, used

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by Sophie Bustos, La nación no es patrimonio de nadie: El liberalismo exaltado en el Madrid del Trienio Liberal (Bilbao, 2022). 22. AN F7, 6644. 23. Ibid. 24. Relación histórica de las operaciones militares del cuerpo de guipuzcoanos realistas (San Sebastián, 1824). 25. Ibid, 2. 26. Ibid, 4. 27. José Luis Comellas, Los realistas en el Trienio Constitucional (1820–1823) (Pamplona, 1958), 36, 63; AN F7, 6643. 28. Relación histórica, 4. 29. Barahona, Vizcaya on the Eve, 60–68. 30. The court file drawn up by the authorities is in AFB, JCR4484/16. 31. Born in Bilbao in 1762, Domingo de Guezala was ordained a deacon in 1785. In 1792, he was made a captain of the Biscay Volunteers against the French Republic. In 1809, he once again took up arms against the Napoleonic occupation. He was rewarded for his services with several decorations. Archivo General Militar de Segovia (General Military Archive of Segovia, hereafter, AGMS), Expedientes Personales (EP), 1, G, exp. 4206. 32. AFB, JCR4484/16. 33. AFB, JCR0177/6. Born in 1788, Fernando de Zabala achieved great notoriety thanks to his participation in the Peninsular War, reaching the rank of sergeant in the First Battalion of the Biscay Volunteers under the leadership of Guezala. He would go on to be one of the ringleaders behind the Carlist insurrection of 1833. 34. AFB, JCR4484/017. 35. Barahona, Vizcaya on the Eve, 64; Pérez, La Diputación Foral, 118–122. 36. Union de las provincias bascongadas Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa y Alava, en defensa de los derechos del altar y el trono (Bilbao, 1823). 37. Pérez, La Diputación Foral, 122. 38. AN F7, 6643. 39. AGMS EP1, L 916, O. 40. Emilio La Parra, Los Cien mil hijos de San Luis: el ocaso del primer impulso liberal en España (Madrid, 2013), 22–30; Comellas, Los realistas, 200–202. 41. Relación histórica, 14, 26, 30. 42. David Todd, ‘A French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870’, Past & Present 210/1 (2011): 155–186. 43. La Parra, Los Cien mil hijos, 295–304. 44. AFB, JCR0177/006. 45. AFB, AQ1292/85. Report of several officials to the Seigneury of Biscay, requesting economic aid for their soldiers, 18 May 1824.

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46. See in this regard the numerous publications of the authorities, in the Biblioteca del Seminario de Vitoria (Library of the Seminary of Vitoria), Ayala collection, fo. 45, no. 20. 47. Archivo de la Casa de Zavala (Archive of the House of Zavala, hereafter, ACZ), Letters, 13.10, Vitoria, 19 June 1823. 48. Archivo de la Casa de Alcíbar Jáuregui Michelena (Archive of the House of Alcíbar Jáuregui Michelena), Alcíbar-Jáuregui collection, file 15, folder 226, Portugalete, 23 December 1824. Born in Bilbao in 1782, Guillermo Uhagón was the son of a merchant by the same name from France. During the Napoleonic occupation of Biscay, he collaborated with the occupiers as a member of the Administrative Council established in the territory (1812). During the Constitutional Triennium, he was a national militiaman and head of the Bilbao consulate. He suffered repression following the reestablishment of absolutism and settled in France in 1825. 49. Ibid., G. Uhagón to M.M. Alcíbar. Bilbao, 6 January 1824. 50. AFB, Familiar, Sota 2875/48, G.  Uhagón to F.  Sota, Portugalete, 19 August 1823. 51. José María Orruño, ‘La militarización de la sociedad vasca en tiempos de paz: los naturales armados (1823–1833)’, Vasconia 26 (1998): 23–40. On the popular participation of regional notables by means of the royalist militias, see Juan Vidal-Abarca, ‘Alava y el carlismo: La familia Varona’, in Los carlistas, ed. Francisco Rodríguez de Coro (Vitoria, 1991), 162–212. 52. Josep Fontana, De en medio del tiempo: La segunda restauración española 1823–1834 (Barcelona, 2006). 53. Archivo Histórico Nacional [AHN] Consejos, file 12.292. 54. Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Political and Consular Correspondence, San Sebastian, III/ 53, 55r–v. 55. AHN Consejos, file 12.292. 56. For Navarre, this has been highlighted by Ángel García-Sanz and Javier Ruiz Astiz, Militares carlistas navarros (1833–1849) (Pamplona, 2017), as well as by Juan Pan-Montojo, Carlistas y liberales en Navarra (1833–1839) (Pamplona, 1990). 57. Archivo de la Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia (Archive of the Royal Academy of History, hereafter, ABRAH), 9, 6708, Urquijo ‘¿Voluntarios o quintos?’, 112. 58. AFB, AQ1365/46. In fact, his brother-in-law, the priest Francisco de Eguía, would take an active part in the local organization of the Carlist insurrection. 59. AFB, AQ1393/212, report of the Carlist commissioner of Durango, 18 February 1837.

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60. ABRAH, 9, 6708, report of the Carlist commissioner of Villarreal, 31 October 1836. 61. AFB, AQ215/ 1, report of the Police, 4 March 1825. See also Gotzon Iparragirre, Debarroko oasi liberala: aitzindarien bila: Eibar, 1766–1876 (Bilbao, 2008). 62. Cayetano Oxangoiti, Consejos a un Hazendado Vizcaino: Memoria para el buen gobierno del caserio bascongado, 1823–1838, eds Enriqueta Sesmero and Javier Enríquez (1823–1838; Bilbao, 2002), 32–34. 63. ACZ, Zavala AP, 104/16.

CHAPTER 9

Revolts, Brigandage and Popular Royalism in Southern Italy in the Aftermath of National Unification Simon Sarlin

The ‘grande brigantaggio’: Land-Hunger Revolt Or Armed Counterrevolution? The Terms of a 160-Year Debate In late 1863, the new Kingdom of Italy employed more than 100,000 soldiers—nearly two-thirds of its army—in the south of the peninsula against the armed guerrillas that directly opposed its authority. The massive increase in the number of active troops in the Mezzogiorno (already up from 15,000  in March 1861 to 50,000 by the end of that year) had enabled the army to quash the open rebellions that had broken out in various locations in almost every southern province following their integration into Victor Emmanuel’s kingdom. Armed bands, some

S. Sarlin (*) Paris Nanterre University, Nanterre, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_9

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comprising more than a thousand men, proceeded to grow and multiply after the revolts were crushed, and adopted a military structure capable of supporting an effective guerrilla movement. Spread throughout practically the entire territory of the former Kingdom of Naples, these bands posed a constant threat to the representatives of the new unified state and its local partisans. As with all guerrilla forces, the fight against these armed bands posed a major problem for the Italian Army. Not only were they highly mobile and knowledgeable of the terrain, they enjoyed the support of many of their countrymen. In the summer of 1861, the military authorities responded by launching a strategy of fierce retaliation against individuals and villages accused of fraternizing with the bands. In October 1863, the Italian Parliament acted on the proposal by the representative for Calabria, Giuseppe Pica, and passed a law ‘for the suppression of the brigandage and the camorrists in the infested provinces’. The main provision of this law was to submit individuals suspected of complicity with the bands (manutengoli) to the military courts and to subject them to severe and dissuasive penalties ranging from imprisonment to forced labour. Such fierce repression on both a military and judicial front gradually deprived the bands of widespread support and led to the disappearance of large militarized bands. However, the Neapolitan provinces continued to experience unrest until the end of the decade, particularly during times of political upheaval (1866 and 1868).1 After several extensions to ‘Pica’s law’, it was eventually repealed in December 1865, at a time when the danger of a collapse in the political and military structures in the south of the peninsula was ruled out.2 The extent of the revolt against the new regime and the violence with which the revolt was repressed weighed on the minds of the liberal elite; they raised the spectre of a painful challenge to their equivalences between nation and people, unity and progress, and ‘Italianness’ and fraternity. In concluding his study of the national imaginary of the Italian elites, Alberto M.  Banti recalls that it ‘was based on a narrative system that revolved around the presupposition of the holistic, compact, organicist nature of the nation’, and that the perception of a north/south territorial divide as well as partisan divisions represented, in the eyes of the liberal elites, an intolerable contradiction with ‘a uniform discursive morphology’ from which they derived the legitimacy of their political program.3 To address these concerns, representatives of the national state and its supporters tended to identify the origin of popular revolts in the scheming of a ‘reactionary party’ comprising clerics and prominent legitimists, spurred

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on by the fallen king from Naples who had since taken refuge in Rome, and perfectly positioned to exploit the turmoil of the political transition by manipulating the misery, credulity and the ‘poor instincts’ of the southern populace. In 1799, the patriots had already accused the Bourbons and the Church of having harnessed the passions of the masses to retake power by means of the bloody Sanfedista crusade. The fact that the southern rural masses were indifferent to the revolutionary impulses of previous decades, and that they even supported monarchical repression of liberal impulses (for example in 1848  in Abruzzo and Calabria, or in 1857  in Cilento against the enterprises of Carlo Pisacane), was interpreted by the patriots as the result of corruption by the despotism of the Bourbons of Naples. This view was made abundantly clear in anti-Bourbon propaganda in the 1850s.4 Before leaving Naples in November 1860, the Sicilian-born former exile Filippo Cordova was thus persuaded that, beyond a small circle of patriots, what dominated in the south was indifference, and that ‘without any outside impulse, Naples would have remained for centuries under its despotism’.5 This interpretation was based on a twofold prejudice held by the urban bourgeoisie vis-à-vis the peasantry and the popular classes in general; that is, the lack of autonomy of the commoner in relation to the upper layers of society, and the primacy of material and selfish—if not criminal— motives in the popular rebellion. In this sense, there was a convergence of opinion between the northern and southern liberal bourgeoisie, between moderates and democrats, and between civilian and military observers. Commenting on the events of Matera in August 1860 during which the populace revolted against the new Constitution and murdered Count Gattini, a great landowner at the head of the liberal faction, the Neapolitan liberal Ruggero Bonghi, who went into exile after 1848, wrote the following in his newspaper Il Nazionale: The events occurring in several parts of the kingdom in connection with the question of communal lands, and in particular those of Matera … took on a counterrevolutionary character; but although these have at this time produced the effects of a counterrevolution, the causes from which they arise are, however, very far from qualifying them as such. The peasantry, because of the work of the last government, rests in the greatest ignorance and lives in a stupor which derives from the deepest idiocy and the lack of political life… . Their misery contributes to throw them into a state of debasement and, moreover, ferocity… . Any other interpretation of the

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actions of this class would be wrong. From the cries of ‘Long Live the Constitution!’ and ‘Long Live the king!’, or others, the peasants choose the one that will best serve their interest. These movements, therefore, have no political character and are not a counterrevolution; their aim is the improvement of the economic conditions of this class; they produce the effect of a counterrevolution because they are untimely and because they are overflowing with a thousand atrocities, the greatest and the most painful of which have been seen in Matera, and Francesco Gattini was the most regrettable victim. Who is responsible? No one, our misfortune, the repercussions of the past, our painful history.6

The Piedmontese officer Giuseppe Clementi, sent to Abruzzo in October 1860, attributed the ‘reaction’ of the district of Isernia to ‘the official impulse given and maintained by the [Bourbon] gendarmerie, as well as by some high-ranking clergymen, by clandestine legitimists and by former henchmen of absolutism’, and explained its success by the allure of ‘the promise of the plunder and the appropriation of the goods of the people doomed to the massacre’ in the eyes of the populace.7 For Giovanni Battista Bottero, who was sent to the same region in January 1861, it was clear that ‘the peasants are neither Bourbonians, nor Mazzinians nor of any other party’ and that they followed the agents of the revolt (in this case, the disbanded Neapolitan soldiers) ‘with a very broad bag on the shoulders, and with an axe or some other weapon in the hand’. However, he concluded ‘they will not do that anymore once they have seen the uniform of the Royal Carabinieri’.8 In other words, enthusiastic repression of the supposed troublemakers, coupled with the progressive benefits of good governance brought in by the new liberal state, would have been enough to restore peace in the southern provinces. This apolitical and ‘criminal’ reading of the popular uprising was not incompatible with a view more attentive to the living conditions of the southern populations and of a socioeconomic interpretation of the revolt. Upon reading the reports of officers of various ranks involved in the repression of brigandage, John Dickie was struck by the frequency with which the revolt was put down to sociological motives: even the ‘infamous’ (according to Dickie) General Giuseppe Govone saw the roots of the revolt in the poverty of the peasantry and regarded it essentially as a class struggle. The political element was only mentioned as a pretext for masking criminal purposes or personal revenge.9 This social reading of brigandage was characteristic of both the moderate right and the democratic left, of the moderate Neapolitan Giuseppe Massari, rapporteur

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for the parliamentary commission of inquiry on brigandage, and of the Mazzinian Aurelio Saffi, author of important articles on the brigandage in June and July 1863. Said articles highlight the negative effects of large rural estates and the misery that these caused for the peasantry, contrasting an impregnable brigandage in Capitanata (a latifundia area) with the social harmony that reigned (according to Massari and Saffi) in areas of fragmented estates, for example Terra di Lavoro or Abruzzo, two regions that were not spared in 1860 and 1861 by the revolts and banditry. This reading, as Salvatore Lupo has pointed out, is ruthless in distorting certain realities and ignoring others, such as the absence in Sicily of a legitimist revolt in the aftermath of unification, despite conflicts and unmet popular expectations as deep as on the continent. However, this was the only response that the economic and political culture pertaining to the ruling class of time was able to provide to a problem considered as being social in nature.10 Identifying the misery of the southern rural proletariat as the fundamental cause of its rebellion facilitated the reassuring idea that an improvement in the living conditions of the people would have been sufficient, not only to halt the protest but to win the support of the masses for the new regime. For several decades, this conviction would continue to inspire the reformist positions of the meridionalisti and, in the case of some intellectuals, the lamentation of a failed agrarian revolution that would have condemned the Risorgimento to remain forever ‘incomplete’. Renewed academic interest in brigandage following the Second World War broke definitively with the criminal interpretation of the southern revolt, though did little to question the established model of the relationships between social causes and the political dimension of popular protest. In his pioneering and still-relevant study, Franco Molfese makes the argument for taking into account the political components of a crisis marked by anti-unity guerrilla warfare. For Molfese, it remains a contextual, though fundamental aspect of a deeper social crisis; rebellion stemmed from a primitive form of unrest that precluded any possibility of an articulated political consciousness, fostering an ‘anarchic drive for revenge and destruction that is peculiar to a backward political mentality’. For Molfese: The peasant masses were set in motion for economic and social causes, both permanent and contingent, which demonstrated the emptiness of the reactionary slogans and explained how these could, at most, fuel furious and

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ephemeral explosions of anger and discontent … The passage of the southern peasants to brigandage was, in any case, in its mass aspect, a form of extreme protest which sprang from misery and found no means other than violence to fight against injustice, oppression and exploitation.11

Eric J. Hobsbawm had published his essay on ‘primitive rebels’ a few years prior to Molfese’s work.12 For these two historians, southern insurgents belonged to a category of individuals with a pre-political mentality who were immersed in a world they could not understand and who rebelled against the social order without a political language at their disposal. Alfonso Scirocco drew the same conclusion. In 1983, he affirmed that ‘it is right to wish for a more comprehensive historical reconstruction which accounts for the “reasons” behind the grande brigantaggio, but it is difficult to attribute any “political” weight to these reasons, which were rooted in confused motives and expressed through non-constructive violence’.13 This view has been challenged by a small number of works inspired by renewed interest in popular protest since the mid-1970s, including a focus on the forms and specific objectives of collective action and its integration into community cultures. In a 2001 article, Andrea Sangiovanni uses a regional analysis of secondary sources and archival documents to ascertain indicators of the politicization of insurgent crowds and armed bands. These are: the discourse of the peasants themselves, as recorded in judicial sources, that pitted the ‘commoners’ (i cafoni) against the landowners (galantuomini), and the explicit denunciation of the alliance between the latter and Garibaldi or Victor Emmanuel via the merging of the two opposition groups (galantuomini/cafoni and nazionali/borbonici); the diffuse presence of politics evidenced by the abundance of trials for ‘seditious speech’; the existence of rituals to which the popular movements seem to conform and which are linked to community celebrations, including portraits of the royal couple carried in procession and subsequently exposed in a public place, sometimes on a throne, or Te Deum masses in the presence (often under duress) of civil and religious authorities; and the omnipresence of symbols such as the red cockade and the white flag—favoured by the ‘Bourbonians’—as well as the ‘Italian’ beards. The author also shows that the violence of popular movements was not blind, since it targeted individuals or objects associated with the most negative aspects of political change. Amid this tangle of factors, A. Sangiovanni concludes that while politics was a constant factor, it was

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often indistinct from other motivations and forms of expression.14 Clearly, the social, political and criminal dimensions of popular protest were not mutually exclusive, as has been demonstrated with regard to ‘anti-Jacobin’ mobilizations in revolutionary Italy and elsewhere.

Seeking Popular Legitimism: The ‘reactions’ of 1860 to 1861 Notwithstanding the role of socioeconomic factors or of opportunism or manipulation by the legitimist notables, the revolts of 1860 to 1861 can also be attributed to a latent popular politicization poised to unfold in times of crisis, sometimes with pro-liberal leanings but mostly in a royalist and counterrevolutionary sense. This process of politicization was all too evident for southern patriots. In the aftermath of the passing of a law on 25 June 1860 by which, under pressure from international opinion, the King of Naples conceded constitutional reform and handed control of the government to the moderate liberals, there was concern among liberal landowners that the crisis of the regime may trigger a wave of popular unrest likely to awaken the Sanfedista impulses of the rural population.15 These fears proved largely unfounded, at least initially. Violence was sporadic and limited—apart from in the capital city, where a state of siege was proclaimed on 28 June—and mainly targeted individuals or groups with close ties to the repressive practices of the ancien régime and to certain bishops or religious orders.16 The only Sanfedista revolt occurred in the village of Montella, in the province of Avellino. According to the account of an anonymous local authority, the refusal of the municipal brass band to play a national anthem (Il Bivacco) upon the request of the galantuomini on 1 July 1860 caused a clash of ‘political factions’. Only one person was wounded, but the confrontation continued throughout the night: The next day, during a procession of the Blessed Virgin, the two camps shouted at each other and came to blows; several people were injured. In the afternoon, the urban guard forced several gatherings to disperse, but the fight began again and ended this time with one dead and several others wounded. A popular horde then burst into the city and, with cries of ‘Long Live the King!’, disarmed the urban guard and then made its way through the town, forcing landowners to hand over their weapons and ammunition. After that, a crowd gathered in the main square, where it threatened to loot the district. This situation lasted until the next morning.17

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Order was quickly restored following intervention by a gendarmerie platoon sent from the nearby city of Ariano. The riot described in this anonymous account highlights the acute antagonism between the ‘commoners’ (il popolo basso) and landowners, expressed politically by the division into two ‘factions’. The crowd was made up entirely of peasants; police reports mention ‘big squads of peasants’ and ‘hundreds of peasants armed with big sticks, rifles and other weapons’.18 The Montella episode, and particularly the fears held by the authorities and the bourgeoisie, reflected powerful tensions in southern rural society. During the first half of the nineteenth century, these tensions led to several conflicts which were often linked to the communal lands and collective rights which had become central to the life of many rural communities.19 Whenever the mechanisms of institutional control were relaxed (that is, in 1848 and before that in 1799 and from 1820 to 1821), said tensions resulted in widespread and multifarious popular unrest which was often counterrevolutionary in nature. In this sense, I would agree with Salvatore Lupo that the troubles of 1860 to 1865 were the final act in a history of revolutions, counterrevolutions and civil wars that began in 1799 and were inextricably intertwined with the process of political and economic modernization.20 The popular unrest of the summer of 1860 was accompanied by land occupations that occurred first in the latifundium regions of Abruzzo and Molise, the provinces of Basilicata and the Sila massif in Calabria. These peasant movements were systematically denounced by the authorities as ‘antiliberal’ or ‘reactionary’ and repressed by armed force. Several sources attest to this antiliberal stance. In Matera (Basilicata), for example, the resistance of local landowners to any concessions led to the murder of Count Francesco Gattini, a great landowner with a liberal reputation and a known ‘usurper’ of communal land. As frightened landowners fled to the neighbouring town of Altamura, the rebellious mob plundered their property to cries of ‘Long Live the King! Down with the Constitution!’.21 Similar events occurred in Bovino, a district in Northern Puglia where unrest also broke out around the issue of usurped lands. On 19 August, a crowd of two to three thousand peasants armed with all manner of rural instruments set fire to the town hall and other public buildings, massacred ‘liberals’, then roamed the district ‘carrying a sheet of white linen on a stick, in the middle of which was an awkward drawing of a fleur-de-lis and the words “Long Live the King!”. The mob forced the inhabitants to

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show themselves at their windows and wave white handkerchiefs, since that was how it wanted to make peace with the galantuomini’.22 The peasant revolt did not spare the properties of great nobles who were faithful to the dynasty, such as those pertaining to the Marquis of Pedicini in Montecalvo Irpino, the Duke of Sangro in Montefalcone Valfortore, the Prince of Sant’Antimo in San Giorgio la Molara and the Prince of Spinoso in the district of Montescaglioso.23 In the southernmost provinces, where the arrival of Garibaldi’s troops provoked a revolutionary process upon the proclamation of provincial provisional governments, the political change initially aroused an expectant attitude among the peasant masses. A portion of the peasantry actively supported the revolution by joining voluntary armed forces formed by liberal landowners (often through their clientelist networks). Once the territories were ‘liberated’, however, the backtracking on all promises of land distribution and the repression of all forms of peasant unrest soon saw the attitude of the masses switch from that of initial adherence to distrust or even hostility, with a clear legitimist orientation. Busts of King Francis II and white flags reappeared in many villages and antiliberal discourse proliferated. Such events (even those of a less serious nature) were an indication of rapid change in those regions that were ‘hitherto designated as being among the provinces that had not given reactionary signals’.24 The centre and north of the kingdom, where the Bourbon State had fared better, evolved from opposition to the political change towards the rejection of liberal and unitary revolution. The insurrectional initiatives of the liberal bourgeoisie almost invariably met with the hostility of the masses, the latter staging spontaneous armed resistance or demonstrating their support for the royal army in war zones. The events of Ariano in early September are particularly relevant here. Liberals of the province who gathered to proclaim a provisional government were dispersed by a band of armed peasants, resulting in a series of royalist uprisings in the provinces of Avellino, Benevento and Irpinia which directly threatened the rearguard of the Garibaldian army.25 The choices made by the local elites—conditioned by the fear of popular violence—often contributed to triggering collective emotions that gave a political ‘direction’ to the protests. Peasant anxieties were thus precipitated in the summer of 1860 by the accession of the liberal bourgeoisie to the head of both national and local institutions, and in particular by the formation of new citizen militias which, by virtue of a decree of 5 July 1860, were to replace the old guardie urbane mostly comprising peasants.

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Ceremonies to mark the entry into service of the national militias and the taking of possession of guard posts were at the origin of many riots. The events of 23 July in Venafro, in the province of Molise, are a perfect illustration of this: Around 11pm, the National Guard met in front of the guardhouse to celebrate its taking of possession. To its cry of ‘Long Live the King and the Constitution!’, the peasants replied ‘Long Live the King. Down with the Constitution!’. Paying no heed to these cries, the National Guard, preceded by the brass band and the tricolour, went round the market and past the city entrance. There, just as it repeated ‘Long Live the King and the Constitution!’, a band of peasants armed with stones, sticks, knives and billhooks converged from all streets towards this location, shouting ‘Long Live the King! Down with the Constitution!’ and attacked the National Guard with stones and sticks; there was even a shot from the top of a house that wounded two soldiers … . Then the guard unloaded a few shots and wounded around twenty-three peasants, including men and women, but the lack of ammunition forced it to withdraw… . At the same time as the event that I just reported, another band of the same nature presented itself in front of the town hall, where it tore up the National Guard lists and threw stones at the balconies, breaking many windows. After that, the captain of the Supino gendarmerie … arrived to re-establish order, which was not disturbed again until the following day, when at about nine o’clock a band of around two hundred peasants came to the guard post and stoned the royal shield and the table of the guard.26

In the Neapolitan provinces, the plebiscite on annexation provoked violent clashes that prevented the vote from being held. Referencing the popular movements that erupted on 21 October and the violent repression that followed, the legitimist historian Giacinto De Sivo proclaimed that ‘the day of the plebiscite marked the beginning of the reaction and of brigandage on both sides (civil, national and social war) in the entire kingdom’.27 Given its implications, as well as its format (a public ballot in which participants had to deposit their vote in a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ box, all carefully managed by the posting of commissioners to the head national guard and Carabinieri companies in the most turbulent districts to ensure victory for the annexationist side), there is no doubt that the operation aggravated the tensions accumulated over the previous weeks and transformed discontent into collective violence. Testament to this are the events that led to the insurrection of Caramanico. Below is an excerpt from the trial documentation:

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On the 21 October at Caramanico, as in all the Neapolitan provinces, the plebiscite was held, and while in this locality all citizens exercised their right to vote, Domenico De Raso [a peasant of S.  Vittorino di Caramanico] approached the urn and shouted: ‘Long Live Francis II!’. The assembled crowd acclaimed the Bourbon King and stones suddenly began to rain down. The National Guard, on the orders of the civil authorities present, opened fire, and the seditious crowd evacuated the place, but it sent messengers to Angelo Camillo Colafella, who lived in hiding because of serious crimes and roamed the countryside at the head of a criminal conspiracy.28

A few days later, the insurgents, under the leadership of Colafella (a former stonemason given to brigandage), battled a column of national guard troops before dispersing in the countryside and subsequently forming the core of an armed band that would hide out for several months in the massif of Maiella. From this point on, persistent insurrectional notions nurtured the formation of the first armed bands. The severe and systematic repression of popular protests provided fuel for the formation and growth of the bands, while these encouraged insurrection through guerrilla action in the mountains and by attacking isolated and poorly defended localities to momentarily restore the ancien régime with support from the populace. There can be little doubt around the involvement of politicized individuals with ties to the ancien régime (most often former civil servants, former soldiers of the royal army and former city guards or clerics, denounced by the liberal authorities as the main ‘agents of the Bourbon party’) in the antiliberal popular revolts, particularly from late 1860 onwards. In January 1861  in Abruzzo, Giovanni Battista Bottero encountered ‘Bourbon proclamations … in very large numbers’ and ‘populations worked by many agents … who led a very active election crusade’.29 Renewed popular unrest in Calabria in December 1860 would appear to be linked to the activity of Bourbon agents and the proliferation of ‘seditious’ writings. The arrival in early January of a vicar working under the bishop of Squillace, bearing a pastoral letter asking the local priests to celebrate the birthday of Francis II (16 January) with a solemn Te Deum, caused disorder which was repressed by the National Guard.30 Revolts were mostly spontaneous, however, and the movement as a whole never displayed signs of regional coordination with the exception of specific instances of gradual expansion from the most significant foci. The claims

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of the insurgents (as reported by repressive sources) are hazy (barring the clear hostility towards the entire class of galantuomini) and were accompanied by generic slogans proclaiming attachment to the monarchy. In his account of the revolt of Montella in July 1860, the captain of the urban guard indicates that the only slogans the insurgent crowd uttered were those of ‘Long Live the King! Long Live Francis II!’: ‘[The peasants] did nothing but shout that they simply hated the entire class of local landowners; such statements have been heard for several days and this morning in the public square there were cries that [the landowners] should be massacred, without knowing exactly what the peasants expect of them’.31 This absence of well-articulated demands does not imply an absence of politicization but rather the existence of well-defined antagonisms rooted in local culture and primed for transposition into a more general political debate. Here, one can return to E. P. Thompson’s now-classic observations on the identification of legitimist notions in almost every riot: that is, that the men and women who rebel share a set of objectives derived from a coherent vision of internal equilibrium of the community, and that these shared objectives constitute ‘the moral economy of the poor’. It is the attack on this moral economy, as much as the misery of the popular sectors, which ordinarily triggers the transition to violent protest. Said moral economy is neither strictly political nor apolitical, the latter implying an attachment to notions of common good traditionally associated with paternalistic protection of the monarchies of the ancien régime. It can therefore be described as a form of dynastic legitimism insofar as it identifies the monarch as the best guarantee against the undermining of traditional community equilibrium by and for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Testament to this are the words of an elderly farmer from Abruzzo, quoted by A. Sangiovanni: Since 1799, the class of ‘galantuomini’ has always been indifferent and hostile to the peasants, such that scarcity itself and all seasonal evils were an opportunity for the former to enrich themselves, while the latter lived in misery and oppression. This originated a hatred that the peasants transmitted to their children and which has grown steadily because of political circumstances. By protecting the peasants, the Bourbon government put them in a position where they need not fear the arbitrariness of the ‘galantuomini’. That is why, whenever political changes have occurred, the peasants have always chosen to remain loyal to this government.32

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In an essay written in prison in 1854, the patriot Silvio Spaventa notes that a form of land egalitarianism was at the root of the dynastic loyalty of the commoners of the south. In his opinion, the Bourbons were seen by the rural masses as the best guarantee of social justice.33

Bandits Or Partisans? Cipriano La Gala, a former merchant from Nola, was sentenced to incarceration in 1855 and escaped from the prison of Castellammare in August 1860. By then given to banditry, he employed cynical irony in telling a rich traveller captured by his band (the traveller thought he would find salvation by showing his sympathy for the Bourbons) that ‘You have studied, you are a lawyer, and you think that we create trouble for Francis II?’.34 In reporting this anecdote, General Govone—responsible for the repression of the guerrillas in Abruzzo—aimed to portray the southern guerrilla movement as a crime endemic in the Mezzogiorno and to justify the repression unleashed against the armed bands. This view has certainly had a lasting influence on the interpretation of the phenomenon, if only by its imposition of the term ‘brigandage’, which is still commonly used to describe the guerrilla warfare between 1860 and 1865. As with the popular anti-unification protest as a whole, of which guerrilla warfare was often an extension, the criminal nature of the motives behind the rebellion (as postulated by the liberal elites) precluded the possibility of real politicization of the bands and their leaders. According to the elites, the links between armed bands and legitimism were the result of a twofold manipulation: that of the exiled monarchy and its agents, who not only claimed that the bands solely comprised partisans but encouraged banditry by all means necessary to facilitate their own goals and deliberately ignored the predominantly criminal nature of guerrilla warfare; and that of the bands, which proclaimed political goals for the sole purpose of justifying their plunder and recruiting supporters. Banditry was indeed endemic in certain areas of the Mezzogiorno and often constituted the beginnings of anti-unification guerrilla movements. Many band leaders fighting in the name of Francis II in the 1860s had a long history of banditry behind them, such as Carmine Crocco in Basilicata, Michele Caruso in the upper Fortore Valley, and Cosimo Mazzeo (known as ‘Pizzichicchio’) in the province of Bari. Each joined the counterrevolution for a variety of motives, among them the promise of reward from legitimist notables, a willingness to continue their activities

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under a more respectable mantle (driven by psychological motivations that it would be wrong to underestimate), the hope of gaining popular support and recruiting former Bourbon soldiers to their bands, or personal revenge. A cursory reading of Eric J. Hobsbawm’s writings on the bandit as a social avenger reveals that some historians have interpreted the attacks of the bands against the great liberal landowners as the expression of a social and political revolt by the peasantry, and even as an early form of class struggle.35 However, this view is based on a naïve and biased reading of the motives advanced by the band leaders themselves, and on an idealization of the relations between the bands and the peasantry, which were often based on violence and extortion. Nevertheless, there is undeniable evidence of politicization of the armed bands and of some of their leaders. Some capibanda granted themselves—or sought to obtain—the title of General of Francis II and made their followers swear legitimist allegiance. Luigi Muraca, a small Calabrian landowner, supported the Garibaldi revolution. When he was accused of common crimes, he was forced to take to the maquis to escape prosecution and used ‘every means to grow his band, in particular giving brigandage a political character by making his family recognize him as a general of Francis II and defender of his cause, and managed to attract among his brigands a large number of disbanded soldiers from the old Neapolitan army’.36 Vincenzo Di Pinto, known as ‘Corporal Cozzitto’, made his men swear allegiance in the church of Santa Lucia d’Agnone in front of the peasants gathered there. According to one officer, it was his ‘intrepid’ political manner that enabled the capibanda to recruit.37 The proliferation of armed bands and their growth from 1861 onwards resulted in significant changes in their organization as new and more ‘politicized’ members joined their ranks, including former soldiers and petty officers. Bands formed around ‘new’ insurrectionary leaders, among them Sergeant Romano (a former petty officer of the Neapolitan army), who immediately adopted the forms and tactics of traditional banditry but with a royalist agenda. The political dimension of the guerrilla movements emerged during the ‘liberation’ of towns. Invasion by the bands was accompanied by a ritual of sorts in which the local national guard was disarmed for the dual purpose of obtaining weapons and destroying symbols of the new regime. The latter were replaced with those of the ancien régime, and the authorities in place prior to June 1860 were reinstated. According to one Giuseppe Bourelly, an officer of the Italian Army, the requisitions, looting

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and killings that generally accompanied these operations were generally targeted and discriminatory: ‘The brigand enters the villages, he loots and kills; but in massacring and burning, he prefers those whom he identifies as his enemy. He destroys emblems, insults the Italian flag and, either by pretext or conviction, wears the Bourbon flag and shouts “Long Live Francis II!”’38 Indiscriminate violence would have put the bands at risk of isolation and this would have proven fatal for them (this is true of all forms of banditry). The same can be said of the extortion practices which were crucial to the bands’ survival. Hence, in the district of Larino, poles bearing a white cloth appeared in the countryside to symbolize safe conduct for landowners.39 Band leaders had no qualms about appealing to supposed political solidarity to in order to extort powerful legitimist landowners. The politicization of guerrilla action had its limits. Though the band chiefs liked to present themselves as all-powerful leaders at the head of their men, they were not entirely free to dictate how their troops operated. This depended first and foremost on the charismatic character and authority of the capobanda, much of whose energy was spent maintaining the unity of the band and their authority over it. Imposing discipline that was too strict posed a real risk to the leaders’ control, as Sergeant Romano bitterly remarked in a note found in his wallet after his death bearing the title ‘My misfortunes’ (le mie disgrazie). He reported how members of the band reacted to his admonitions: ‘We left our homes, we are called brigands and we must rob; and if our leader does not do as we say, he will have a bad death or will end up alone’.40 During his trial, Crocco emphasized the limits of his own authority and it is unlikely that this stemmed from a simple desire to clear his name. Regarding the crimes and abuses committed by his men, he exclaimed: ‘As if I had superior authority … to return to the right path those brigands who would be but robbers at all cost!’41 Foreign volunteers were sent to take command of the bands in the name of Francis II, such as the Spaniards José Borges in Calabria and Basilicata, and Francesc Tristany in Abruzzo. However, the exiled monarchy failed to command and impose a military plan on the bands to bring about a major royalist uprising in the former kingdom. After the capture and execution of Borges in December 1861, the Italian government hastened to publish its diary of operations in the hope of proving—in the eyes of European opinion—the gap separating the idealism of the volunteers and the sordid reality of ‘brigandage’. The Carlist general

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describes his isolation after his landing in Calabria, the mistrust of the local bands towards him, the miseries of refuge in the mountains and the ambiguous attitude of the peasantry. The capobanda Crocco, whom Borges joined in Basilicata, refused ‘out of jealousy and baseness of ambition’ to organize his band to undertake a real military campaign. His men fled ‘like a flock of sheep’ as soon as a detachment of regular troops or the National Guard appeared, and committed all manner of atrocities in the conquered localities.42 Crocco admitted to having nurtured strong antipathy from the outset towards the Spanish general who was to strip him of his command. He accused Borges of having been ‘but a poor naive man from his distant country’ sent to command a non-existent army. Following an initial ‘colossal fiasco’ in Calabria, Borges (according to Crocco) had failed to understand that the way the bands were organized, and the strategy for their occupation, would have immediate and uncertain consequences while also leaving them vulnerable to repression by the Italian army, and would put the bands at risk of fatal isolation. Hence, when it became clear that the outside help promised by the Carlist would not arrive, Crocco simply abandoned Borges to his fate and advised other band leaders to do the same. The legitimist historian Giacinto De Sivo has supported Crocco’s position. He attributes the absence of help to a lack of appreciation among royalist leaders who, ‘seeing disjointed reactions, thought that a leader was lacking, and that it was enough to send one to lead them to victory’. This attitude ignored the reality of the war that the bands had to wage; bands whose numbers were markedly lower than those of the adversary. The result was a ‘fragmented war’ (guerra spezzata) that prevented a general uprising capable of facilitating a ‘large-scale war’ (guerra grossa).43 This is why, in the absence of an international uprising capable of countering the force of the repression, the insurrectionary plans of foreign leaders were doomed to fail, or worse, received a hostile reception among the bands. The policy of fierce retaliation against individuals or villages accused of fraternizing with the ‘brigands’, which began in the summer of 1861 and was reinforced by the Pica law of 1863, forced the guerrilla leaders to change their tactics to ward off the risk of total isolation. From that point on, the number of occupations in populated localities gradually declined (with seasonal variations), the bands fragmented, and large bands with a military structure almost disappeared completely. In parallel, the number of criminal acts (theft, kidnapping, extortion) increased, first against the liberal bourgeoisie and then indiscriminately against wealthy individuals. The royalist guerrillas gradually slipped into a form of common banditry.

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Notes 1. It was not until January 1870 that the special military zones instituted in 1862 for the repression of the guerrillas were abolished. 2. Alfonso Scirocco, Il Mezzogiorno nell’Italia unita: 1861–1865 (Naples, 1979); Roberto Martucci, L’invenzione dell’Italia unita: 1855–1864 (Milan, 1999), chap. 6. 3. Alberto Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin, 2000), 199–205. 4. Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), chap. 4. 5. F. Cordova to Cavour, Naples, 23 November 1860, in La Liberazione del Mezzogiorno e la formazione del regno d’Italia, vol. 3, 371–374. 6. Marcello Morelli, Storia di Matera (Matera, 1963), 387–388. 7. G. Clementi to Cavour, Sulmona, 10 October 1860, in La Liberazione del Mezzogiorno e la formazione del regno d’Italia, vol. 3, 80–81. 8. G. B. Bottero to Cavour, L’Aquila, 18 January 1861, in La Liberazione del Mezzogiorno e la formazione del regno d’Italia, vol. 5, 347. 9. John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York, 1999), 36–37. 10. Salvatore Lupo, ‘Il grande brigantaggio: Interpretazione e memoria di una guerra civile’, in Storia d’Italia: Annali 18: Guerra e pace, ed. Walter Barberis (Turin, 2002), 463–502. 11. Franco Molfese, Storia del brigantaggio dopo l’Unità (Milan, 1964), 156–158. 12. Eric J.  Hobsbwam, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester, 1959). 13. Alfonso Scirocco, Il brigantaggio meridionale post-unitario nella storiografia dell’ultimo ventennio, in Archivio Storico per le Province Napoletane, CI, 1983, 26. 14. Andrea Sangiovanni, ‘“Evviva Francesco morendo gridiam”: aspetti politici del brigantaggio in Abruzzo’, in Trimestre 34/1–2 (2001): 223–295. The same conclusions are drawn by Carmine Pinto in the latest overall history of Brigantaggio: La guerra per il Mezzogiorno: Italiani, borbonici e briganti, 1860–1870 (Bari and Rome, 2019). 15. Archivio di Stato di Napoli (ASN), Ministero di Polizia: the Intendant of Salerno, 30 June (vol. 5), the Judge of the district of Montecalvo (Avellino), 2 July, and the captain of the urban guard of Buonalbergo (Benevento), 4 July (vol. 6). Also, the circular from the Minister of the Interior and of the Police, Federico del Re, to the provincial intendants ‘on the maintenance of public order in the provinces following the publication of the Sovereign Act of 25 June 1860’.

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16. ASN, Ministero di Polizia, vols. 6 and 7, July 1860. 17. ASN, Min. Polizia, 1566, vol. 6: unsigned report of 5 July 1860 on the events of Montella. 18. Ibid., report of the judge of Montella, 2 July 1860. 19. John Anthony Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-­ Century Italy (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1988), 38–65. 20. Lupo, Il grande brigantaggio, 495. 21. Niccolo De Ruggieri, I moti popolari di Matera del 1860: Eccidio Gattini (Matera, 1978). 22. ASN, Min. Polizia, 1567, vol. 8, 6, fasc.3: report of the local authorities of Bovino, 22 August 1860. 23. ASN, Arch. Borbone, 1166I, fol. 670: Minister of the Interior to the intendant of Basilicata, Naples, 8 August 1860. 24. ASN, Min. Polizia, 1586, vol. 85: Governor of Reggio, 8 October 1860, and reply from the Minister of the Interior, Naples, 16 October 1860. 25. Francesco Zerella, ‘La reazione di Ariano nel 1860’ Samnium 1–2 (1943–1945): 23–44. 26. ASN, Min. Polizia, 1567, vol. 9: report of the judge of Venafro to the intendant of Caserta, 29 July 1860. 27. Giacinto De Sivo, Storia delle Due Sicilie, vol. 4 (Viterbo, 1867), 274. 28. Quoted by Fulvio D’Amore, Viva Francesco II, morte a Vittorio Emanuele!: insorgenze popolari e briganti in Abruzzo, Lazio e Molise durante la conquista del Sud, 1860–1861 (Naples, 2004), 277. 29. G.B.  Bottero to Cavour, L’Aquila, 18 January 1861, La Liberazione del Mezzogiorno, 346. 30. ASN, Alta Polizia, 179, 5935, fol. 26: report by Agostino Plutino, Reggio, 23 January 1861; and fol. 48: Governor of Catanzaro, 24 January 1861. 31. ASN, Min. Polizia, 1566, vol. 6, Report from the captain of the urban guard of Montella, 2 July 1860. 32. Quoted by Sangiovanni, Evviva Francesco, 252. 33. Silvio Spaventa, L’esercito napoletano e la riazione, Dal 1848 al 1861: lettre, scritti, documenti (Bari, 1923), 159. 34. Umberto Govone, Il generale Giuseppe Govone, Frammenti di memorie (Turin, 1902), 400. 35. For instance: Antonio De Leo, Carmine Crocco Donatelli: Un brigante guerrigliero (Cosenza, 1983). On the debates raised by the sociological explanation of brigandage based on E.  Hobsbawm’s concept of ‘social bandit’, see Anton Blok, ‘The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14 (1972), 494–503; Richard W. Slatta, ‘Eric J. Hobsbawm’s Social Bandit: a Critique and Revision’, A Contracorriente, 2 (2004), 22–30 and Gilbert M. Joseph,

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‘On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant Resistance’, Latin America Research Review, 25, 3 (1990), 7–53. 36. Quoted by Daniela Adorni, ‘Il brigantaggio’, in Storia d’Italia. Annali 12, La criminalità, ed. Luciano Violente (Turin, 1997), 293. 37. ASN, Min. Pol., 1680, 127.2.5.2: Governor of Campobasso, 17 June 1861. 38. Giuseppe Bourelly, Brigantaggio nelle zone militari di Melfi e Lacedonia: dal 1860–1865 (Naples, 1865), 84. 39. ASN, Min. Pol., 1680, 127.2.25: Governor of Campobasso, 13 July 1861. 40. Quoted by Giuseppe Massari, Il brigantaggio nelle province napoletane (Milan, 1863), 208–209. 41. Ibid., 166–167. 42. Marc Monnier, Histoire du brigandage dans l’Italie méridionale (Paris, 1862), 171–238. 43. Giacinto De Sivo, Storia delle Due Sicilie, vol. 5 (Viterbo, 1867), 165–166.

PART III

Visions of the Royalist People: Discursive Construction of Reactionary Mass Politics

CHAPTER 10

‘The True Language of the Spanish People’ and Discourses of Early Ecclesiastical Antiliberalism Josep Escrig Rosa

In this chapter, I explore the image of the people that was constructed by some prominent ecclesiastical antiliberals in Spain between 1810 and 1825. I focus on three political moments: (1) the break-up and the challenge of the opening session of the Cortes of Cadiz, in the context of the Peninsular War; (2) the absolutist restoration in 1814; and (3) the absolutist restoration in 1823. These periods are different, but in all of the texts examined here the Spanish ‘people’ (pueblo) have a place that stands out as an ultimate source of legitimacy. Antiliberals were well aware of the growing politicization of the Hispanic Monarchy after 1808 and the importance of the popular component therein. Some of them turned to providence, yet this soon proved to be insufficient to protect the traditional values under threat and sustain their own political projects. In the

J. Escrig Rosa (*) University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_10

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face of such turmoil, a situation which raised many questions for them and encouraged them to intervene more directly, antiliberals began to use innovative ways of mobilization in which the people acquired an unprecedented prominence, although at the same time leading to increased fears and many setbacks. For this historical moment, the ‘people’ must be observed as a flexible and polysemous category which was elaborated from diverse sources and was capable of portraying different realities. We must accept this lack of precision at the outset. With the passage of time, however, this term would acquire conceptual accuracy among the different political cultures.1

Political Change, Resistances and Challenges Spanish ‘patriots’, who since 1808 had resisted the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, maintained a certain unity until September 1810, when the sessions of the Cortes of Cadiz began.2 Many years later, in 1825, Rafael de Vélez (1777–1850), a Capuchin friar and a reactionary publicist as well as the Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela, recalled the two measures that caused the final split.3 On the one hand, the deputies in Cadiz proclaimed that sovereignty resided in the nation in Decree I of 24 September. On the other, they also sanctioned the recognition of freedom of the press in the Decree IX of 10 November. Soon afterwards, it became evident that the Church had as a result lost its ideological hegemony. On this subject, it has been pointed out that political positions were more clearly marked from that moment onwards.4 In this specific case, reactionary antiliberalism ended up defining a political culture that, during the war years, would be replenished by a strong popular component when it came to implement effective action in the defence of religion, the king and the fatherland (patria). These were terms that had different levels of relevance in the context of the conflict, depending on the moments in which such discourses were elaborated and on the figures who communicated them. In this search for legitimacy, antiliberal ideologists needed to paint a picture in which the ‘people’ were on their side and which showed the true essences of native Spaniards. This process was not as simple as it seemed. The profile was formed by different mechanisms, references and representation games that revealed their expectations and trust, but also tensions, ambiguities, mistrust and many contradictions. From a Manichean interpretation of reality, the ‘real’ people confronted the people that had emerged from revolutionary discourses, and this accounts for

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the complexity and importance of taking possession of the term and its potential for mobilization. In the context that emerged after the crisis of September 1810, ecclesiastical counterrevolutionaries were faced with the challenge and the need to imagine a politically mobilized Catholic ‘people’, but without having any sovereign power. It is well known that the search for popular support as a source of legitimacy was not new and was evident during the years of the war against the French Convention (1793–95).5 During this time, however, the monarchy took control of this strategy. As José Mª Portillo points out, at that time, the state conception of the royal institution—in which the Catholic prince occupied the exclusive centre of the political life—was being newly promoted. According to this outlook, vassals, the Christian people, were to be kept completely apart from this political life, ‘as a subject only of a duty of religious and political obedience’.6 Likewise, a similar strategy of demobilization was pursued in the critical moments experienced during the transition from the reign of Charles IV to that of Ferdinand VII.7 However, everything changed from May 1808 on. The institutional collapse of the monarchy, the Abdications of Bayonne, the resulting power vacuum and the loss of the papacy’s international agency led to a new scenario in which the ‘people’ were about to acquire a unique importance.8 When the liberal Cortes—the holder of national sovereignty—took power over the country, the counterrevolutionaries understood that the mobilization of the civil population was intertwined with the process of politicization in which the nation was immersed. Old discourses were adapted; they now had new meanings. They were about defending the privileged position of the church, the rights of an absent monarch, and a fatherland whose essence was being attacked by foreigners and liberal Spaniards. In the context of the war, there was a split between the public and private sphere and an emergency of a modern civil society facing politics. All of this drew a new picture, which was confusing and open to different views. According to the Jurist Francisco Martínez Marina (1754–1833), the mutation of the ‘people’ into a sovereign nation implied the transformation of citizens into active agents in the public sphere and, therefore, in politics as well.9 Regardless of what they fought for, their role as ‘head of household’ and as members of the community was understood to be transcendental in the formation of the new society, whether it was a community of believers in defence of the traditional order or a community of Catholic citizens in defence of the constitution. In this sense,

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revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries competed for the control of the emerging public opinion. This was going to be very important at a time when the way of doing politics was changing.10

The Voices of an Imagined ‘people’ The phrase that the present chapter takes its title from—‘El verdadero lenguaje del pueblo español’ (The true language of the Spanish people)— appeared in the article ‘Espíritu Público’ (Public Spirit) in the Gaceta de Madrid (The Madrid Gazette) of 15 September 1812. The liberal nature of the text was immediately rejected by Matías Vinuesa (c. 1776–1821), a priest in Tamajón (Guadalajara, Spain) and a distinguished representative of the ecclesiastical counterrevolution. This rejection shed light on many of the reflections that Vinuesa had included in his popular work Preservativo contra la irreligión (Preservative against the irreligion), which was also published in 1812 by Friar Rafael de Vélez.11 A year later, Vinuesa’s same reflections were extended and published.12 Reading Preservativo contra la irreligión had made a deep impression on him. Shortly after the first edition was published, he started to write a new one that incorporated as appendices a whole body of documents that proved what Father Vélez had stated.13 Vinuesa continued to maintain an intense friendship with him, as we will see later on. In this section, I am going to focus on the nature of all the texts, the rate at which they were written and the type of the controversy they generated. This analysis will show how important it was for intellectuals during the Peninsular War to use what they understood as the real voice and will of the Spanish people for their own benefit. The lesson received by the Spanish people after the French invasion was explained in the abovementioned article published in the Gaceta de Madrid. In accordance with the anonymous author, the Spanish people had recovered their brave and bellicose nature. Before the invasion, the ‘people’ were blind, but now they could see clearly the antiquated and depraved nature of the old institutions, the ineptitude of the nobility, the need to reform ecclesiastical abuse and the expediency of bringing the Spanish Inquisition to a close. In general terms, the article continued to talk about the fact that the ‘people’ had known their own rights and expressed their firm will to exercise them and keep themselves free from domestic and foreign tyrants. The homeland was the priority objective for which the people fought. This was its ‘true voice’:

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I will sacrifice my children, my interests and my life; but I want to assure freedom and glory to my successors: we do not shed blood for the interest of the Kings, of the great, or of any kind: I have been torn by this for a long time; the fatherland is my numen: I defend it, I conquer it; it belongs to me; and the same blade that recovered it from the tyrant, will defend it from usurpers.14

This idealization of the values embodied in the people conflicted with that conceived by Matías Vinuesa. According to his reply, the fatherland could be one of the transcendental elements that encouraged the Spaniards’ fight against Napoleon. However, he speculated, were Ferdinand VII and religion not transcendental elements as well? Expressions such as ‘blade’, ‘avenger sword’ and ‘exterminator dagger’ that were used by the columnist of the Gaceta de Madrid in order to reclaim the rights of the people recalled the language heard during the French Revolution. On the contrary, Vinuesa considered himself a ‘true Spaniard’ and he made his voice coincide with those who, in his opinion, shared the same identity: The true language of the Spanish people is that they defend the rights of religion, of our fatherland, and of our government; that the true liberty of our nation be assured, with a religious obedience to the legitimately constituted powers, not conspiring against them. This is their numen; this is their true glory, which they would like to transmit to their fellow citizens, for eternity.15

The rights and freedom that Matías Vinuesa considered typical of Spaniards were far from those within liberal parameters. He understood them as a safeguard of traditional frames of reference that he now saw in danger. Freedom referred to its Catholic meaning, based on obedience to and respect for the constituted hierarchies. In this interpretation, religion was the most important concept in order to counteract a reading that converted the secular fatherland into a deity.16 The love of the ‘people’ for religion and its ministers had led them into the war against the abuse committed by the Napoleonic soldiers. Both Vinuesa and Vélez fully coincided on this matter. Yet while in the discourses around 1808, the king and the monarchy occupied a hegemonic place,17 in the period between 1810 and 1812 defence of faith would occupy a privileged place for certain ecclesiastical antiliberals. This implied an early rereading of the period and the motivations that had led the people to war. Vinuesa recalled: ‘The voice of

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religion must be more imperious than that of the Fatherland’s’. Vélez was even more emphatic in his statement: Know that it is not only the love of Ferdinand, the possession of temporary goods, the delights of a beloved fatherland, nor the fear of being handcuffed to the north, which have kept us fighting for five years in such a disastrous and cruel war. The whole world should know that what makes us suffer so many sacrifices and being superior to ourselves is the love of our beloved religion. Yes, those objects moved us in the past, attract us now and still have some incentive for our sensitive hearts, but what mainly keeps us fighting is our religion.18

According to this friar, the value of religion was above that of any other aspect or motivation. The French had miscalculated their plans for conquest due to undervaluing the religiousness of the Spanish people. The war was understood as a ‘crusade’ in which a preeminent role was granted to ecclesiastics, both in directing the fight and in leading the people. It was the responsibility of the ministers of the altar ‘to make the gullible see that the proclaimed freedom of France is slavery, equality is in the dungeons and happiness and regeneration is serving a tyrant, throwing off the yoke of religion’.19 As Vinuesa argued, those who attempted to discredit priests—such as Gaceta de Madrid writer—were mistaken. He claimed that neither the French nor the liberals would ever take away the Spaniards’ love for the clergy.20 Both Vélez and Vinuesa considered leadership of the people necessarily important. This is significant because it reveals the deep anxiety that existed regarding the danger of the concept of the ‘people’ being manipulated. Both feared that the people would take over the leadership of the country. As a starting point, they considered the ‘people’ naïve and ignorant by nature, a blank canvas that could be manipulated without proper guidance. The people’s state of innocence made them both a repository of traditional values and a completely malleable mass. Vinuesa saw that so-­ called false philosophers were trying to seduce the peninsular population with modern notions of equality and freedom.21 The liberal ideas that had spread thanks to the freedom of press were reaching all corners of the peninsula. Printed leaflets were new weapons that had not been known until then. According to Vélez, ‘Spain … has started to feel in its own bosom a new revolution of ideas, a war of opinion, an internal conflict more terrible than that of France’. And he continued, ‘a people who

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cannot see the differences’ welcomed the doctrines that falsely praise them, and ‘follow blindly those who assert being the restorers of its rights’.22 This is, then, a case of constructing an image of what Immanuel Kant termed an immature people; a people incapable of thinking for themselves and, therefore, of being free, at least in the modern sense of freedom. It was a people who would become an easy prey, because of their guilty ignorance, for the seducers of the new political religion. The two authors under study here saw that the war against Napoleon brought destruction and death, but it also meant that new ideas alien to the Spanish spirit, whose effect would be more pernicious in the long run, had permeated the country. As Vinuesa put it, ‘Bonaparte’s main triumphs have not been swords exactly, but mainly perverse doctrines’.23 Vélez added that the emperor knew that ‘writers and writings have always fanned the flames of rebellion against religion and against the state itself in peoples’ revolutions’.24 In the territory that was not occupied, through the freedom of printing, some liberals had begun to corrupt public opinion. With such writings, new ideas were filtering down to the ‘people’, who, in their Christian ignorance, had remained righteous until then. Vélez feared that an internal revolution would split Spain once the French had been expelled. In his opinion, the main problem rested on a ‘people’ that had known new principles and values contrary to their traditional knowledge. In 1812, he understood that this could complicate, in the future, any attempt to return to the statu quo prior to the revolutionary disruption: ‘the people who until a year ago did not know the brilliant titles of freedom, equality and citizens’ rights; who were perfectly attached to the King … who venerated religion … who always listened submissively to the ministers of the Sanctuary … this people so attached to their opinions have heard some completely new voices and some suggestive ideas’.25 Now, this people were acting in another sphere, scene or context, namely that of politics. The people took and made decisions. In this way, society ran the risk of becoming a political body because its members would be contaminated with the sinful and absurd ideas of liberalism. But, despite this danger of infection, both Vélez and Vinuesa insisted that most of this illiterate social contingent remained incorrupt, the guardians of tradition. In 1808, Vélez said, ‘A people who cannot calculate were the only ones raising their voices’.26 For antiliberals, this essentialist picture of a people mobilized in the defence of national principles was devoid of any theory of popular or national sovereignty. They were suspicious of the capacity of the people

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described to assume the reins of the state. The anthropological pessimism with which they analysed society prevented them from conceiving any kind of representation in these terms. They compared the image of a sovereign people to disorder and anarchy. But this assessment should not lead us to think that their solution relied simply on elites. Broadly speaking, counterrevolutionary authors of the period believed that many members of the elite had been corrupted because of the new philosophical doctrines.27 This led them to launch harsh critiques of some sectors that, precisely because of their rank, should have been aware of their responsibility. According to Father Vélez, there had been an ‘afrancesamiento28 of politics, customs, language, devotion, books and universities since the Peace of Basel (1795).29 For his part, Vinuesa insisted that the contagion had expanded with the entry of French troops in the peninsula. He talked about a ‘moral plague’, the ‘noxious miasma of novelty’ and ‘foul leprosy’. And the number of proselytes of this false philosophy had not stopped increasing since then.30 In his interpretation, moreover, Vinuesa imbued his ideas with a gendered discourse when it came to defining values as Spanish or not. In other words, he would project both the virtues and the moral deficiencies supposedly inherent in both sexes in corresponding social images.31 While the elites, both liberal and ‘afrancesados’, would be associated with negative female images, in 1808 the Spanish people embodied the male values of strength and resistance. Vélez noticed that eighteenth-century Frenchmen had been influenced by the immoral tastes of effeminacy, debauchery, immorality and luxury. Vélez’s Preservativo contra la irreligión mainly focused on a feminization of evil that condensed all the vices in enlightened women, to the extent of practically turning the feminine into the embodiment of the antichrist.32 This friar complained that Spain could not escape from the influence of the new trends.33 Politics was also effeminate, since politicians had learnt the art of trickery and intrigue from women. Vélez used allusions to the body and appearance as ideological and moralizing tools. With them, he condemned the ‘afrancesamiento’ of traditions and the use of foreign garments and accessories. In this sense, he also censured the lack of masculinity in important people such as Louis XVI, whose lack of strength prevented him from stopping the revolution that led him to the gallows.34 Spain had to wait until 1808 for the resurrection of the ‘people’, who had been dormant up until then. For Vélez, the male attributes of courage and heroism were those that had led the Spanish army to fight, despite

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being inferior to their enemies and possessing a smaller arsenal. The Christian people that stood by their religion and king were a group of true patriots whose virtues were opposed to the vices of those contaminated by the new doctrines. Women were prominent among them and were now armed with male attributes: ‘Among us even the fair sex has lost its shyness and delicacy’. He said that the ‘Spanish midwives became superior to themselves, joined the army and fired the cannon’. Mothers became transmitters of a powerful moralizing discourse that would serve to get lost dignity back at an individual and collective level. Vélez preferred a fanatical to an enlightened people. Fanaticism, he claimed, ‘although bloodthirsty and cruel’, is ‘a big and strong passion’ that allowed the best virtues of men and women to be revealed.35 According to Vélez and Vinuesa, the role model to follow was in the past, when the people had shown the patriotic manliness that characterized them. Vélez contended that the feats of the Greeks and Carthaginians could not be compared with the strength shown in the sieges of Gerona and Saragossa. On the other hand, the epic persistence of Sagunto and Numancia turned into a demonstration of the capacity of this people to resist and regenerate. Highlighting the great achievements of these ancestors turned out to be an ideal way to establish links that showed shared characteristics and values, which, he believed, it was in turn important to revitalize.36 Vinuesa, for his part, focused on the Christian heroes of the national pantheon whose deeds had to be copied. He cited the feats of medieval kings such as Pelayo, Recaredo, Alfonso, Isabella and Ferdinand. The virtues of these important people from the imperial past should emerge in their descendants.37 The events that followed the liberation of Ferdinand VII after the Treaty of Valençay (11 December 1813) gave antiliberals the opportunity to ideologically rearm themselves and act on these agreed terms.

Popular Legitimacy and the First ‘restoration’ of Ferdinand VII In May 1814, after the arrival of the king on the peninsula on 24 March, there was a counterrevolutionary coup that annulled all liberal legislation. The reactionaries presented it as proof of the return to the natural order prior to the revolutionary rupture. This was followed by unprecedented political and intellectual activity that sought to seize power and discredit

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the constitutional period.38 Discourses at that time put forward different sources of legitimacy to consolidate the restored absolutism, despite the fact that the king soon began an authoritarian, patrimonialist and despotic shift that had little in common with the expected plans.39 Rafael Velez’s Apología del Altar y del Trono (Apology of the Altar and the Throne) was used to strengthen the regime.40 Javier Herrero considers this document ‘the most systematic construction of the reactionary ideology of that time’.41 The censors initially prohibited the two-volume work for attacking the royal reformism of the eighteenth century. However, the volumes were eventually published in 1818 thanks to Vinuesa, who in the meantime had been promoted to the posts of chaplain of honour and the king’s preacher. Indeed, on account of his support for the antiliberal cause, Vélez became the Bishop of Ceuta in November 1817. In Apología del Trono, Vélez elaborated a whole discourse in which Spaniards assumed the leading role in order to explain the reposition of Ferdinand VII as an absolute monarch. It is interesting that he gave more importance to the popular component rather than to providence when it came to explaining the king’s restoration with full power. Evidently, it was a discursive weapon to endorse the coup d’état and undermine from below the work of the deputies of Cadiz. In Vélez’s discourse, God guided the actions of the community—here, the old idea of vox populi, vox dei, was present—and yet he has also admitted the need to assign the initiative of intervention in the new public space to a ‘healthy’ people. After God, the king was at the centre of the political system, but what really reinforced his position was the strong connection with the popular opinion that had led him to power. In a way, the ‘uncorrupted’ people were those that, unanimously, took the initiative to reinstate Ferdinand VII.  Furthermore, according to Pedro Rújula, ‘the king acted in a populist way presenting himself as the embodiment of the will of the people’ and a direct interlocutor.42 The monarch’s strategy was in harmony with Vélez’s writings. Vélez claimed that the constitutionalists of Cadiz had imitated the French revolutionaries when they stole the voice of the people to justify their actions. However, after the end of the imperial siege of Cadiz in July 1812, it was the moment to check if this invocation really matched the reality. It was a contradiction for Vélez that the liberals claimed to have the support of the general opinion at the same time they deployed an unprecedented propaganda to explain the new legal code: ‘If the nation supported the constitution, why were these emissaries sent to Galicia, Majorca, Madrid to establish it? If Spaniards gladly subscribed to the Constitution,

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why were the deputies and publicists continuously alarmed?’ Moreover, he continued, if everyone apparently showed their loyalty to the Cortes government, why were the deputies reluctant to leave Cadiz? All such inconsistencies made Vélez have his suspicions: ‘I cannot imagine the love of the people for the new institutions with the fear of the constitutionalists’. He observed that, as the contents of the constitution became known, so the people became more disenchanted with it. His words are illustrative of the particular reading he was making of the period: Meanwhile the Constitution did not arrive to the people, it made some proselytes. After the Constitution appeared, disdain and even execration followed the compliments that were given to them. There were more constitutionalists in the first year than in the second year, because while the more the people is instructed about the contents of the code of the new reforms, the more they plagiarize the French one and its wrongs, and the inconvenience that threaten us.43

According to the decree of 26 November 1813, the Cortes was to be moved to Madrid. For Vélez, the liberal deputies were opposed to leaving Cadiz because they had no support outside the city. In his opinion, at the end of 1813 the country was in a deplorable state. Only the return of the king guaranteed that the Spanish people had the opportunity to freely express their true opinions about the new institutions. In unison, the friar said, ‘all the villages and cities anticipated the King’s will in his proscription’.44 Showing support was the best way to give legitimacy to a counterrevolutionary project: ‘I cannot quote any other document more convincing than the universal shout of the “villages and cities” against the Constitution after knowing the return of our Sovereign as evidence that the nation hated the new institutions’. Emilio La Parra points out that— except in certain cases such as Valencia and Toledo—everything suggests that the destruction of constitutional signs and symbols only occurred after the Decree of 4 May 1814, in which the king sanctioned the coup d’état. This decree was published eight days later.45 However, Vélez insisted on giving prominence to the people and highlighted these public manifestations of rejection of the liberal system. He pointed out that the papers published since the end of April in the main cities of Spain only spoke about ‘the breaking of tombstones, the burning of the constitution, plays in honour of our King, proclamations about his sovereignty … and real hatred of everything that was new: reforms, constitution’. Moreover,

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he recalled that it was not necessary for the people to wait for Ferdinand VII to express his political will in order to show their antiliberal beliefs: ‘Did Spain want the Constitution or not? Ferdinand has not spoken yet: there were not enough emissaries for every town to articulate in less than fifteen days their constant adhesion to the old laws and the hatred of the Constitution’. He insisted that all towns should rise up at the same time and say that they did not want the Constitution; they should curse the reforms and proclaim their king to enjoy the sovereignty he had held until that time.46 The process was nearing its end. Vélez, to give substance to the popular enthusiasm for the return of the king, highlighted the events that took place after the arrival of Ferdinand VII in Valencia, whose triumphal entrance occurred on 16 April 1814. As we can see in Miguel Parra’s painting, a crowd of men and women from all different social classes accompanied the king. He was also flanked by the army and, in the front row, was the Captain General Francisco Javier Elío, a true representative of the armed counterrevolution.47 According to the author of Apología del Trono, the apotheosis occurred when the king received the Representación y Manifiesto (Representation and Manifesto) from the sixty-nine absolutist deputies in which he was asked to abolish the Cadiz legislation. Vélez stated that ‘the clamour of all the towns and the cries of the whole Nation added to this request’. The king could not deny such display of loyalty.48 In fact, as explained by the friar, in the Decree of 4 May, Ferdinand VII had dealt with these countless requests: I declare, in agreement with such determined and general displays of the will of my people, and because they are fair and well founded, that: my Royal spirit is not only not to swear and not to agree with the Constitution or with any decree of the extraordinary and ordinary General Cortes currently open … but to declare that such Constitution and such decrees are invalid, with no value or effect, now or at any time, as if such acts had never happened and were removed from history.49

Despite the order, Vélez was fully aware that the king was wrong, since it was ‘impossible’ to reverse the previous events.50 The predictions did not take long to fulfil. The triumph of the Revolution of 1820 was a new challenge for the royalists in their conceptualization of the people. Ferdinand VII himself resorted to his ‘will’, both to pledge allegiance to the 1812 Constitution that was imposed on him and to promote conspiracies that overthrew it.51 In fact, when the Constitution was abolished on

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October 1823, the king appealed again to his ‘will’ to restore absolutism for the second time.52

The Weapons of Loyalty During the years in which the liberal legislation was in force between 1820 and 1823, there was a continuous confrontation between the forces of the revolution and its opponents. The need to gain support made antiliberals choose a double strategy, which was especially noticeable from the summer of 1822 on. On the one hand, they exonerated those that had remained passive or had accepted the change of regime in 1820. On the other, they insisted that honourable people remained loyal to traditional values.53 When the liberal treason could no longer be tolerated, the people encouraged the 1823 reaction, which would lead to a new absolutist restoration with the help of the French Army under the auspices of the Holy Alliance. Despite the Spanish counterrevolutionary forces not being large enough in number to overthrow the constitutional regime on their own, some antiliberal leaders promoted a particular and biased reading of the events from then onwards. At this point, the image of an unscathed and liberating people that once again had to act in defence of traditional values became especially prominent in their discourse. This was going to call into question the reformism that had been initiated within absolutism, lessening the attempts at political moderation that the European powers had requested of Ferdinand VII.54 Moreover, the recalcitrant absolutists distrusted the entry of the old ‘afrancesados’ into the administration.55 The construction of the people that was being elaborated by reactionary ecclesiastics could be traced back to the Spanish bishops’ answers to the enquiry about the state of the country made by the Duke of the Infantado—Pedro de Alcántara de Toledo y Salm-Salm—a month before the Junta Consultiva de Gobierno56 was created (September 1825).57 The Bishop of Guadix, Juan José Cordón, assured that the constitutionalists fell into their own deception. They thought that the general silence of the population could be understood as tacit support; but when this same population had the opportunity, it did not hesitate in freeing itself from such apathy and opposing the constitutionalists. The bishop observed: ‘The general mass of the Spanish people is not as corrupt as they may think’, since ‘they reason even more deeply than those who consider themselves politicians’.58 For the Bishop of León, Joaquín Abarca, these ‘people’ were those who had twice freed the king and the religion. Again, the credit for

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the triumph of the restorations was theirs and theirs alone. He remarked that, without this support, the ‘French bayonets’ would have never managed to enter the peninsula and defeat the liberals. In his opinion, the ‘people’ were upset with the subdued repression that the government was enforcing on the old revolutionaries. The uncorrupted people were ready to implement a new liberation of the country, this time from its internal enemies: The Spanish People is concerned about the sad and terrible idea that the Freemasons and other supporters of the sects gather around the Throne of HM, influence his mood and even govern the Monarchy almost exclusively … When I seriously meditate about these fears and sadness together with the disasters waiting to happen to the Spanish Throne and the Altar, I see the uniformity of feelings and I am almost persuaded that this is the voice of God that is warning the Spanish People, preparing them and getting them ready to save their country for the third time.59

This ‘people’, the Archbishop of Toledo, Pedro de Inguanzo, stated, were the true ‘anti-revolutionary’ and of ‘the monarchic spirit of order’, different from the mood that guided civil servants, whose lack of integrity contaminated the country. The historical circumstances which the peninsula had gone through showed that, in Spain, a policy based on widespread agreement was impossible to carry out as it was in Europe: ‘I think they have given in too much on this issue, and they made a great mistake, under the pretext of moderation or a conciliatory politics. Maybe they acted like this due to unusual influences or because they tried to imitate the examples set by the French government after the revolution’.60 According to the Bishop of León, a part of this impossible agreement was to be found in the nature and integrity of the Spaniards, who were completely different to the frivolous French and their interest for new ideas.61 For his part, the Archbishop of Valencia, Simón López, insisted that the people mistrusted a government controlled by ‘their own sectarian enemies’.62 It was essential to always be aware of this. In the peninsula, two revolutions had taken place in less than twenty years. Now, in addition, the enemies had infiltrated the structures of the state and threatened to destroy it from within. The government—with the king as the head—never gave any signs of eradicating evil. As Jerónimo Castrillón, Bishop of Tarazona, said: ‘The people, whose politics have never failed, observe all of this … [and] are constantly watching and are eager to get their hands on the

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enemies to tear them to pieces’.63 Faced with this situation, the political and ideological attitude of the ecclesiastical antiliberals turned towards the people and the popular classes as the only ones capable of keeping the spirit of the traditional values alive. The Bishop of Guadix seemed to agree with this when he explained that only ‘in the middle classes and poor classes’ was Spanish honour obvious, since ‘even the nobility which was the support and defence of the Throne has been corrupted’. The people had to keep active and avoid taking any kind of ‘narcotic’ that would put them ‘into a deep sleep’.64 In this task, the militias of royalist volunteers created in 1823 presented themselves as the main guardians of the traditional order. For the Bishop of Guadix, they were ‘sentinels widespread through all the towns and no one could evade their surveillance’. This ‘type of militia’ was like an ‘impregnable wall’ that was responsible for increasing the number of the king’s supporters.65 Many pleas criticized the subdued absolutism that was in power at that moment. In particular, such critiques were a response to the regulations of February 1824 that tried to control the development of these militias by subordinating them to the authorities.66 Faced with the mistrust that the use of armed popular mobilization generated among important sections of the population, the bishops showed quite a different opinion. The Bishop of León, in fact, believed that the towns saw such ordinance as a ‘labour of Philosophy’. For him, these popular outfits were agents of the counterrevolution and were politically essential in the role they played: ‘It is said that Sovereigns fear an armed People, but, Sir—the Duke of the Infantado claimed—only loyalty is armed’.67 For Vélez—who was now the Bishop of Santiago de Compostela—the extinction of the volunteer bodies would mean the ruin of the country. In his opinion, they ‘have everyone’s trust’ and the people thought that ‘the King’s enemies are trying to destroy them’.68 In fact, now, in 1825, the Apología del Altar y del Trono by Vélez was reprinted to reinforce the king’s position in the terms previously established. Additionally, the bishops presented the reestablishment of the Inquisition as another great demand of the people, since the Inquisition was the only institution that could persecute the revolution ‘in all their secret fields and annihilate it’, as Bishop Joaquín Abarca stated.69 In general terms, the prelates’ reports showed a determined attempt to make the voice of popular sections of society their own, at the time of presenting a general state of opinion that would encourage a political reaction. The outcome of the two previous revolutionary experiences made

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the prelates deposit their trust in the armed people, at least at the level of discourse. This ‘people’ were not always concrete and uniform, nor easily identifiable from a sociological point of view. The righteous and politically mobilized people during the Peninsular War must now be attentive, wait for any move and be prepared to defend the values of traditional Spain. As Gonzalo Butrón argues, to weigh the protection of the legitimacy of clear absolutism on the people’s shoulders was a risk that had to be taken.70 This accounts for the initiative taken by the counterrevolutionaries, and at the same time it shows their capacity to respond to the new challenges. From their point of view, according to the prelates’ interpretation, revolutionaries had succeeded in spreading across the state and the solution to the problem of liberalism did not yet depend on those social sectors that supported or were influenced by this doctrine. The 1827 upheaval of the ‘malcontents’ or ‘aggrieved’ revealed the extent to which the antiliberal ecclesiastics’ discourse about the people and their decisive intervention in the protection of the religion and the absolute monarchy could become a challenge for the Crown.71

Conclusion Juan Francisco Fuentes notes ‘a certain symmetry’ between feelings about the people on the part of ultra-absolutists and the more advanced liberals. Faced with the mistrust expressed by moderates on both sides, Fuentes believes that the two political families coincided in creating an ideal picture, made up of ‘a series of recurrent virtues, such as heroism, simplicity and, above all, instinct’ to defend the causes they considered fair.72 In this chapter, I have examined how this construct was formed and its potential for mobilizing wills by some antiliberal leaders, as well as the tensions and dangers involved. From early on, the need to form an image of the people as a guardian of the counterrevolutionary cause was evident. Based on the experience of the War of the Pyrenees (1793–95), the extraordinary context in which the political life in Spain was framed after 1808, in addition to the initial decisions made by the Cortes of Cadiz from September 1810 on, reactionaries such as Rafael Vélez and Matías Vinuesa weighed the hopes of the triumph over the French and liberals on the shoulders of popular support. Under the protection of ecclesiastics, the righteous ‘people’ were those who should recover the values of their ancestors. In accordance with their particular interpretation, Spaniards supported in their masses the return of Ferdinand VII as an antiliberal

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monarch. It is true that, as La Parra has argued, there is still a lack of studies on the importance of the people in demonstrations in favour of the absolute monarch which took place before the coup d’éta,73 but Vélez had no doubts about this. Herein lies a part of the creativity in his reasoning. The friar had learned from the revolutionary experience and tried to counteract the rhetorical appeal to the people made by the constitutionalists of Cadiz through an account in which this same people took the restorative initiative. In 1823, this initiative was even more linked to the popular support when the bodies of the volunteers were formed to fight the reoffending liberal enemy and to avoid the moderation defended by the French. In one way or another, the reactionary ecclesiastics concluded that those responsible for the defence of the absolute monarchy were suspicious. From then onwards, this responsibility was associated with the people, now transformed permanently into those at the forefront of the fight against the revolution. For the ecclesiastical antiliberals, the elements that formed ‘the true language of the Spanish people’ were not new, but they ended up taking on a new nature in the light of the transformations that had occurred in the discourses of the time. The value of voices and old reference frameworks—such as religion, the Catholic monarchy and the fatherland— served to guide individuals’ actions. The reactionaries soon assumed some of the main components of modernity. The latter were the idea that politics and political affairs, together with the mobilization and the power of public opinion, were a powerful tool for change.74 In such a discovery, the patriotic people, embodying the traditional values of Spaniards, became the support and a main source of legitimacy in the fight against liberalism and the new political options that, in different contexts, would spread throughout the whole century. Funding: Research project funded by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, ‘La dimensión popular de la política en la Europa meridional y América Latina, 1789–1898’, code PID2019-105071GB-I00; and research project funded by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, ‘Las barricadas del recuerdo. Historia y memoria de la Era de las revoluciones en España e Hispanoamérica (1776–1848)’, code PID2020-120048GB-100. The chapter was written as part of the UNAM Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme

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Notes 1. Juan Francisco Fuentes, ‘Pueblo’, in Diccionario político y social del siglo XIX español, eds Javier Fernández Sebastián and Juan Francisco Fuentes (Madrid, 2002), 586–593. For the initial moments, see, among others, Alberto Gil Novales, ‘Pueblo y nación en España durante la Guerra de la independencia’, Spagna Contemporanea 20 (2001): 169–187; Richard Hocquellet, Resistencia y revolución durante la Guerra de la independencia (Saragossa, 2008), 133–141; and Pedro Rújula, ‘Guerra civil y pueblo en armas en los orígenes de la Guerra de la independencia”, in La Guerra de la independencia española: una visión militar (Saragossa, 2009), vol. 1, 43–52. See also the multiple author monograph ‘Pueblos, ciudadanía y otros conceptos políticos’, Historia Contemporánea 28 (2004): 83–94, 95–110 and 205–234; and Mª Cruz Romeo, ‘¿Y éstos en medio de la nación soberana son por ventura esclavos? Liberalismo, nación y pueblo’, Alcores 7 (2009): 13–37. 2. Carmen García Monerris: ‘El grito antidespótico de unos patriotas en guerra’, in Dos siglos de historia: actualidad y debate histórico en torno a la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–1814), ed. Rebeca Viguera (La Rioja, 2010), 233–256. 3. Rafael de Vélez, Nos don Fr. Rafael de Vélez, por la gracia de Dios y de la Santa Sede Apostólica, arzobispo de la Sta. apostólica metropolitana iglesia de Santiago… (Santiago de Compostela, 1825), 16. 4. Pedro Rújula, ‘El antiliberalismo reaccionario’, in La España liberal, 1833–1874, eds Mª Cruz Romeo and María Sierra (Madrid and Saragossa, 2014), 377–409; Jean-Philippe Luis, ‘La construcción inacabada de una cultura política realista’, in La creación de las culturas políticas modernas, 1808–1833, eds Miguel Ángel Cabrera and Juan Pro (Madrid and Saragossa, 2014), 319–345. 5. Pedro Rújula, ‘El nacimiento de un patriotismo monárquico’, in Cuando todo era posible: Liberalismo y antiliberalismo en España e Hispanoamérica, 1780–1842, eds Encarna García Monerris et al. (Madrid, 2016), 73–94. 6. José Mª Portillo, Revolución de nación: Orígenes de la cultura constitucional en España, 1780–1812 (Madrid, 2000), 85. 7. Pedro Rújula, ‘Realismo y contrarrevolución en la Guerra de la Independencia’, Ayer 86 (2012): 45–66. 8. Pedro Rújula, ‘La densificación del universo político popular durante la Guerra de la Independencia’, in Guerra de ideas: política y cultura en la España de la Guerra de la Independencia, eds Pedro Rújula and Jordi Canal (Madrid and Saragossa, 2011), 173–190. 9. Portillo, Revolución, 189–190.

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10. There are some interesting reflections on this point in Amos Hofman, ‘Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel’s Theory of Conspiracy’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 27/2 (1993): 27–60. 11. Rafael de Vélez, Preservativo contra la irreligión o los planes de la falsa filosofía contra la religión y el estado, realizados por la Francia para subyugar la Europa, seguidos por Napoleón en la conquista de España, y dados a luz por algunos de nuestros sabios en perjuicio de nuestra patria (Cadiz, 1812). I use the version published in Mexico in 1813. The addition of Vinuesa is titled: Adición a esta obra sobre el preservativo contra el espíritu público de la Gaceta de Madrid, y de otros periódicos, en donde por medio de varias observaciones muy importantes se desenvuelven sus doctrinas antirreligiosas y antisociales (Madrid, 1813). 12. Matías Vinuesa, Observador político-religioso o sea análisis de las máximas anti-sociales e irreligiosas de los periódicos corruptores de la sana moral: y preservativo contra la irreligión y pirronismo. Obra que puede servir de suplemento a la del R. P. Vélez, Capuchino (Palma, 1814). 13. ‘Segunda edición aumentada con algunas observaciones y documentos importantes por el Doctor D.  Matías Vinuesa López de Alfaro, cura de Tamajón’ (Madrid, 1812). 14. ‘Espíritu público’, in Gaceta de Madrid 2/14, 134–136. 15. Vinuesa, Observador, 39. 16. Ibid., 61. 17. Rújula, ‘Realismo’. 18. Vélez, Preservativo, 117. 19. Ibid., 11. 20. Vinuesa, Observador, 7. 21. Ibid., 25 and 53. 22. Vélez, Preservativo, 12 and 42. 23. Vinuesa, Observador, 113. 24. Vélez, Preservativo, 183. 25. Ibid., 13 and 14. 26. Ibid., 109–113. 27. Javier Herrero, Los orígenes del pensamiento reaccionario español (Saragossa, 2020 [1971]). 28. ‘Afrancesados’ or ‘afrancesamiento’. The latter literally means ‘Frenchification’, so the sympathy with or the attempt to implement French models, especially those of the Napoleonic empire. 29. Vélez, Preservativo, 59. 30. Vinuesa, Observador, 113 and 114. 31. See, on these questions: Nira Yuval and Flora Anthias, Women-Nation-­ State (London, 1989); Stefan Dudink and Karen Hagemann, ‘Masculinity in politics and war in the age of democratic revolutions, 1750–1850’, in

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Masculinities in politics and war: Gendering modern history, eds Stefan Dudink et  al. (Manchester, 2004), 3–21; and Xavier Andreu, ‘Nación y masculinidades: reflexiones desde la historia’, Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 43 (2021): 121–143. 32. Encarna García Monerris and Carmen García Monerris, ‘Palabras en Guerra: La experiencia revolucionaria y el lenguaje de la reacción’, Pasado y Memoria 10 (2011): 139–162. 33. Antonio Elorza, ‘El temido árbol de la libertad’, in España y la Revolución Francesa, ed. Jean-René Aymes (Barcelona, 1989), 69–117. 34. Vélez, Preservativo, 36. 35. Ibid., 107, 108 and 128. 36. Ibid., 109. 37. Vinuesa, Observador, 112 and 113. Juan Pablo Domínguez, ‘La idea de España en el discurso “servil” (1808–1814)’, Historia y Política 41 (2019): 177–209. 38. Pedro Rújula, ‘El mito contrarrevolucionario de la “Restauración”’, Pasado y Memoria 13 (2014): 79–94. 39. Encarna García Monerris and Carmen García Monerris, ‘El rey depredador’, Historia constitucional 18 (2017): 21–47; and Emilio La Parra, Fernando VII: Un rey deseado y detestado (Barcelona, 2018), 224–374. 40. Rafael de Vélez, Apología del Altar y del Trono o historia de las reformas hechas en España en tiempo de las llamadas Cortes, e impugnación de algunas doctrinas publicadas en la Constitución, diarios y otros escritos contra la religión y el Estado, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1818). 41. Herrero, Los orígenes, 312. 42. Pedro Rújula, ‘Una monarchia populista? Potere assoluto e ricorso al popolo nella restaurazione spagnola di Fernando VII’, Memoria e ricerca 62 (2019): 421–435. See also David San Narciso, La monarquía en escena. Ritualidad pública y legitimidad política en el liberalismo español (1814–1868) (Madrid, 2022), 33–73 and 75–93. 43. Vélez, Apología del Trono, 241 and 242. 44. Ibid., 243. 45. La Parra, Fernando VII, 274 and 275. 46. Vélez, Apología del Trono, 280, 286 and 290. 47. Ester Alba Pagan and Mª José López, ‘La imagen victoriosa de Fernando VII: Las entradas triunfales del pintor Miguel Parra (1780–1846)’, in Las guerras en el primer tercio del siglo XIX en España y América, vol. 2 (Seville, 2005), 606–624. See also Encarna García Monerris and Carmen García Monerris, La nación secuestrada: Francisco Javier Elío. Correspondencia y manifiesto (Valencia, 2008); and Emilio La Parra, ‘Fernando VII en Valencia: La preparación del golpe de Estado’, in El viaje del rey: Fernando

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VII desde Valençay a Madrid, marzo–mayo de 1814, ed. Pedro Rújula (Saragossa, 2019), 105–120. 48. Vélez, Apología del Trono, 294–296. 49. ‘El Rey’, in Gaceta Extraordinaria de Madrid 70 (12 May 1814), 515–521. 50. Vélez, Apología del Trono, 60. 51. La Parra, Fernando VII, 378, 379 and 399–407. 52. Josep Fontana, De en medio del tiempo: La segunda restauración española, 1823–1834 (Barcelona, 2013), 81. 53. Pedro Rújula, Constitución o muerte: El Trienio Liberal y los levantamientos realistas en Aragón (1820–1823) (Saragossa, 2000); Ramón Arnabat, Visca el rei i la religió! La primera guerra civil de la Catalunya contemporània (1820–1823) (Lleida, 2006), 743–494 and ‘La contrarrevolución y la antirevolución’, in El Trienio Liberal (1820–1823): Una mirada política, eds Pedro Rújula and Ivana Frasquet (Granada, 2020), 285–307. See also Gregorio Alonso, ‘“Sable en mano, con la cruz a cuestas”. Las reacciones y los espacios del clero católico ante el Trienio Liberal’, Bulletin d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’Espagne 54 (2020). 54. Gonzalo Butrón, La intervención francesa y la crisis del absolutismo en Cádiz, 1823–1828 (Huelva, 1998); and Emilio La Parra, Los cien mil hijos de San Luís: el ocaso del primer impulso liberal en España (Madrid, 2007). 55. Jean-Philippe Luis, L’utopie réactionnaire: épuration et modernisation de l’état dans l’Espagne de la fin de l’Ancien Régimen (1823–1834) (Madrid, 2002). 56. The advisory governing body. 57. The transcription of the documents can be found in ‘Informes sobre el estado de España (1825)’, in Documentos sobre el reinado de Fernando VII, ed. Federico Suárez Verdeguer, vol. 2 (Pamplona, 1966). 58. Ibid., 171, 173 and 177. 59. Ibid., 205 and 206. 60. Ibid., 320. 61. Ibid., 209. 62. Ibid., 329 and 330. 63. Ibid., 290 and 291. 64. Ibid., 178–180. 65. Ibid., 176. In general, royalist volunteers were recruited from among day labourers, artisans and farmworkers. By Álvaro París, see ‘Los voluntarios realistas en Madrid: politización popular y violencia contrarrevolucionaria (1823–1833)’, in El desafío de la revolución: Reaccionarios, antiliberales y contrarrevolucionarios (siglos XVIII y XIX), eds Pedro Rújula and Javier Ramón Solans (Granada, 2017), 89–106; and, in comparative perspective, ‘Armar el pueblo en defensa del rey: las milicias contrarrevolucionarias y

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realistas en Europa (1789–1830)’, Rubrica contemporánea 18 (2020): 23–51. 66. Gonzalo Butrón, ‘Pueblo y elites en la crisis del absolutismo: los voluntarios realistas’, Spagna Contemporanea 25 (2004): 1–20. 67. ‘Informes’, 205. 68. Ibid., 258. 69. Ibid., 207. Emilio La Parra, ‘Ni restaurada ni abolida: Los últimos años de la Inquisición española (1823–1834)’, Ayer 108 (2017): 153–175. 70. Gonzalo Butrón, ‘Pueblo y elites’. 71. It was an uprising to prevent the moderation of the absolutist regime. Jaume Torra, La guerra de los agraviados (Barcelona, 1967); Emilio Soler et  al. (eds), Diarios de viaje de Fernando VII (1823 y 1827–1828) (Alicante, 2013). 72. Fuentes, ‘Pueblo’, 589. 73. La Parra, Fernando VII, 274. 74. Encarna García Monerris and Josep Escrig Rosa, ‘¿Reacción frente a modernidad? Algunas reflexiones’, in Discursos y contradiscursos en el proceso de la modernidad (siglos XVI–XIX), eds José Ángel Achón and José María Imízcoz (Madrid, 2019), 407–444.

CHAPTER 11

A Kingdom of This World: Ultramontanism and the Mobilization of the Masses During the Papacy of Pius IX (1846–78) Francisco Javier Ramón Solans

In the 1860s, thousands of books, pamphlets and articles were published in defence of the temporal power of the pope and, as such, in defence of his powers as a monarch. To contemporaries the question was clear: the Holy Father was not only a religious leader but also a monarch who ruled over a state which occupied practically one third of the Italian peninsula. However, this power was seen to have been seriously compromised by the process of Italian unification and, for some, doubts arose concerning the advisability of maintaining the pope’s territorial sovereignty in order to guarantee his independence as a religious leader. The conquest of Rome by Italian troops in 1870 put an end to the millenarian Kingdom of the Papal States. It took time for the defeat to be absorbed by both Catholics and the Vatican itself. Even in 1925, in his

F. J. Ramón Solans (*) University of Saragossa, Zaragoza, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_11

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Quas Primas, Pius XI defended a monarchical vision of the Church with the introduction into the liturgical calendar of the Feast of Christ the King. Within the context of the crisis of democracies in interwar Europe the pope defended ‘an authoritarian and hierarchical legislation in which government was exercised by a leader invested with an absolute authority legitimized by reference to spiritual values’.1 The Lateran Pacts of 1929 put an end to 59 years of conflict surrounding the Roman Question with the creation of the city-state of the Vatican. With this, the pope returned to being an absolute sovereign, even though his power now did not rest within this small territory; rather, it lay in his role as the guide to global Catholic opinion. The political nature of the Catholic Church in the modern era bears a distinct character.2 Both the Papal States of the past and the Vatican City in the present have simultaneously functioned as monarchical states governed by the pope and as the central seat of a religious organization with a global vocation: the Catholic Church. Throughout the nineteenth century, as the Papal Kingdom diminished, the symbolic power of the pope increased via dogmas such as papal infallibility and devotions such as that of Christ the King. In this sense, it can be stated that the definitive loss of the Papal States in 1870 allowed for the transition from an ancient feudal kingdom to a modern ‘soft power’ whose existence was guaranteed not by the extension of its kingdom—a micro-state within Rome—but by its symbolic power and its role within the international public sphere. However, historiography has neglected the monarchical dimension of papal power in the modern era in order to focus on the process of centralization, hierarchization and globalization of its power throughout the nineteenth century. Without overlooking this perspective, this chapter seeks to offer a rereading of the papal cause in terms of legitimism, analysing its alignment with other European legitimisms, as well as the popular dimension of this movement. In order to approach this question, I will focus on one of the most decisive popes in the history of the Catholic Church, Pius IX (1846–78), in that his papacy experienced the loss of the Papal States alongside the consolidation and extension of his power over the global Catholic Church.

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Ultramontanism and Legitimism Ultramontanism is a concept which arose within the context of the religious controversies of the seventeenth century in order to attack those who defended papist positions. In fact, ultramontanism literally means ‘beyond the mountains’, that is to say, beyond the Alps. The polemic nature of this concept, along with its excessive identification with antiliberalism and legitimism and obviating the existence of liberals within their ranks, has led French historians to lean towards concepts of ‘Romanization’ and/or ‘Roman ecclesiology’.3 The German debate in this sense has been less rigid, oscillating between a view of ultramontanism as a form of Catholic fundamentalism or as a movement which would be the beginnings of a Catholic democracy.4 On analysing the development of Ultramontanism in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Latin America, its association with intransigent legitimism becomes notably blurred. Thus, for example, the Cardinal of Westminster, Henry Manning, was a clear defender of papal infallibility, discipline and uniformity, in that he believed the Catholic Church should speak with a one single voice within such a hostile context whilst he was at the same time in favour of liberalism in its British expression.5 Aware of these limitations, Austin Gough points out that ultramontanism and devotion to the pope might lead to liberal conclusions such as those of Montalembert and his circle as much as to intransigent positions bordering on legitimism.6 Furthermore, the association of ultramontanes with legitimism and religious fundamentalism has meant that it has frequently been described as an antimodern, retrograde and archaic movement. However, the richness and variety of the means deployed by ultramontane sectors has led historians to reconsider this relationship and point out the ways in which ‘the antimodern Church deployed the most modern of means’ in the nineteenth century.7 If the conservative Catholic movement arose in reaction to modernity, this had not impeded the deployment of modern means such as associations, parties and periodicals in the defence of its positions.8 It is precisely the use of these resources which leads Victor Conzemius to define ultramontanism as an ‘attempt by the Catholic masses of the nineteenth century to make possible the transition to modernity via the selective appropriation of organizations and means of communication present within modernity’.9

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Conzemius’ reflection allows us to introduce the debate concerning popular participation within ultramontanism. In general, two great analytical models have been delineated.10 The first of these would revolve around a vertical axis which extends from ‘above’ (the pope) to ‘below’ (the faithful)—the result of a hierarchized and controlled structure—or from ‘below’ to ‘above’ as a spontaneous movement of the faithful.11 Whether from above or below, it is true that despite reaffirming his control over the Church, the pope showed himself to be receptive to some impulses and initiatives proposed from the base. Secondly, and closely related to this vertical axis would be a centripetal perspective—the world drawn towards Rome—or a centrifugal perspective from a symbolic centre outward toward the end of the world. A final factor to be taken into account is that the very meaning of the term ‘ultramontanism’ evolved throughout the nineteenth century. As such, for example, the field of what we might define as ‘ultramontane’ would come to be considerably reduced between the revolutionary cycle of 1848 and the First Vatican Council of 1868. Following the brief liberal spring of Pius IX’s papacy (1846–48), the impact of the Roman Revolution of 1848, the assassination of the Prime Minister of the Papal States Pellegrino Rossi, the exile of the pope in Gaeta and his restoration in 1849 all drove a turn towards the intransigence at the heart of the Catholic Church which would, in the end, facilitate a convergence between antiliberalism, legitimism and ultramontanism. In exile in Gaeta, on 2 February 1849, Pius IX published the encyclical Ubi Primum in which he consulted the world episcopacy concerning the advisability of dogmatically defining the Immaculate Conception. Despite almost unanimous support, the pope’s decision was not devoid of controversy, not only on account of the polemical nature of the subject, but because it was the first time a dogma had been declared which was not contained in the Holy Scriptures.12 As such, Ineffabilis Deus of 1854, which proclaimed the Immaculate Conception, was, at the same time, a confirmation of papal infallibility.13 Moreover, consideration was given to including the famous Syllabus Errorum within the declaration of the Immaculate Conception. This would end up being published as an annex to the encyclical Quanta Cura on 8 December 1864. With Gallicanism in full retreat, the Holy See sanctioned the intransigent and legitimist stances to the detriment of a liberal Catholicism which had displayed its defence of the pope from other positions. The publication of the Syllabus was greeted with joy by the

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intransigent sectors who used it to label their adversaries at the journal Le Correspondant—the organ of liberal French Catholicism—as heretics. The situation was extremely tense and could have developed into a full-blown schism. Prior to the publication of the papal bull, the Bishop of Orleans, Félix Dupanloup, put aside everything in order to prepare an annex in which he defused some of the explosivity of the Syllabus by recourse to the well-known distinction between ‘thesis’ and ‘hypothesis’; between that which the Church put forward as ‘the ideal’ and ‘reality’.14 However, the Bishop of Orleans did not manage to pacify a conflict which would explode with force in the prolegomena of the First Vatican Council. The match was struck by the brief and vitriolic article on Catholics in France which appeared in La Civilità cattolica, making the distinction between ‘true Catholics’ and ‘liberal Catholics’.15 The importance of such a brutal attack lies in the proximity of the publication, led by Jesuit Fathers, to the Holy See. The response was almost immediate. The German theologian Ignaz von Döllinger, writing under the pseudonym ‘Janus’, published five forceful articles in the Allgemeine Zeitung—later gathered together in Der Papst und das Konzil (1869)—in which he criticized the declaration of papal infallibility as a new form of papal absolutism. Without exaggeration, the challenge to papal authority implied by the works of Döllinger, and which ended with his excommunication, has been compared to the cases of Luther in the sixteenth century, and Galileo in the seventeenth.16 The very idea of ‘papal absolutism’ which Döllinger used to criticize the pope turns out to be especially illustrative of the worldly dimension of pontifical power, as it is of the type of monarchy which this set out in the heart of the Catholic Church, itself a long way from the conciliarist projects of the eighteenth century. Although the excommunicated German theologian would spread this idea of ‘papal absolutism’ in the 1870s, his critique was not new. In fact, in the middle of the century the hero of Italian independence, Giuseppe Mazzini, offered the censure that the papacy in the nineteenth-century Catholic world had been defined by Joseph de Maistre in Du Pape (1819) as, ‘paring it with the absolute king and the executioner: Catholicism, despotism and the death penalty, three bases, according to de Maistre, of society, three elements, in fact, of the old world which the new world destroyed’.17 The polemic continued to be fuelled by articles pseudonymously by Dupanloup declaring papal infallibility ‘inopportune’, without criticizing the idea outright. As Roger Aubert has clearly shown, the group associated

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with Le Correspondant was not opposed to the declaration of infallibility in and of itself; rather, it feared the excesses such a declaration might produce in the hands of fanatics.18 This aggressive campaign left many Catholics in the realm of the heterodox, if not that of heresy; even though they may have disagreed with such an intransigent line, they were partisan to the Romanization and the hierarchization of the Catholic Church. In this light, it serves to recall that apart from the Conciliar Fathers in the Americas and Switzerland, the remainder of the prelates came from countries with either monarchical or hereditary systems. Both the documents, and the Conciliar Fathers themselves, moved within an essentially monarchical frame of reference which took no account of the great variety of the political systems within which Catholics outside of Europe experienced.19 On 18 July 1870, the Conciliar Fathers approved the dogmatic Constitution of Pastor Aeternus, in which papal infallibility was declared and, more importantly still, the primacy of the pope over the Catholic Church was affirmed. The session was a success for the most intransigent positions within ultramontanism in that it consolidated the pope’s dual and absolute sovereignty over the Catholic Church and the Papal States. Nonetheless, such reverie among this sector was to be short lived. After the summer break, the Council would never meet again. On 20 September 1870, Italian troops opened a breach in the Porta Pia and took Rome. Pius IX excommunicated Victor Emmanuel II and declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican. During the final years of Pius IX’s papacy, there was a convergence between ultramontane postulates and the cause of the legitimists in Mediterranean Europe. In addition to the aforementioned turn towards intransigence at the end of the 1860s, there was a rapprochement between neo-Catholics and legitimists. The formers were disappointed with the liberal-conservative monarchical model which they had supported in France and Spain as a way of exiting the crisis of 1848. The Roman Question played a central role in this rupture in that the neo-Catholics on both sides of the Pyrenees condemned the Italian policy of their respective heads of state.20 In fact, the Second War of Independence of 1859, the rebellion in Romagna and the Expedition of the Thousand in 1860 thwarted both the Papal States, which lost two thirds of their territory, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which was annexed by Italy in 1861. Francis II was

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received by Pius IX in Rome and resided there until the fall of the Papal States. From Rome, between 1861 and 1866, Francis II organized and tried to capitalize on a number of movements in order to recuperate his kingdom.21 Both conflicts awoke legitimist sympathies and European Catholicism, with thousands of volunteers signing up to defend the twin causes of Francis II and Pius IX.  Between 1860 and 1870, 11,000 volunteers—the majority from northern Europe—enlisted with the troops known as the Papal Zouaves.22 In France, the defeat at Sedan and the Paris Commune were jointly interpreted alongside the Fall of Rome as a sign of the sins committed by country. The anxiety produced by these events was in part channelled via the great collective pilgrimages to French sanctuaries, the aim being the re-Christianization of society. These pilgrimages had a strong legitimist presence, given that the social and political crisis of the 1870s was seen as the perfect occasion for the restoration of the Bourbons via the Count of Chambord. During such pilgrimages, canticles such as ‘Piety, My Lord’ by Aloïs Kunc were recited: ‘God of clemency, oh! Victorious God, Save Rome and France, in the name of the Sacred Heart’.23 On the other side of the Pyrenees, in Spain, the departure of the Bourbons during the Democratic Sexennium of 1868 to 1874 and the Second Carlist War of 1872 to 1876 similarly favoured the convergence of the causes of the pope and that of Carlos VII. This relationship was expressed, as in France, through pilgrimages to Rome organized by the Nocedal brothers in 1876 on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Pius IX’s ascension to the papacy; and in 1881 in redress for the Roman protests prior to the translation of Pius IX’s remains to the Basilica of San Lorenzo Outside the Walls.24 Thus it was that during the 1860s and 1870s the causes of intransigent ultramontanism and legitimism converged in the defence of the Bourbon monarchies in France and Spain, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the temporal power of the pope, seen as the ultimate guarantee of order and religion in Europe. Via the defence of the Papal States and neo-Catholic influence, the legitimists inscribed themselves within a greatly expanded religious framework encompassing other aspects of social life and broadening their combative strategies to politics and to religious mobilization. All of this implied granting the people a new role within counterrevolutionary political thought.25

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Ultramontaine Piety Throughout the nineteenth century, what has been called an ‘ultramontane piety’ was asserted, that is to say, a ‘partial Romanization of piety and the formation of a mass Catholic religiosity’. These new forms of piety would stand as a reaction to the political, cultural and social transformations of the nineteenth century which were seen as a threat on the part of Catholics.26 Originating in the fervour of romanticism, these devotional forms would emphasize the emotional and public aspect of the religious experience. The central figures in this new form of piety would be devotion to the Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart, the Holy Family, the Eucharist and the pope. These devotions were driven both from above, from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and from below by the faithful themselves, whether organized or not via lay organizations. As such, rather than a vertical diffusion from ‘above’ to ‘below’, it might be better to speak of a ‘circular’ and ‘transversal’ model in which the Catholic masses found a space of participation and development. In fact, on occasion the Church hierarchy limited itself to recognizing and legitimizing movements and expressions of a popular nature. Thus, for example, during the revolutionary crisis of 1789 to 1814, some of the Catholic faithful took recourse to the devotion of the Sacred Heart and to the Virgin Mary as elements of protection and consolation, as well as mobilizations against the Revolution, especially in France, Italy and Spain.27 Following his restoration in 1814, Pius VII not only approved this devotional movement and linked it to the victory against the Revolution, but he also gave impetus to its very development and deployed its popularity in order to consolidate his own power. Pius VII crowned the Madonna di San Ciriaco, whose miracles had inspired the resistance against the French invasion of the Italian States in 1796. He also extended the celebration of the Seven Sorrows of Mary to the entire Catholic Church, conceded indulgences to the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, promoted the celebration of the Month of Mary and beatified Alphonsus Maria de Ligori, one of the most important spiritual figures of the eighteenth century and promoter of both Marian devotion and that of the Sacred Heart.28 Throughout the nineteenth century we can clearly observe this dialectic between ecclesiastical authorities and the faithful in the promotion of the Immaculate Conception. In the promotion of this dogma, a central

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role was played by the apparitions of Mary ‘conceived without sin’ to Catherine Labouré in the Rue du Bac in Paris. The two apparitions of July and November of 1830 are related to the context of the political crisis prior to the Revolution of 1830, and to the consolidation of the regime of Louis-­Philippe of Orleans. Medallions of the apparition, known as Notre Dame de la médaille miraculeuse (1830), would become spectacularly widespread with some one million copies sold in only ten years.29 This immaculist fervour was promoted, as previously mentioned, following the revolutions of 1848 with the proclamation by Pius IX of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. For Catholics over the world, this dogma was seen to be confirmed by the apparition of the Virgin Mary before a girl called Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes in 1858. From this moment on, this small village in the Pyrenees became one of the most important devotional centres in the world. Alongside the apparitions at La Salette (1846) and Pontmain (1871), Lourdes came to consolidate a more popular and highly politicized Marian model. On occasions, the Virgin Mary was represented crushing the head of a snake, symbolizing her triumph over original sin—an image which was easily translated to that of the Church overcoming the sin of the French Revolution and crushing materialism.30 From the mid-nineteenth century on, the Catholic Church showed its capacity for mobilizing great masses of the devout. This would be the case, for example, of the pilgrimage to Trier to view the Holy Robe in 1844. In 50  days—between 18 August and 6 October—this small town on the banks of the Mosel with scarcely 25,000 inhabitants hosted close to half a million visitors. It is calculated that half of all Catholics in the Diocese of Trier attended the celebration. Pilgrimages also arrived from the diocese of Cologne, Limburg, Luxemburg, Mainz, Metz, Münster, Nancy, Speyer, Verdun and Brussels. Pilgrimage became one of the most stirring events in the history of German Catholicism and one of the most impressive examples of mass Catholic mobilization prior to the development of the railway.31 The significance of the 1844 pilgrimage has been the object of intense historiographical debate within Germany. In this light, Wolfgang Schieder maintains that the pilgrimage was an enactment driven and channelled from above, in short, an instrument of propaganda on the part of a joint alliance between the Prussian monarchy and the ultramontane hierarchy for the channelling of social unrest. Schieder points out, and not without reason, how the ideologues of the pilgrimage placed the event under the

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emblems of the restored Prussian monarchy—‘Peace and Order’ (Ruhe und Ordnung), all the while signalling the Church as a bastion against the revolution. In response, Rudolf Lill points out that Schieder’s interpretation overlooks the religious motivations, the belief of the pilgrims, and assumes an overly monolithic vision of the Catholic Church. Other authors such as Christopher Clark have opted for a combined view, noting that what was novel about Trier was not the imposition of a clerical project but the convergence of clerical activism on several levels with a revitalized popular piety.32 During the 1870s, within the context of the culture wars, the struggle of the legitimists and the loss of the pope’s temporal power, this new model of mass devotion converged in the defence of papal temporal power and the rights of the French, Spanish and Italian dynasties. As such, for example, in 1873 the legitimists and French intransigents organized a cycle of three national pilgrimages to Chartres, Paray-le-Monial and Lourdes. Comprising thousands of pilgrims and hundreds of legitimist deputies, they linked the cause of the French monarchy with that of the papacy.33 On the pilgrimage in defence of Catholic France to Lourdes in July 1873, the pilgrims sent a message to Pius IX in which the French and Vatican crises were linked: ‘it is by the fact our Fatherland has forgotten its mission that it is humiliated, and it is for this reason it is humiliated and you are prisoner’.34 Following these massive demonstrations of strength, the Assumptionists and the founders of the Conseil général des pèlerinages, Françoise Picard and Vincent de Paul Bailly, organized a ‘month of pilgrimages’ for France and the pope between 22 July and 22 August 1873. In total, 699 pilgrimages were undertaken throughout the country, mobilizing some 470,147 of the faithful for both causes.35 In the nineteenth century, a new devotional object emerged which had spectacular success among all levels of society: devotion to the pope. The strengthening of the dogmatic and ecclesiastical authority of the pope had its popular and informal correlate in the development of devotional forms towards his person. Although they were not explicitly disapproved of, such religious expressions could not be officially recognized in the heart of the Catholic Church as, since the regulation of the Council of Trent, veneration was not contemplated beyond the Virgin Mary and the Saints. After the Fall of Rome, the French clergy came to sell straws from the mattress on which he supposedly slept, as if they were relics. Letters arrived from all corners of the globe expressing solidarity and the profound sentiment which the situation of the Holy Father had caused.

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Pilgrimages to Rome were organized in order to console the Pope and masses were ordered to be sung in his honour in 1871 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession to the Seat of St Peter, and again in 1875 for his jubilee.36 After the Napoleonic Wars, pilgrimages to Rome had practically ceased. Between 1815 and 1865, the journey became the exclusive privilege of a small elite who could afford the cost of several months stay in a foreign land. This was Romantic Rome, which was immortalized by Goethe in his Die italienische Reise (The Italian Journey, 1813–17), the destination of nobles and Catholic European writers who turned their eyes to the capital of Christianity. It was a Rome restored not only politically but also artistically and archaeologically, with the expansion of the Vatican Library and Museums, excavations at various sites in the Papal States, the restoration of ancient monuments such as the Coliseum and the spectacular rediscovery of the Roman catacombs which reinforced the image of ‘martyr Rome’, the heart of Christianity.37 The progressive improvement of means of communication with the establishment of rail networks in northern Europe, and the steam ship lines which connected Marseilles with the principle Italian ports, made the journey somewhat more accessible although it remained beyond the expectations of the middle and lower classes. Along with the centralization of Catholicism, Rome increasingly became the destination for ‘business trips’ by priests, monks and prelates alongside Catholic journalists, writers and politicians who came in search of legitimation, inspiration and concessions.38 The Italian conquest of Rome in 1870, far from stemming this flow, turned the city into a site of ever larger pilgrimages in order to visit the pope, known as ‘the prisoner of the Vatican’.39

Empathizing with the Pope Since the beginnings of the modern era, papal charisma had been seen to be reinforced by the positions taken by the pontiffs in the face of the political events which occurred between 1789 and 1814. Pius VI appeared as the pope who had fought the French Revolution from the start, and who had bodily suffered the consequences of his opposition through his detention, deportation and then his death at Valence-sur-Rhône. Pius VII would gather still more sympathy through his confrontation—described in legendary terms—with Napoleon, and his incarceration in Fontainebleau. Throughout the Restoration, engravings, pamphlets and poems praising Pius VII as a ‘Pope martyr’ multiplied. This escalation affected all social

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classes: from leaflets to the official portraits by Ingrès, Lawrence and Cánova. Such papal charisma also crossed confessional lines, drawing the attention of the Protestant public, who came to consider the pope a moral authority and a spiritual model.40 As with other European monarchs, after the fall of Napoleon, Pius VII was restored to his throne. After three years’ incarceration in Fontainebleau, on 24 May 1814, Pius VII began his return journey to Rome, generating demonstrations of jubilation wherever he went. He was received in Rome as a true and absolute sovereign. His entry into Rome was similar to that of other returning European monarchs, combining traditional elements of divine legitimacy with a new popular legitimacy.41 Pius VII entered in a carriage drawn by 64 ‘young maids’, all dress in black, representing the complete restoration of papal sovereignty and the popular support which he enjoyed. The temporary monuments raised for the occasion emphasized the triumph of the ‘martyr-pope’ and his Church over the challenge of the Revolution.42 The eulogies and demonstrations of support to both Pius VI and Pius VII would, in part, anticipate the thematic nature of the campaigns in support of Pius IX as a martyr to Italian unification. However, the differences were also notable in that the campaigns did not bear with them demonstrations of feelings towards, and expressions of empathy with, the sufferings of the pontiff, nor were they articulated in international campaigns of solidarity. Pius IX was, in fact, the first truly media celebrity pope. From the early years of his papacy on, a very real Piononomania (Pius the ninth-mania) emerged. His image and name appeared on and in all manner of media, from monuments and official portraits to all kinds of daily objects such as scarves, handkerchiefs, flags, cigarette boxes, coasters, pins, lithographs, and so on.43 This ‘Pius the ninth-mania’ benefited from developments in technical and communicative media. The reduced cost of these images of the pope allowed, for the first time, the diffusion of his portrait amongst popular sectors of society. Likewise, improvements in communications made the image of this pope the first to be spread throughout the Western world. Pius IX was not only the first pontiff to be photographed, but he also came to transform the papal audience into a media event which, in addition to reinforcing the centrality of the papacy, served to transmit an image of a proximate power with which one could empathize.44 Almost all narratives coincide in signalling such proximity and the deep emotions evoked by the slightest papal gestures towards his visitors. Le Parfum de Rome (The

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Perfume of Rome, 1862) by the ultramontane journalist Louis Veuillot was one of the first instances of such evocation and soon became a key reference point for Catholic writers. The text also presents a narrative of the author’s conversion from materialism to Catholicism which occurred during his travels to Rome in 1838.45 The emphasis on the emotive and personal dimension was such that it gave way to a new literary genre surrounding his person: the intimate life. The great biographies of the pontiff all included a chapter dedicated to narrating the daily details of papal life.46 In fact, some biographies were even constructed from brief anecdotes which served to bring the pope’s life closer to the reader. A case in point is Récits anecdotiques sur Pie IX (Anecdotal accounts of Pius IX, 1860), a publication which, in the space of a year, extended to 5000 copies over three editions.47 The paradigmatic example of this new form of narrative was an article titled ‘The Intimate Life of Pius IX’ published in Messager du Coeur de Jésus in 1870 by editor and Jesuit Henri Ramière. Written in the context of the first Vatican Council and the exaltation of the pope as the centre of a global Catholic Church, the article was quickly translated and republished in numerous Catholic journals and periodicals over the world.48 The narrative was one of an austere and hard-working pope, dedicated to prayer and to the worldwide governance of the Church. With the improvements in communications between the spheres of Catholicism, there was an increase in the number of letters of alms, literary works, depictions and supportive testimonies to which Pius IX would respond twice weekly. Over and above the day-to-day movements of the Holy Father Ramière granted a central role to the papal audiences. Two elements were primary in these descriptions: the small gestures of care on the part of the pope, and alongside that, the idea that such gestures could move even the nonbeliever who would pay him a visit, and that even ‘his enemies’ were overwhelmed by his charisma.49 Likewise, in his description of Pius IX, Father Jean-Joseph Huguet returned to the papal audience in order to represent the pope as ‘the most accessible Sovereign’ who is available to everyone ‘without distinction of class nor position, his voice consoles, his look illuminates, and his hand, so full of grace, reaches equally with love to all’.50 Such accessibility explained much of his monarchical charisma in that ‘no sovereign king shows himself to be father of his children as does Pius IX: Nemo tam pater. Yet it is necessary to say also that no king is as beloved as he’.51

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Solidarity with the Pope The exiling of the pope at Gaeta in 1848 caused a convulsion within the Catholic world which translated into innumerable letters, collections of funds and signatures and the development of an extraordinary publicity campaign of support. The editorial of Civiltà Cattolica published a twovolume anthology of expressions of love received by the pope during this time. Significantly titled L’Orbe Cattolico a Pio IX (The Catholic World to Pius IX), it included letters of protest from Hong Kong to Baltimore or Sydney, and driven by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but also by Catholic personalities, associations and councils. Among the expressions of solidarity was the reinvention by the Catholic committee of Paris of the medieval practice of ‘Peter’s Pence’ as a voluntary contribution to the maintenance of the papacy. This practice was soon to spread throughout the dioceses of France and Belgium, then throughout the world.52 The revolutionary cycle of 1848, furthermore, favoured the creation and densification of the associative Catholic warp and weft which would soon play a central role in the organization of demonstrations in favour of the pope. Inspired by the Catholic Association set up by Daniel O’Connell in Ireland, in 1848, German Catholics founded the Piusvereine (pious associations) with the aim of uniting the faithful there by means of organizing Katholikentage (Catholic Days) along with other initiatives. In line with the very name itself, the Piusvereine became instruments for the promotion of diverse demonstrations in support of Pius IX. Piusvereine were also founded in Switzerland in 1857 and, later, in 1905 in Austria, both of which would play a notable role in the promotion of expressions of solidarity with the pope in their respective countries.53 As a consequence of the Italian war of 1859 and the rebellion of Romagna, the Holy See mobilized Catholics the world over to demonstrate their support for the papal cause. This mobilization took on a variety of forms, from the gathering of five million signatures directed to Pius IX, to the recruitment of papal Zouaves, to the singing of pro papa masses in all Catholic dioceses. Likewise, these campaigns were driven both horizontally and vertically by the Roman chancelleries, the Catholic press, prelates, lay associations, and so on.54 In the 1860s, the consolidation and globalization of ‘Peter’s Pence’ was especially notable. The importance of this contribution rests not only in the indispensable financial support for a state on the verge of bankruptcy in need of financing an army in order to defend its borders, but in the ‘profound effect upon the role of the pope

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himself, and his relation to the faithful’, in that it was the first time a pope could actively and publicly participate in the life of the global Catholic Church.55 The fall of Rome in 1870 raised a wave of protests in favour of the self-­ declared ‘prisoner of the Vatican’. Pius IX not only refused to recognize the new Italian State but he called on other countries to do the same. The main achievement of this period was the creation of a secret organization known as the Black International which brought together Catholic leaders from nine European countries in order to drive forward protests against the conquest of Rome and also to combat the Socialist International. Although it could rely on the implicit support of the Holy See, the organization was viewed with suspicion due to its autonomy and its legitimist inclinations.56

Conclusion During the papacy of Pius IX, a particular form of legitimism was articulated which defended the pope’s temporal and absolute power. Following the antiliberal turn of Pius IX’s papacy, this movement converged and entered into a highly fertile dialogue with other European legitimisms. The Revolutions of 1848  in the first instance, and then the subsequent unification of Italy, gave rise to a wave of expressions in defence of the pope’s temporal sovereignty which adopted many and varied forms and which was driven transversally forward by the entire ecclesiastical warp and weft, from the Catholic hierarchy to the faithful, through to secular associations, brotherhoods, the Catholic press, and so on. This mobilization was characterized by its capacity when it came to creating spaces for popular participation and for taking into consideration initiatives from ‘below’. Furthermore, this mobilization in support of the papacy was not limited to the solidarity of European legitimists, although their contribution would be decisive during the 1860s and 1870s, but it also knew how to unite the Catholic faithful throughout the world. The popularity of this papal legitimacy lay, essentially, in two elements: the emotional and empathetic connection of the believer with the pope and the linking of this sentiment to new forms of mass devotion. During the nineteenth century, the figure of the pope became closer to the faithful. The centralization of the Church, along with improvements in communication, facilitated the dissemination of papal news. Such descriptions conjoined in highlighting the emotional aspects and his

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closeness to the faithful. These stories sought to personify the Holy Father and awaken empathy with his fate. In this period, a new religious literary genre even emerged which described the daily life and the most intimate aspects of the pope, who was presented as both monarch and father to the faithful. For its part, the coming into being of new forms of ultramontane piety, capable of mobilizing the Catholic masses, was decisive in the spreading of fidelity to the pope among the popular classes and a means by which to set in train the great ceremonies held by the masses in his support. During the twentieth century, the defence of the pope’s temporal power would continue to lose importance as it became established that his power lay, rather, in his role as the leader of global Catholic opinion. His realm continued to be of this world, but his power was no longer based on sovereignty over a concrete territory.

Notes 1. Daniele Menozzi, ‘La dottrina del regno sociale di Cristo tra autoritarismo e totalitarismo’, in Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo: Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia), eds Daniele Menozzi and Renato Moro (Brescia, 2004), 17–55, 54. 2. Mariano Barbato et  al. (eds) Popes on the Rise: Modern Papal Diplomacy and Social Teaching in World Affairs (London, 2019). 3. Philippe Boutry, ‘Ultramontanisme’, in Dictionnaire historique de la Papauté, ed. Philippe Levillain (Paris, 1994), 1651–1653; Bruno Horaist, La Dévotion au Pape et les catholiques français sous le pontificat de Pie IX (1846–1878): D’après les Archives de la Bibliothèque Apostolique Vaticane (Rome,1995), 9–22; Yves Bruley, ‘La romanité catholique au XIXe siècle: un itinéraire romain dans la littérature française’, Histoire, Économie et Société 21/1 (2002): 59–70. 4. Victor Conzemius, ‘Ultramontanismus’, Theologische Realenzyklopädie 34 (2002): 253–263, 253. 5. Jeffrey von Arx, ‘Introduction’, in Varieties of Ultramontanism, ed. Jeffrey von Arx (Washington, 1997), 1–11. 6. Augustin Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign, 1848–1853 (Oxford, 1986), 60–79. 7. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte. 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich, 1994), 412. 8. Urs Altermatt, Katholizismus und Moderne. Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Schweizer Katholiken im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert (Zurich, 1991), 49–62; Wilfried Loth, ‘Der Katholizismus –Eine globale Bewegung gegen die Moderne?’, in Sozial- und Linkskatholizismus:

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Erinnerung–Orientierung–Befreiung, eds Heiner Ludwig and Wolfgang Schroeder (Frankfurt, 1990), 11–31. 9. Conzemius, ‘Ultramontanismus’, 253. 10. Olaf Blaschke, ‘Transnationale Parteigeschichte. Das Zentrum zwischen kleindeutschem Zuständigkeitsbereich und “schwarzer Internationale”’, in Die Zentrumpartei im Kaiserreich. Bilanz und Perspektiven, eds Andreas Lisenmann and Markus Raasch (Münster, 2015), 339–366. 11. Arthur Herisson, ‘Une mobilisation international de masse à l’époque du Risorgimento: l’aide financière des catholiques français à la papauté (1860–1870)’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 52 (2016), 175–192. 12. François Jankowiak, La curie romaine de Pie IX à Pie X: Le gouvernement central de l’Église et la fin des États pontificaux (1846–1914) (Rome, 2007). 13. For the dogma of the Immaculate conception see Claude Langlois, ‘Le temps de l’Immaculée conception: Définition dogmatique (1854) et événement structurant’, in La dévotion mariale de l’an mil à nos jours, eds Bruno Béthouart and Alain Lottin (Arras, 2005), 366–379. 14. Roger Aubert, Le Pontificat de Pie IX (1846–1878) (Paris, 1952), 224–261. 15. ‘Corrispondenza di Francia’, La Civiltà cattolica V (1869): 345–352, 349. 16. Thomas Albert Howard, The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (Oxford, 2017), 128. 17. Giuseppe Mazzini, Dal Papa al concilio (Rome, 1875 [1849]), 15. 18. Aubert, Le pontificat, 318–322. 19. Elisa Luque Alcaide, Iglesia en América Latina (siglo XIX): Renovación y continuidad en tiempos de cambio (Pamplona, 2012), 84–85. 20. Alexandre Dupont, ‘¿Un momento neocatólico? La influencia neocatólica en los legitimismos francés y español hacia 1870’, in Dimensiones religiosas de la Europa del Sur (1800–1875), eds Rafael Serrano García et  al. (Valladolid, 2018), 187–200. 21. Carmine Pinto, ‘Una guerra de Resistencia: La monarquía borbónica tras la revolución (1861–1870)’, in El desafío de la revolución: Reaccionarios, antiliberales y contrarrevolucionarios (siglos XVIII y XIX), eds Pedro Rújula and Javier Ramón Solans (Granada, 2017), 159–184. 22. Simon Sarlin, Le légitimisme en armes: histoire d’une mobilisation internationale contre l’unité italienne (Rome, 2013); Jean Guénel, La dernière guerre du pape: Les Zouaves pontificaux au secours du Saint-Siège (1860–1870) (Rennes, 1998). 23. Quoted in Dupont, ‘¿Un momento neocatólico?’, 197. 24. Francisco Javier Ramón Solan ‘De lo individual a lo colectivo: Las peregrinaciones de masas en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX’, in Imágenes devociones y prácticas religiosas: La Europa del Sur (1800–1960), eds Nathalie Cerezales et  al. (Valladolid, 2018), 117–134; Solange HibbsLissourgues, Iglesia, prensa y sociedad en España (1868–1904) (Alicante, 1995), 183–189.

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25. Dupont, ‘¿Un momento neocatólico?’; Dupont ‘“Las causas”’; Alexandre Dupont, ‘Hacia una Internacional neo-católica? Trayectorias cruzadas de Louis Veuillot y Antonio Aparisi y Guijarro’, Ayer 95/3 (2014): 211–236. 26. Bernhard Schneider, ‘Reform of Piety in German Catholicism, 1780–1920’, in Piety and modernity, ed. Jarlert Anders (Leuven, 2012), 193–224. 27. Francisco Javier Ramón Solans, ‘Milagros, visiones apocalípticas y profecías: Una lectura sobrenatural de la Guerra de la Independencia’, Ayer 96/4 (2014): 83–104; Massimo Cattaneo, Gli occhi di Maria sulla Rivoluzione: “Miracoli” a Roma e nello stato della chiesa (1796–1797) (Rome, 1995). 28. Roberto Di Stefano and Francisco Javier Ramón Solans (eds), Marian Devotions, Political Mobilization, and Nationalism in Europe and America (New York, 2016); Francisco Javier Ramón Solans, ‘A Renewed Global Power: The Restoration of the Holy See and the Triumph of Ultramontanism, 1814–1848’, in History of the European Restorations. Vol. II.  Culture, Society and Religion, eds Michael Broers and Ambrogio A. Caiani (London, 2019). 29. Claude Langlois, ‘La conjoncture mariale des années quarante’, in La Salette. Apocalypse, pèlerinage et littérature (1846–1996), eds François Angelier and Claude Langlois (Grenoble, 2000), 21–38. 30. Georges Tavard, La vierge marie en France aux XVIIIe et XIXe: Essai d’interprétation (Paris, 1998); Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London, 1999), 284. 31. Wolfgang Schieder, ‘Kirche und Revolution: Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Trierer Wallfahrt von 1844’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 14 (1974): 419–451. 32. Christopher Clark, ‘The New Catholicism and the European culture wars’, in Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth Century Europe, eds Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (Cambridge, 2003), 11–46. See also Margaret Lavinia Anderson, ‘Piety and Politics: Recent Work on German Catholicism’, The Journal of Modern History, 63/4 (1991): 681–716. 33. Quoted by Joseph F. Bymes, Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France (University Park, 2005). On the national pilgrimage to Paray Le Monial, see Philippe Boutry and Michel Cinquin, Deux pèlerinage au XIXe siècle: Ars et Paray-le-Monial (Paris, 1980), 187–196; Bruno Maës, ‘Les pèlerinages de 1873, préparation d’une restauration monarchique ?’, in L’Eglise dans la rue: Les cérémonies extérieures du culte en France au XIXe siècle, ed. Paul D’Hollander (Limoges, 2011), 285–295. 34. Quoted in Horaist, La Dévotion, 633.

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35. Horaist, La Dévotion, 36–37; Sylvain Milbach, ‘“L’année des pèlerinages”, miroir de la pastorale pèlerine du XIXe siècle’, in Identités pèlerines, ed. Catherin Vincent (Rouen, 2004), 77–91. 36. David I.  Kertzer, Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes, the Kings, and Garibaldi’s Rebels in the Struggle to Rule Modern Italy (Boston, 2004) and Horaist, La Dévotion, 37–42. 37. Vincent Viaene, Belgium and the Holy See from Gregory XVI to Pius IX (1831–1859): Catholic Revival, Society and Politics in 19th-Century Europe (Leuven, 2001), 236–279; Vincent Viaene, ‘Gladiators of Expiation: The Cult of the Martyrs in the Catholic Revival of the Nineteenth Century’, Studies in Church History 40 (2004): 301–316; Philippe Boutry, ‘Les saints des Catacombes: Itinéraires français d’une piété ultramontaine (1800–1881)’, Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome 91/2 (1979): 875–930. 38. Viaene, Belgium, 236–243. 39. Brian Brennan, “Visiting ‘Peter in Chains’: French Pilgrimage to Rome, 1873–93”, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51/4 (2000), 741–766. 40. R.J.M. Olson, ‘Representations of Pope Pius VII: The First Risorgimento Hero’, The Art Bulletin 68/1 (1986): 77–93. 41. Pedro Rújula López, ‘El nacimiento de un patriotismo monárquico’, in Cuando todo era possible: Liberalismo y antiliberalismo en España e Hispanoamérica (1740–1842), eds Encarnación García Monerris et  al. (Madrid, 2016), 73–94. 42. Susan Vandiver Nicassio, Imperial city: Rome under Napoleon (Chicago, 2005), 223; Thomas Worcester, ‘Pius VII: moderation, revolution and reaction’, in The Papacy Since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor, eds James Corkery and Thomas Worcester (Cambridge, 2010), 107–124; Olson, ‘Representations’. 43. Ignazio Veca, Il mito di Pio IX: Storia di un papa liberale e nazionale (Rome, 2018). 44. Jörg Seiler, ‘Somatische Solidarität als Moment ultramontaner Kommunikation: Die Inszenierung der Körperlichkeit Pius` IX. in der Rottenburger Bistumszeitung’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 101 (2007): 77–106. 45. Louis Veuillot Le parfum de Rome, vol. 1 (Paris, 1867 [1862]), 7–9. 46. Charles Sylvain, Histoire de Pie IX le Grand et de son pontificat, vol. 2 (Paris, 1878), 353–366 and ‘La Vie Intime de Pie IX, par un correspondant de L’Univers’, Annales catholiques, 23 January 1875, 272–275. 47. Victor Alfred Dumax, Récits anecdotiques sur Pie IX (Paris, 1860). 48. Henri Ramière, ‘Vida íntima de Pío IX’, La Cruz, vol. 2 (1870), 173–181. This also appeared in El Pensamiento español, 26 July 1870. The article was originally published in Bulletin du concile: Supplément hebdomadaire au Messager du coeur de Jésus 10, 17 February 1870.

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49. Ramière, ‘Vida’, 176. 50. Jean-Joseph Huguet, El espíritu de Pio IX, ó Los rasgos mas notables de la vida de este gran papa (Barcelona, 1868), 268–269. 51. Huguet, El espíritu, 279. 52. Pollard, Money; Herisson, ‘Une mobilisation’; Veca, Il mito. 53. Schneider, ‘Reform of Piety’. 54. Francisco Javier Ramón Solans, ‘Transatlantic solidarities: Ultramontanism and Papal Mobilization in Latin America’, in The Pope, the Public, and International Relations: Postsecular Transformations, ed. Mariano Barbato (New York, 2020). 55. Pollard, Money, 32–33. 56. Emiel Lamberts (ed.), The Black International, 1870–1878 (Leuven, 2002).

CHAPTER 12

A Kingless People is a Dangerous Crowd: An Examination of French Far-right Demophobia in Pierre Gaxotte’s La révolution française (1928) Baptiste Roger-Lacan

One of the key issues in the early twentieth-century counterrevolutionary narrative on the French Revolution was how to represent the notion of ‘the people’ (whether revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, republican or royalist) in history books, textbooks, novels and plays. This is of course not specific to the counterrevolutionary historiography, since republican and liberal historians have also given a lot of attention to the depiction of the people in the work they have devoted to the Revolution. However, this collective actor is treated differently from the individual historical figures—Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Robespierre and Danton, to name the most famous of them—who are abundantly described and analysed in the historical depictions of the Revolution. In the counterrevolutionary

B. Roger-Lacan (*) Centre Norbert Elias, Marseille, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_12

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narrative, there is no exaltation of the people constituting themselves as a political body against the arbitrary nature of the monarchy; on the contrary, the people are often a frightening and incoherent body: portrayed as violent crowds, armed populaces or enslaved peasants. There is no shortage of nightmarish images in the service of a virulent argumentation against the Revolution and its supporters. Although this counterrevolutionary feeling was passed on from generation to generation, giving way to the repetition of various themes, motifs and images meant to prove the horror of the Revolution, these stories were also reconfigured according to the context in which they were written. In other words, the fear of the Revolution was reinterpreted according to contemporary political urgencies and polemics, but it was also a testimony to the evolution of the reactionary and counterrevolutionary movements. The 1920s were quite symptomatic in this respect. On the one hand, old fears were revived by the Bolshevik Revolution. On the other, in France, on the extreme right, if the years following the end of the First World War witnessed the reinforcement of the intellectual magisterium of Action française, the condemnation of the movement and the excommunication of its leaders and followers by Pope Pius XI in 1926 propelled change and gave way to a partial generational renewal. It is in this context that Pierre Gaxotte’s La Révolution française (The French Revolution),1 the book on which most of this case study is based, was published in 1928 by Fayard Editions. It is through this specific work that I would like to analyse counterrevolutionary representations of the people during the French Revolution. This approach is justified by the fact that Pierre Gaxotte’s famous book was a foundational moment in its doctrine regarding the Revolution: the royalist movement finally had a book synthesizing its counterrevolutionary vision of history. It also was a a true commercial phenomenon in the rich publishing history of Action française, which benefited both its publisher and Action française. For its publisher, Arthème Fayard, with whom Gaxotte had been very close since his years at the École Normale Supérieure, it was a way of renewing his pool of historians. Pierre Gaxotte was young—at thirty-three years old he was younger anyway than the other historians which Fayard published at the time—and even though he was well-known in militant royalist circles, he had never published a book. It was all the more an editorial challenge since the book was part of a series, ‘Les Grandes Études Historiques’ (Great Historical Studies), which

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had begun in 1924 with the publication of Jacques Bainville’s Histoire de France (History of France). The aim of the series was to publish the great names of what came to be known as Capetian history’.2 This was the generic name given by René Grousset to designate historians who were members or travelling companions of the Maurasian movement, such as Jacques Bainville, Louis Bertrand and Frantz Funck-Brentano. La Révolution française also benefited Action française, whose leaders widely disseminated the book’s theses, before and after its publication. They made extensive use of the first-page editorials in the movement’s newspapers, especially those of Léon Daudet, whose articles had a wide audience. The daily press review—one of the sections in the newspaper with the largest readership—highlighted its qualities and attacked with the characteristic violence of the movement all those who dared criticize it. Gaxotte, although barely thirty years old, was indeed very close to Charles Maurras, having been his night secretary between 1917 and 1918, as well as Léon Daudet and, to a lesser extent, Jacques Bainville.3 Gaxotte was well versed in their historical theories, their influence being foundational to his work, although he claimed to stand out from Bainville, whom he considered too focused on politics and diplomacy, a trait that he wanted to blend in his own work with a more social and material turn. In addition to those of Action française, Gaxotte enjoyed very favourable reviews in the rest of the conservative and Catholic press: this was particularly the case in two issues of La Croix, the most important Catholic newspaper in France. Therein, Jean Guiraud, historian and editor-in-chief of the newspaper, wrote two laudatory articles under the title ‘Une histoire scientifique de la Révolution’ (A scientific history of the Revolution)4 in two Sunday editions. Moreover, the Revue des questions historiques, the main historical review aimed at the Catholic and conservative public, also devoted a praiseworthy critique to it.5 This impressive press campaign, which coincided with the 1928 parliamentary elections, contributed to the success of the book, which was reprinted at least 72 times that same year alone, and reissued in the following years. It was therefore very much a personal success for Pierre Gaxotte, who made a name for himself and earned a place among the leading figures of the royalist and conservative field; and it was also a financial success for Fayard as well as a political success for Action française, since the book’s readership went far beyond the newspaper’s that had been steadily declining since 1926.6

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This great public success needs to be examined since Gaxotte, undoubtedly, was one of the main vectors for the dissemination of counterrevolutionary representations from the late 1920s onwards.7 In the field of history, he had a role similar to Taine’s, who served as an inspiration to some extent at least and to whom he was frequently compared8 at the end of the nineteenth century: they both became referential authors for anyone who was looking for a powerful argument against the Revolution. This sudden dominance in the field was fuelled by a press campaign but also by his claim to be scientific, an assertion that the other ‘Capetian’ historians had not bothered to make. Indeed, his persona as a historian revolved around his claim that he had synthesized the ‘most recent historical works’, quoting republican and socialist historians,9 such as Albert Mathiez and Ernest Labrousse, thus giving him an aura of objectivity on which he capitalized enormously. Above all, however, his work builds on 30  years of Action française theories, whose vision of history was grounded in the nineteenth century: Charles Maurras and others, such as Louis Dimier,10 elaborated a synthesis of French intellectual thought by the likes of Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan and Albert Sorel,11 who had gained huge popularity in conservative circles and developed a long-standing ultra-royalist historical approach which had long been exemplified in the Revue des Questions historiques, founded in 1866. In addition to these classic sources, he was also influenced by Augustin Cochin, whose works were published posthumously in the 1920s. We will see that this latter influence was decisive, especially in Gaxotte’s representations of the motivations of the people in revolution. Since La Révolution française agglomerated in its narrative many counterrevolutionary traditions, it seems that its analysis could serve as a gateway into a vast nebula of hostile narratives. It also gives us an insight into the way a text written in the late 1920s reflects both on contemporary events and yet builds on a complex and multifaceted counterrevolutionary tradition, which was grounded in the nineteenth century. Through the examination of a few highly dramatized episodes of revolutionary violence, this case study aims at understanding the visions of the people put forward by Pierre Gaxotte. Moreover, it seems to us that at the heart of his representations of the people and of the crowd rested another issue, namely that of the figure of the ‘leader’, thus leading to two underlying questions: who manipulated the revolutionary crowd? Who could command the counterrevolutionary crowd?

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Figures in the Crowd The people as they appear in Pierre Gaxotte’s La Révolution française quickly ceased to be a people and became a terrifying crowd. The latter term is deliberately chosen since Gustave Le Bon’s works, particularly the Psychology of the Crowds12 (1895) and The French Revolution and the Psychology of Revolutions13 (1912), served as a doctrinal inspiration for members of Action française. His analyses of the individual’s behaviour in a group and, as we shall see, the possibilities of manipulation offered by this situation are echoed in Gaxotte’s depiction of the revolutionary crowd. This starts with a shared contempt for the crowd. In La Révolution française et la psychologie des révolutions, Le Bon uses a lot of contemptuous terms for the people, often speaking of the ‘populace’. Similarly, Pierre Gaxotte describes starkly the procession that rushes towards Versailles on 5 October as ‘A troop of people of sackcloth and rope, gathered in the gutters’.14 And about the crowd that takes the royal family back to Paris the next day: ‘A hideous and grotesque procession starts. First, as trophies, the bloody heads of the guards; then a crowd of women, robbers, drunken, sloppy, screaming soldiers, making the most obscene remarks and making the most disgusting gestures’.15 In these excerpts, the people are systematically bestialized, presented as a mob, a collection of bandits made even more dangerous by their numbers. Even more than the leaders of the Revolution, this crowd is presented as the force that occupies the foreground of the Revolution, its evil force. The reader is here confronted with a case of historiographical demophobia, the irrational fear of crowds. In fact, and following Gustave Le Bon, there is a terrible fear of what the crowd can accomplish and, above all, destroy. Some passages thus see him completely abandoning his composed tone, which is part of his attempt to give the appearance of objectivity to his book. His description of the events of 10 August 1792 has almost a gothic quality: ‘You have to read the accounts of the witnesses to get an idea of these horrors. Men are thrown alive from the windows and impaled down on spikes. Others are shredded, mutilated. Bare bodies are piled up on the paving stones, set on fire, grilled like chops’.16 Here, Gaxotte lets go of his composed tone and pretence at scientific objectivity to revive an old counterrevolutionary tradition, namely the compilation of the horrors of the Revolution, a genre that often found its most systematic expression in the accounts of the wars of Vendée.17

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This vilification of the crowd when it is rioting is also reflected in his depictions of women, which are omnipresent in the narration of the events of 5 and 6 October; but also in the chapter devoted to the end of 1793, the ‘Communist Terror’, a title that clearly echoes the anticommunist feeling that has structured the French—and European—rights since 1917.18 These women are embodied in a few stereotypical characters: the prostitute, the fishwife, the woman of the Halles and, during the terrorist period, the tricoteuses (who supposedly spent their whole day knitting by the guillotine), the latter being led by Théroigne de Méricourt, a striking falsification by Gaxotte. This anecdote was then repeated by Léon Daudet, becoming something of a counterrevolutionary trope. They exemplify the debasement of the crowd and they are recurring motifs in counterrevolutionary literature. Vociferous and violent, they fit well in the Gaxottian narrative. Painting such portraits has several functions. First of all, it is a way of depreciating the people, presented as a gross and criminal mass. The motif of the prostitute facilitates the criminalization of the Revolution, which is disparaged by this association. It also resonates with the common nickname given to the Republic by contemporary royalist circles, la Gueuse. Second, these fallen women are proof of the immorality of the Revolution that transforms common women into bloodthirsty harpies who are even more dangerous than men. These female figures embody the disorders of the period and appear in stark contrast with the order-based ancien régime, in which popular violence was strictly controlled and repressed. Finally, these women are often compared with worthy female figures that are usually associated with the ancien régime. Marie-Antoinette and Madame Royale have, for instance, been celebrated since the Restoration by the royalists. Stories of the queen’s execution often contrast her dignity on the cart that led her to the scaffold with the brutal behaviour of the women in the mob which surrounds her. Other martyr figures are sometimes conjured up: Gaxotte describes the Princess of Lamballe’s execution during the September 1792 massacres in the following terms: ‘Her throat was slit on a milestone of the rue Pavée’.19 The depiction of her death is a topical point of martyrological narratives of the counterrevolution since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Often depicted in a gruesome and obscene fashion, in Gaxotte’s account she is slaughtered like a farm animal, and the shocking description of her death stands in stark contrast to the refined elegance of the ancien régime. This

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century-old topos, well described by Antoine de Baecque,20 was clearly manipulated by Gaxotte. The revolutionary crowd is nothing but terrible and terrifying in this book; the many pages devoted to its crimes are undoubtedly the most baroque of Gaxotte’s work. These descriptions call for a dual observation. On the one hand, they are expected in counterrevolutionary literature, in which they seem to respond to a macabre fascination of the conservative reader for the horrors of the Revolution: considering La Révolution française’s posterity, one may also wonder whether this graphic use of violence participated in its editorial success. On the other, this terrifying crowd, with its dramatized violence, obviously serves a political purpose by reminding the readers how political turmoil transforms an otherwise peaceful people.

A Weak Image of the Counterrevolutionary Masses In contrast to these apocalyptic images of a bestialized crowd, unrestrainedly released on anyone suspected of opposing the Revolution, one could imagine that Pierre Gaxotte, like most of his predecessors like Taine, Beauchesne, and, closer to him, G. Lenotre, would have made point of representing more heroically those segments of the French population fighting the Revolution, particularly the Vendéens. This is not, however, the case. The wars of Vendée occupy only a meagre place in this long work: barely a few pages in Chap. 11, the title of which, ‘The Victorious Revolution’, does not suggest any exaltation of the resistance of the Vendée. It is described in a few lines before the author relates how the uprising was crushed in two pages: Bushy, mysterious, criss-crossed with ravines, cut off by hedges and hollow roads, the country was not well suited for major military operations, but it was ideally suited for a war of surprises and ambushes. On two or three occasions, the Vendée leaders managed to raise considerable masses of men, but they dispersed as quickly as they had gathered. One day there was an army, the next day there was nothing left. Accustomed to pain and suffering, these peasants fear neither fatigue nor death, but their minds are as short as their horizon. They are fighting for their church and their village. When they have delivered them, they believe that their task is over. They did not want to hold garrisons or patrols: they went to receive their bell tower and their victory was short-lived.21

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There is nothing heroic or romantic about these ‘masses of men’ with their ‘minds short as their horizon’, quite the contrary. Although he admits, two pages later, that the massacres and violence of the republican armies against the population repulsed him, he does not make the Vendée or the Vendéens one of the symbols of his hatred for the Revolution. Although this is one of the few references of a portion of the population that was explicitly counterrevolutionary—hence very different from the barbaric populace that rises every day but also from the indifferent masses, which according to Gaxotte represented the majority of the population from 1790 onwards22—it seems that the Vendée does not matter much to him. This is all the more surprising since, in addition to the many magazines published in western France and the numerous references to the Vendée in the counterrevolutionary literary and historical production, more than 200 books and brochures were specifically devoted to the region between 1900 and 1928, many of them referring to the violence committed against the civilian populations. Nevertheless, the Vendéens—whom the counterrevolutionary narrative of the Revolution has essentialized and dramatized as the People’s Counterrevolution—serve here as a useful tool in the more general fresco of the French victims of the revolutionary wars. It seems, however, that Gaxotte’s demophobia is not completely lifted by the fact that the Vendéens fought for the Church and the king. They remain afflicted with the main shortcoming of the people as a whole, their lack of intelligence and its spontaneity.

A Mystery of the French Revolution: Why Would a Happy People Revolt? The second chapter, ‘L’État pauvre dans le pays riche’ (A poor state in a rich country),23 which is the second part of his presentation of France during the last years of the ancien régime, concludes with a paragraph which is somehow programmatic for the rest of the book: France before the Revolution was not unhappy. It had cause for complaint about, not for, revolt. Of the two major problems that had to be addressed: the abolition of the vestiges of feudalism and financial reform, none would have been insoluble if an intellectual and moral crisis had not reached the French soul to its very depths. It complicated the slightest conflict and made a situation that was only difficult worrying and then desperate’.24

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It is not surprising, of course, that the greatest bestseller of counterrevolutionary historiography presents if not an idyllic, at least a reassuring, vision of the ancien régime, as a prelude to systematic attacks against the Revolution. This is even less surprising given the fact that Gaxotte’s work was first born from the scattered notes he had taken when he was still a high school teacher for a possible history of the ancien régime:25 the pre-1789 period, and the subsequent analysis of the revolutionary rupture, is at the heart of his historical hermeneutics. Two axes of this intermediate conclusion are nevertheless obvious: France, which is to be understood here as a metonymy of the French people, was not unhappy in 1789. This is an affirmation that echoes his surprising description of peasant life a few pages earlier: namely, that ‘behind this coat of rags [those of the peasant], a peaceful, [there was] often [an] easy, sometimes affluent life’;26 their soul was, however, suffering from a deep intellectual and moral crisis. His analysis is deeply marked by Ernest Renan’s violent criticism of the Republic, particularly in La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (Intellectual and moral reform),27 a book which was paramount in the making of Action française doctrine28 and established Renan’s status as one of the ‘masters’ celebrated by the movement. This intermediary conclusion is an implicit answer to Gaxotte’s main question: ‘why and how did a happy people rise up to bring down a thousand-year-­old institutional edifice?’ The answer is because the country was corrupted, perhaps manipulated. Thus, and as is often the case in the counterrevolutionary historiography of the Revolution, the first chapters devoted to the ancien régime serve as an introduction to the rest of the book by laying down the motifs that will then be spun throughout the story of the disaster. Symptomatically, Gaxotte dedicates a very large part of his first two chapters to a material and cultural description, combining economic data and testimonies, of a French people whose transition to revolution remains somehow incomprehensible. The Revolution is explained by the encounter between the French people, the toxic ‘revolutionary doctrine’ (the title of Chap. 3) brandished by some of the urban elites, and ‘the crisis of authority’ (the title of Chap. 4), which defines the state during the years that precede the Revolution. These are the two factors that have transformed a peaceful population whose condition has improved over time because of the wise policy-­ making of the monarchy into a violent and uncontrollable mass; and this makes the kingdom the landmark of ‘anarchy’, the title of Chap. 5, in

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which he begins the history of the Revolution. He uses analyses already developed at length by Hippolyte Taine in the Origines de la France contemporaine (The origins of contemporary France)29 and by Charles Maurras and Jacques Bainville in the first phase of the theoretical and historical elaboration of Action française doctrine: the deleterious influence of the philosophers and of the spirit of the Enlightenment on the monarchy. This spirit, for him, could be defined by a mixture of derision for the constituted bodies and for sophistry. Combined with a weak monarch, this spirit contributed to the ruin of the ancien régime and to the liberation of popular violence, until then constrained by the monarchy. Yet, although he talks about anarchy, he often suggests, and sometimes affirms, that the people were manipulated. More generally, from the role of Louis XVI to the figure of Napoleon, including all the chiefs of the Revolution—as he seems to consider Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Brissot, and so on—the problem of command and leadership in the eighteenth century is directly mirrored in the attitudes of the people. In short, in Pierre Gaxotte’s Révolution française, the depiction of the people is inseparable from the question of the leadership before, during and after the Revolution.

The People as a Mirror of the Leader? Manipulating the People The underlying discourse of this book is that the crowd, seemingly uncontrollable and untameable, has been manipulated. La Révolution française is filled with references to Freemasonry and its influence on French society. Revolutionary ‘journées’ are always the result of plots cooked up by leaders, whether explicitly named by Gaxotte or not, to advance their own objectives. On 5 and 6 October, for example, he intertwines two different events: one, which has already been examined, regarding the march on Versailles; the other, however, focuses on the clubs’ plot to bring the king back to Paris. This plot on the part of the revolutionary leaders is slowly unveiled by Gaxotte. First, there is the growing tension between the Court and Paris. First of all: ‘It was therefore quite easy to foresee that, to defeat the recalcitrant [the king and his supporters], the patriots would use their ordinary weapon: a riot whose purpose would be, this time, to put under the

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control of the rabble not only the King, but the Assembly itself’.30 Then, in regard to the outbreak of the riot: ‘On the morning of 5 October, after two days of growing excitement, the riot broke out, driven by a rigorous plan that was only gradually revealed’.31 La Fayette, grotesque and oblivious to the fact that he is a pawn in the hands of the clubs, is depicted in the following terms: ‘La Fayette, distraught and glorious, floating on his horse, not knowing what he was doing there or what was going to happen, but determined to be, in the end, acclaimed and carried to triumph’.32 And manipulating the crowd at Versailles when its will is starting to weaken: ‘They [the royal family] are acclaimed, but from the unstable crowd, moved and ready to be swayed, rises this slogan, the ultimate cause of the whole insurrection: “Bring the King back to Paris!”’.33 The conclusion is curt. Who is the real beneficiary of the whole turn of events? The answer: ‘The Clubs held their hostages’.34 These plots run all through Gaxotte’s narrative of the French Revolution. The influence of Augustin Cochin,35 mentioned several times in the book, is palpable. His work was a refinement of the age-old counterrevolutionary theory of the Masonic conspiracy, founded in a political sociology of the ‘sociétés de pensées’ (thought societies) in which the urban elites of the ancien régime gathered before the Revolution (usually connected to masonic chapters): for him, these societies in turn became the founding stones on which the Jacobin clubs thrived all over France after 1789. In their understanding, far from being an incomprehensible phenomenon, these crowds are in fact precisely organized and follow plans prepared several days in advance. Of course, no evidence or source can justify this unfalsifiable theory since it is the secret of the decision-making process that proves its reality. Moreover, Gaxotte is careful not to be too obvious in his depiction of the Revolution as a vast conspiracy. Half of his references to the manipulation of revolutionary crowds are rather allusive: names are rarely given, while he mostly focuses on two connected entities that act as the brains of the mobs, the clubs and the patriots. At times, he names the main Girondins or the members of the insurrectional Commune. La Révolution française is clearly rooted in the abundant counterrevolutionary editorial landscape in France: nearly 250 anti-­Masonic books and pamphlets were published between 1900 and 1928, two-thirds of which revolve around the revolutionary period. In addition to these books, reviews like the Revue international des sociétés secrètes,36 published from

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1912 to 1914 and then from 1920 to 1922, widely disseminated the pseudo evidence of a plot that began in 1789 and redefined the world order. Revolutionary chaos and violence are therefore the objects of the manipulation of a few; to use Gustave the Le Bon’s concepts, we are dealing in Gaxotte’s understanding of the French Revolution with determination of the actions of a very large heterogeneous crowd by a homogeneous crowd, the latter being a small number of insiders ready to bring down the ancien régime.

Louis XVI, Disciple of Fénelon and Misfortune of France But this manipulation is only possible because France in 1789 was left without a true leader. The dislocation of the ancien régime and the transformation of the people into a bestial crowd was only possible because of the nullity of the king. In this respect, Gaxotte is very unequivocal when he writes of the death of the king: ‘Unfortunately, Louis XV died. Unfortunately again, Louis XVI succeeded him’.37 As well as being a story of the Revolution, its violence and associated crimes, this book is also the history of a failed king who, unlike his predecessors, was incompetent, a bad leader and incapable of commanding the army. Moreover, the book asserts, he could not carry out any violence— he is described several times refusing to do so, on 14 July, 5 October and in Varennes—or take any firm decision. Although a royalist, Gaxotte refused to give in to the facility of the royal martyrologue and while he recognized the courage and constancy of Louis XVI at the time of his death, the portrait he painted of him was also a warning to those who wanted to rule without having the qualities that it required. This is how we must understand, for example, his long criticism of the Telemachus of Fénelon, which, according to him, Louis XVI was too imbued with, rendering him incapable of fully exercising his prerogatives as king and leader. Fenelon’s ideal prince, wise and moderate, was seen as a weak model and unfit to rule. This was not a new theme within Action française. At the Institut d’Action française, founded in 1906 to oppose the supposed influence of the republican universities by distilling the historical, sociological, economic and philosophical theories of the movement, an important part of René de Planhol’s lesson about the

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‘origins and formation of the revolutionary spirit’ was dedicated to Fénelon.38 And again in 1929, Jean Héritier, another young historian close to the movement and later a dutiful collaborator of the Nazis, developed this theme in his July 1929 lecture at the Institut d’Action française, titled ‘Louis XVI or the imitation of Telemachus’.39 This harsh judgment of Louis XVI and the parallel account of revolutionary violence testify to the need for a leader. Without a charismatic, strong and authoritative figure, the organic character of a society, which Gaxotte and other members of Action française believed to be a necessary factor, quickly collapses. His description of the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792 is particularly striking and emphasizes Louis XVI’s incapacity to exercise his prerogatives as a leader: ‘But there is no leader’.40 It is the king who gives his organizing and unifying principle to a people. And when anarchy strikes, the need for a leader is quickly felt, as Gaxotte expresses in the last sentence of his book: ‘To avoid the Bourbons, the doctrine-makers of 1799 were reduced to giving themselves a sword’.41 This reflection on leadership is also part of a more general intellectual context during the first half of the twentieth century in which the figure of the leader became a recurring theme in the literature of social sciences and psychology, as Yves Cohen demonstrates in Le siècle des chefs (The century of leaders).42 In this colossal work, he focuses on two complementary phenomena: the demand for a leader, which increased at the end of the nineteenth century, and the action of these commanding figures in the first half of the twentieth century. A significant part of the book’s sources is the prescriptive literature defining, in many different fields, what a correct leader should do and how he should act. However, the book barely talks about the historical production of the time, focusing mostly on the literature of economics, political sciences and sociology. Yet, for these counterrevolutionary writers, history as a subject was an ‘experimental policy’, to quote Joseph de Maistre in De la souveraineté du people (On the sovereignty of the people).43 Similarly, in the Maurasian concept of organizational empiricism, history is as much a hermeneutic of the present as it is a field for political experimentation. In this respect, Pierre Gaxotte’s La Révolution française offers a historical reflection with very contemporary accents on the organically linked issues of popular violence and the ways in which one can command a crowd.

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An Opening: The Transfer of Jaurès’ Ashes What emerges from La Révolution française is a feature common to all Capetian historians, namely this idea that the revolutionary crowd, anarchic and violent, is necessarily manipulated. It is a subversion of the people, which allows for their worst and most terrifying characteristics to emerge and threaten the organic order of a society. In this respect, for Action française, the revolutionary decade was an archetype of the way in which a society based on order and cohesion can collapse into anarchy and terror. This contrast between order and chaos, an orderly people and a violent crowd, is omnipresent in the Gaxotian depiction of history. It permeates Action française’s understanding of the world. For instance, on 24 November 1924, four years before the publication of La Révolution française, Action française gave parallel accounts of the transfer of Jean Jaurès’ ashes to the Pantheon—ten years after his assassination by a nationalist militant in July 1914—and the commemoration of the murder of Marius Plateau, the former Secretary General of the Camelots du roi, who sold the newspaper on the street and participated in violent activity against other political movements. While the transfer of Jaurès’ ashes, disturbed by a communist counterdemonstration, is presented as a grotesque and chaotic parade, an image of left-wing government incapacity to impose some order on the streets or to discipline the crowd, Maurice Pujo and Charles Maurras give another account of the beginning of their commemoration: Long before the time set for the rally, the crowd of Action française, Camelots du Roi, students and high school students, joined by many patriots who did not belong to our organizations, invaded the surroundings of the fifteenth arrondissement town hall. An ever-pressured stream continued to flow out of the metro. But when, at 3 a.m., Maxime Real del Sarte called the troops to attention, all the sections, all the groups fell into formation behind their leaders without the slightest confusion; it was not a crowd, it was regiments that gathered.44

It is this political concern and will to see the chaotic and disturbing crowd become a regiment that animates part of the intellectual debate between the two world wars. In this sense, the case of La Révolution

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française, in which the terrible revolutionary crowd is finally subdued by Bonaparte’s sword, is an illustration of the fears and aspirations of the conservative and far-right movements.

Notes 1. Pierre Gaxotte, La Révolution française (Paris, 1928). 2. Philippe Ariès, Le Temps de l’histoire (Paris, 1986), 44–68. 3. This is chronicled in the second volume of his memoirs: Pierre Gaxotte, Les autres et moi (Paris, 1975). 4. Jean Guiraud, ‘Une histoire scientifique de la Révolution’, La Croix, 8 April 1928; Jean Guiraud, ‘Une histoire scientifique de la Révolution, suite’, La Croix, 29 April 1928. 5. ‘La Révolution française de Pierre Gaxotte’, Revue des questions historiques, third ser., vol. 13 (1928): 475–476. 6. Eugen Weber identified a noteworthy decline of the Action française from 1924, when it registered 75,000 daily readers, to 1927, when it fell to just 50,000. 7. Christian Amalvi, ‘Les conceptions de l’Histoire selon l’Action Française de 1910 à 1940’, in L’Action Française: culture, société, politique, 1910–1940, eds Jacques Prévotat and Michel Leymarie (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2008), 66. 8. Paul Bourget, ‘Autour de l’œuvre de Taine’, Le Figaro. Supplément littéraire, 21 April 1928; Paul Mathiex, ‘Taine et ses successeurs’, L’Express du Midi, 29 April 1928. 9. Guillaume Mazeau, ‘La bataille du public’, in Histoire d’un trésor perdu, ed. Sophie Wahnich (Paris, 2013), 345–367. 10. Louis Dimier, Les Maîtres de la contre-révolution au dix-neuvième siècle (Paris, 1907). 11. Victor Nguyen, ‘Esquisse d’une posture historique de l’Action française’, Études maurrassiennes 3 (1974): 7–16. 12. Gustave le Bon, La Psychologie des foules (Paris, 1895). 13. Gustave le Bon, La Révolution française et la psychologie des révolutions (Paris, 1912). All quotes were translated from the original French, unless stated otherwise. 14. Gaxotte, La Révolution, 131. 15. Ibid., 134. 16. Ibid., 247. 17. Jean-Clément Martin, ‘Les “Annales” et la Révolution française, à la fin du XIXe siècle: la case départ?’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 101/ 1 (1994): 55–64.

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18. Ralph Schor, L’opinion française et les étrangers en France, 1919–1939 (Paris, 1985), 78–79; Frédéric Monier, Le complot dans la République: stratégies du secret, de Boulanger à la Cagoule (Paris, 1998), 145–184; Serge Berstein and Jean-Jacques Becker, Histoire de l’anti-communisme en France (Paris, 1987), 118–136. 19. Gaxotte, La Révolution, 253. 20. Antoine de Baecque, La gloire et l’effroi: sept morts sous la Terreur (Paris, 1997), 79–106. 21. Ibid., 304. 22. Ibid., 199. 23. Ibid., 29–48. 24. Ibid., 48. 25. Gaxotte, Les autres, 274. 26. Gaxotte, La Révolution, 35. 27. Ernest Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris, 1871). 28. Victor Nguyen, Aux origines de l’Action française: Intelligence et politique à l’aube du XXe siècle (Paris, 1991), 72–84. 29. Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (Paris, 1875–1893). 30. Gaxotte, La Révolution, 128–129. 31. Ibid., 131. 32. Ibid.. 33. Ibid., 134. 34. Ibid., 135. 35. Ibid., 140. 36. Emmanuel Kreis, ‘Les réseaux antijuifs et antimaçonniques autour de la Revue internationale des sociétés secrètes (RISS) de l’entre-deux-guerres à la période de l’Occupation’, Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 198/1 (2013): 117–139. 37. Gaxotte, La Révolution, 83. 38. René de Planhol, ‘La subversion des idées au XVIIIe siècle: origines et formation de l’esprit révolutionnaire’, Les cours de l’Institut d’Action française 5 (October 1923). 39. Jean Héritier, ‘Louis XVI ou l’imitation de Télémaque”, Les cours de l’Institut d’Action française 17 (July 1929). 40. Gaxotte, La Révolution, 245. 41. Ibid., 447. 42. Yves Cohen, Le Siècle des chefs (Paris, 2014). 43. Joseph de Maistre, De la souveraineté du people (Paris, 1992). 44. L’Action française, 24 November 1924.

CHAPTER 13

Epilogue: Emancipation and Popular Politics—An Aporia of Liberalism José M. Portillo

The people constituted a not insignificant problem for liberalism from its inception. On the one hand, revolutions were carried out in its name which swept liberals into power and there was an almost systematic appeal to the people when it became a question of legitimizing a political change. On the other, however, the people were systematically separated from the sphere of political power, as if they were as remote from it as the wealth they lacked. In order to carry out this distancing operation, the development of the concept of the nation became enormously useful. Specifically, it allowed liberalism to maintain the fiction of a universal representation of society, while leaving to legislative discretion the ability to define those who were really invited to the party of politics and, eventually, government. It is well-known that for much of the nineteenth century, that possibility—the substitution of the people for the nation when it came to political power—was used in an extremely restrictive

J. M. Portillo (*) University of the Basque Country, Bilbao/Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9_13

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sense, leaving it in the hands of the largest owners in each nation. In this way, what we usually term the nation-state emerged through the exclusion and non-integration of much of society in the second of these terms, the state, and did so by using the first, the nation. This most contradictory relationship between the people and liberalism has something to do, among other things, with emancipation, one of the main foundations on which the political theory of liberalism was constructed. Ex manu capere, to no longer go hand in hand, is an etymology which explains accurately how useful the idea of emancipation was in western thought up to the revolutionary era, which began in the late eighteenth and lasted until the nineteenth century. It was one of the fictions of law which marked the moment of reproducing the oikos by means of the male child’s access to the new legal status of pater familias. Western political legal culture, with its Christian Roman roots, had adopted this figure of Roman law—like so many others—and recycled it in the ius commune tradition. Shedding what was considered barbarian (the public sale of the son to signify his emancipatio), emancipation had been formulated as a new legal status (or, more accurately, a new condition of person) consisting of the assumption of two necessary attributes in the emancipated: freedom and independence. This is how legal treatises usually incorporate it, and not just those based on ius commune, but also those rooted in common law when it comes to the question of people: the emancipated was he who, ‘in addition to being free’, was independent of another’s will, that is, who did not depend on or was under the right of  others. This was, by the way, a foundation of which the everlasting dependence of women on men would be argued at length. One of the aspects in which, first, the Enlightenment and then the constitutional revolutions marked out a dividing line in regard to the previous political legal tradition was linked precisely, in my opinion, to this idea. That tradition had delimited perfectly and strictly the scope of emancipation to the reproduction of familial authority, and nothing else. One of the motives for reflection in enlightened thought consisted precisely of exploring the possibility that emancipation was significant for liberating other subjects, beyond just the male child. The constitutional revolutions were, to some extent, a spillover effect of the idea of emancipation outside the sphere of the oikos in order to encompass the domain of the Res publica. Then nations were also emancipated: ‘That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States’; ‘the Spanish nation is free and independent and is not, nor can be, the patrimony of any

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family or person’. Now, it was not only the male offspring of families who had reached a certain age that were free and independent, emancipated; it was also, and in a very significant way, the nation. And through the very act of emancipating themselves, nations became one with sovereignty, thereby displacing monarchs from the latter. The chapters contained in this book describe a historical process that, although forming part of this tale of emancipation, is usually presented as something separate from it. Under the label of ‘popular’ or ‘plebeian’ classes, the historiography usually understood their experience of modernity to be another historical process parallel to, though at the same time separate from, that which had given rise to the great revolutions and the rise of liberalism. However, as this book expertly demonstrates, it was in fact one and the same historical process in which liberalism introduced a language of emancipation that, while it went beyond its use in traditional political legal culture, also generated its own limits. Indeed, it produced an aporia (contradiction) which, in the long run, forced liberalism to reinvent itself from the 1930s onwards in a complex and painful process (which included the totalitarian reaction and the Second World War) that led to something substantially different which we term using the same adjective: liberal democracy. This aporia could be expressed in the following way: modernity demanded emancipation in order to be able to create a society of free and independent people that formed, in turn, free and independent nations capable of constituting their own states. However, liberalism was based on the selective application of this principle, avoiding extending it any further on the assumption that it would lead to anarchy and ungovernable situations. Put another way, liberalism took shape while proclaiming both emancipation and its very limits at the same time. These limits included, to begin with, one which liberalism appropriated from traditional political anthropology and which was reflected paradigmatically in chapter VI of title V of the 1804 French Civil Code which regulated the respective position of men and women in family society. It also reinterpreted the old principle that representation consisted of selecting the best and soundest in the community, understood now as the radical sovereignty of property: that was the best and soundest part of a modern society and therefore a significant sector of liberalism understood that the more property ownership was required to enter into the field of politics, the better.

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This is a key aspect of the above-mentioned aporia of liberalism, since both gender and property denoted the space of authentic emancipation. There were other markers, such as religion, race and culture, which delimited still more the circle around the truly emancipated, that is, those who could really exercise liberty and independence. The first of those markers was nationality and it is, by the way, the only one that still exists. This gives us some idea of the extent to which the history of the last two centuries can be represented as a struggle for the emancipation of different sectors within our western societies. Nineteenth-century liberalism, which began with the constitutional revolutions and ended with the First World War, brooded constantly over one major issue: the government of society. Its politicians and philosophers were fully conscious of the fact that the aforementioned aporia which liberalism implicitly implied created a serious problem for government. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Lorenz von Stein (1815–1890) dedicated their intellectual lives to reflecting on how to make governable a modern world which had established a hitherto unusual principle: the existence of a single society regulated by universal laws, such as the Civil Code itself. The creation of specific ministries to do so (termed those of the Interior, of Development or of Governance) is particularly illustrative of the extent to which, for nineteenth-century liberalism, the government of society was decisive. Liberalism thus devised a form of governing society in contrast to that, one could say, of societies which had traditionally made up political continents—monarchies—which were capable of almost limitless expansion. They could do so precisely because their formation implied the addition rather than the integration of differentiated societies with distinct characteristics and rights. The Spanish Monarchy was the most extreme case of this in the modern age and the most subject to criticism on the part of enlightened liberal thought on the grounds of being an ungovernable empire. It was modern to consider that the government of a state should be addressed in a uniform way to a society in which there were no legal differences that would hinder its activity. As Javier de Burgos, the Spanish minister who drew up the country’s modern territorial division, noted in 1833, the ideal was a government which would extend from a ministerial office to the humblest of shacks. The most important question this book raises is that of the extent to which this liberal project, with its aporia of emancipation, could manage to seduce certain popular classes that were marginal to the gubernaculum

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steered by the state. We should hasten to clarify that it did, and as quickly as possible. The nineteenth century was marked by numerous revolutionary processes in which the people also aspired to have a hand on that rudder, that state gubernaculum, as expressed so clearly by the Chartist movement. The revolutionary theory of Marxism would soon come along to propose not just touching it but taking hold of the entire state vessel in to change, precisely, society. But there were other potential answers which consisted of opposing the liberal idea of a state and a society against a continuity of the monarchy and societies. It is true, and the chapters in this book contain very accurate analyses in this respect, that in most of the proposals which nourished this continuity one perceives an awareness that the liberal revolutions had disrupted the scenario forever. For this reason, in historiographical terms it is most prudent to consider those popular royalist movements as part of the same historical process which gave birth to liberal modernity. It was a form of reacting against the same thing and its main feature was devising another modernity in which a complex of heterogeneous societies— comprising, for example, ecclesiastics, guilds and local communities— could continue to exist and be orchestrated by a monarchy whose precise function was to steer the gubernaculum. While liberal modernity had to contend with its aporia, this other popular monarchical modernity also created its own version since it could scarcely integrate the idea of an open society. This all greatly enriches historiographical understanding of the process that we may term modernity precisely because it extended the idea of emancipation beyond the family sphere and because it conceived of a system centred on a state and a society. It makes us more aware that all of this was a novum in the nineteenth century and of that its formation was a gradual, contradictory and, above all, very conflictive process.

Index1

A Abarca, Joaquín, Bishop of León, 203–205 Abruzzo (Italian region), 171–173, 176, 179–181, 183 Action française, 11, 234–237, 241, 242, 244–246 Africa, 39 Aguirre, Ramón, 155, 156 Álava (Spanish province), 149, 150, 154 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, 20 Aloïs Kunc, 219 Altamura (Italy), 176 American colonies, see United States/ United States of America American War of Independence, 26 Andalusia (Spanish region), 91, 96, 99 Angouleme (Duke of), 157, 159 Anjou (French duchy), 109

Apodaca, Juan Ruiz de, 127, 136 Aragon (Spanish region), 47, 91, 92, 95 Areche, Antonio, 54 Arendal (Norway), 53 Argenson, Marquis d’, 20 Ariano (Italy), 176, 177 Army of the Émigrés (France), 116 Arredondo, Joaquín de, 137 Arrien, José Ramón, 155 Artois (Count of), 21, 155 Astarloa, Pedro José, 152 Austria, 157, 226 Austria, Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and Sicily, 67, 75 Austria, Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, 233, 238 Avellino (Italian province), 175, 177 Ayacucho (Peru), 136

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Artola, Á. París (eds.), Royalism, War and Popular Politics in the Age of Revolutions, 1780s–1870s, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29511-9

255

256 

INDEX

B Bailly, Vincent de Paul, 222 Bainville, Jacques, 235, 242 Baltimore (USA), 226 Basque Country, 9, 11, 91–93, 95, 147–157, 159–162 Basque (language), 152 Basque Provinces, see Basque Country Bayonne (France), 92, 131, 155, 156, 193 Belgium, 123n18, 226 Benevento (Italy), 177 Bergen (Norway), 5, 39–41 Bertrand, Louis, 235 Bilbao (Spain), 149, 152, 155, 159, 166n31 Bill of Rights, 20 Biscay (Spanish province), 149–151, 154, 158, 159, 166n31, 166n33, 167n48 Bolshevik Revolution, 234 Bonaparte, Joseph, 66 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 24, 63, 66, 72, 76, 151, 195, 197, 223, 224, 242, 247 Bonapartism, 23, 27 Bonghi, Ruggero, 171 Borges, José, 183 Bottero, Giovanni Battista, 172, 179 Bourbon, Marie-Thèrese (Madame Royale), 238 Bourbon (Dynasty), 7, 24, 25, 41, 44, 51, 57n16, 62–67, 80, 136, 137, 152, 171, 172, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 219 Bourbons, 22, 24, 44–46, 52, 95, 171, 181, 219, 245 Bourelly, Giuseppe, 182 Boyacá (Colombia), 136 Brabant (Dutch province), 21 Breton, see Brittany (French region)

Brigandage, 28, 169–184 Brigands, 28, 152, 182–184 Brigantaggio, 105n37, 169–175, 187n40 Brissot, Jacques Pierre, 242 Britain, 29 British, see United Kingdom Brittany (French region), 8, 9, 18, 27, 109, 111, 112, 117, 120 Brussels (Belgium), 221 Burgos, Javier de, 252 C Cadiz Cortes – Cortes of Cadiz, 22, 91, 132, 135, 138, 139, 191–193, 200–202, 206, 207 Calabria (Italian region), 170, 171, 176, 179, 183 Calleja, Félix, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138 Canada, 215 Capitanata (Italian district), 173 Caramanico (Italy), 178, 179 Caribbean, 39, 40 Carlismo/carlism, 89, 90, 95, 96, 99, 148, 150 Carlist, 22, 148, 151, 160, 161, 163, 166n33, 183 Carlist insurrection, 161, 166n33, 167n58 Carlist Wars, 22 See also First Carlist War; Second Carlist War Carlos III, see Charles III Carlos IV, see Charles IV Carlos VII, see Charles VII of Spain Carlos María Isidro, see Charles V of Spain Caruso, Michele, 181 Castellammare (Italy), 181

 INDEX 

Castile (Spanish region), 47, 51, 91, 92, 95 Castrillón, Jerónimo, Bishop of Tarazona, 204 Catalan, 95 Catalonia (Spanish region), 1, 9, 91–93, 95 Catholic Church, 90, 97, 214–218, 220–222, 225, 227 Chambord (Count of), 219 Charles I, King of England, Ireland and Scotland, 19 Charles III (Carlos III, King of Spain), 46 Charles IV (Carlos IV, King of Spain), 46, 193 Charles V of Spain (Carlos V, legitimist pretendant to the throne), 64, 151, 159 Charles VII of Spain (Carlos VII, legitimist pretendant to the throne), 219 Charles X, King of France, 76, 155 Chartres (France), 222 Chiapas (Mexican region), 134 Chicontepec (Mexico), 134 Chouan, 110, 112, 116–119 Chouannerie, 8, 18, 27, 90, 93, 95, 98, 110 Church, 10, 27, 65, 68, 74, 76, 80, 84n36, 90, 95, 97, 123n18, 171, 192, 214–218, 220–222, 224, 225, 227, 240 Cicignon, Ulrik Frederik, 39 Cilento (Italian region), 171 Clementi, Giuseppe, 172 Clergy, 8, 10, 18, 27, 90, 91, 94, 96, 99, 109–120, 130, 150, 152, 154–156, 167n58, 179, 194, 196, 222, 223 Clerics, 94, 155, 170, 179

257

Cochin, Augustin, 236, 243 Colafella, Angelo Camillo, 179 Cologne (Germany), 221 Comte, Auguste, 252 Comunero Rebellion, 51 Comuneros, 42, 51 Condorcanqui, José Gabriel, 42, 52–55 Conquest of Rome in 1870, 223 Constitutional regime, 90, 91, 93, 203 Constitutional Triennium (Spain), see Liberal Triennium (Spain) Cordón, Juan José, Bishop of Guadix, 203 Cordova, Filippo, 171 Cortes, 45, 47 Côtes-du-Nord (French Department), 112, 116 Council of Trent, 222 Creus, Jaime, Archbishop of Tarragona, 92 Crocco, Carmine, 181, 184 Cuzco (Peru), 53, 54 D Dahl, 54 Dalarna (Swedish province)/Dalecarlia (Swedish province), 42 Dalecarlian, see Dalecarlians Dalecarlians, 50–52 Danton, Georges Jacques, 233, 242 Daudet, Léon, 235, 238 Declaration of Human Rights, 21 Delandine, Antoine-François, 21 Democratic Sexennium (Spain), 219 Denmark, 39, 41, 44–47, 58n19 Deva (Basque Country, Spain), 161 Deva Valley, 161 Diderot, Denis, 20 Di Pinto, Vincenzo, 182

258 

INDEX

Directory (French Revolution), 117 Döllinger, Ignaz von, 217 Don Carlos, see Charles V of Spain Duke of the Infantado—Alcántara de Toledo y Salm-Salm, Pedro, Duke of the Infantado, 203, 205 E Eceiza, Francisco José, 154, 155 Echevarría, Miguel de, 156 Eguía, Francisco (General), 92, 94, 155, 156, 167n58 Éibar (Spain), 161 Elío, Francisco Javier (General), 202 Empordà (Spain), 99 England, 19, 43, 44 English, see England English Civil War, 4, 19 Ermua (Spain), 161 Expedition of the Thousand, 218 Extremadura (Spanish region), 92, 96 Extremaduran, 95 F Fall of Rome in 1870, 227 Faroe Islands, 39 Félix Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, 217 Fenelon, François, 244 Ferdinand I, King of Two Sicilies, 64 Ferdinand IV, King of Naples, King of Two Sicilies, 24, 29, 66, 67, 78 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 1, 22, 64, 66, 67, 68, 74, 78, 90, 91, 94, 131, 139, 151, 155, 156, 158, 193, 195, 199–203, 206 Finistère (French Department), 112 First Carlist War, 9, 148, 161, 163 First Vatican Council, 216, 217 First World War, 234

Fontainebleau (France), 223, 224 Fougères (France), 117 France, 7–9, 18, 21, 23, 24, 26–28, 32n21, 43, 58n19, 62–65, 67, 69, 71–73, 80, 90–96, 99, 109, 118, 155–157, 167n48, 196, 217–220, 222, 226, 234, 235, 240–245 Francis II, King of Two Sicilies, 177, 179, 181–183, 218 Fredrik, Prince, 54 French, 21 French Empire, 22 French Monarchy, 157 French Republic, 149, 166n31 French Revolution, 4, 5, 8, 18, 19, 43, 61, 62, 64, 69, 75, 109, 153, 195, 221, 223, 233, 234, 237, 240–244 Funck-Brentano, Frantz, 235 G Gaeta (Italy), 216, 226 Galicia (Spanish region), 91, 92, 95, 200 Galician, 95 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 174, 177, 182 Gattini, Francesco (Count), 171, 172, 176 Gaxotte, Pierre, 233–247 German, 45, 215, 217, 221, 226, 230n32 Germany, 221 Girondins (French Revolution), 24, 243 Glatin, Angélique, 115 Godoy, Manuel, 46 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 223 Gorostidi, Francisco Ignacio, 154 Govone, Giuseppe (General), 172, 181 Great Britain, see United Kingdom Greenland, 39

 INDEX 

Guadalajara (Mexico), 133 Guadalajara (Spain), 194 Guanajuato (Mexico), 133 Guezala, Domingo de, 156, 166n31 Guipúzcoa (Spanish province), 149, 150, 154, 155, 159 Guiraud, Jean, 235 H Habsburg (Dynasty), 21, 43, 46, 49, 51 Habsburgs, see Habsburg (Dynasty) Haleux, Marie, 117 Henry IV, King of France, 19 Holstein (Duchy), 39 Holy Alliance, 90, 203 Holy Father, see Pope Holy See, see Vatican Hong Kong, 226 Huguet, Jean-Joseph, 225 Hundred Days, 24 Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis (Cien Mil Hijos de San Luis), 93, 157 I Ibáñez-Cuevas, Joaquín, Baron of Eroles, 92 Ibarzábal, Gabriel, 161 Iceland, 39 Ille-et-Vilaine (French Department), 112, 113 India, 39 Indians, 1, 4, 25, 131, 134, 135, 137–139 Inguanzo, Pedro, Archbishop of Toledo, 204 Inquisition (Spain), 194, 205 Irpinia (Italian district), 177 Isabel, 151 Isabella II, Queen of Spain, 64, 65

259

Isernia (Italy), 172 Italian, 18, 22, 28, 170, 174, 182, 183, 213, 217, 218, 220, 223, 224, 226, 227 Italian Peninsula, see Italy Italian unification, 213, 224 Italy, 90, 93, 94, 99, 169–184, 185n9, 213, 218, 220, 227 J Jacobins (French Revolution), 67, 77, 78, 80, 243 Jacobite, 19, 29, 32n16 Jáuregui, Gaspar, 161 Jaurès, Jean, 246 Jersey (Great Britain), 117 K Kant, Immanuel, 197 Kristian Lofthus, see Lofthus, Kristian L La Fayette (Marquis of), 243 La Gala, Cipriano, 181 La Queuille (Marquis of), 21 La Salette (France), 221 Labouré, Catherine, 221 Labrousse, Ernest, 236 Lamballe (Princess of), 238 Latin America, 136, 215 Le Bon, Gustave, 237, 244 Liberal regime of the Cadiz Constitution, 132 Liberal Triennium (Spain), 4, 8, 22, 76, 89–93, 148, 150, 153–158, 160, 162, 167n48 Liberal Wars, 23 Ligori, Alphonsus Maria de, Catholic saint, 220

260 

INDEX

Lillesand (Norway), 53, 55 Limburg (Diocese of), 221 Lofthus, Kristian, 42, 53–55 Lofthus uprising, 42 Longa, Francisco (General), 156 López, Simón, 204 Louis XV, King of France, 244 Louis XVI, King of France, 23, 24, 27, 198, 233, 242, 244–245 Louis XVIII, King of France, 24, 26, 76 Louis-Philippe/Louis-Philippe I, King of France, 64, 221 Lourdes (France), 64, 222 Loyalists, 19, 20, 129 Luxemburg (Diocese of), 221 Lyon (France), 19, 24, 27, 121n3 M Madrid (Spain), 66, 67, 78, 93, 159, 194–196, 200, 201 Maestrazgo (Spanish region), 92, 95 Maiella (Italy), 179 Maine (French Department), 109 Mainz (Diocese of), 221 Maistre, Joseph de, 217, 245 Moguel, Juan José, 152 Malcontenti, 74 Malcontents, 72, 74, 90, 95, 206 Manning, Henry, Cardinal of Westminster, 215 Marat, Jean-Paul, 242 María da Fonte, 90 María da Fonte Revolt, 90 Marillet, François Guillaume, 23 Martínez Marina, Francisco, 193 Massari, Giuseppe, 172 Mataflorida (Marquis of), see Mozo de Rosales, Bernardo, Marquis of Mataflorida Matera (Italy), 171, 176

Mathiez, Albert, 236 Maurras, Charles, 18, 235, 236, 242, 246 Mazzeo, 181 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 217 Metz (Diocese of), 221 Mexico City, 127, 131, 133, 135 Mezzogiorno (Italian region), 9, 169, 181, 185n9 Midi (French region), 28, 35n50 Miguelism/miguelismo, 8, 90, 95, 96, 98 Miguelists, 23 Moguel, Vicenta, 152 Molise (Italian region), 176, 178 Monarchiens, 18, 21 Montella (Italy), 175, 176, 180 Morbihan (French Department), 112, 113 Mozo de Rosales, Bernardo, Marquis of Mataflorida, 91, 92, 94, 97, 98, 156, 159 Munguía (Spain), 160 Münster (Diocese of), 221 Muraca, Luigi, 182 Murcia (Spain), 95 N Nancy (France), 221 Naples (Italy), 7, 22, 24, 29, 62–68, 72, 77, 78, 80, 156, 170, 171, 175, 187n38 Napoleonic, 22, 43, 45, 148, 151, 152, 166n31, 167n48, 192, 195, 223 Napoleonic Wars, 5, 8, 43, 63, 65, 69, 223 National Assembly (French Revolution), 21, 26 National Guard, 72, 178 Navarre (Kingdom of), 91–93, 95, 147, 167n56

 INDEX 

Neapolitan, 170–172, 178, 179, 182 Nedenes Amt (Norway), 54 Netherlands, 21 New Galicia, 133 New Granada, 25, 40, 42, 44, 51, 52, 137 New Spain, 9, 127, 130–132, 134, 135, 137, 140, 141 Norway, 39, 42, 44, 45, 47, 54, 55 O Oaxaca (Mexico), 133, 137 O’Connell, Daniel, 226 Oldenborg (Dynasty), 39, 41 Oldenborgs, see Oldenborg (Dynasty) Oñate (Spain), 160 Orleans (Duke of), 23 Oxangoiti, Cayetano, 161 P Pactism, 51 Papacy, 193, 214, 216–219, 222, 224, 226, 227 Papal States, 22, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219, 223 Papal Zouaves, 226 Paraguay, 22 Paray-le-Monial (France), 222 Paris (France), 24, 26, 30n2, 33n25, 35n48, 111, 219, 221, 226, 230n30, 237, 242, 248n20 Paris Commune, 219 Parma (Italy), 22 Parthenopean Republic, 66 Pêche, Louis, 154 Pedicini (Marquis of), 177 Peninsular War, 10, 141, 155, 162, 166n33, 191, 194, 206

261

Peru, 52–54 Philip II, King of Spain, 20 Pica, Giuseppe, 170 Picard, Françoise, 222 Piedmont (Italian region), 22, 64 Piedmont-Sardinia (Kingdom of), 22 Pius VI, pope, 223, 224 Pius VII, pope, 220, 223, 224 Pius IX, pope, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219, 221, 222, 224–227 Pius XI, pope, 214, 234 Planhol, René de, 244 Plateau, Marius, 246 Pontmain (France), 221 Popayán (Colombia), 25, 139 Pope, 22, 213–220, 222–228 Portugal, 8, 9, 22, 64, 90, 92, 93, 95, 157 Précy (Count of), 24 Priests, see Clergy Provence (Count of), 21 Prussia, 157 Prussian monarchy, 221 Puebla (Mexico), 133, 134 Puglia (Italy), 176 Pujo, Maurice, 246 Q Querétaro (Mexico), 135 Quito (Ecuador), 5, 40, 41 R Redon (France), 117 Renan, Ernest, 236, 241 René Grousset, 235 Restoration, 2, 23, 24, 28, 36n62, 52, 62–64, 66–73, 76–80, 115, 117–120, 148, 157–160, 162, 191, 199–203, 216, 219, 220, 223, 224, 238

262 

INDEX

Revolution of 1820, 202 Risorgimento, 173 Robespierre, Maximilien, 233, 242 Rome, 10, 19, 171, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219, 222–224 Rossi, Pellegrino, 216 Royalist militias, 28, 134, 141 Royalist Volunteers, 69, 72, 76, 86n51, 159 Ruffo, Fabrizio, Catholic cardinal, 66, 75, 76, 78 Ruiz de Apodaca, Juan, Count of Venadito, 127 Russia, 157 Russo-Swedish War, 42 S Saffi, Aurelio, 173 Saint-Malo (France), 115, 117 Salvatierra (Spain), 154 Sanfedists/sanfedisti/sanfedista, 8, 22, 24, 171, 175 Sangro (Duke of), 177 San Luis Potosí (Mexico), 133 San Sebastian (Spain), 149 Santa Fe (Colombia), 51 Santafede, see Sanfedisti Sant’Antimo (Prince of), 177 Savoy (House of), 22 Scandinavia, 7, 39–56 Schlewswig (Duchy), 39 Second Carlist War, 219 Second War of Independence, 218 Sedan (France), 219 Sergeant Romano, 182, 183 Seven Years’ War, 39–41 Sicily (Italy), 64, 66, 173 Sigüenza (Spain), 92 Slaves, 2, 4, 24, 25 Socorro (Colombia), 51, 52 Sorel, Albert, 236

Soubirous, Bernadette, Catholic saint, 221 Spain, 4, 5, 7, 9, 41, 42, 44–47, 52, 54, 58n19, 62–68, 71–74, 76, 77, 80, 89–91, 93, 97, 98, 128, 130–136, 139, 147, 156–158, 191, 196–198, 201, 204, 206, 218–220 Spanish, 1, 4, 5, 8–12, 18, 22, 28, 33n31, 39–56, 67, 69, 74, 78, 89, 97, 98, 127–130, 134, 139, 147–149, 160, 162, 163, 184, 191, 192, 194–198, 201, 203–205, 207, 250, 252 Spanish America, 4, 5, 7, 39–56, 57n16, 128–130, 134, 138, 139, 141 Spanish crown, 22 Spanish Empire, 10, 22, 152 Spaventa, Silvio, 181 Speyer (Germany), 221 Spinoso (Prince of), 177 Stein, Lorenz von, 252 Stockholm (Sweden), 42, 50, 51 Struensee, Friedrich, 46 Stuart (Dynasty), 19, 29 Sweden, 42, 44–48, 50, 58n19 Swedish, see Sweden Swedish Diet, 45 Switzerland, 218, 226 Sydney (Australia), 226 T Taine, Hippolyte, 236, 242 Tamajón (Spain), 194 Taupin, Pierre, 115 Tehuantepec (Mexico), 134 Terrier, Ursule, 115 Thouvenot, Pierre (General), 152 Tory, 19, 31n15 Trani (Italy), 78

 INDEX 

Tras-os-Montes, 9 Trier (Diocese of), 221 Tristany, Francesc, 183 Tupac Amaru, see Condorcanqui, José Gabriel Tupac Amaru rebellion, 42 Tuscany (Grand Duchy of), 22 Two Sicilies (Kingdom of), 64, 71, 73, 218, 219 U Uhagón, Guillermo, 158, 167n48 Ulíbarri, José Pablo, 152 Ultramontanism, 213, 215–219 Ultra-royalism, 22, 73–74 Ultra-royalist/ultra-royalists, 1, 63, 71, 73, 74, 78, 118, 158, 159, 236 United Colonies, see United States/ United States of America United Kingdom, 20, 24, 26, 40, 45, 215 United States/United States of America, 20, 24, 215, 250 Urgel Regency, 92, 156 V Valdespina (Marquis of), 155, 161 Valence-sur-Rhône (France), 223 Valencia (Spain), 91, 92, 95, 201, 202, 204 Varennes (France), 244 Vatican, 213, 214, 216–218, 222, 223, 225–227 Vélez, Rafael, 192, 194–202, 205, 206, 210n46

263

Vendée (French region), 8, 9, 90, 95, 96, 98, 109, 237, 239, 240 Venezuela, 22, 137 Veracruz (Mexico), 40, 133 Verdun (France), 221 Verona (Congress of), 93, 157 Versailles (France), 237, 242, 243 Veuillot, Louis, 225 Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy, 169, 174, 218 Vienna (Congress of), 157 Villafuertes, (Count of), 158 Vinuesa, Matías, 194–200, 206 Vitoria (Spain), 158, 159, 167n51 Viva Maria (counter-revolutionary movement), 8, 22, 90 W War against the French Convention (1793–95), 193 War of Independence (Spanish America), 127, 130, 131, 141 War of the Aggrieved (Spain), 72 See also Malcontents War of the Pyrenees, 65, 206 Wars of Religion, 19 Westphalia (Kingdom of), 22 White Terror, 72, 80, 91 Y Yvon, Olive, 114 Z Zabala, Fernando de, 156, 158, 161, 166n33 Zacatecas (Mexico), 133, 135