Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain: From Crowd to People, 1766-1868 3030525953, 9783030525958

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Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain From Crowd to People, 1766–1868

Pablo Sánchez León

Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain

Pablo Sánchez León

Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain From Crowd to People, 1766–1868

Pablo Sánchez León Centro de Humanidades (CHAM) Universidade Nova de Lisboa Lisbon, Portugal Translated from Spanish by Igor Knezevic

ISBN 978-3-030-52595-8    ISBN 978-3-030-52596-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 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: Artokoloro / 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

To “los López” and the people of the AEF from the students strike of ’87 and thereafter, where all this started For León, in transit from adolescent plebe to young people

Preface

The writing of this book was not the outcome of a long-premeditated plan but rather the result of a fortunate discovery. In the summer of 2016 I happened to re-read several conference papers I had written over the previous seven years for international meetings on a variety of themes. Reading them again it occurred to me that a common thread run through them despite focusing on different topics and beyond the fact that they all dealt with the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Once this became clear to me, I was able to sketch the outline of a book that was originally projected as a series of independent albeit chronologically overlapping chapters. I presumed that by filling several lacunae they could provide a general picture of the conceptions of political exclusion and popular participation over a century of Spanish history. I was wrong, as it became much harder to construct an overall hypothesis, and eventually I acknowledged the need of further reflection and research if the goal was to offer a single interpretive scheme. This has left its imprint on the structure of the book. Most of the chapters are either profoundly transformed versions of earlier papers or combinations of two different papers with significant alterations and additions. Only Chap. 5 is entirely new, designed to give cohesion to the overall argument, though it also benefited from an introductory study for another publication. The introduction and conclusion were written for this book. The process of partial rewriting, revision, and re-assembling of the chapters obviously extended beyond my original previsions. But the project also ran into an unexpected roadblock. When I had sketched a provisional table of contents and could submit an outline of the vii

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introduction and a more or less final version of one of the chapters, I sent the project to a Spanish publisher. This took place in a context of great political expectations that I was also partaking of, and which seemingly imbued a part of the publishing sector with an ideological bias. The fact is that, after a long wait, the project was rejected with scarcely any justification or an opportunity to send an alternative proposal. It is only much later that I understood the severity of the blow, as I used to have an intimate bond of solidarity with the publisher. Despite half of the book being ready, this setback led me to postpone the project indefinitely: there were other issues consuming my attention, and my invariably precarious job situation made it difficult to leave time for finishing a work that seemed not to be fulfilling its destiny. The landscape changed dramatically when in early 2019 I started work at the Centro de Humanidades (CHAM) of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. For the first time in my career I enjoyed a degree of job stability and enviable working conditions, and was able to benefit from a policy of support for international publications—something I had not profited from before. Moreover, as an émigré I could shed the label of being a “Spanish historian” (one that I have never been much fond of) and take on the role of a “hispanist”—which my colleague and friend Sebastiaan Faber used to tease me about—that is to say, someone who offers to the global community the results of his research on the history of Spain. Consequently, I decided to re-configure the project in English and to send it to a few international publishers along with the same sample chapter. In contrast to my experience with the Spanish publisher, the proposal was received with interest by Palgrave, and the editor Molly Beck quickly solicited two evaluations from colleagues, to whom I am indebted to for their insightful comments on improving the proposal, resulting in a more coherent and comprehensive publication. Also thanks to Pedro Cardim from CHAM. I contacted Igor Knezevic, who has dedicatedly translated my baroque Spanish into English. Maeve Sinnot and Lakshmi Radhakrishnan have since continued with the work of aligning the book with the publisher’s standards. Lisbon, Portugal

Pablo Sánchez León

Acknowledgements

The author of a book that is the product of research and writing extending over several years incurs too many debts to be recalled or properly acknowledged. Some however are impossible to forget or omit. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to the small but industrious research group that I was a member of between 2010 and 2018 at the University of the Basque Country. Directed by Javier Fernández Sebastián, its core was initially composed of Luis Fernández Torres and Cecilia Suárez Cabal, and later reinforced with the addition of Nere Basabe, Kirill Postoutenko, Marcos Reguera, and David Beorlegui, all of whom have contributed to accomplishing the various projects of the group that in turn resulted in the earlier versions of the chapters of this book. Other members of the Grupo de Historia Intelectual de la Política Moderna—Javier Tajadura, Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel, Iñaki Iriarte, Pedro Chacón, and Carmelo Moreno— also participated in its seminars together with colleagues from the Leioa campus such as Noé Cornago. A second set of acknowledgements is for the active members of the History of Concepts Group, an international network organizing annual conferences, where I have presented most of the original texts of the chapters. I wish to mention Jan Ifversen, Helge Jordheim, Margrit Pernau, Michael Freeden, Jani Marjanen, Willibald Steinmetz, Martin Burke, Gabriel Entin, and Sinai Rusinek among other European, American, and Asian colleagues. I would like to extend my gratitude to the members of Iberconceptos, an interrelated network I have been involved in since 2013, as a member and coordinator of a team of researchers on the “mixed constitution.” I enjoyed especially fruitful ix

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collaborations and exchanges with Fabio Wasserman, Gabriel Entin, Clement Thibaud, Noemí Goldman, José Javier Blanco Rivero, Francisco Ortega, Georges Lomné, and Elias Palti. Still at the level of institutional acknowledgements, a special mention must be made of the rather chaotic but deeply rigorous group Hicoes (Historia constitucional de España) that I was invited to participate in from 2016—a challenging proposal that proved to be extremely enriching, especially thanks to exchanges with Marta Lorente, Txema Portillo, and Carlos Garriga. I am extremely grateful to François Godicheau, my colleague and long-standing friend, who now from his base in Toulouse remains an indefatigable intellectual companion, and to Rubén Pérez Trujillano for inviting me to give a talk on issues related to several chapters of the book. There are several others with whom I have been sharing and debating my ideas on representation and participation in theory and history. Germán Labrador from Princeton University stands out as a frequent and invaluable interlocutor on the relations between cultural and political identities—and we also jointly contributed to the publishing of a chronicler analysed in Chap. 5. Miguel Ángel Cabrera from Universidad de La Laguna invited me to a seminar when the book was in its final stages, subsequently reviving a conversation begun some time ago on the relations between discourse and action in accounting for modern citizenship. I had another opportunity to present the manuscript in Buenos Aires, in a seminar hosted by Noemí Goldman at the Instituto Ravignani, and another one organized by the group Política, Institucions i Corrupció a l’època contemporània (PICEC) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Finally, several colleagues have read the manuscript in its entirety, providing me with insightful comments: Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, Joanna Innes, Guy Thomson, María Sierra, and Txema Portillo. This book project was shaped in a political context that I cannot fail to acknowledge, as a co-founder of the small group of professors of Political Science and Sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid that was a precursor of the Unidas Podemos party—“La Promotora” was its original name, to which was later added the rather pedantic tag “de pensamiento crítico” (“the promoter … of critical thought”). Despite the party’s later achievements, I wish that this emerging generation of leaders had committed themselves to thinking historically about the conditions of their own irruption into the political scene, marked as it was by their reliance on a corrupted academic space that they have endorsed rather than

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critically transformed. In compensation, I have closely witnessed the way representation and participation relate to each other in a most original social movement born out of Spanish democracy—the so-called memorialist movement, committed to the identification and exhumation of mass graves of those killed following the 1936 fascist coup d’état. My status as a participating observer in this movement owes much to regular communication with Emilio Silva, Manuela Bergerot, Marina Montoto, and other activists. Another connection I wish to acknowledge is with Iñaki Bárcena and Izaro Gorostidi from the project Parte Hartuz (Participate) at the University of the Basque Country, who led me to captivating and always instructive conversations on current political events. Bridging these two groups is Ariel Jerez, who for over twenty-five years now has been sharing his ceaseless ponderings on the question of how to integrate participation in the political cultures from the Left in dialogue with the issue of representation in parties, organizations, and institutions. Leopoldo Moscoso always offers invaluable criticism of my reflections and writings, and we have been debating on politics and knowledge for years now. Never-ending conversations with Dardo Scavino, Celicia González, and Gloria Vergès during my visits to Aránzazu Sarría Buil in Bordeaux were another singular contribution to my learning process. I am also much indebted to Manuel Pérez Ledesma, thanks to whom I became interested in the historical approach to citizenship as a means of overcoming the shortcomings of classic social history and to whose innovative and dissident stances I still owe a lot. My sincere thanks also to my first mentor Reyna Pastor: after all, I think with this book I have merely expanded upon her original Resistencias y luchas campesinas, but on a different historical context. A long time ago, Julio Pardos, probably the best interpreter of Spanish historiography I have ever met, pointed out to me that historians never abandon the topic that initially captured our imagination. In this case, my first essay for the master’s programme supervised in 1988 by Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, and elaborated together with Leopoldo Moscoso, was on representative institutions in England and the Crown of Aragón between the Middle Ages and the early modern period; and the first paper I presented at a conference in the same year dealt with “political integration in the program of Enlightened reforms, and its limits,” where the term “integration” tried to rather unconsciously and inaccurately embrace the spheres of representation and participation. Finally, for several years at the end of the 1990s, I coordinated together with Leopoldo and Jesús

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Izquierdo an informal seminar at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid with the telling title, “Social Order and Representation: Fragments for a Theory.” Yet Julio’s insight (above) notwithstanding, I must confess that while writing this book I was not aware I was going back to my first steps, so to speak. Avoiding a Nietzschean misinterpretation, I justify myself by saying that we are always in the company of the same issues; it is only we who change and address them differently to the point of not recognizing their earlier forms—because we have forgotten who we were. The original versions of the texts that make up the book were drafted between 2009 and 2015—quite a long time span—and between Madrid, Oyarzun, and Bilbao. The final versions were written and revised between 2016 and 2019 in either Madrid, Bordeaux, Buenos Aires, or Lisbon. In spite of the geographic distance, these places have been experienced as one whole, united by the galactic connection I maintain with Aránzazu Sarría Buil, without whose presence even in physical absence this book would not exist. This book had the support of CHAM (NOVA FCSH/UAc), through the strategic project sponsored by Fundaçao para a Ciência e a Teconologia (FCT) (UID/HIS/04666/2019). The book is part of the output of the project “RESISTANCE: Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, 16th–19th Centuries” (778076-H2020-MSCA-RISE-2017) Universidade de Evora— Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Contents

1 Introduction: Historizing the Language of Modern Citizenship  1 2 Order: From Plebeian Disorder to Popular Citizenship— Constitutional Imagination Between Contexts, 1766–1814 29 3 Subject: Education, Taxed Wealth, Capacity, Roots— Citizenship Criteria from the Enlightenment to Liberalism, 1780s–1840s 91 4 Space: The Spectre of Plebeian Tyranny—Popular Participation, Radical Leadership, and the Revolutions of 1848135 5 Time: The Fatalist Loop—Historical Culture and Popular Empowerment in the Mid-­Nineteenth Century173 6 Identity: Enraged Citizens or Subaltern Crowd? Popular Mobilization, Representation, and Participation in the Spanish Revolution of 1854211 7 Recognition: Vulgar as a Political Concept—Discourse and Subjects of Corruption in the Public Sphere of Limited Suffrage253 xiii

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8 Epilogue: Decline and Fall of the Liberal Monarchy, 1865–1868295 9 Conclusions: Studying Modern Citizenship as Historical Condition311 Index333

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Historizing the Language of Modern Citizenship

Representation and Participation at the Crossroads With the march of globalization, democracy has become generally established as the one legitimate form of government that guarantees citizen rights.1 As part of the same process, however, new challenges are imperilling the capacity of citizens to collectively determine our own destiny. While in the twentieth century tyranny in the form of despotic regimes rendered the advance of democracy precarious, in the twenty-first century it is mainly the unbridled economic powers and actors who stand accused of threatening hard-won rights and corroding citizenship values. In such a context, it has become commonplace to speak of a crisis of political representation within systems based on universal suffrage.2 Crises of representation are inherent to parliamentary democracy: they originate in disjunctions between the ideological, social, or cultural identities of citizens and the organizational and institutional framework for the channelling of interests.3 When such fracture becomes very marked, the 1  For a long-term perspective on globalization as linked to the worldwide diffusion of democracy, see Robertson (2005). 2  For the case of Spain, see an essay based on polls in Urquizu (2016); focusing on recipes and alternatives, see Politikon (2014) and Garrorena (2015). For an overview with generalizations drawing on the Spanish case, see Inerarity (2019). 3  See an example from the 1980s in Köchler (1987). For a historical overview of the complex relations between political parties and the representation of interests, see Pizzorno (1981).

© The Author(s) 2020 P. Sánchez León, Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5_1

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established order is subjected to criticism, and possible alternatives are proposed that may affect the constitutional order itself. Over the last decades, various initiatives have come under discussion in this regard, such as changes in voting legislation aimed at introducing proportional representation, limitations and revocation of mandates, open candidate lists, reforms in party financing, and so on.4 Interestingly, however, the current sense of crisis has not translated into disaffection among citizens. Although not entirely absent, nowadays public disaffection is usually spasmodic rather than sustained. In part this may be due to the fact that globalization has also deepened the public sphere, making the manipulation of public opinion by the media easier and more likely while at the same time also empowering citizens. In any case, it is not possible to speak of political participation—an essential feature of citizenship—as diminishing. Quite the contrary, it is precisely this domain that has witnessed major experimentation in recent decades. From the end of the Cold War, and especially in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and the ensuing economic downturn, participation has expanded its semantic field to include a whole new set of practices and procedures: primary elections in organizations and parties, consultative and binding referendums, participatory budgeting, and so on, along with the entire range of political communication and activism channelled through the social networks.5 Although many of these initiatives are being implemented in cities or small urban quartiers rather than in the national or international political arena, they amount to a new conceptualization of democracy: the emerging sense is that of deliberative democracy, which places emphasis on the role of citizens in decision-making.6 This stress on participation leaves the act of voting in a contradictory situation: on one side, it now appears as a rather simple, primitive, and even obsolete mechanism; on the other, there are demands for its introduction in organizations and institutions where it has not featured hitherto. The same may be said about the election of 4  All these proposals and measures seek to increase transparency and render accountability effective; see a pioneering survey in Przeworski et al. (1999). 5  For a view from the Occupy movement, see Sitrin and Azzellini (2014); a study of some of these developments, in Bobbio (2010). 6  For an overview of debates on deliberative democracy, see Dryzek (2000). On the new conceptual consensus on “deepening democracy,” as applied to different instances and institutions, see Fung and Wright (2003). It is also referred to as “participatory democracy”; see an overview of experiences in Bherer et al. (2018).

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representatives: while called for in new settings and in formerly resistant organizations, the figure of the representative is being questioned from the perspective of a reinvigorated discourse on direct democracy.7 Something similar is occurring with the concept of populism, deployed in public debates with increasingly contradictory meanings that reveal the tensions shaping the current entanglement of participation and representation.8 Representation is an inherent feature of the parliamentary system as much as participation is inextricably tied to political citizenship. Yet their relations are not normative or structural but rather historical and contextual. For a start, many of the current practices and procedures of civic participation are hardly new, and have in fact marched in step with the history of citizenship. In the case of Spain, for example, during the transition to democracy in the late 1970s newly empowered citizens engaged in a whole range of activities, from street protests to neighbourhood assemblies, individual and collective petitions, and so on.9 Officially, however, participation was reduced to the casting of votes in ballots, so that all other types of political engagement were indistinctively designated as “informal” and classified as part of the repertoire of social movements, even as forms of protest, and mostly placed outside the system.10 The example reveals that political-institutional changes affect the meaning of participation and its relationship to representation. Much the same can be said of collective social and political mobilization, which in turn touches upon the distinction between order and disorder. The re-­ fashioning of the conceptual universe linking representation, participation, and mobilization leads to the re-evaluation of hitherto informal and marginal practices, which now are perceived as significant and 7  On the revival of the debate on direct democracy, see Bookchin (2015) and Matsusaka (2005). For a historical perspective on alternative practices of democracy founded on plural sovereignty instead of a monopoly by the State, see Tomba (2019). 8  Populism has become a fetish term in the context of the current crisis in representation. For a definition emphasizing its intrinsic relation to democracy and its capacity for renewing it, see Laclau (2007) and Panizza (2005). On the turn in discourse towards negative connotations of the term, see Stavrakakis (2018). For an overview of current debates and issues, see Kapferer and Theodossopoulos (2019); in Spain, see Villacañas (2015). 9  In fact, the practices and procedures shaping the demands for popular democracy in Spain after Franco’s regime were highlighted as a model of grassroots citizen participation; see the classic by Castells (1983): 213–88. See an overview of participatory practices up to the present, albeit seen from the usual perspective of social movements, in Alberich (2015). 10  See Maravall (1982).

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consequently formalized. In fact, many such practices had existed previously but were dismissed as dysfunctional or radical, and so deemed incompatible with the parliamentary system. At present they are being discursively re-categorized as part of the established order. This book’s basic epistemological assumption is that historical phenomena acquire a new dimension when they are rooted in language. Many political, social, or cultural phenomena, though empirically observable, do not always attract the attention of ideologues, opinion makers, or scholars, who only take them into consideration once they have been duly incorporated into a conceptual framework that renders them meaningful. Other phenomena do not even feature in the discursive vocabulary of a culture, or lack a commonly recognized name. In the absence of formal conceptualization, phenomena cannot be included in discourse and subject to competing interpretations in the public sphere, without which they can scarcely become an object of public debate or scholarly study. Above all, conceptualization may serve as an indicator of their social diffusion as well as a factor in the empowerment of established or emerging actors whenever capable of appropriating their meanings for effecting political, social, or cultural change.11 As much as scholars devote efforts to defining and refining analytical categories, historical perspectives are usually acknowledged as crucial for understanding and explaining social phenomena—despite historical narratives too often end up naturalizing them in the past. In this respect, addressing phenomena by studying their history should be clearly distinguished from another, more ambitious and radical activity of “historical thinking” or historizing. The former assumes that the phenomena under study already existed in the past, though maybe in an embryonic or limited form, under another name or in the guise of a different but equivalent phenomenon, and reduces the task of the historian to tracing its trajectory from its origins until the present, usually through a linear narration shaped by present-day commonplaces. Historizing a phenomenon is however a very different quest: it implies taking a critical distance towards the currently dominant interpretations by contrasting these with the discursive status of a phenomenon in other historical contexts, when it may not even have had a name, or conversely may have been even more pervasive than today, though with a different labelling, content, or acknowledgement. In 11  On the understanding of concepts as both indicators and factors of historical change, see Koselleck (1990) [1979].

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this latter way of tackling knowledge about the past there is no linear history to be narrated, and discontinuities between contexts are assumed to affect the meaning of historical phenomena. Changes in their conceptualization shape political participation, representation, and mobilization as social and institutional practices. In the advent of representative government, between the second half of the eighteenth century and throughout a good part of the nineteenth century, procedures such as universal suffrage were seen not just as being outside the system but antithetical to freedom: considered as deeply menacing to the emerging parliamentary system and a harbinger of disorder, the mere demand of voting rights for (male) adults passed for a radical claim that threatened to unsettle the social order as a whole. However, democracy was not itself stigmatized. This apparent paradox originated in democracy being primarily conceived as a legitimate dimension of any well-ordered political system while rejected as a self-sufficient form of government except by radical ideologies, or for very specific polities such as city-states. Even in these cases, language embraced a conceptualization as “pure” democracy to denote an extreme, exclusive, and unbalanced version compared to the hegemonic, eclectic, and functional definition. For their part, assemblies and other deliberative practices and procedures, despite voting rights being restricted to a social minority, were not excluded or denigrated but often retained certain legitimacy as legacies from the past, and this facilitated the redefinition of their status in times of political crisis. On the whole, the semantic referents of representation, participation, and mobilization were different and scarcely comparable to their modern counterparts, and not because they were unrefined or primitive versions pending of evolution into present forms. The aim of this book is to study those referents and their meaning for a better understanding of the relations between representation, participation, and mobilization in a context of epochal changes.

The Differentiation Between Representation and Participation as a Modern Phenomenon Modernity is identified with diversification and specialization, both functional and semantic: the separation of the spheres of the political and the economic, between public and private, the state and civil society, the transition from privileged estates to social classes equal under the law, or from

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the subject to the citizen. All these transformations have been the object of scholarly analysis and intellectual inquiry, and out of this activity have emerged the main categories of the social sciences. The complexity of the modern world derives precisely from the translation of social processes into the language from which the categories for understanding and explaining social phenomena are devised; yet at the same time the semantic resources for constructing those categories are drawn from the available language as inherited from the past. The abruptness and the depth of the passage from the Old Regime to modern society has imbued the discourse of modernity with dichotomies: as the changes involved entail a deep and enduring divide, usually they are given meaning through concepts developed as counterpoints to traditional terms. However, modern concepts are sometimes themselves inherited from the cultural tradition of the Old Regime, which had its own conceptions of politics, representative institutions, and the subject; consequently, modern redefinitions are by necessity tainted by old semantics. As a result, scholarly work risks confusion due to the overlap of institutional processes and linguistic terminologies. Debates about changes and continuities often get entrenched as researchers address historical phenomena through categories superimposing modern and traditional meanings, or resort in their accounts to a distinction between form and content which is itself a legacy from the philosophical tradition of the Old Regime. This study offers an alternative framework for dealing with the transition from the Old Regime. It does so however by extending even further the above-mentioned reflection on differentiation and specialization characteristic of modernity. Its focus is on another genuine feature of modern cultures: the distinction between representation and participation. This conceptual pairing is anything but novel in political science: it is well rooted in the discipline, where it has customarily epitomized the cleavage between the constitution of the state and the political articulation of civil society. The current crisis of democracy seems to entail a further disengagement from each other attracting the attention of experts as part of a wider concern with the legitimacy of constitutional systems. However, not much effort has been undertaken to observe their mutual interaction historically as a means to contributing to current debates on the future of democracy. A historical perspective on the dichotomy representation/participation should not limit itself, however, to describing their mutual relations in changing historical contexts, nor to gauging their relative significance in

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discourse through different periods. Instead, the aim here is to analyse jointly some of the qualitative changes in meaning that occurred in that pair of concepts in the passage from the Old Regime to Liberalism, and in connection to the semantics of mobilization from outside the system.12 This goal raises a number of questions: Was there an increase in the autonomy of participation vis-à-vis representation as provided by professional politicians? Was it simply a phenomenon of functional differentiation, or did the shift in the boundaries of their respective semantic fields impose a hierarchy between them? To which extent were the semantics of representation and participation influenced by waves of collective mobilization that in turn altered the boundaries established between order and disorder? The answers to such questions differ depending on whether a normative approach or a historical one is adopted; in turn, any response also depends on whether the chosen approach is a prospective or rather a retrospective one. In any case, a common point of departure is that representation and participation have attracted very uneven attention from historians. It is well known that in Antiquity forms of urban self-government developed that were based on direct citizen participation, whereas representative institutions remained rather limited. From the Middle Ages onwards, however, a great variety of forms of representation flourished that were to endure throughout the Old Regime.13 As a result, the study of representation has been undertaken assuming that modern constitutions imbued traditional forms of representation with a new legitimacy based on popular sovereignty.14 Accordingly, scholars have tended to embrace a restrictive definition of the category of representation that suits modern constitutional frameworks—representation as a formal means for channelling the interests of pre-constituted individual subjects. However, before the advent of Liberalism the concept was endowed with meanings drawn from other semantic fields. Overall, representation enjoyed the

12  The literature on representation has been dominated by analyses on its relationship with consent; see Monahan (1987) and Hwa-Yong Lee (2008). The relation between representation and local self-government has also been addressed; see Ertman (1997). 13  For the issue of civic participation in the Ancient city-states, the essential reference is Hansen (1991); see a perspective on this from popular political culture in Wood (1988). For a comparative approach to the issue of political participation between Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, see Sánchez León (2000). 14  On this issue, see the classic works by Hintze (1975a) [1902] and (1975b) [1931].

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status of a sort of meta-concept transversal to traditional European culture.15 More specifically, the proliferation throughout the Old Regime of various forms, mechanisms, and procedures of representation provided the term with significant contents that encompassed the functional together with the performative, even amounting to a constitutive understanding of subjection.16 By contrast, there has been much more limited interest in the historical forms of participation, especially in traditional communities lacking an instituted conception of citizenship. Recently, studies have started to flourish on practices and procedures of participation from pre-modern times, including the appointment to offices by lot, election by voting, or the exercise of the right of petition.17 Yet these findings actually contribute to underscore the absence in the language of Old Regime of an overarching definition comprising them all. Indeed, in the Old Regime one single semantic field in principle encompassed the spheres of participation and representation, the former being inherent in membership in communities or corporations as much as the latter was inextricable from the recognition and inclusion of subjects in political communities.18 Accordingly, representation and participation 15  As a result of this, and compared to other concepts which have eventually become categories in the social sciences—such as state, politics, subject, status, and so on—representation has not attracted much theorization among modern scholars. For decades it was hardly an object of reflection, and actually the definition provided by Pitkin (1967) remains hegemonic; see renovated approaches in Rosanvallon (1998) and Ankersmit (1996). For critical, more sophisticated usages, see Duso (1988). See an overview of theories of representation in Sintomer (2013). For an account of political representation in Spain from the Old Regime to the parliamentary system that tackles many of these issues, see Fernández Albaladejo (1998). 16  Studies of the works of relevant medieval jurists, such as Marsilius of Padua, have questioned the notion that representation in the Old Regime was an embryonic form of the modern one; see Lee (2008): 9. See a perspective on the constitutive character of representation in relation to agency in the Old Regime in Sánchez León (2007). On the psychosocial foundation of participation, see Honneth (1996); a theory of identity as founded on recognition and representation, in Pizzorno (1986). 17  On designation by lots, a practice abandoned with the advent of Liberalism, see Sintomer (2011); on its recent revival in party organization, see Feenstra (2017), and from a radical perspective, see van Reybrouck (2016). On voting practices before political suffrage, see Christin (2017). On petitioning as a flexible and complex practice from the Old Regime to Liberalism, focusing on the case of Spain, see Palacios Cerezales (2019). 18  The formula quod omnes tangit at the basis of all parliaments in the Old Regime implied not only representation but also participation; on this issue for the case of Portugal in the early modern period, see Cardim (2020). At the institutional level, the notion of plena potes-

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f­eatured in a hybridized form both in language and in institutions, mutually dependent on each other though also conflated in separate, particular spheres.19 Certainly, parliaments enjoyed a degree of universality and generality in the Political Body; however, their status was not the same as nowadays, being at most keystones in a wider universe of concurring instances of representation lacking autonomy. This hybrid configuration of representation and participation at once reflected and conditioned conceptions of the subject. The anthropological imagination of the Old Regime empowered primarily collective subjects, not individuals.20 Social roles for their part did not usually include citizenship, a form of subjection only exceptionally developed and consigned to the urban world: in the Spanish peninsular kingdom of Castile, aside from that of subject to the king, the more common status of vecino (literally: neighbour) consisted mainly in duties and certain associated rights, which were usually local and communitarian in nature and scope.21 Overall, inequality under the law allowed members to enjoy different rights of participation in the same corporation, based on their status.22 At the same time, certain forms of representation did not ensure

tas—the great innovation in the technology of representation in medieval legal culture— involved participation in the designation of representatives; see Lee (2008): 37. 19  These hybrid forms of representation and participation extended throughout political communities profiting from a conception of time as aevum, which allowed for their continuity beyond the limited lifespan of their members; see Kantorowicz (2016) [1957]. 20  See Gurevich (1985) [1972]. Individual identity was subsumed in membership in any wider community—of kinship, craft gild, confession, territory, and so on—and individuals only obtained recognition as representatives of third parties—of lineages in time through patterns of inheritances, and of domestic units in space as pater familias. In fact, family and kinship provided the imagination for a whole representation of the social order and its governance; see Frigo (1985) and Agamben (2011): 17–184. 21  On the relation between duties and rights of vecindad in the Hispanic world during the early modern period, see Herzog (2003), 43–63, and Carzolio (2002). 22  Numerous stipulations enshrined in law presented obstacles to equal rights of deliberation and election among members of corporations. In the case of parliaments, representatives did not act as delegates of the community as a whole but of the electors in their communities, and were not full representatives but were segmented by privilege; an overview of these issues in Graves (2013): 159–221. Moreover, procedures of designation changed not only in space but also in time. The case of Republican Florence is illustrative: it combined designation by consensus, by lot, by candidates, or by majority depending on periods and contexts; see Keller (2014).

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participation, while participation in the designation of representatives did not always entail deliberative capacities.23 These broadly sketched relations between representation and participation may be traced to the institutions of numerous Western states throughout the early modern period. However, the case of the Spanish Monarchy is especially significant and interesting in this general picture given the range of constitutional settlements it established with different principalities and jurisdictions.24 Expanding into a transoceanic colonial empire, its domains comprised territories in Europe and America sharing a common legal and political framework throughout the Old Regime.25

Democratic Imagination in the Passage to Modernity How did the shift occur from the framework of representation and participation outlined above to the one we identify with parliamentary systems and representative government? No doubt, the promulgation of nation-­ wide constitutions from the end of eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century was decisive, as it based legitimacy on popular sovereignty, defined citizenship rights, and established election by suffrage. Yet this overall realignment in the relations between representation and participation was preceded by other discursive shifts that contributed to alter the meaning of some fundamental political concepts. 23  Not all the organs of a body politic had legal capacity to represent, that is, not all were corpus representans, but often they were represented by third entities, thus functioning as a persona representata; on this issue for the case of Castile, see Pardos (1988). In deliberative capacity, representatives experienced an unsolved tension between plena potestas and binding mandate; see the classical studies on the Iberian world by Post (2015) [1964], and a reappraisal, in Decoster (2016). Parliaments or Cortes for their part were not sovereign, their summoning being a prerogative of the head of the principality, who usually gathered them for counselling and fiscal purposes. In sum, parliamentary representation in the Old Regime differed from its modern counterpart with regard to who was represented, how, and for what purposes; see Lee (2008): 37–38. 24  On this issue, as framed by the category of “composite monarchies,” a label especially suitable for the monarchies of the Iberian peninsula, see Elliott (2009): 29–55. For the related and more recently developed notion of “polycentric monarchies,” see Cardim et al. (2014): 3–8. 25  A growing number of scholars refer to it as the Catholic Monarchy due to the interweaving of political and meta-political or religious languages in its legitimating discourses and aims; see Fernández Albaladejo (1997); see a masterful account of its performance during the seventeenth century from this perspective in Fernández Albaladejo (2009).

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Some aspects of this process are quite well known. Beginning with the Renaissance and throughout the early modern period, as part of the assertion of an increasingly autonomous space for politics, important discursive elaborations allowed subjects to be imagined as citizens dedicated to furthering collective over particular interests.26 The Enlightenment for its part gave greater autonomy to culture and its power to effect historical change: the emergence of the public sphere on one side and the notion of the subject as a self-referential individual on the other are two essential preconditions for the transformation of the relations between representation and participation.27 The great revolutions of the last quarter of eighteenth century unquestionably represented the irruption of a distinctly new social order—and yet the political crises of the Old Regime did not bring about genuine re-­ conceptions of political participation. To begin with, few political crises of the period resulted in major transformations of the constitutional framework or the inherited language of politics. Aside from France, the majority of European states did not experience radical alterations in the social order between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and even less frequently were these the result of the mobilization of former subjects.28 In colonial domains the process was only different in the United States and in very circumscribed territories like Haiti: in the illustrative case of the Spanish empire, both the metropolis and its domains in the New World retained an important part of the vocabulary on representation from the Old Regime, and their respective constituent processes and struggles for independence were no less indebted to the juridical legacy of the Catholic Monarchy than they were inspired by new principles of popular sovereignty.29 26  See Pocock (1975). On the definition of the concepts of power and politics from the Renaissance onwards, see Duso (2009). 27  See Taylor (1989) and Guilhamou (2011). 28  On the roots of modern political language in the French revolution, see Reichard (2002); on the frameworks for political participation in revolutionary France, see McPhee (1986); on the transformation in the conceptions of representation following 1789, see Baker (1990): 224–51. 29  On the process on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic, see Portillo (2006a). For the case of the United States, focusing on conceptions of representation, see Reid (1989); for practices of citizen participation in the context of the rise of democratic imagination in North America, see Wilentz (2005). See a general synthesis for England from 1688 to the end of the American Civil War in Kloppenberg (2016).

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The Spanish case is notable for being an amalgam of apparent changes and continuities. The 1812 constitutional settlement, though certainly influenced by foreign revolutionary experiences, followed a singular pattern of its own. The power vacuum in the wake of the invasion of the peninsula by French troops in 1808 led to the formation of self-governing local units—so-called juntas—that assumed sovereignty in the monarch’s absence, first locally but later attaining nationwide coordination. In the domain of participation, the movement of urban juntas affirmed the role of assemblies with deliberative capacity while rejecting vetoes or social distinctions.30 Regarding representation, as the summoning of the old parliament or Cortes abandoned the tradition of gathering by estates, countless (male) taxpayers were granted voting rights through a system of indirect or dual suffrage.31 Finally, the constituent process culminating in the 1812 Constitution promulgated in the city of Cádiz combined inspiration in transnational conceptions of natural law with vernacular historicism as sources of legitimacy.32 This ambiguity has resulted in a rather schizophrenic historiography, with scholars either emphasizing changes or underlining continuities.33 The lack of dialogue between them has generally limited the advancement of knowledge about the transition to Liberalism, and more particularly is an obstacle to addressing of the central historical questions at the core of this book: How were the relations between representation and participation conceptualized from the crisis of the Old Regime, and how did they influence the overall shaping and development of Spanish Liberalism? Those scholars who see an essential discontinuity do not sufficiently take into account that corporate bodies in their entirety, such as the clergy, the merchant, and artisan gilds were not suppressed in the post-revolutionary setting: To what extent were they exposed to the emerging understanding 30  The classic study along these lines is Artola (1973); see a more recent iteration in ColónRíos (2019). 31  On representation in this context, see Portillo (2006b). 32  For a comparative perspective, see Fernández Sarasola (2000). 33  Notable among the former is Varela Suanzes-Carpegna (2011) [1983]; for a more nuanced approach in this vein, see Fernández Sarasola (2011). Among those who argue that in Cádiz early liberals “gave constitutional form to a series of key elements from the culture and institutions of the old Catholic Monarchy adapting them to a new understanding of politics,” see Garriga and Lorente (2007): 16, emphasis in the original; see also Portillo (2000). On a study on revolutionary France that adopts a similar perspective on the issue of political participation, see Edelstein (2015).

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of representation? On the other hand, those who stress continuity have not paid enough attention to the evolution of the political culture of Cádiz after 1812: Did the experience of political participation upheld by this culture decline with time or endure in memory? In this latter case, to which extent did its revival influence the overall dynamics of nineteenth-­ century Spanish Liberalism and, conversely, how much was it transfigured by changing political contexts? Answering this set of questions entails analysing the shifts of status in the semantic fields of representation, participation, and mobilization in discourse. This in turn requires a multi-disciplinary approach drawing at the very least from a critical combination of the history of social movements, of constitutional law, political history, and the history of thought. Needless to say, to account for the discursive relations between representation, participation, and mobilization in the demise of the Old Regime requires an epistemological, theoretical, and methodological framework capable of accounting for epochal transformations from a single set of categories; in turn, these analytical categories must be validated by specific concepts recorded in historical discourse. Fortunately, this latter condition is met by invoking the repertoire of the mixed constitution or government. The mixed constitution was originally an ideal combination of the features of the three pure forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—in an equilibrium and mutual check that was meant to ensure political stability. Reasserted since the Renaissance, its successful diffusion owed much to The Spirit of Laws (1748) by Montesquieu, a work in which the mixed government, rather than an abstract and ideal political model, is for the first time distilled as a constitutional vein running through Western history.34 This modern history of the mixed constitution proceeds from the middle of eighteenth century: as the issue of citizen self-­ government was posed in the following decades, the conceptual repertoire of the mixed constitution began to take centre stage in the political debate

34  The ideal of mixed constitution was distilled from the works of the great philosophers of Antiquity: in trying to overcome the natural tendency of human institutions towards degradation, especially in the Roman world authors such as Polybius and Cicero were among the first to imagine government as a combination of the most valuable features of each of the pure forms, and balancing them to slow down the so-called anacyclosis or circular substitution of forms; see Carsana (1990) and Morrow (1998). Recovered in the Renaissance, its “recurring presence” in legal and political debates up to the Enlightenment has been noted, though not mush studied; see Gaille-Nikodimov (2005): 7.

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as an overall frame increasingly adopted by all kinds of observer-­participants throughout all the ancien régimes engulfed in an overriding crisis. Seen from this perspective, the mixed constitution has been an essential repository for the socialization of political language in the context of the rise of modern constitutionalism and citizenship.35 Its cultural endurance relies on its remarkable flexibility as a framework of semantic ordering. The mixed constitution is not a product of Old Regime culture but a trans-historical artefact subject to re-interpretations in changing contexts. Neither a strictly juridical construct nor just an ideological or purely intellectual product, it overflows the framework of conventional conceptual history, introducing a whole vocabulary into discourse, not in a piecemeal, concept-by-concept fashion, but rather wholesale and as an interrelated cluster. In turn, each of the three concepts—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—involves an abstraction, which makes them translatable into the language of the social and political sciences: monarchy is the element or dimension giving unity and coordination to the whole, and so crucial for establishing the dividing line between order and disorder; aristocracy brings discerning judgement and moral quality, a set of competences essential for the exercise of representation; and democracy endows the system with collective force by sheer quantity, assuring its universal legitimacy and capacity for self-defence. Finally, their mutual balancing ideally limits the infringement of one element upon the others and prevents degradation into any one of their respective obverse forms, as defined by the counter-concepts of tyranny, oligarchy, and demagogy or anarchy.36 From this perspective, beyond a political ideal the mixed constitution resembles a social imaginary, in Charles Taylor’s definition: “not a set of ideas” but “rather what, by giving them meaning, makes possible the

35  To this day, historians of political philosophy and constitutional law still address the issue mainly as an intellectual legacy which, despite its influence in the formation of modern constitutional culture, finally waned with the rise of Liberalism; see Fioravanti (1999). Among the reasons for its relative disregard by scholars, at least one has its origins in the “checks and balances” formula coined by Montesquieu, which has led to confusion between the logic of the mixed government and the division of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at the foundations of modern constitutionalism; see Hansen (2010). 36  On the concept of tyranny in historical perspective, see Turchetti (2001); on oligarchy in Antiquity, see Simonton (2017); on anarchy from the middle of eighteenth century, especially in French thought, see Deleplace (2000); the term “ochlocracy,” originally used in this context to refer to a degraded democracy would be eventually abandoned; see Ferreira (2013).

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practices of a society.”37 In linguistic terms it may be thought of as a grammar, that is, a set of rules for the discursive combination of fundamental political concepts. This dual character made the mixed constitution suitable for different and often competing ideological purposes and provided it with a privileged status for channelling the historical differentiation between the fields of representation, participation, and mobilization. As a grammar, it conditioned the transference from Old Regime to Liberalism in the semantics of representation, mainly through discourse on the concept of aristocracy; it also coalesced the semantic field of political participation in the passage towards modern citizenship, especially through changes in the meaning of democracy; finally, it defined the boundaries of the system, establishing the basic distinction between order and disorder, through the concept of monarchy. As an all-encompassing meta-concept, the mixed constitution itself favoured the conjugation of those three conceptual fields in tandem. As social imagery, it successfully adapted itself to the legal-political cultures of the Old Regime while both revealing and fostering radical transformations in constitutional settings.

The Inclusion of the Crowd as a Contingent Process The argument of this book is that the historical separation between the spheres of representation and participation did not result in their mutual autonomy. On the contrary, in the passage to Liberalism, a distinct hierarchical relationship was established between them both at the conceptual and institutional levels: just as their contents were being redefined, participation was subordinated to representation, to the extent that autonomous manifestations of the former were treated as mobilizations external to the system and threatening the established order. A manifestation of this process was the introduction of limited suffrage, which instituted a divide in the social body between two types of subjects, only one of which enjoyed recognition as full citizens. However, subordination was already accomplished prior to the establishment of representative government, through 37  Taylor regards social imaginaries as “complex” artefacts incorporating an “idea” of “the class of common understanding which allows to develop the collective practices that inform our social life,” as well a “notion” of “the type of participation which corresponds to each in common practice”; see Taylor (2004): 13 and 37, respectively. For Taylor, social imaginaries are a product of modernity, which makes the mixed government an original exception placed halfway between pre-modern thought and the great epistemic divide of modernity.

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a combination of the language of corporations from the Old Regime and the grammar of the mixed constitution. On the basis of the former, popular collective action overgrowing the established frame had been hitherto addressed by the authorities as disorderly hazards; from then on, by resorting to the latter protesters could be conceptualized as a part of the social body to be excluded from membership in the political community. The fear of an excessive pressure from the people could be conjured up by supplementing the traditional approach to collective action, which reduced the legitimate claims from subjects to petitions and other non-collective forms of representation, with the repertoire of the mixed constitution, in which participation (as the natural field of democracy) was subordinated to unity (as embodied by monarchy) and to representation (as relating to aristocracy). The result of this discursive combination was a newly re-sharpened contraposition between two subjects: the people and the crowd or plebe. The “people” and the “plebe” are two concepts with a long history in Western culture. The contrast and mutual opposition between populus and plebs go back to classical Antiquity.38 In medieval constitutional culture the antithesis was considerably diluted by being subsumed in the Third Estate, a juridical category that incorporated the concept of the people while encompassing plebeians as taxpayers. From the Renaissance and through the early modern period the distinction re-emerged, with “people” normally designating the majority of the population as supplementary source of sovereignty to the divine right of kings, whereas “crowd” (or mob) referred to the lower ranks of society whose inclusion in the government of the commonwealth was discouraged for its disorderly externalities. Yet the conception of the crowd as a menacing subject, deprived of economic, moral, and cultural dignity and to be feared of as potentially destroying the standing order—in sum, the plebe as a non-citizen in the transition to modern citizenship—is a product of the Enlightenment. The discursive engineering of this subject is better explored in the cultural setting of Southern Europe. In north-western European countries, the relatively early decline of corporate associations made it possible to imagine an autonomous multitude capable of decisive intervention in the

38  Usually addressed as a rather stable trans-historical pairing, the people/plebe divide seems, however, to have undergone significant relational changes from the Renaissance onwards, and especially in the eighteenth century; see McClelland (2011).

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political processes that brought about modernity.39 By contrast, in Bourbon Spain, a politically mobilized people deprived of representation within a resiliently corporate society was successfully dismissed as the manifestation of a contemptible and threatening crowd, a conception that endured with some fluctuations through the rest of the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century, until the first establishment of democracy. The distinction between the “people” and the “plebe” was not purely rhetorical or a simple literary metaphor. Much more than that, it is a genuine instance of asymmetrical counter-concepts that were crucial for the transition to constitutional systems in Spain and beyond. Reinhard Koselleck defined asymmetrical counter-concepts as the means for depriving subjects of identity, and singled out three major conceptual pairs of this kind: civilized/barbarian, believer/pagan, and human/nonhuman.40 Yet the people/plebe pairing, insofar as it distinguishes between citizen and non-citizen, also belongs in this category.41 It does so in a unique way, however: in this case, the identity denied to the plebe is exactly that of its counter-conceptual pair, the people. This is because, compared to the other three pairs of asymmetrical counter-concepts, the plebe is considered part of the same community as the people, founded not on ethnical, cultural, or confessional but on shared political referents. In other words, the plebe is a counter-concept coined to deny and exclude a political subject in partaking with the people. Once fixed in language, this conceptual asymmetry was to have profound and lasting political-institutional and socio-cultural effects in the majority of parliamentary systems. It would shape the relations between representation, participation, and mobilization throughout the process of their historical differentiation. To begin with, the system bestowed representation with overarching powers for exclusion, and this not only 39  A well-known case is Baruch Spinoza’s formulation of the notion of “multitude,” based on his experience in the Low Countries at the beginning of the eighteenth century; see a recent the focus on his work for theoretical reflections on the constituent subject in the age of globalization, in Hardt and Negri (2004). After 1789, events in France were also to obliterate the distinction between the people and the plebe from the Enlightenment. However, the influence of the French Revolution on modern historiography has contributed to the scholarly neglect of the role of the plebe in shaping political cultures elsewhere on the continent; there are exceptions though: see a classical study focused on the crowd in that context in Rudé (1964). 40  See Koselleck (1990) [1979]: 205–205. 41  The following paragraphs draw on Sánchez León (2020b).

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legalized an internally hierarchized citizenship but actually converted the minority of voters into representatives of the majority of the population stripped of political rights. Moreover, the struggles for extending the right of suffrage further reinforced the definition of political participation as exclusively the election of representatives by individual voters. Consequently, all struggles for recognition that incorporated other forms of participation than voting were classified as disorderly—in other words, “informal” participation became identified with mobilization external to the system, if not with anti-system activity. As this makes clear, in the passage to modernity the relations between participation, representation, and mobilization became inextricably linked to the cleavage separating the “people” from the “plebe” The histories of these two sets of concepts are closely intertwined, though they would have a different ending: in the case of the triad mobilization/representation/ participation the result was a growing institutional and semantic differentiation; in that of the people versus plebe, historical dynamics deriving from the inherent contestability of these concepts allowed for a semantic convergence that eventually dissolved the institutional separation between them.42 Without such a final outcome there could not have been democracy. In this sense, the overcoming of the people/plebe dichotomy is a precondition of the establishment of universal suffrage; however, it is also the result of historical processes, and so a contingent outcome.

Spain, 1766–1868: Democracy in the Struggle for the Meaning of Citizenship Studying historical processes like these requires a methodology sensitive to the constitutive properties of language in social and political relations as much as to its historicizing. Without doubt, the chronological frame needs to be extended in order to include two contiguous historical periods—the crisis and demise of the Old Regime and the establishment and consolidation of representative government—which are normally considered separately due to the arbitrary barrier dividing early modern from modern history. Only by embracing a chronological span from the second half of eighteenth century to the middle of nineteenth century is it possible to observe that the plebe is not a by-product of Liberalism but rather a legacy 42  Recently the category of plebe has been used as a guide for reflecting on political modernity overall; see Breaugh (2007). On the notion of “inherent contestability of concepts”, see Freeden (2004).

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of the Old Regime, though re-emerging in a re-signified context, and thus reviving a longstanding tension with the concept of the people in the wake of previous political crises. For that matter, Spain is a particularly useful and instructive case study. Having experienced an early and marked irruption of the plebe/people divide before the cycle of Atlantic revolutions of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in scarcely a single century Spain witnessed the introduction of male universal suffrage, certainly as a short-lived experience but enough for the blurring of the separation between the people and the plebe, for a substantial alteration in the relations between representation and participation, and for transgressing the established boundaries between order and disorder. The other methodological assumption is that, in order to properly account for the processes at stake, conceptual history needs to be complemented by a pragmatics for better studying how discursive practices both impose limits but also allow for semantic and institutional changes. Based on a series of conceptual matrices, the task consists in accounting for processes of appropriation of meaning from the fields of participation, representation, and mobilization, and to place them at the core of the formation and evolution of ideological and political identities. To sum up, the obstacles to political participation that later accompanied the institution of representative government had their origins in a process that unfolded between 1766 and 1774 in the context of a political crisis in the Spanish Old Regime: in effect, the then mobilized subjects were repressed as incarnations of disorder and reclassified as an excluded plebe, resulting in an overemphasis of representation over participation in the discourse legitimizing the Bourbon Monarchy. Yet, when a much more serious crisis of legitimacy arose in 1808, the semantic barriers separating the “plebe” from the “people” were suddenly erased as an effect of a popular mobilization that also not only recovered the practices of participation inherited from the Old Regime, but widened the range of possibilities  of an entire constituent process culminating in 1812, leaving in its wake a political sensibility that incorporated into the discourse a diffuse conception of democracy (Chap. 1). This outcome of early Spanish Liberalism forced the second generation of liberals to place representation on a new footing, now based on taxable property ownership rather than education, which had been the referent inherited from the Enlightenment. As a result, the divide between people and plebe was restored while the political exclusion of the majority of the population was now reinforced by a constitutional framework that tended to see participation beyond the exercise of minority voting rights as a phenomenon external to the system,

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and therefore similar in nature to revolts or revolutions. However, the price of this new framework was that political citizenship instituted in Isabelline Liberalism lacked autonomous communitarian moorings, which enabled the survival in the public sphere of evolving radical sensibilities that harkened to the experience of early Liberalism (Chap. 2). On this basis, the dynamics of ideological debates throughout the reign of Isabella II was marked by the fact that ultimately the excluded plebe was part of the same social and cultural community as the people, and therefore individuals classified into the former necessarily built their identity by drawing on a repository of language shared with the latter. However, since the plebe could not represent itself, its condition as a subject was based on a performative factor: the concurrence of representatives from outside the plebe who, speaking on its behalf, initially reproduced its exclusion but could also contribute to its inclusion (Chap. 3). This opened up the possibility that, in certain spheres of discourse, such as historical narratives or aesthetics, the plebe could be included in the people even to the point of dissolving the asymmetry between the two concepts (Chap. 4). Despite the fact that these cultural processes initially had no political impact, during political crises popular mobilization could subvert the subordination of participation to representation, transcending the boundaries between order and disorder. Such a situation occurred in 1854, giving rise to the fleeting appearance of a popular collective subject that, in the short term, was however represented only with great difficulty by the emerging leadership of democrats and republicans in the process of replacing the legacy of doceañista sensibilities (Chap. 5). Yet at least post-1854 cultural debates prevented a reaffirmation of the split between the “plebe” and the “people,” while parliamentary debates brought with them a renewed emphasis on education that came to question the hegemony of taxable property as a criterion for voting exclusion. Recovering other traditions of early Liberalism, a strongly inclusive conception of the people was now formed which, under democratic and republican leadership, was in a position to contend with the elites accused of corruption as the legitimate representatives of an order of liberties (Chap. 6).

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio (2011). The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trad. Lorenzo Chiesa, Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press.

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Alberich, Tomás (2015). Desde las Asociaciones de Vecinos al 15M y las mareas ciudadanas [Breve historia de los movimientos sociales], Madrid: Dyckinson. Ankersmit, Frank R. (1996): Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value, Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press. Artola, Miguel (1973). La burguesía revolucionaria (1808–1874), Madrid: Alianza. Baker, Keith M. (1990). Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bherer, Laurence; Dufour, Pascale and Montambeault, Françoise (2018). “The Participatory Democracy Turn: An Introduction”. In Laurence Bherer, Pascale Dufour and Françoise Montambeault (eds.), The Participatory Democracy Turn, London: Routledge. Black, Antony (ed.) (2002). Otto Gierke. Community in Historical Perspective, trad. M. Fischer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bobbio, Luigi (2010). “Democrazia e nuove forme di partecipazione”. In Michelangelo Bovero and Valentina Pazé (eds.), La democrazia in nove lezioni, Roma: Laterza, 46–62. Bookchin, Murray (2015). The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy, London: Verso. Breaugh, Martin (2007). L’experience plebeienne. Une histoire discontinue de la liberté politique, Paris: Payot. Cardim, Pedro (2020). “Os antecedentes: as Cortes no Portugal de Antigo Regime. Participar, votar e discutir a política no Portugal dos séculos XVI a XVIII”, (forthcoming). Cardim, Pedro; Herzog, Tamar; Ruiz Ibáñez, José J. and Sabatini, Gaetano (eds.) (2014). Polycentric Monarchies: How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony?, Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. Carsana, Chiara (1990). La teoria della “Costituzione mista” nell’età imperiale romana, Como: New Press. Carzolio, Ana Inés (2002). “En los orígenes de la ciudadanía en Castilla. La identidad política del vecino durante los siglos XVI y XVII”, Hispania 211: 637–92 [available at http://hispania.revistas.csic.es/index.php/hispania/article/ view/262]. Castells, Manuel (1983). The City and the Grassroots. A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Christin, Olivier (2017). Vox Populi: une histoire du vote avant le suffrage universel, Paris: Seuil. Colón-Ríos, Joel I. (2019). “Primary Assemblies, Constituent Power, and the Imperative Mandate”. In Hanna Lerner and David Landau (eds.), Elgar Handbook of Comparative Constitution-Making, Edward Elgar [available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3392115].

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Decoster, Caroline (2016). “L’usage de la plena potestas dans les assemblées médiévales”, Cahiers de Recherches Médievales et Humanistes 31: 31–42 [available at https://journals.openedition.org/crm/14002]. Deleplace, Marc (2000). L’Anarchie de Mably à Proudhon (1750–1850), Lyon: ENS Editions. Dryzek, John S. (2000). Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duso, Giuseppe (1988). La rappresentanza: un problema di filosofía política, Milano: Franco Angelli. Duso, Giuseppe (2009). “El poder y el nacimiento de los conceptos políticos modernos”. In Sandro Chignola and Giuseppe Duso (eds.), Historia de los conceptos y filosofía política, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 197–242. Edelstein, Melvin (2015). “Citoyenneté, élections, démocratie et Révolution: les fondements de la France contemporaine”, La Révolution française 9 [available at http://journals.openedition.org/lrf/1388]. Elliott, John H. (2009). Spain, Europe, and the Wider World, 1500–1800, New Haven (CT): Yale University Press. Ertman, Thomas (1997). The Birth of Leviathan: States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Feenstra, Ramón A. (2017). “Democracia y elección por sorteo en las nuevas formaciones políticas: teorías políticas clásicas y contemporáneas”, Daimon. Revista internacional de filosofía 72: 205–19 [available at https://revistas. um.es/daimon/article/view/295601]. Fernández Albaladejo, Pablo (1997). “Católicos antes que ciudadanos: gestación de una ‘política española’ en los comienzos de la Edad Moderna”. In José I. Fortea (ed.), Imágenes de la diversidad. El mundo urbano en la Corona de Castilla, siglos XVI–XVIII, Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 103–27. Fernández Albaladejo, Pablo (1998). “La representación política en el Antiguo Régimen”. In Manuel Pérez Ledesma (ed.), El Senado en la Historia, Madrid: Secretaría General del Senado, 69–121. Fernández Albaladejo, Pablo (2009). La crisis de la Monarquía, Barcelona: Crítica/Marcial Pons. Fernández Sarasola, Ignacio (2000). “La Constitución española de 1812 y su proyección europea y latinoamericana”, Fundamentos: cuadernos monográficos de teoría del Estado, derecho público e historia constitucional 2: 359–457[available at https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=204828]. Fernández Sarasola, Ignacio (2011). La Constitución de Cádiz. Origen, contenido y proyección internacional, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. Ferreira, Oscar (2013). “‘La démocratie dans toute sa pureté’. Une longue histoire de la sortie en politique du concept d’ochlocratie (1780–1880)”, Revue de la Recherche Juridique 147 [available at https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ hal-01549827].

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Fioravanti, Maurizio (1999). Costituzione, Rome: Il Mulino. Freeden, Michael (2004). “Editorial: Essential contestability and effective contestability”, Journal of Political Ideologies 9/1: 3–11. Frigo, Daniela (1985). Il padre di famiglia. Governo della casa e governo civile nella tradizione de la “oeconomica” tra Cinque e Seicento, Rome: Bulzoni. Fung, Archon and Wright, Eric O. (2003). Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance, London: Verso. Gaille-Nikodimov, Marie (2005). “Introduction”. In Marie Gaille-Nikodimov (ed.), Le gouvernement mixte, de l’ideal politique au monstre constitutionnel, siécle XIII–XVIII, Sainte-Etienne: Publications de l’Université, 7–14. Garriga, Carlos and Lorente, Marta (2007). Cádiz, 1812: la constitución jurisdiccional, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. Garrorena, Ángel (2015). Escritos sobre la democracia. La democracia y la crisis de la democracia representativa, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. Graves, Michael A.R. (2001). The Parliaments of Early Modern Europe, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Guilhamou, Jacques (2011). “The Temporality of Historical Forms of Individualization in Modern Times”. In Javier Fernández Sebastián and Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel (eds.), Political Concepts and Time: New Approaches to Conceptual History, Santander: MacGraw-Hill/ Universidad de Cantabria, 345–368. Gurevich, Aaron (1985) [1972]. Categories of Medieval Culture, trad. G. L. Campbell, New York: Routledge. Hansen, Morgens H. (1991). Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology, Oxford: Blackwell. Hansen, Morgens H. (2010). “The Mixed Constitution versus the Separation of Powers: Monarchical and Aristocratic Aspects of Modern Democracy”, History of Political Thought 31/3: 509–31 [available at https://www.jstor.org/ stable/26224146?seq=1]. Hardt, Michel and Negri, Antonio (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of empire, London: Penguin. Herzog, Tamar (2003). Defining Nations. Immigrants and Citizens on Early Modern Spain and Spanish America, New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press. Hintze, Otto (1975a) [1902]. “The Formation of States and Constitutional Development: A Study in History and Politics”. In The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert, New York: Oxford University Press, 157–77. Hintze, Otto (1975b) [1931]. “The Preconditions of Representative Government in the Context of World History”. In The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert, New York: Oxford University Press, 302–55.

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Honneth, Axel (1996). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trad. Joel Anderson, Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press. Inerarity, Daniel (2019). Politics in the Time of Indignation: The Crisis of Representative Democracy, trad. Sandra Kingery, London: Bloomsbury. Kantorowicz, Ernst (2016) [1957]. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kapferer, Bruce and Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios (2019). “Populism and Its Paradox”. In Bruce Kapferer and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (eds.), Democracy’s Paradox. Populism and Its Contemporary Crisis. London: Berghahn Books, 1–34. Keller, Hagen (2014). “Formes électorales et conception de la communauté dans les communes italiennes (12e-14e siècle)”, Revue Française de Science Politique 64/6: 1083–107 [available at https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-de-science-politique-2014-6-page-1083.htm]. Kloppenberg, James T. (2016). Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Köchler, H. (1987). The Crisis of Representative Democracy. Bern: Peter Lang. Koselleck, Reinhard (1990). Future’s Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trad. Keith Tribe, Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press. Laclau, Ernesto (2007). On Populist Reason, London: Verso. Lee, Hwa-Yong (2008). Political Representation in the Later Middle Ages: Marsilius in Context, New York: Peter Lang. Lorente, Marta and Portillo, José María (dirs.) (2012). El ‘momento gaditano’. La Constitución en el orbe hispánico (1808–1826), Madrid: Congreso de los Diputados. McPhee, Peter (1986). “Electoral Democracy and Direct Democracy in France, 1789–1851”, European History Quarterly 16: 77–96. Maravall, José María (1982). La política de la transición, Madrid: Taurus. Matsusaka, John G. (2005). “The Eclipse of Legislatures: Direct Democracy in the 21st Century”, Public Choice 124: 157–77. McClelland, John S. (2011). The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti, London: Routledge. Monahan, Arthur P. (1987). Consent, Coercion and Limit. The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy, Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Morrow, John (1998). History of Political Thought. A Thematic Introduction, London: Macmillan. Palacios Cerezales, Diego (2019). “Re-Imagining Petitioning in Spain (1808–1823)”, Social Science History 43/3: 487–508 [available at https:// www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/reimagining-petitioning-in-spain-18081823/1A5F797DA8E4493B8A43B680 A2FF6EAB].

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Panizza, Francesco (2005). Populism in the Mirror of Democracy, London: Verso. Pardos, Julio A. (1988). “Communitas, persona invisibilis”. In Arqueologia do Estado, Lisbon: Historia & Crítica, 935–955. Pitkin, Hannah F. (1967). The Concept of Representation, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pizzorno, Alessandro (1981). “Interests and Parties in Pluralism”. In Suzanne Berger (ed.), Organizing Interests in Western Europe: Pluralism, Corporatism and the Transformation of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 249–86. Pizzorno, Alessandro (1986). “Some Other Kind of Otherness: A Critique of ‘Rational Choice’ Theories”. In A. Foxley et al., Development, Democracy, and the Art of Trespassing: Essays in Honor of Albert O. Hirschman, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 335–73. Pocock, John G.  A. (1975). The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press. Politikon (2014). La urna rota. La crisis política e institucional del modelo español, Madrid: Debate. Portillo, José M. (2000). Revolución de nación. Orígenes de la cultura constitucional en España, 1780–1812, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. Portillo, José M. (2006a). Crisis atlántica. Autonomía e independencia en la monarquía hispana, Madrid: Marcial Pons/Fundación Carolina. Portillo, José M. (2006b). “Cuerpo de Nación, Pueblo Soberano: la representación política en la crisis de la monarquía hispana”, Ayer 61: 47–76 [available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/41324956?seq=1]. Post, Gaines (2015) [1964]. Studies in Medieval Legal Thought. Public Law and the State, 1100–1322, Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press. Przeworski, Adam; Stokes, Susan; and Manin, Bernard (1999). Democracy, Accountability and Representaion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reichard, Rolf (2002). La Revolución francesa y la cultura democrática: la sangre de la libertad, Madrid: Siglo XXI. Reid, John P. (1989). The Concept of Representation in the Age of the American Revolution, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Robertson, Robbie (2005). The Three Waves of Globalization: A History of a Developing Global Consciousness, London: Zed Books. Rosanvallon, Pierre (1998). Le peuple introuvable: histoire de la représentation démocratique en France, Paris: Gallimard. Rudé, George (1964). The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848, New York: Wiley and Sons.

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Sánchez León, Pablo (2000). “La ciudadanía que hemos perdido: el zóon politikón en perspectiva histórica”, en Manuel Pérez Ledesma (ed.), Ciudadanía y democracia, Madrid: Fundación Pablo Iglesias/Siglo XXI, 37–65. Sánchez León, Pablo (2007). “El poder de la comunidad”. In Ana Rodríguez (ed.), El lugar del campesino. En torno a la obra de Reyna Pastor, Madrid: Universidad de Valencia-CSIC, 331–58. Sánchez León, Pablo (2020a). “La constitución mixta: una gramática elemental para la imaginación política en el paso a la modernidad”. In Francisco A. Ortega, Rafael Acevedo and Pablo Casanova (eds.), Historia conceptual transatlántica: metodologías y nuevas perspectivas de análisis, Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia (forthcoming). Sánchez León, Pablo (2020b). “‘People’, ‘Plebs’ and the Changing Boundaries of the Political: Asymmetrical Counter-Concepts at the Origins of Spanish Democratic Discourse, 1750–1875”. In Kirill Postoutenko (ed.), ‘Hellenes’ and ‘Barbarians’: Counter-Concepts and Conceptual Asymmetries in European Discourse, London: Berghahn Books (forthcoming). Simonton, Matthew (2017). Classical Greek Oligarchy. A Political History, Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press. Sintomer, Yves (2011). Petite histoire de l’expérimentation démocratique: Tirage au sort et politique d’Athènes à nos jours, Paris: La Découverte/Poche. Sintomer, Yves (2013). “Le sens de la représentation politique: usages et mésuages d’une notion”, Raisons Politiques 50/2: 13–34 [available at https://www. cairn.info/revue-raisons-politiques-2013-2-page-13.htm]. Sitrin, Marina and Azzellini, Darío (2014). You can’t represent us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy, London: Verso. Stavrakakis, Yannis (2018). “How did ‘populism’ become a pejorative concept? And why is this important today? A genealogy of double hermeneutics”, Populismus working paper 6 [available at http://www.populismus.gr/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/stavrakakis-populismus-wp-6-upload.pdf]. Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Tomba, Massimiliano (2019). Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turchetti, Mario (2001). Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Urquizu, Ignacio (2016). La crisis de la representación en España, Madrid: La Catarata. Van Reybrouck, David (2016). Against Elections: The Case for Democracy, London: Random House.

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CHAPTER 2

Order: From Plebeian Disorder to Popular Citizenship—Constitutional Imagination Between Contexts, 1766–1814

Regime Changes and the Resignification of the Legacies of the Past Spanish democracy has been immersed in an ongoing process of transformation since the beginning of the 2010s. Every regime, whether democratic or not, is subject to changes, but these are not always accompanied by a collective awareness of the transformations. In the case of Spain, much of the discourse in the public sphere over the last few years has revolved around the transformations under way, including proposals for changes that are yet to be made, and debates over whether they ought to be persisted with or stopped, hastened, or contained. The general consensus is that the prevailing regime is going through a crisis, but opinions vary

This chapter combines modified versions of two seminar presentations for the project “Re-Imagining democracy in the Mediterranean, 1750–1860” (www. re-imaginingdemocracy.com): “Nameless democracy, feared multitude: Conceiving disorder and citizenship in the Esquilache Riots (1766) and its aftermath,” presented at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid (11–13 April 2014), and “Constitutional imagination and the shaping of political citizenship in Spain, 1808–1876,” presented at the European Institute of Columbia University in New York (13–14 September 2013). I am grateful to the organizers for their invitation and to the participants for their comments. © The Author(s) 2020 P. Sánchez León, Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5_2

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regarding its nature and depth, as well as what degree of engagement is demanded from citizens. It is widely held that the two-party system that has dominated Spanish politics for the past three decades is waning, although the emergence of new political parties has not altered the established form of representation in any fundamental way.1 Others point to the territorial model as clearly obsolete; in this case, the demand for its restructuring has led to regional mobilizations for greater citizen participation through processes of collective deliberation.2 For certain segments of public opinion, the crisis of Spanish democracy has above all revealed the influence of a series of private powers that foster inequality and degrade civic rights, and constitutional changes have been proposed as a means of reining them in.3 Finally, some of the more unsettling analyses point out that those powers and other practices seen as corrupting Spanish democracy are legacies transmitted from the previous regime; these approaches normally emphasize the necessity of raising awareness in public opinion and of pressuring the institutions through civic mobilization.4 Despite their marked differences, all of these stances are shaped by a common type of narrative that combines changes and continuities from some fixed point of origin. It is not an original format but rather a narrative mould inherent to accounts of crisis and transformation. Yet it is also very disempowering, for it limits itself to classifying phenomena according to a simple dichotomy. A more sophisticated approach to the processes that mark out crises is possible, though it requires focusing on continuities that are traced further back in the past. In post-Franco Spain, pre-democratic legacies provide the added interest of having been almost completely overlooked until recently. This communitarian awareness of issues hitherto scarcely acknowledged reflects a change in the cultural context of Spanish democracy—and in turn is a 1  Regarding the crisis of the two-party system in Spain, see Orriols and Cordero (2016) and Sánchez Muñoz (2017). 2  The case of Catalonia is emblematic of a mobilization in which nationalism mixes with the demand for participation and with experimentation in processes of citizen deliberation; see Perelló-Sobrepere (2017) for an overview of these processes; regarding Catalonia’s demand for independence, see Crameri (2014). 3  Regarding the transferring of members between the boards of large businesses and highlevel public servants and representatives, see Juste de Ancos (2017). 4  The endurance of the legacies of Francoism in the democracy is a subject that counts on a certain tradition; see Navarro (2006).

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factor that contributes to the ongoing transformations. Seen in this way, the past that lingers in the present acquires meaning by a process of resignification marking out differences between the current context and the immediately preceding one.5 In the case of present-day Spanish democracy, the memorialist movement has partaken in that resignification of the past by elaborating a discourse increasingly extended throughout the public sphere that links the deficits of democracy with structures and practices of power transmitted from the Francoist regime.6 But the ongoing resignification is also partly an outcome of the process known as 15-M, which has redeemed the value of a series of practices of civic participation and assembly-based deliberation, many of which hark back at least to the transition.7 Properly supplemented, these two discourses involve a qualitative change of cultural context in Spanish democracy. In principle, this outline applies to all contexts in which the regime enters into crisis due to the pressure of a collective mobilization founded on an imaginary of citizenship. A split then appears between the established forms of representation and participation, and a constitutional imagination is activated that addresses a markedly inclusive subject as the foundation of sovereignty: the people. Thus, it should also be valid for the process operated at the dawn of modernity, when a notion of sovereignty based on the divine right of kings was abandoned and replaced by the principle of a morally upright people capable of self-government. Without a doubt, this historic transformation was much more profound than the one currently under way, and accordingly the processes of redefinition of the past in that present were much more pronounced. Yet the contrast between those two contexts of crisis is interesting because it illuminates the different status acquired by the imaginary of democracy in each case. In the current context democracy is on the global scale assumed to be an independent and self-sufficient form of government; by contrast, the crisis of the Old Regime—despite encompassing the first definition of a modern political community self-governed by citizens—did so in a context in which democracy was not normally assumed to be a self-sufficient form of government, or even a legitimate one, at best acquiring meaning only if 5  This reflection on the differences of meaning among historical contexts draws from reflections on cultural memory; see Assman (2011). 6  For an emblematic example, see Silva Barrera (2019). 7  For an overview of the assembly practices of the 15-M Movement, see Estalella and Corsín (2013). Regarding the role of memory in the context of that movement, see Lacasta (2013).

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properly inserted into a wider framework of language for conceiving the political—that of the mixed constitution. The issues dealt with in this chapter revolve around constitutional imagination in the crisis of an established mode of representation, participation, and mobilization. Nevertheless, just as in the case of the present-­ day democracy, in order to overcome a simple dichotomous perspective reduced to changes and continuities, it is essential to also include processes that occurred before the crisis of the Old Regime at the beginning of the nineteenth century: in effect, the then-unfolding democratic imagination started earlier, and on the other hand the Old Regime was not a static institutional configuration lacking history and internal changes, being on the contrary also heralded by processes of resignification between contexts internal to traditional legitimacy. In the case of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy and its transatlantic empire, the year 1766 may be seen as a dividing line: at the dawn of the Enlightened reforms of the second half of the eighteenth century, there took a popular mobilization that the authorities had to confront by means of a discourse which was elaborated just as the concept of democracy was being diffused throughout the public sphere. In its aftermath, recourse to the tropes of democracy, properly inserted in the wider repertoire of the mixed constitution, allowed the strengthening of popular participation in local institutions, although duly subordinated to the framework of representation in the established institutions. Additionally, however, the architects of the Bourbon reforms had to reformulate the notion of crowd or plebe as a category devoid of all legitimacy for participation and essentially as a non-subject, thus splitting the category of the people into two. As a whole, the crisis begun in 1766 fractured the established relation between representation and participation. With the Old Regime entering into a much deeper and decisive crisis in 1808, a new popular mobilization would upend and seek to establish a different relationship between order, representation, and participation.

Disorder, Restoration, and Change: The Old Regime Re-signified, 1766–1774 “Null,” “illicit,” “unheard-of,” “defective,” “obscure,” “violent,” “of pernicious example,” “obstinate,” “illegal,” and “irreverent”: these were the descriptors, emphatically underlined, that the attorneys (fiscales) of the

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Royal Council of the Bourbon monarchy used to refer to the “extraordinary congregation of people” in 1766 in Madrid—an event conventionally known in historical narrative as the Esquilache Riots (motín de Esquilache).8 The popular mobilization of 1766 has been the subject of numerous studies from different perspectives, but because the revolt failed, the tendency has been to dismiss it as a minor, purely reactive episode, directed against the modernizing programme of the Enlightened reformist court of Charles III (1759–1788).9 What is certain is that the protest had a wide territorial scope, extending beyond the capital of the Spanish Monarchy to other peninsular cities and even reverberating across the Atlantic throughout the monarchy’s overseas possessions.10 Despite this fact, inasmuch as it did not enduringly destabilize the institutional order of the Spanish Monarchy, the crisis of 1766 has not been properly inserted into the wider cycle of Atlantic revolutions of the second half of the eighteenth century—which it anticipated in many ways, but is also clearly distinct from.11 However, its importance at the time is unquestionable. Although the revolt neither aspired to topple the monarchy nor did it cause irreversible damage to its legitimacy, the event was interpreted in its context as a state of exception that had profoundly subverted the social and institutional order. The jurists of the Council demonstrated as much in their report, written several weeks after the popular outbreak with the purpose of delegitimizing “those who speak in the name of the People”—by virtue of which the mutinous population had obtained from the monarch himself the suppression of a series provisioning and sumptuary measures adopted 8   “Real Provisión” (1766): 6–9. A facsimile of this document is found in Macías Delgado (1988). 9  For a recent account of the event and its antecedents, see López García (2006). The historiographical interpretation in a folklorist and traditional key emerges from historians of the nineteenth century; see Ferrer del Río (1856): II, 5–116. 10  The number of localities in which disturbances of some kind were recorded hovered around forty, distributed throughout the Spanish territory; see Vallejo García-Hevia (1997): 210. Regarding its impact on Spanish America, see Andrés-Gallego (2003): 201–83. 11  Even in the monographs that include comparisons with other colonial powers, such as Great Britain or France, the mutiny in Madrid does not appear as a point of departure in the crises of the Spanish Old Regime; see Klooster (2009): 117–57. This deficit impedes the full evaluation of the meaning of the event within its context, even when the revolt of 1766 was the only one of consideration prior to the French Revolution that affected an imperial metropolis. For a classical interpretation that  pointed out the magnitude of the protest within the framework of the continental monarchies, see Vilar (1972).

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by the royal minister Esquilache, in addition to forcing his dismissal as Secretary of the Treasury and of War.12 Upon revoking these concessions made in a state of extreme chaos, the attorneys, led by Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, put into circulation all the available discourse regarding participation and representation.13 In the first place, they denied the people any capacity for independent self-management. In their judgment, the Madrid protests of 23–26 March ought to have been declared “null” because “there is hardly any Capital City in which there is memory of having held a Concejo abierto [open council]”—the name given in the Castilian legal tradition to local assemblies for decision-making.14 By relying on this traditional concept, the fiscales were characterizing the practices of political participation that enabled the protests as legitimate in origin but obsolete. The general or open councils had been suppressed from the end of the Middle Ages in the bigger Castilian cities and towns, giving way to a closed, oligarchic system of government called the regimiento, composed of hereditary municipal office-holders alongside a number of popular representatives and local judges (originally elected, though the process was open to abuse), coordinated by the figure of the corregidor, an agent appointed by the royal government, whose absence in this case justified the declaration of the popular gathering as “illicit.”15 The inherited juridical repertoire was employed in order to delegitimize the popular protest from the standpoint of participation—whereas it reaffirmed the established form of representation. Indeed, the fiscales 12  The monarch’s concessions were revoked, but the resignation and exile of Esquilache remained. For more on the life trajectory of Leopoldo di Gregorio, Marquis of Esquilache—a high-level bureaucrat with a background in trade whom Carlos III brought with him from his court in Naples—see Strazullo (1997). 13  On the figure of Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes within this context, see Vallejo García-Hevia (1997): see also Llombart (1992) and De Castro (1996). 14  See “Real Provisión” (1766): 13. Just a few years earlier, an authority in legal matters had annotated that concejos abiertos were  “rarely if ever held in the populous Cities”; see Santayana Bustillo (1742): 26. Regarding its persistence throughout the early modern period, normally in minor places or only for certain elections for local offices in Castile, see Bravo Lozano (2004); for colonial Spanish America, see Tapia (1965). 15  See “Real Provisión” (1766): 13. On the regimiento in its context of origin, see Monsalvo Antón (1990); on the municipal regime in the early modern period, see Hijano (1992); regarding the regimiento in colonial Spanish America, see Kinsbruner (2005): 33–48. On the introduction of the figure of the corregidor in the Castilian councils since the fifteenth century, see Lunenfeld (1987).

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stressed that the “Town and [Corporate] Bodies” of Madrid had “all the necessary authority,” since “the Ayuntamiento (Municipal Council)” was in itself “the condensed voice of the People” with full legitimacy to represent or propose “whatsoever befitted the common good.”16 This assertion of the established institutions’ exclusive capacity to represent was effected by employing a longstanding tradition of corporate language.17 Thus the protest was also described as “unheard-of” because “the People of Madrid have never been accustomed to congregating in a Body.”18 Combining custom and law, the foundations of legitimacy of the established order were given as sufficient. Consequently, the graces or concessions obtained from the king by the rebels were dismissed as mere “pretentions”—as stated in title of the attorneys’ official document—for having been “introduced without legitimate personality,” being declared “opposed to the Laws and constitution of the State.”19 In principle, thus, the de-legitimization of the revolt against Esquilache served to actualize a conventional repertoire of tropes that referred to the Catholic juridical tradition.20 However, the Real Provisión published by the Royal Council contained other important features that do not fit as easily into that repertoire. First, the attorneys’ document was a response to the “Representación” made to the monarch and his Council by “the Nobility, Town, and Gilds of Madrid”—that is, by three corporate bodies and not simply that of the regidores, each of which offered its own battery of arguments. No doubt, the involvement of the nobility and the gilds 16  See “Real Provisión” (1766): 13. This qualification of the regimiento referred to a longstanding tradition, synthesized in the treatise on local government by Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla towards the end of the sixteenth century. According to it, the regidores “represent the people and are the entire city,” to the point that “alone they can do everything that the people do together”; see Castillo de Bobadilla (1978) [1597]: book III, chapter VIII, title II, n. 18, p. 122. 17  According to the judges, the “vecinos do not represent” because “they are not qualified”; see “Real Provisión” (1766): 15. 18  The prosecutors admitted the necessity of “the general convocation of the People” in “some rare cases,” but this could not take place “without causa cognita,” needing a “superior license,” in reference to the Royal Council, which the people have address in order to “correct any offense” that the regimiento does against the vecinos; see “Real Provisión” (1766): 13. 19  See “Real Provisión” (1766): 1. 20  On the category of “Catholic juridical tradition” to designate the cultural and institutional configuration of the Spanish monarchy in the Old Regime, see Garriga (2010) and (2016).

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highlights the depth of the crisis of 1766: together, their approaches demonstrated a social order expressing itself in full, albeit through the instituted division by estates. Nevertheless, the capacity of legitimate representation granted to the privileged and non-privileged was distinctive and to a large extent inconsistent with that embodied by the regidores incorporated in the Ayuntamiento.21 First, the presence of the gilds was both extraordinary and contradictory; for according to the legal tradition invoked by the restorationist discourse, in the majority of the cities and towns throughout the peninsula and the New World at the local level the non-privileged were not represented by artisan gilds but rather by reference to a different entity, known as the Común [Commons], encompassing all taxpaying vecinos.22 On the other hand, the presence of the so-called major gilds, which included the great merchants, investors in manufacturing, and royal lenders, rather blurred than underlined the popular element in the representative body.23 But even more contrary to tradition was the inclusion of the nobility in the document, beginning with the fact that it assumed a representative role before the Royal Council ahead of the municipal council itself. In principle, the participation of the nobles could be explained by the fact that Madrid’s status as a town overlapped with that of being the capital and the seat of the court in a territorially vast institutional framework. However, this nobility, united in the solemn act of redress to the king, was not a simple collection of titled nobles but instead appeared organized in a body; and while the gilds were a modality of corporation that proliferated in the towns and cities of the peninsula and the overseas dominions, in the case of the corporations of nobles by contrast there was not an inherited juridical tradition to rely upon. Indeed, a common feature of the territories of the Spanish monarchy from the beginning of the early modern period was the absence of collective organizations of the nobility 21  The royal prosecutors’ document affirmed that the three were joined as they “are in themselves the voice of Madrid, and legitimate Representatives of the Public”; see “Real Provisión” (1766): 13. 22  Regarding the category of the Commons as a format of popular representation in the Castilian cities opposite the artisan gilds, see Monsalvo Antón (2002). For a general overview of gilds and the Commons in the eighteenth century in particular, see Sánchez León and Slemian (2021). 23  On the Cinco Gremios Mayores de Madrid, a corporation founded in 1667 and composed of jewellers, haberdashers, silk dealers, drapers, and druggists (drogueros), see Gómez Rojo (2008).

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beyond blood lineages, so that neither at the level of municipal councils and less even so at the central level could the privileged count on any solid tradition of representative bodies.24 The presence of the nobility in a corporate body with representative capacity was a novelty that by necessity invoked an alternative tradition to that which animated the jurists of the Council.25 The initiative originated with the new strongman of Charles III’s court following the dismissal of Esquilache: the Count of Aranda.26 This member of the military and high nobility hailed from Aragon, a territory of the monarchy in which the gilds and corporations of the nobility had enjoyed constitutional status until the arrival of the Bourbons.27 However, although it is certain that Aranda was behind the collective organization of the court nobility that asked the king to return to Madrid once the capital was pacified, his initiative was short-­ lived and did not lead to a more ambitious and enduring effort to re-­ establish the representation of the nobility in the Spanish monarchy.28 This latter fact shows that the rationality of the initiative was neither directly or exclusively the result of the influence of an estates-based imaginary inspired by the legal culture from the ancient Crown of Aragon. To 24  The final formal convocation of the estates in the Castilian Cortes was in 1539. But before then neither the nobility nor the clergy fulfilled functions of representation by parliamentary means. For the status of the Castilian Cortes and its historical dynamics, see Fernández Albaladejo and Pardos Martínez (1988). For an interpretation of the social and political conflicts in Castile between the medieval and early-modern periods from the frustrated attempts of the nobility to construct corporate organizations in the cities, see Sánchez León (2002) and (2007). 25  A final proof that there was no corporation of the nobility in the capital of the kingdom is that it was notably absent when in 1759 Carlos III arrived in Madrid from Naples; it was exclusively the “Municipal Council and vecinos of Madrid” who received the monarch, with only the regimiento, the academies of arts, and several of the major gilds being involved in erecting the ceremonial architecture of the royal entrance into the court; see Corregidor and Ayuntamiento de Madrid (1760): 9. 26  Regarding the figure of Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, the tenth count of Aranda (1719–1798), see Olaechea and Ferrer Benimeli (2008). 27  Aranda’s inspiration for the “Representation” of the nobles and gilds to the monarch was intense; see Andrés-Gallego (2000). For a comparative perspective on the Aragonese juridico-constitutional tradition with the Castilian one, see Villacañas Berlanga (2008) for the medieval period, and Gil Pujol (2005) for the early-modern period. 28  In the short run, no corporate reorganization of the nobility in Madrid or in the court came about. It took until 1782 for the enactment of a Real Cuerpo Colegiado de Caballeros Hijosdalgo de la Nobleza de Madrid [Royal corporate body of the Gentlemen of the Nobility of Madrid], which also lasted a very short while. On this delayed corporation, see Álvarez de Toledo y Trenor (2005).

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better understand Aranda’s policy in relation to the privileged group and in line with all the official discourse in the wake of the crisis of 1766, another important element must be considered, more strictly intellectual in character: republicanism.29 Tropes from this tradition of thought distilled from the civic humanism of the Renaissance had recently re-entered the public sphere and the court circles of the first Bourbons as part of the emerging reorientation of their politics towards the telos of “public happiness.”30 By that point, the influence of Montesquieu’s work among the cultured public had favoured the integration of the classical ideal of citizenship within a broader grammar of political concepts centred around the triad of monarchy-aristocracy-democracy. This overall framework of the mixed constitution shaped the discourse that sparked Aranda’s reforms following the Esquilache Riots.31 Yet the combination of those three concepts and their counter-concepts had to be necessarily sui generis in this context. What the mixed-­ constitution ideal prescribed in situations such as the upheaval of 1766 was a rebalancing of relations between the three dimensions of the constitution in order to obviate future popular uprisings that might be justified by claims of an institutional drift towards tyranny; this in turn favoured the exercise of moderation, defined as the main attribute of an aristocracy.32 29  Aranda himself had contributed in prior years to its introduction among court nobles; see Onaindía (2002): 129–58. 30  Republicanism emphasized civic virtue, but it did not presuppose that moral commitment to the res publica was contradictory with the inequality under the law embodied by privileges. On the other hand, it was especially appropriate for the promotion of an ethos expected from the magistrates and high-level officials of the monarchy, many of whom were titled nobles. On the penetration of English-style republicanism in the discourse sponsored by the Bourbons, especially through the trope of the patria, see Fernández Albaladejo (2001). For an overview of patriotism in the Spanish colonial world, see Entin (2013). Regarding the concept of public happiness at the foundation of the Enlightened politics of the Bourbons, see Paquette (2008): 56–92. 31  In a work published during this crisis, one of the main ideologues in Aranda’s circle, Enrique Ramos (though using the pseudonym Antonio Muñoz), distinguished between “Monarchical Government,” in which “all the attributes of Sovereignty are united in one person alone,” and that in which “the attributes are divided” in a combination of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic features. In this case, “the Government is mixed”—a model he assigned to the monarchy of Charles III; see Ramos (1769): 2. On the presence of the mixed-constitution imaginary in pre-1766 Spain, see Sánchez León (2020). 32  On moderation as a central virtue in the mixed-constitution imaginary, especially as embodied by the aristocracy, see generally for the second half of the eighteenth century Backes (2009): 56–71.

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According to these, it corresponded to the aristocracy to play a prominent role on the new stage, which definitively reveals Aranda’s plan of strengthening the weight of the nobility in the institutions, given that his approach of course presupposed that in Spain the aristocratic element was embodied by the nobles, and especially the titled nobility. However, when it came to its implementation, a major drawback of this scheme was the genuine difficulty of increasing the nobility’s hold over the institutions, especially at the local level. Indeed, the writers from Aranda’s circle could not help but highlight that, despite its lack of corporate organizations, the nobility already exercised a quasi-monopoly over urban government and judicial posts, both in the peninsula and overseas: in effect, the “balance between the two Estates” of the nobility and the people had for long been “broken”—but only because the “party of Nobles” had remained clearly “superior” in the municipal councils, so that increasing their influence would only entrench popular distrust towards the institutions of urban government, which was considered to be the source of social protests.33 From the mixed-government perspective, to empower a noble corporate body would impose a kind of oligarchic despotism over the cities— that is, a monstrous aggregation of the flawed forms of monarchical and aristocratic government.34 In this way, in spite of a marked influence by the high nobility in the wake of the Esquilache Riots, the recourse to the grammar of the mixed constitution actually came to favour a discourse that proposed that, instead of the aristocracy moderating the monarchy 33  In the words of Enrique Ramos, the problem that Charles’ reformers faced was one long-standing inheritance of vecinos of towns and cities “not having representatives” in their councils, which over time came to make them “distrust the administration.” This degraded scene was attributed to the selling of municipal offices to particulars, which had long been transformed into a “law” imposed upon the “Third Estate” to the point of becoming in many cities a “Statute” by “all the Regidores,” who came from the noble “class”; see Ramos (1769): 24–25 and 23, respectively. This trope of an urban oligarchy has been replicated up to its naturalization in post-Franco historiography; see in general Aranda Pérez (2006), and more particularly for the case of Madrid, Hernández (1995). 34  Over time, a combination of corruption and despotism—relating, respectively, to the degradation of aristocracy and the monarchy—would serve to explain the local stage prior to the riot of 1766. According to a jurist towards the end of the century, “the People” claimed to rise up because, under the pretext of wheat shortages, local authorities were governing “despotically and arbitrarily […] with no regard for the Commons”; yet vecinos added to this claim that the regidores “concealed, with a particular and perverted purpose,” increases in the price of bread because “they had interests in that branch” and “did not provide the corresponding remedy”; see Serrano Belezar (1783): 12, 10, and 47, respectively.

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and the people, it was most necessary to boost the democratic dimension of the governing institutions by favouring an increase in popular representation. The implemented reforms primarily consisted in the creation of the offices of syndic (síndico) and spokesperson (personero) of the Commons, two posts for the representation of non-privileged vecinos in the municipal councils that, unlike other historical institutions, would be limited to twoyear terms.35 The offices of síndico and personero were non-hereditary and thus not subject to the “patrimonialization” that was seen as the source of the imbalance between the estates in public offices—but at the price of instituting a new tension. For although they were ostensibly charged with popular representation, on closer examination they rather used representation to resolve a double challenge—technical and political—presented by concentrating the entire population of vecinos in the sessions of the municipal corporations. Actually, the alternative established was a system of indirect elections in two phases, the first of which granted the right of participation to the majority of adult male vecinos in neighbourhood and parish assemblies.36 In sum, the promulgation of this reform strained the institutional tradition of the monarchy, in which representation was inseparable from certain degree of participation. Additionally, the reform also alleviated the objections that were made against the democratic dimension as a promoter of partialities and discords, by implementing subsidiary institutional measures.37 35  The dimension of representation was more pronounced in the case of the spokesperson or Personero, an office that lacked deliberative capacity, being nothing “more than a Deputy of the Commons, who in the business matters he intervenes has a voice but no vote,” and a voice that serves “only to implore”; see Serrano Belezar (1783): 90, 94. Regarding these two institutions of syndic and spokesperson of the Commons, see Guillamón (1980). 36  Indeed, the argument of the treatises would be that the concurrence “of the entire People in the Municipal Councils” was both “difficult” and “dangerous”—representation being established as “the regular means of seeking [popular] interventions.” The election would be done “by the vecinos,” but “gradually” so: that is, “naming first, from among them, Electors, and proceeding [by the latter] the election of Deputies and Spokesperson in the name of all the People”; see Serrano Belezar (1783): 13 and 37, respectively. 37  The main one consisted in the creation of the Mayors of the Quartiers (Alcaldes de Barrio), a figure with judicial functions of first instance which was justified in facilitating “the knowledge of individuals of the People of the greater neighbourhood,” devoted to guarding “their actions” so as to be able to “contain the slightest movements and effects of rancour, ire, or unease, fomenting discord and illusion”; see Enrique Ramos (1769): 4. Regarding this institutional figure and its introduction into the capital, normally dealt with by studies only

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On the whole, perhaps the profile of síndicos and personeros may sound old and traditionalist, but the discourse that gave meaning to these institutions was not, and the popular political practices they enabled even less so.38 The concurrence of two languages with different genealogies and discursive statuses—that of the Catholic juridical tradition and that of the mixed constitution stuffed with republican tropes—on the one hand came to express that the context had been partially redefined, and on the other brought about changes in the established fields of meaning. Although tropes from both traditions coexisted in discourse, far from becoming fused in a hybrid, the process was marked by a whole series of dissociations, some of them unprecedented. To begin with, while reaffirming the inextricable link between the Commons and the democratic dimension of the constitution, the juxtaposition of corporate and republican tropes led to the revival of the old debate over nobility versus aristocracy—and in a context in which the moral and civic were being increasingly privileged over social hierarchy and estates.39 Above all, the supplementing of the corporate rhetoric with republican components contributed decisively to a new tension between the semantic fields of representation and participation. This tension would remain latent at least for a few years, however. The reform cycle beginning with the crisis of 1766 did not end in the introduction of the síndico and personero of the Commons in urban government: that had to wait until 1774, when the monarchy issued a decree intended to “prevent any popular turmoil or commotion” in all the peninsular and overseas territories “with perpetual effect” and “in their very roots.”40 The core discourse of this legislation strengthened the position of magistrates, now even denying gilds and other corporations from assuming, on behalf of the Commons, “the representation that does not belong to them”; but in its activity of social control, see Sánchez León (1988). For a dynamic overview of the institution throughout the Spanish world, see Exbalin and Marin (2017). 38  Jurists could eventually argue that although “its erection is nothing new,” it could anyway be considered that “its exercise” was hitherto “unknown”; see Serrano Belezar (1783): 11. 39  For an overview of these debates regarding the nobility and virtue in the Spanish Enlightenment, see Morales Moya (1983) and Aragón Mateos (1989). On the evolution of the nobility in Spain and in the colonies in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Felices de la Fuente (2013). 40  This course of action was decided in a meeting organized to this effect at the court; see Garriga (2017): 739, on which the following interpretation relies; see also Godicheau (2013). For the piece of legislation, see Pragmática (1774).

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above all, it stipulated that not even the “abuse” of power by public ­officials authorized “resistance or disobedience,” delegitimizing any “pretext for disturbing the public order with agitations or riots.”41 By denying any avenue for complaint through direct action, the jurists and authorities of the monarchy not only completely subordinated participation to representation but also denied the possibility of any collective political agency, including by fully legitimate organs of the political body, denigrating all such avenues of participation as if they were mobilizations against order and leaving the individual petition as the only legitimate means of complaint.42 Thus, order was on the one hand amalgamated with representation, and on the other participation along with mobilization were placed outside the system, thus separating hitherto inseparable institutional spheres. On the conceptual level, although this outcome may not have been intentional, it nevertheless reveals that the restoration in the wake of Esquilache Riots was of a markedly ideological nature. On the other hand, the supplement provided by the grammar of mixed government indicates that on its own the language of the Catholic juridical tradition had not sufficed either in giving meaning to the turmoil or in providing for justification of the subsequent reforms.

Mobilization and Participation Without Representation: The Coining of the Plebe, 1766–1808 It should not come as a surprise that among the governmental authorities the Esquilache Riots forced a reflection of constitutional scope.43 What perhaps needs more emphasis is that this was in response to another constitutional imaginary emerging from the popular mobilization. The royal attorneys certainly had no doubt that the rioters’ complaints were “pacts” which the latter considered to be binding between the people and their 41  The argument for this refusal was that the laws had established “recourses and means of containing” the public officials “in fulfilment of their obligation”; see Garriga (2017): 742. 42  Indeed, the decree only allowed subjects to “represent each of them all that they could” only “after disbanding and obeying the Justices” and “so long as they remain obedient,” in which case it was admitted that “their complaints be heard, and whatever is right and just be remedied promptly”; see Pragmática (1774): 9 (art. 18). 43  For this dimension, see Coronas González (1997) with regard to 1766, and Garriga (2017) with regard to 1774.

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monarch, for which reason they described the Madrid protest as “irreverent” and “illegal,” duly counterposing it a “general pact of society” that in their own words “forms the political Constitution of the Monarchy, and Spanish Nation.”44 Historiography has not been generally sensitive to the radical aspect of the uprising, however: it has of course denied constitutive capacity to the popular insurgency, but even the importance and integrity of its discourse has been diminished, presenting the people of Madrid as the dupe of the high nobility in its conflicts with the strongman of Charles III’s court, when otherwise not manipulated by the sectors of the clergy opposed to the rampant regalism of Bourbon politics.45 For their part, alternative interpretations that have acknowledged the popular protagonism have focused their attention on the “moral economy” as the rebels’ inspiration, assuming that, while serving as a basis for opposition to the advancement of market relations, it would only have given rise to a reactionary ideology, an interpretation which in turn has favoured a relative convergence with other emerging perspectives that underscore the “nationist” component of the mobilization, activated in rejection of a supposedly foreign culture influencing the new court of Charles III.46 To be sure, all of these interpretations are partially correct, but it is just as true that the revolt of 1766 was occasion for the elaboration, on the part of the mobilized, of a discourse that, much like the one established after the restoration of order, exceeds the matrices of the traditional 44  The attorneys explained that the former qualification was due to the fact that the “Tumultuous crowd” had intended “to pact serious matters in public,” forcing the king to grant their demands “immediately” and “by his own Person”; the latter was justified in that those pacts regarded “matters” that were not “of the inspection of the particular People” but belonged to the Cortes or the Royal Council; see “Real Provisión” (1766): 15. 45  Of the insurgents’ ideology, what have normally been searched are its possible affiliations with publicists of the political or intellectual elites. Regarding the involvement of sectors of the court nobility in the financing and preparation of the mutiny, see Corona Baratech (1969), Rodríguez Casado (1962), Olaechea (2002), and Andrés-Gallego (2003): 287–320. On its part, the influence of the clergy, especially the Jesuits, has inspired a long line of historiography interested more in exonerating the Company of Jesus from supposed involvement in agitations before and after the riots; see Andrés-Gallego (1996) and (2005): 429–645. On the policy by Carlos III of reversing prerogatives handed over to the clergy, see Mestre Sanchís and Pérez García (2004). 46  For a focus through the lens of moral economy of the populace, see Vilar (1972) and López García (2006); on the “nationist”-reactionary perspective, see Gelz (1999). Regarding the category of “moral economy,” the necessary reference is Thompson (1991): 213–394; regarding that of “nationism” to designate a kind of national identity prior to modern nationalism, see the works by Fernández Albaladejo (2006).

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language on complaints. To prove this assertion, it is necessary to study the texts produced by the insurgents, mainly composed by a series of anonymous chronicles developed in the weeks following the protest and compiled by the authorities in its wake.47 A glaring paradox of the urban riots against Esquilache is that they were in part the unintended consequence of various measures introduced precisely to stave off the threat of popular disturbances in reaction to shortages. Indeed, the so-called Free Trade in Grains Act of 1765, which for the first time opened to competition the urban bread supply, repealing the traditional fixed price, was justified above all as a measure intended to end subsistence riots.48 To account for an effect so contrary to the one intended, it must be understood that the initiative formed part of a wider horizon of policies inspired by the so-called commercial society, an evolved version of which Bourbon Spain was assumed to have become upon leaving behind decadence, but still considered precarious and in need of support. Accordingly, institutional policies were being deployed to activate the self-interest of the subjects for their own benefit and, in so doing, having them contribute through their individual enrichment to the international glory of the monarchy.49 In sum, with the opening of the domestic market for basic products, decisive steps were being taken in order to institute an entirely new conception of the subjects of the monarchy as self-interested individuals and civil subjects. 47  It deals with a series of documents with the format of a palimpsest in which among the accounts of actions there are included excurses and reflections, justifications and explanations of the uprising together with copies of official regulations, testimonies of the events, popular verses, and even apocryphal accounts of the reactions of the court: “Discurso histórico de lo acaecido en el alboroto de Madrid ocurrido el Domingo de Ramos 23 de marzo de 1766” [Historical discourse on what occurred in the disturbances of Madrid on Palm Sunday, 23 March 1766], “Papeles que salieron contra el Marqués de Esquilache antes y después del alboroto de Madrid” [Papers that came out against the Marquis of Esquilache before and after the disturbance in Madrid], “Causas del Motín de Madrid en 28 de febrero de 1766” [Causes of the riot in Madrid on 23 February 1766], and “Relación del motín contra Esquilache” [Account of the riot against Esquilache], collected in Macías Delgado (1988): 43–83, 85–98, 99–146, and 147–88, respectively. All of them were elaborated several weeks after the riot and have the seal of works written by educated authors. 48  Regarding this stage of the liberalization of markets, see Llombart (1992): 155–90. 49  On the scenery enabling the imaginary of the “commercial society,” see Hont (2005): 1–58. Regarding its Scottish context of formulation, see Berry (2013). For a comparison between Scotland/England and France, see Hont  (2013); for the Spanish case, see Viejo Yharrassarry (2018) and Sánchez León (2005).

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That being said, in the thinking of the initiator of this project, the royal attorney Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, the collective moral transformation of Spaniards had to be achieved mainly through what he called the “imperceptible affinity” for new tastes based on private interest, which in practice entailed exposing them to market relations only gradually, until “profit” became their main motivation. From that perspective, Esquilache’s decision to include in the reform package of 1765 other measures that directly touched upon customs—especially the prohibition among the popular sectors of the traditional embozo (folded top of the long cape) and wide-brimmed hat, substituted by a short cape and French-style tricorne— not only completely altered the tempo of the reforms projected by Campomanes but also linked them to a risky social experiment.50 Finally, the urgency of introducing at once all these changes in a period of bad harvests exacerbated the generalized feeling of discontent against the king’s favourite, which finally exploded when the local authorities in the capital were ordered to enforce the new sumptuary code. On 23 March 1766, taking advantage of a religious festivity, the rebels set in motion the Alboroto matritense (Madrid disturbance)—so called in many of the contemporary chronicles. In ideological terms, it was characterized by a critical appropriation of the discourse centred on the prosperity and happiness of the kingdom, albeit to develop an alternative one openly opposed to the reforms of the domestic market.51 Indeed, the grievances recorded in the texts are marked by a defence of traditional values run through with Baroque political sentiments such as love for the king, loyalty, or national honour.52 They were predominantly drawing on 50  Campomanes, officially in charge of carrying out the measure, lashed out against the prohibition against the cap and cape, not because of cultural or aesthetic reasons but rather for the fear that a reform of customs pushed by institutional means would provoke a violent reaction among the population, as indeed occurred. The two reports by the attorney on this matter were incorporated into the document “Causas del motín” in support of the revolt’s legitimacy; see Macías Delgado (1988): 102–13. On this question, see Sánchez León (2005). 51  Of the available anonymous texts, the one that shows an author most expert in political economy—although it also features the most intense critique of the liberalizing reforms—is “Rasgo político” [Political trait], included in the document “Causas del Motín” and which discusses issues of agriculture and markets. It has been speculated that it may have been penned by the Jesuit Miguel Antonio de la Gándara, an author of various important works on political economy in the mid-eighteenth century and who was imprisoned after the riot for decades until his death; see Macías Delgado (1991). 52  The main source to these effects is one called “Humilde representación” [Humble representation], a text included in various reports with slight modifications. Its axis is a language

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the neo-scholastic thought of the Catholic Monarchy, taking inspiration from the doctrine of tyrannicide applied to the person of the Marquis of Esquilache, though explicitly sparing the king and upholding the value of prudence, so central to the political discourse of the Habsburg period.53 Even if these were generally arguments emanating from the educated, the interaction of this discourse with lower cultural strata was assured, however, since the riot erupted in a context in which the Spanish public sphere had not accomplished the separation between high and low culture.54 This allowed for tropes of the “science of commerce” that supported Charles III’s reforms to be diffused through lampoons and especially satirical poems aimed at the uneducated public, a practice that preceded the revolt and would remain in its wake, leading to the attorneys’ description of the rioters as “obstinate.”55 In principle, this traditionalist discourse opposing the royal policies inspired by an individualist and acquisitive imaginary gave shape to a corporate anthropology explicitly vindicated by the rioters. However, the definition they gave of themselves as a “body” contains revealing of sentiments with strong moral charge and political dimension presented in simple dichotomies that refer to a longstanding tradition as the basis of the link between the monarch and his subjects: “fidelity”/“infidelity,” “love”/“hate,” “disobedience”/“pure loyalty”; see Macías Delgado (1988): 77. It is equally present in popular verses, like one addressed to Esquilache justified to “give you in Christian warnings / political documents,” and “As a Christian I implore you / as I see you a tyrant”; see Macías Delgado (1988): 87 and 69, respectively. 53  Terms such as “covert tyranny” or “unjust despotism” are common, especially in the “Discurso histórico,” a document that also includes a rhyme that apparently “coursed” through the streets before the mutiny and in which Esquilache expresses himself as follows: “I consult and inform nothing / I reform the good / and I annihilate the People.” For its part, the document “Causas del Motín” closes with a “warning” addressed to the “Governor,” that he be “mature, reflective, and prudent,” and one addressed to the “Public,” that it remain “considerate, submissive, and obedient”; see Macías Delgado (1988): 47, 78, and 141, respectively. Regarding prudence as a moral and political value in the education of princes and magistrates during the time of the Habsburg, see Feros (2002): 39–75. 54  The shaping of the public sphere under the Bourbon monarchy has given rise to an interpretation that considers that during the first half of the eighteenth century, the popular cultural fabric was at once more sensitive and more porous to intellectual innovations; on this “plebeian public sphere,” emerging during the reign of Ferdinand  VI (1746–1759), see Medina (2009): 57–82. 55  Such characterization was justified by the jurists arguing that the rioters “disseminated Pasquinades, Satires, defamatory Libels, and threats to the most distinguished Persons” with which they “rattled many gullible people” and tried to “discredit the Government”; see “Real Provisión” (1766): 15.

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paradoxes. First, the insurgents appeared to have sworn themselves to not having anyone appear at their “head,” which guaranteed that the mobilization would later be dismissed as “obscure” by the Royal Council’s attorneys, since “no one appears to be representing that sort of people.”56 Yet overall that popular corporate body came about for a specific purpose and dissolved itself once it had been achieved, not wishing to endure in time as prescribed by the treatises on the corporate political imaginary.57 This anomaly indicates a profound reworking of the legacy of traditional tropes that both reflected and favoured a partial redefinition of the context. By not counting on their own representatives, in the available accounts the rioters appear as encountering or searching for intermediaries. First it is members of the high nobility who emerge with the intention of appeasing the mobilized with advice and offering to negotiate on their behalf; then come ecclesiastical preachers, one of whom actually assumed the task of presenting the popular demands to the king, centred on the expulsion of Esquilache and the suppression of the Junta de Abastos (Provisioning board) in charge of liberalizing the grain market. This mediation seems to have brought about important results in the short run: the very next day after the outbreak of the Madrid riot, 24 March, Charles III emerged onto the balcony of the Royal Palace surrounded by his councillors and declared his approval of the rioters’ demands. At first sight, the mobilization had succeeded in its objectives and could now disband. The following day, however, the king and his family left the court without notice, and accounts indicate that the rioters took this move as a sign that the promises given 56  In the “Constituciones u Ordenanzas,” which were prepared by the insurgents and which appeared in all the palimpsests of documents, it is established that “we all unanimously ought to swear to not be discovered,” so that if one of the sworn was detained and interrogated, he would have to say that he “does not know or have news that there is a Head or Party for this disturbance, but rather hearing the voices and deeming them just, he followed those who proffered them”; see Macías Delgado (1988): 82, emphasis in the original. The attorneys’ description is found in “Real Provisión” (1766): 14. 57  The rioters’ tenth and final ordinance stipulated that as long as the king “pardons this disturbance,” then “this Body would dissolve entirely,” with “each person going to his or her own house, without re-inciting even the slightest disruption, not even for acclaim”; see Macías Delgado (1988): 68 and 70, respectively. In the classical definition of the medieval canonists, juridical bodies were naturally enduring, which distinguished them from human bodies subject to deterioration and extinction; see Kantorowicz (1981) [1957]: 273–313. In fact, the royal attorneys followed that conception by noting that “regarding a chimerical and uncertain body,” such as the one formed by the rioters “there can be no constant representation”; see “Real Provisión” (1766): 14.

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would not be kept; consequently, they decided to remain organized, to take up arms to control the gates of the capital, and send a letter to the king asking him to return to the court. As a result of this sudden outcome, the uprising entered into a new phase in the chronicles, leading one of the anonymous authors even to speak of a “Second Tumult” and the attorneys to stress that the entire mobilization deserved the qualification of “violent.”58 The accounts dealing with the aftermath highlight the capacity of the populace for political and military self-organization, including explicit references to assembly-­ based formats and deliberative proceedings, thanks to which the rioters took the gates of the city, disarmed soldiers, freed prisoners, and the like.59 On the narrative level, this entire part is inspired by a mould inherited from Renaissance humanism that plagues the text with democratic tropes. Though not explicitly using that terminology, these tropes feature inserted into the semantic repertoire of the mixed constitution as the chronicles enter into a third phase once the rioters obtained from the monarch on 26 March a document confirming the concessions made. Indeed, in that new stage the people now counted on representatives, who receive in all accounts the emblematic title of “tribunes” from the classical tradition.60

58  According to the “Relación del motín,” in that second phase of the revolt there were fewer active participants, being mostly composed of “the unhappy poor from the Outskirts of Madrid, women, and boys.” Nevertheless, in a “Nueva Representación” included in the “Discurso histórico,” the ninth and penultimate ordinance explicitly proclaims that “women are not included” in the “Body” of the rioters “until the particular Junta decides”; see Macías Delgado (1988): 168 and 83, respectively. The role of women in the insurrection is corroborated in other sources; see López García (2006). 59  One of the ten clauses of the constitution establishes that the “Chief” makes his decisions always with the Deputies, “together forming a Council and following the opinion that gets more votes” under penalty of the “disgraceful deprivation of their jobs” if they failed to do so; see Macías Delgado (1988): 171. This kind of procedures also appears in verses that seems to have been composed in the heat of the revolt and are recorded in the document “Papeles” as follows: “We the alborotadores / of Madrid (…) being in a secret meeting / and in splendid council (…) determined in agreement / that with ayes and with shouts / it is to be claimed with great urgency / the following”; and it ends: “By a plurality of votes / all this was agreed upon / to be carried out, and it is written / for the record, today Sunday”; see Macías Delgado (1988): 96 and 97, respectively. 60  This is not the only reference to “tribunes,” who speak on behalf of the people, in the documental record of the Esquilache Riots: An anonymous “Contra-bando” [Counteredict] meant to censure the edict that prohibited the wearing of pasquinades in the streets, opened with the following formulation: “We your Tribunes, by the grace of your Plebe”, and

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It is probable that the “alborotados” of 1766 really enabled formulas of representation before, during, and even after the mobilization. What is certain is that the transmitted information is contradictory on this issue, due to the coexistence in the accounts of two narrative moulds: a corporate one, albeit re-elaborated in order to account for a body without a head, and a republican one, albeit reframed by the structure of the mixed constitution. Their juxtaposition within the same discourse allows for both the denial of and the emphasis on the presence of representatives. In fact, those decidedly juxtaposed narrative frames split the semantic fields of representation and participation into two, showing that the separation of those two spheres of meaning was already produced in the discourse of the rioters, later being only elaborated upon by the authorities following the restoration of order. However, in stark contrast with the latter, the discourse by the insurgents of 1766 does not suggest a rearmament of representation; quite the contrary, it highlights the value of participation. Indeed, even if it seems impossible to verify whether the protesters truly fostered political participation, the authors of the available accounts deployed such referents in order to give meaning to the actions of the rioters of 1766. The  anthropology of  collective organization featuring in those documents does not easily fit into a condition of subjection—but rather depict a citizen deliberating in self-governing assemblies, which is what the republican tradition reserved for democratic governments; moreover, this popular collective actor is described as capable of self-restraining from violence.61 Seen in this way, the available discourse on the insurgents of 1766 cannot be easily dispatched as traditional.62 On the other hand, by the standards of the time, this configuration clearly assessed participation another was explicitly titled, “The Tribune of the Plebe”; see Memorial (1768): 35 and 39, respectively. 61  Indeed, the “Discurso histórico” emphasizes that when they stormed Esquilache’s house, the alborotados “did not touch anything”; also, as recorded in the “Relación del motín de Esquilache,” when the mutiny entered into its radical phase—and was “only composed of the rabble of the Outskirts” and a number of “lowly crowd” with “few or no obligations, and ill-bred boys and girls”—the rioters did not “commit foul deeds, or excesses, or thefts, or any damage to any of the vecinos,” observing the self-established ordinances on that matter; see Macías Delgado (1988): 55 and 170, respectively. 62  This characterization is self-limiting in its recourse to a simple dichotomy traditional/ modern, with a long lineage in the social sciences and the history of social movements. For an example, see Vilar (1972); see generally Hobsbawm (1971). The use of the category of traditionalist is more adequate, as long as one clarifies that its language of reference is not entirely traditional.

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higher than representation while simultaneously placing it under the banner of mobilization. Yet for the perspective of the established institutions, no matter how much the rioters succeeded in maintaining order in the streets of the capital, their courses of action could not be seen but as an extreme manifestation of disorder. The most aggressive discourse against the self-presentation of the populace of Madrid in 1766 was developed by the corporations summoned to make amends to the monarch. The discursive thread common to both the gilds and the improvised gathering of the nobles—beyond denying the legitimacy of the pretentions of the protest—centred around depriving the “body” of the rioters of any entity. Just like the nobles emphasized that those “popular masses” could by no means “usurp” the privileged estate “of any of its representation,” for the major gilds the body formed by the rioters had conducted in such a way that had come to appropriate “Representation that does not apply to [such a body].”63 In principle, the language employed was in full harmony with the corporate imaginary.64 But the intervention of the estates in the restoration of order delved into other matters, provoking changes and semantic innovations that reached the core of social and institutional order. Despite the attempts to deny legitimate personhood to the protest, the discourse of the corporations necessarily had to give its protagonist a name. The coincidence among the representatives of the corporations was complete on this matter: the script signed by dozens of nobles of the court made reference to “a Plebe” or “capricious Vulgo (mob)” identified with the “lowly class of people” composed of “the most contemptible idlers, beggars, and foreigners”; on their part, the major gilds were equally explicit in identifying the riot with “the Plebe and Crowd” comparable to “the lowliest” and formed by “a raw portion of poorly occupied and

63  In support of this interpretation, the jurists from the Council described the protest as “defective” because “the Nobility, the Merchants, and the Artists” in their “Representations” to the king “condemn and detest such an abominable congregation of fanatical and unruly people”; see “Real Provisión” (1766): 4, 8, and 14, respectively. 64  A corporate response was even more marked in the case of the imputation of leadership to the revolt: the Bourbon magistrates ended up blaming it, not on a court faction or a network of popular instigators, but on an entire organ of the Political Body, the Jesuit order, which was expelled from the territories of the monarchy in 1767 as a sequel to the mutiny; see in general Andrés-Gallego (2003): 461–89 and 569–94; see also Mestre Sanchís and Pérez García (2004).

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foreign waste.”65 Many of these terms and descriptions were usual at the time, but not combined in a discourse regarding constitutional order and disorder. The resulting conception of the plebe differed from what was conventionally established in the political and legal culture of the Spanish monarchy. Indeed, the term plebe had always been ambiguous and had lent itself to being applied to the socially lower classes considered to be morally corrupt, especially by tacking on the adjective of “lowly” (ínfima); however, in the Spanish cultural tradition, plebe was not necessarily a degrading term since it encompassed an entire estate represented in the Cortes.66 The discourse in the wake of the protest of 1766 forced a drastic reorientation of its meaning, however, which entailed distinguishing it from the concept of the people, setting the two apart and confronting each other through their most constitutive features. What the ideological rearming of the Monarchy would establish in the subsequent months was that the people—although not entitled to developing practices of participation independent of the authorities—counted on the established institutional channels to represent themselves, even if solely at the scale of its individual members. By contrast, this reminted plebe was born deprived of capacity for representation. Above and beyond the moral and social stigma that accompanied it, this is what characterized the crowd in opposition to the category of the people. Therefore, its redefinition was less at the cultural and sociological levels than the political or institutional. This strongly suggests that the resulting semantic change originated in the insertion of a vocabulary that supplemented the hegemonic corporate one. In this latter one, the potential opposition between the people and the plebe tended to be of a symmetrical character—that is, it established a lower rung in the juridical and moral hierarchies expecting to produce among the individuals thus classified an identity acquiescent with their status. Yet it was difficult for this other plebe in the making to assume the position assigned to it given that, in addition to not being able to self-represent, it also had no one to represent it in order to be integrated into the order. 65  Finally, the minor gilds explained that the riot had no “other foment or support” than that of “unruly, unknown, and unworthy People in the Republic”; see “Real Provisión” (1766): 4, 8, and 9, respectively. 66  In a work published in the same year as the revolt, the traditional distinction was still proffered, according to which while the “People are the entire congregation of Citizens,” by contrast the “Plebe” or crowd was “the congregation of Citizens separated from the Nobles and the Generous”—that is, the Third Estate; see Mayans and Ciscar (1766): 3.

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Indeed, the plebe after 1766 would not be a constituted entity, unlike the Commons, the vecinos, or the subjects—in short, the people at large. Although it continued to form part of the social whole, it did not fit into the Political Body. The function of this conceptual redefinition of plebe was to acknowledge it, not so as to integrate it into the order but rather, once excluded, to contain and eventually dissolve it as a collective; in the interim, authorities tried to administer its individual members as non-­ subjects and especially as non-citizens. The result of this operation of semantic engineering would be an asymmetric counter-concept, constructed as a classifying category to deny the identity of the group or the collective to which it applied. For reference to this generic category, a radically novel logic of biopolitical management would be imposed that for the first time established institutional discrimination against entire groups of subjects who in everything else shared in a common confessional and juridical community.67 This form of managing otherness would progressively be extended throughout the monarchy during the reign of Charles III, but it was not incompatible in the short run with repression more avant la lettre. Indeed, the extension of the Madrid protest to other parts of the peninsula—in the form of disturbances that forced the authorities to “reduce provisions, pardons, and indulgence of popular hatreds and caprices”—led to the attorneys describing it as “of pernicious example”; nevertheless, in these other local cases, the institutional treatment was much more expeditious.68 For its part, the repression in the provinces anticipated the destiny that awaited the overseas colonies in the subsequent decades, as the preventive measures enacted there were not be sufficient for avoiding the onset of a cycle of mobilizations in which the emerging asymmetric definition of plebe would unite with rooted indigenous identities, historically

67  For a study on this matter, see Vázquez (2009). The institutional management of the plebe centred around the large collection of vagos malentretenidos (loafing idlers). This classification drew from reflection on labour as developed in the emerging political economy; see an overview of these questions in Díez (2014): 69–101. On the construction of a discourse regarding these collectives, see Soubeyroux (1984) and Hontanillas (2016). In turn, the institutional modality of management of this subject would be the police; regarding this concept in the Spanish Enlightenment, see Sánchez León (2005). 68  See “Real Provisión” (1766): 14.

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discriminated but increasingly willing and able to challenge the legitimacy of colonial government.69 On the peninsula, by contrast, there were no considerable popular outbreaks towards the end of the century, and that contributed decisively to settling the conventional definitions regarding the relation between representation, participation, and mobilization—to the point of even affecting the discursive treatment of the democratic imaginary. Already by 1766, the reflection on democracy had a certain lineage among the ilustrados, who were inserting it into distinct interpretive schemes.70 However, the riots against Esquilache had placed on the table the defiance of a mobilized population willing to decide its own laws—an alternative that dangerously resembled the kind of self-government which according to the tradition corresponded to democracy as  a “pure” form of government. The memory of the 1766 crisis and its resolution left such an imprint that the ilustrados continued to address its corresponding discourse on representation and participation in their later discourses. The treatises written in the final decades of the century developed a very singular interpretation of democracy in which the component of representation appeared especially highlighted. A notorious example is found in the work of José Agustín Ibáñez de la Rentería, “Discurso sobre las formas de gobierno” [Discourse on the forms of government]. The text argues that “Sovereignty” even when “the State is purely popular” could not “be verified but in representation,” not only because of the technical question of the size of the states—which made it “impossible” for “all of the people individually” to be able to exercise as “Legislator” and “Governor of the State”—but also because by its very nature, democracy consisted in “every [male] individual” exercising “sovereignty by himself 69  For a general overview of these movements, presented in an imbrication with nascent anticolonial identities, see Faverón Patriau (2006). For the meaningful case of late-colonial Peru, see Flores Galindo (1984) and Serulnikov (2006). 70  In the treatises of the early Hispanic culture, democracy had normally been addressed by subordinating the tradition of civic humanism to fundamentalist Catholic transcendentalism. This relationship was continued in the anti-Machiavellianism of intellectuals from the first half of the eighteenth century such as Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, who highlighted the contradiction by the author of The Prince in both advocating for tyranny at times and presenting himself as a “lover of democracy” at others; see Feijoo (1733): II, §8. By contrast, several years later Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes overcame such bias regarding democracy, inserting it into the debate over commercial society; he nevertheless tried to legitimize the monarchy by distinguishing it from republican government, which “naturally flowed toward democracy”; see Rodríguez de Campomanes (1984) [1750]: 59.

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in some way,” yet insofar as he possessed “the universal capacity to elect the members of government.”71 This conception, so indirect and mediated of popular sovereignty, was complemented by a more specific reflection on municipal government that in turn left civic participation in the background. For Ibáñez de la Rentería, even in the smallest localities, “the most critical moment of the government’s happiness” was not in the convocation of deliberative assemblies but rather in “the election of the offices of the Municipal Council.”72 No doubt, this discourse adapted well to an emerging political culture critical of the patrimonialization of offices that, following the exhaustion of the reformist impetus of the second half of the century, began to point to the very constitutional frame as the origin of the problems of the monarchy.73 In that context, the imaginary on the plebe came into focus, though in a peculiar manner: it was interpreted as a legitimate reactive force facing the despotic drift of government, a trend especially manifest in the final decade of the century. In the graphic words of a renowned ilustrado writer, the right for the plebe “to stone their Magistrates” should be at least given recognition whenever these failed to fulfil their basic tasks.74 In a legal-constitutional culture that imposed representation as the only legitimate procedure for the demands of justice, the plebeian

71  Additionally, he preached of the advantages of a mixed government of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy by referring to England and its elective chamber; and he provided a definition of “Anarchy and Ochlocracy” as a state of confusion that emerged in the Republics “wherever there is no legitimate head or government”; see Ibáñez de la Rentería (1790): 98 and 97, respectively. Regarding this figure and his work, see Fernández Sebastián (1996). 72  For according to the author, “the good state of the Republic hangs on the success of this operation.” For his reflections on local government, the author benefitted from the existing tradition in some towns in Biscay (in the north of Spain) of local elections of some public offices, himself having been elected throughout his career to several posts of representation and management at both the local and regional levels; see Ibáñez de la Rentería (1790): 196–97. 73  For the emergence of constitutional reflection following the crisis of the Bourbon reforms, see Fernández Albaladejo (1992). Regarding its links to political economy at the basis of reforms, see Portillo Valdés (2017). On the notion of “traditional constitution” of the Spanish monarchy developed in that context, see Agüero (2020). 74  However, immediately afterward its author, Juan Pablo Forner, attacked the possibility of popular self-government, asking himself: “where has there ever existed a truly legislative people?” see Forner (1794): xxxvi. For more on this notable polemicist, see López (1999) [1976].

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multitude in action was in a way thus empowered, not as a constituent power but rather as a destituent force.75 Still, the repertoire of mobilization established in 1766 appeared to be profoundly rooted in the Spanish political culture even after 1789, when the French Revolution had already profoundly transgressed its usual frameworks and substantially altered its content. Indeed, by March 1808, a new protest broke out against the strongman of the court, in this case Manuel de Godoy, in which the popular protagonism is unquestioned.76 In this so-called Mutiny of Aranjuez, however, the intervention of groups of influential courtiers reached up to the figure of the heir prince Ferdinand, which anticipated the coming of a distinct political stage.

Constitutional Crisis, Popular Power, and Democracy-in-Corporation: 1808–1814 Within just a few weeks after the mutiny of Aranjuez, the entire order of the Spanish monarchy appeared profoundly and irreversibly shaken when the royal family—upon having permitted the entrance of the Napoleonic troops into the peninsula with the justification that they were en route to invade Portugal—left the court for France, where they would admit a dual 75  This understanding of the function of the popular dimension in every constitution has a certain genealogy that links it to the right of resistance in the early modern period. It is related to a type of political contestation moved less by the bid for taking power than for keeping it in check, having the governors fulfil their duties and only attacking them from the outside to overthrow abusive; rulers for an historical interpretation of the right to resistance in this vein, see Nootens (2013): 20–41. 76  Yet given that in the so-called Mutiny of Aranjuez there was not an acknowledged leadership, with time this protest would be inserted into the historical narrative as a new example of the same kind of mobilization as the one in 1766. Regarding this other riot, there is a still more heavily accumulated historiographical prejudice, since the interpretation by post-1814 liberals reduced it to a conspiracy of a court faction orchestrated by Prince Ferdinand and capable of manipulating an easily agitated plebe. Within its context, however, the mutiny of Aranjuez came to be seen as a popular “Revolution” that, in opposing the “tyranny” of Godoy, had established the initial conditions for the constitutional change later to come about; see Calvo Maturana (2012). In fact, popular intervention in this riot seems to have had its own trajectory of independent self-organization; see París Martín and Nieto Sánchez (2019). Regarding the mutiny, see Hilt (1987) and Esdaile (2002): 31–67. For comparisons between the riots of 1766 and 1808, highlighting similarities and differences, see Stiffoni (1982) and Moscoso and Sánchez León (1993).

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abdication: of then-king Ferdinand VII back to his father Charles IV, and from the latter to the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, enthroned as José I. Unlike any political stage since the arrival of the Bourbon dynasty at the beginning of the eighteenth century, what entered into crisis now was the legitimacy of the persons who embodied sovereignty and to whom corresponded the functions of unity and coordination of the entire institutional framework. In such a situation, the established frontiers between order and disorder were completely altered. But unlike in 1766, the shaping of this crisis was not only in  a popular mobilization from below but also involved a risky conflict among the courtier elite that included strong pressure from a foreign power. On that emerging stage, a new, decisive popular mobilization came to be triggered, though at first as a reaction to the events that deposed the Bourbon dynasty. It initially consisted of a series of uprisings in the main cities, often with the support of troops, followed by the rapid formation of guerrillas, giving rise to what is known as the Spanish War of Independence. Although the convergence in a same context of a political crisis from above and an extended collective mobilization from below synthesize the conditions for a modern social revolution, the communitarian response in this case began as very conservative in discursive and institutional terms, activating a mechanism inherent to the Old Regime: the temporary reversal of sovereignty to the kingdom.77 Yet the situation created by the vacatio regis, or absence of the monarch, defined an evident state of exception whose management necessarily entailed the alteration of the inherited framework of relations among mobilization, participation, and representation—just as with time it entailed the demise of the referential language of order itself, the subjects who received recognition within it, and in sum the political community as a whole that hosted the defenders of the questioned legitimacy of the Bourbons, and not only on the peninsular metropolis but also throughout all its extensive overseas colonial empire. True enough, this collective response consisted in enabling an available instance of the inherited order: the constitution of juntas, a tradition rooted in Spanish institutions for making binding decisions.78 However, the urban juntas of 1808, by assuming sovereignty as deposited in them, 77  For definition of a modern social revolution with those features, see Skocpol (1979). A relevant distinction for this context is between a “revolutionary situation” and a “revolutionary outcome”; see on this Aya (1989), and more generally Moscoso (1997). 78  For an overview of this institutional mechanism up to 1808, see Andrés-Gallego (2008).

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immediately adopted measures related to treasury and military conscription; in short, they came to exert power over the territory.79 It is equally true that on the peninsula, the juntas were often called by the established authorities themselves after having their functions ended by the new legitimacy of Bonaparte, which assured a certain continuity in the social profiles of the new sovereign power. However, despite its expressly conservative or restorative character, the movement of juntas of 1808 was not accompanied by a phenomenon that was characteristic of the return to order forty years prior, following the Esquilache Riots: the formal intervention of the nobility with a degree of collective organization, nor that of the gilds or other corporations, which were subsumed if not diluted in the juntas and its assemblies.80 The fact was clearly recognized in its context, to the extreme that the absence of privileged groups in the collective response against the French occupation forces became a basic leitmotif common among all reflections and accounts written in the wake of the resistances initiated in May 1808.81 The situation would thus give rise to characterizations that, resembling those of 1766, spoke of a “people without a head,” only that now the said decapitation, far from being considered the expression of utter chaos, appeared as the condition for the people to aspire to “be governed with energy” by the juntas, and therefore as the basis of the new order in the making.82 79  For an overview of the juntas movement on both sides of the Atlantic, see Portillo (2006a): 53–103. See a reflection on the limitations of focusing on the changes and continuities regarding this phenomenon in Annino (2018). 80  Thus, an account just a few months later that summarized the process emphasized that the juntas were commonly constituted after “municipal council[s] or general meeting[s] of all the constituted authorities and classes of the people” were called; quoted in Portillo (2000): 239. 81  In contemporary accounts, criticism was aimed at magistrates and officials, pointing out their conformity and passivity, when not their direct collaboration with the occupant forces. But they often included references to the corporate framework that entailed a tacit censure of the privileged. In an article from 1812 titled “Quién ha hecho la Santa Revolución de España” [Who has achieved the Holy Revolution in Spain], its author had no problem pointing out “with frankness” that before the crises of dynasty and of independence, “some of the leading authorities had forgotten the people” just as “several respectable corporations followed that same behaviour,” with their “individuals” only worrying about taking care of “their own fortune”; see La Abeja 69 (19-11-1812): 153–54. 82  Indeed, it appears thus in a proclamation in which the lack of leadership is combined with the danger of being “led toward sinister paths” by various “Chiefs,” who the people finally “have withdrawn” in order to support the “lights” and the “patriotism” of the urban junta; see Diario de Badajoz (17-06-1808), quoted in Portillo (2000): 177.

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On the opposite extreme, by contrast, the people obtained a generous acknowledgement as an indispensable collective subject in the communitarian reaction that followed the French invasion, and this left a distinct trace in the discursive register. In that sense, beyond the generalized reference to their heroism and abnegation in the events that marked the beginning of the war, its most meaningful expression consisted in the sudden extension of the field of meaning of “the people,” making it the all-­ encompassing category that had ceased to be since the middle of the eighteenth century. The concrete way in which this occurred in the official documents of the new power and the accounts of the struggle against the French was through the blurring of the asymmetry that set plebe and people against each other as counter-concepts, which now came to be used as completely synonymous terms.83 The reintegration of the plebe into the people not only widened the contours of the basis of support for the urban juntas but also—by coinciding with an unusual empowering of neighbourhood assemblies and deliberative proceedings—entailed a restructuring of the hierarchy among mobilization, participation, and representation in favour of the first two that turned over the relation inherited from the immediately preceding context.84 These general features were shared among the juntas that were proclaimed in the Spanish American colonies, but from the beginning these 83  Thus, right after praising the “people” for their conduct in those days of May 1808, it was affirmed that it was the “plebe” who had revolted in Madrid; see Almacén (1808): 2, 36. This blurred usage would continue throughout the period, as seen as late as 1812 in a pamphlet published with the expressive title, “Elogio de la plebe española” [Praise of the Spanish crowd], but in which the “plebe” of the title scarcely features, while “people” is used throughout; originally published in El Robespierre español XXVII, 417–22, the text has been reprinted in Fuentes (1988), 38–40. These interchangeable references were not only to heroism but also to “patriotism,” which could be imputed to the “people” but also to the “humble” and “most noble plebe,” which had already proclaimed “to be set free” from tyranny; see La Abeja 69 (19-11-1812): 154 and 155, respectively. More on this matter can be found in Landavazo Arias (2004) and in Sánchez León (2021a). 84  Thus, in a memorial that offered an eloquent synthesis of the new situation, José Canga Argüelles highlighted that what triggered the formation of urban juntas was the fear, in “the most critical” of circumstances “in which the Nation had been,” that the “Magistrates would lose their force, and their measures to defeat the enemy would consequently be null.” By contrast, the juntas ended up gaining greater legitimacy thanks to the trust placed in them by “the People,” who obeyed them “for their intervention in the deliberations”; see Canga Argüelles (1808): 16, 20, and 21, respectively. The text was published anonymously. Regarding this bureaucrat of the late Enlightenment reformism who would eventually radicalize his stances in favour of constitutional change, see García Monerris (1995).

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latter showed important differences in their capabilities for coordination and for expanding their social bases. On the peninsula, the dual situation of a suddenly headless metropolis and an invaded territory prompted the search for a superior, centralized entity, consummated in the formation of the Junta Suprema Central at the end of the summer of 1808. By contrast, in the juntas empowered in the Spanish American territories, the loss of legitimacy by the traditional institutions of justice and government was from the beginning lower given the absence of an invading power, and so situations of dual power proliferated throughout the territory, eventually giving rise to conflicts of legitimacy.85 On the peninsula, although centralized coordination at first allowed for military victories by the forces opposed to the invading power, the reinforcement of the Napoleonic troops put to test the entire emergent institutional order—including the semantic and classificatory changes that accompanied it. In the early months of 1809, the troops of the Junta Central faced setbacks that came to threaten the stronghold of Cádiz, crucial for communication with the overseas possessions of the monarchy and for the army supply on behalf of the British. During the defence of this city there was a local political crisis, as the governor sent by the Junta brought with him a troop of foreigners who had deserted the Napoleonic forces while also tried to impose a series of measures that affected popular customs, such as the prohibition of dances and certain clothing.86 The popular reaction that this incited was accompanied by an effective, collective self-organization that forced the governor to resign. However, despite appearing very similar to the events of 1766 in Madrid, the outcome of this process probed very different.

85  Differences also had to do with conceptions of the subject, though. Indeed, in the colonial territories, the previous trajectory of exclusion based on ethnic criteria seems to have limited the reach of the identification of plebe with people, maintaining as illegitimate the forms of mobilization and participation attributable to the former, and allowing the elites to reduce the protagonism of the latter to their being represented; see generally Guerra (2009). For a historiographical overview of plebeian involvement in Iberian Amrica in this context, see Morán (2011). For the contrast between concurrent sources of institutional legitimacy, I follow the interpretation by Portillo (2000): 159–256, and (2006a): 29–104. 86  The mobilization included the attack on prisons to liberate prisoners and the appointment by popular acclamation of a local friar as interim governor substituting the one appointed by the Junta, who belonged to the ranks of the titled nobility. Regarding Cádiz during the war of independence, see Moreno Alonso (2011).

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In fact, the institutional response made way for a new framework for the management of disorder that signalled the obsolescence of the inherited one: although the authorities of the Junta Central initially resorted to activating the 1774 decree against riots still in force, they soon felt obligated to adapt it to a stage of legitimate popular control in which certain collective values had become prominent, such as the “interest of the Patria,” that used to be subsidiary, while others such as “civil liberty” were foreign to the traditional maintaining of order.87 Significantly, moreover, the repression of collective protests to come would be aimed firstly at their “heads,” a radical shift with respect to the cycle begun in 1766, additionally emphasizing the definition of a new kind of crime, “treason against the patria.”88 Above all, even if official accounts and published testimonies took great pains to restate the distinction between people and plebe, the persecution of crimes made this latter category be newly identified with the afrancesados, or Francophile Spaniards, when not composed of reactionary serviles, while the “people” no longer appeared as mere vecinos but were instead duly dignified as “citizens” guarantors of order, therefore legitimized to represent and be represented, if not to participate actively in communitarian self-government.89 87  The old Pragmática was supplemented with several “Additions,” the first of which placed the control over disorder in the hands of the urban militias of popular base. Pushed after the events in Cádiz, this reform of the legislation against riots acknowledged in its preamble that the extant laws “for punishing the tumultuous and the bustling” were no longer “sufficient” in those exceptional times due precisely to the incidence of such new values, which some apparently confused with “licentiousness and license”; see “Bando” (1809): 5 and 1, respectively. 88  The sixth addition to the reform reads: “The heads of the riot will be irretrievably executed by harquebus,” and the remaining rioters will be “punished according to how active a role they played in the uprising”; see “Bando” (1809): 6. More on the question of the mobilizing leadership is in Chap. 4 of this book. 89  The edict reforming the Pragmática of 1774 was careful to not mention the plebe as the cause of the disruptions but instead targeted “a few wicked men”; see “Bando” (1809): 1. Its publication was ordered by the provisional governor of Cádiz, who also offered his testimony in a letter published in the official bulletin of the Junta. In it he strongly assured that the “uprisings” of Cádiz were the work of “the lowest and crudest segment of the populace” and not by the “healthy people” and “honourable vecinos.” By contrast, in a “representation” of the “vecindario of Cádiz” published in the same newspaper and endorsed by the syndic of the city and representatives of all its quartiers, the reference to the vecinos was not as subjects but rather as “good citizens” amounting to the whole “people of Cádiz,” who were exonerated from having arrested the governor; see Gaceta del Gobierno (10-03-1809): 197 and 198, respectively. Regarding the so-called afrancesados, see the classic study by

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Overall, this episode reveals a deep process of redefinition of subjects and objects between the context of 1766 and that of the 1808 crisis. The presence in the same texts  of discourse with opposing terminology expresses that also in the latter there coexisted different languages regarding order. However, compared to the former, the traditional semantics of corporations did not anymore enjoy a hegemonic position, having now to share status with a republican language that, following the wake of the French Revolution, had been gaining ground in Spanish culture, so that its tropes could actively contribute to the forging of political identities based in the vindication of popular sovereignty in a formal constitutional framework.90 Thus, among the first-known “liberals,” there stood out a group of activists around the Semanario Patriótico, a publication printed in Seville whose editors decisively contributed to receiving and spreading the definition of the scenario opened in 1808 as a crisis of constitutional reach that, by witnessing the intervention of an unprecedented popular mobilization, qualified for a proper “revolution”; moreover, as some of these writers were also representatives in the Junta Central, they ended up being decisive in opening up to discussion the necessity of a constituent process.91 This proposal, already radical in itself, took shape in the same context of a debating about whether to transform the Junta into a Regency, a traditional institution that in principle did not call for an elective format. This latter option temporarily gave initiative to the old bodies of the Monarchy, especially the Royal Council nourished by members of the high nobility, some of whom, in the attempt to impede the convocation of the Cortes, Artola (2008) [1953]; on the emerging traditionalist identity, already labelled then as “servile,” see Rújula (2012). 90  Such coexistence of languages was not only made possible but also fostered by a sensation felt by the observer-participants that the state of exception begun in 1808 questioned the capacity of the available language to signify the new context; see on this Fernández Sebastián (2008). For a pioneering study on the politico-constitutional language emerging from this crisis, see Seoane (1968). 91  Among these activists—who formed a tertulia, or small social gathering, and a cell of conspirators known as the Junta Chica [Little Junta]—were the jurist Isidoro de Antillón, the merchant Lorenzo Calvo de Rozas, and the poet Manuel José Quintana; on this publication and group, see Rico Linage (1998). Regarding its influence over the juntista political stage, see Portillo (2000): 208–56. On the interpretation in that context of the cycle begun in 1808 as a revolution, see Busaall (2012): 226–37; see also Lampérière (2004) for the Spanish world in its entirety. On the coinage of the concept of “liberalism” and its adjective “liberal” in this context, see Fernández Sebastián (2006).

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tried to delegitimize all prior action undertaken by the Junta Central. Yet such reaction could eventually be presented as a conflict between two bodies that, being both legitimate, were nonetheless founded on different referents—but with only the juntas being representative in the dual sense of having an elective popular origin and being more appropriate to the exceptional conditions of the moment.92 The resolution of this crossroads—together with the implementation of a constitution in the territories dominated by the French that competed as a source of sovereignty—eventually led to the Regency deciding to summon the Cortes in January 1810.93 In the subsequent months until the gathering of the Cortes in September 1810, different positions on its composition were profiled. However, such proliferation and the eventual bet on one of the positions were possible thanks to the imaginary of the mixed constitution being much more inscribed in the matrixes of the political language of the Spanish culture compared to 1766, serving now as a common basis for all discourses and opinions.94 In fact, this grammar now allowed for a brief repertoire of concepts for giving meaning to the entire local, national, and imperial stage. To begin with, the conjugation of its tropes allowed to interpret the 1808 re-assumption of sovereignty by the numerous juntas as a potential drift towards anarchy. Of course, the language of the Catholic 92  This conflict was described a few months later by the jurist and member of the Junta Central, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, in a memoir that, by denying the accusations against him that poured in from the members of the Royal Council, made clear that one of the weaknesses of his opponents was the reference to “public opinion,” a type of lexicon foreign to the legal tradition of the Catholic Monarchy. In passing, he affirmed that a Regency reduced to the members of the Council would result in an “incomplete” and “imperfect” representation; see Jovellanos (1811): lxxxiii and lvi, respectively. On this unique figure of the Enlightenment and of early Spanish Liberalism, see Chap. 3 of this book. On his political thought in this context, see Coronas González (2000) and Fernández Sarasola (2011). 93  Regarding the so-called Constitution of Bayonne, established in 1809, in a comparative perspective with the constituent process of 1812 Cadiz, see Busaall (2012): especially 33–90. On the evolution in the stances of the members of the Junta Central and later the Regency, from simply reforming the fundamental laws inherited from the traditional mould to proposing a novel constitution, see Tomás y Valiente (1995); see also the description in Portillo (2000): 208–56. 94  Moreover, during those years and on the basis of the revolutionary experiences in France and the United States, the grammar repository of the mixed constitution was being synthesized, especially through the work of Destutt de Tracy; see a summary in Sánchez León (2017). For an interpretation of the juntista crisis in the colonial viceroyalty of Peru that highlights the role of this language, see Morelli (2008).

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juridical tradition allowed for an analogous diagnose, but the repertoire of the mixed constitution offered the crucial addition of seeing behind the  drive towards a centralized government the  threat of despotism. In short, only from this matrix could it be argued that in the state of exception of the Spanish monarchy, there were not one but two dangers involved, as derived from the excess weight of the monarchical and democratic elements, respectively.95 Additionally, the ideal of mixed government also provided with the general framework for elaborating alternatives, all of which revolved around a restructuring of forces in order to guarantee a balance among the three levels or dimensions of the whole constitution. From this framework, whether it was about making a new or reforming the existing one, in principle the key seemed to be in the semantics of aristocracy. Indeed, both the monarchical/despotic and the democratic/anarchic tendencies indicted to the vacatio regis were produced at the expense of the aristocratic dimension of the constitution, a level that in principle was even more indispensable insofar as moderation was also preached as a needed general principle. If to this interpretive framework it is added the enormous discrediting of the French Revolution—as initially deriving into the demagogic experience of the Terror and then drifting towards tyrannical government by Bonaparte—it is reasonable that many among the early Spanish liberals searched for inspiration mainly in the English constitution, whose upper chamber produced sufficient consensus as a bastion of moderation and balance. And yet, given these predispositions, what is interesting about the Spanish case is that the summoning of the Cortes ultimately did not follow a bicameral division, or even a division of estates: instead, the gathering was made for a single Cortes—an option that is 95  In the emblematic interpretation of José Canga Argüelles, the legacy of tyranny was long, for ever since the Habsburgs stopped passing laws in the Cortes, the Spanish monarchy “was changed from moderate to despotic.” In turn, the government established in the face of the vacatio regis, “as it was formed in the conflict of the noble passions, inclined itself toward democracy,” accustoming “the people to decide, to order, and to obey.” Yet what was exceptional about the scenario begun in 1808 was the dynamic combination of these two trajectories, for although the urban juntas “gave the Nation energy and enthusiasm,” the continuity of the “fatal folds” caused in the “spirits” by the stubborn despotism under the Bourbons had triggered in the people an arrogance—the term that was used is “elation”— that by not being properly reoriented, condemned the new stage to “disorder”; see Canga Argüelles (1811): 31, 30, and 34–35, respectively. For discourse interpreting  the passage from the Junta Central to the Regency as the anteroom of a new despotism, comparable to that embodied by the invading Napoleonic power, see texts in Hocquellet (2001): 276–80.

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even more striking considering that the English model counted on supporters both within the Regency, especially the jurist Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, and outside it, among them influential British diplomats like Lord Holland.96 In the interpretations regarding the origins of the constitutionalism of 1812 there is agreement in considering that the options of bicameralism and unicameralism both responded to normative bases and historical readings as well. However,  the fact is that those who opted for a bicameral model or an estates-based convocation did not incorporate to their proposals the discourse from the many treatises that in that context of crisis were devoted to constitutional traditions, especially those of the historic kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon, which hosted chambers of estates-­ based representation.97 This was so not for lack of will; rather, this shortcoming originated in a shared awareness that, although from the beginning of the early modern period the nobilities of the different peninsular kingdoms had been preserved as an estate—even catapulting many of its individual members into the highest posts of local, regional, or central leverage—this came at the expense of its integrity as a body. In short, in the different historic peninsular kingdoms there were juridical privileges and institutional traditions among the privileged, but not organizations of the nobility as a corpus representans at the scale of kingdoms. And devoid of this organic entity, in addition to being deprived of a social base with which to establish collective representation, the nobility could not legitimately aspire to embody moral virtues as a group, to say nothing of political virtue inspired in republican discourse—a conclusion that fit well on the other hand with the predominant perception that regarded the different peninsular nobles as already well represented at the expense of other groupings and powers. Indeed, for a majority of observer-participants, three long centuries first under the dynasty of the Habsburgs and then under that of the Bourbons had ended with the possibility for the Spanish nobility to constitute a corporate subject in any of the peninsular territories that could serve as a model for its potential recreation on a national scale, being the case that at the same time everybody claimed that the 96  On this mutual inspiration and their common strategy, as well as the ties between these two figures, see Fernández Sarasola (2016). 97  The most unique and influential figure in this respect is Antonio de Capmany, member of the Junta Central who fought hard to recover the arcane elements of the historic constitutions of the Aragonese territories; on his publishing activity in this context, see Portillo (2000): 217–36.

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aggregation of its individual members constituted a tremendously powerful estate. From the language of Catholic legal culture, they appeared as an aberrant head without a body, if not a hydra of many heads. But more importantly for the crossroads at play, from the grammar of the mixed constitution a nobility that had not exercised autonomous collective participation for a long time and had relinquished the practice of corporate representation, being reproduced by means of royal co-optation and the transmission of privileged property, should not be deemed a constituent subject for the simple reason that it could not be considered as an aristocracy worthy of such a name.98 This interpretation is even more plausible in light of the long-run overview offered in this chapter: for with regard to the relation between nobility and aristocracy, the situation in 1808 was analogous to that of 1766, with the difference that now there was not a consolidated and re-­ legitimized central power available, as embodied by the count of Aranda under Charles III, with options for reorganizing in extremis a body of the nobility that could give the appearances of an aristocracy; and still, in neither of the two scenarios did corporate disorganization impede the nobility from featuring as an ostentatious estate with inflated power.99 Ultimately, the long trajectory of the nobility as an estate power without corporation was decisive for Spanish liberals to opt for a single chamber as the criterion for the constituent Cortes. Indeed, what the available accounts show is that even the option of a nonelective Regency was already suspected by 98  Nevertheless, Jovellanos was persuaded, albeit somewhat naively, that the two chambers would be “two bodies,” different “in character and passions” but “equally interested in the general good”; consequently, from a position derived from “principles,” he opined in favour of the amalgamation of the arms of the clergy and the nobility into one, as well as for the “division of congress into two separate bodies or halls or chambers”; see Jovellanos (1811): lxxv and xc, respectively. In reality, Jovellanos’s stance was that an aristocracy adapted to the constitutional times would eventually settle itself following the establishment of a conjoint chamber of prelates and nobles. 99  My interpretation differs from the one offered by the historiography that reveals itself as more sensitive to the anthropological and sociological dimension of the political and legal thought around Cádiz; see Portillo (2000). This other view has correctly pointed out that in accounting for the nobility, anthropology can help understand its status as a corporate subject and sociology its status as a privileged estate; however, it has failed to account for the fact that in the case of Spain, due to its historical trajectory, these dimensions had become contradictory, especially observing the issue from the tension between participation and representation.

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many liberals as being a formula ripe for a despotic drift; accordingly, adding to that dangerous bet a chamber representing the nobility in the hazardous parliament to come, far from anticipating the successful development of a moderate and balanced constitution, actually unleashed the most shaking fears of a monstrous combination of tyranny and oligarchy.100 This argument was re-elaborated later on, once the Cortes were met, by combining technical, historical, and normative reasoning to justify that a second or third chamber would pose a frontal threat against the constituent order in the making.101 In frank contrast to the privileged nobility, the people could in that same context be instead much easily conceived as a corpus representans. On the one hand, it was so from principles that referred to an entire framework of philosophical and legal traditions in which the Catholic tradition provided abundant reflection,  while on its part republicanism had been revitalizing and refining the definition of people as a source of alternative sovereignty to the divine right of kings. And on the other hand, in the historical discourses elaborated on the eve of the vacatio regis and thereafter, the people could appear as a body already emerging in the medieval period to stop, aided by the royal summoning of the Cortes, the abuses of the nobility in seeking to impose its power at the expense of the common

100  Even in the aseptic account by Jovellanos, his stance in the Regency in favour of bicameralism made way for the “fear of preponderance” that would entail summoning the Cortes “by arms or a fused chamber of nobility and clergy”; see Jovellanos (1811): xc. On his part, Canga Argüelles would denounce the establishment of the Regency as an error, having the Junta Central ceded “executive power to three dozen men,” branding it precisely as a “monstrous body, mixed of sovereignty and aristocracy”; see Canga Argüelles (1811): 130 and 131, respectively. 101  Indeed, in the “Preliminary discourse” that justified the tasks of the constitutional commission, its author, the jurist Agustín de Argüelles, in addition to pointing out that the “inequal” distribution of the nobility throughout the different territories of the peninsula constituted an “insurmountable obstacle” for devising a second chamber, also argued that in the past the attendance of the estates at the Cortes had been “purely a custom of uncertain origin” and never “subject to any fixed or known rule,” being customary that the grandees and the prelates were not chosen through election among peers. From this perspective, establishing either a bicameral or tricameral parliament constituted a “true novelty,” from which only “all the problems” would be expected for a constituent Cortes: it would provoke “the most frightening disunity,” foment “the self-interests of the bodies,” and incite “jealousies and rivalries”; see Argüelles (2011) [1811]: 83, 82, and 84, respectively; a study of this oratorial piece, in 9–61.

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good to the point of threatening the authority of the monarchy.102 But beyond this, even though the people could not boast of longstanding traditions of self-governance, the 1808 crisis had empowered local entities that, by nourishing themselves with popular participation, considered themselves legitimate for representing the people in its totality without exclusions or internal cleavages, assuring the people a crucial role as constituent subject. This perspective was checked by a spatial limitation, though,  for the real subject stemming from the 1808 crisis was not as much the people in singular (el pueblo) as in a complex territorial plurality of peoples or pueblos that, both in the European peninsula and the American continent, required to be duly represented in order to overcome possible slippage into fragmentation and anarchy.103 From this perspective, it is possible not only to understand the option for a unicameral Cortes but the complex aetiology of the political community that was eventually enacted by the 1812 Constitution: the Nation. An interpretation that has been gaining consensus among specialists highlights that the Nation of 1812 was above all shaped by strong communitarian and inclusive ethno-religious referents, albeit also tainted with an exclusionary confessional bias; and there is no doubt that the formulation of the community of early Spanish liberalism relied on a Catholic cultural tradition deeply inscribed in the institutions and the semantics of the fundamental concepts of order, in complex relation to the relentless rise of modern politics and its conceptions of citizenship and self-determination.104 However, this communitarian identity could feature in constitutional discourse firstly thanks to the discursive dismissal of the nobility as a constituent subject, a process that paved the way for the privileged and the nonprivileged 102  Such historical account, become over time hegemonic, was authored by the jurist Francisco Martínez Marina, who in a work published in the prelude to the crisis of 1808 had already offered a narrative in which the medieval origin of the Cortes lay in the union of the people around the king to end the excess power of the nobility and the clergy; see this interpretation in Portillo (2000): 294–300. For a study on this work by Martínez Marina, the Ensayo histórico-crítico sobre la antigua legislación de Castilla y León, see Coronas González (2013). 103  On this plural definition of peoples and its territorial dimension, see in general Clavero et al. (2004); for a relevant comparative case in Spanish America evolving into demands for federalism, see Calderón and Thibaud (2010): 85–118. 104  This interpretation derives from the attempt to account for a declared singularity of the constitutional text of 1812: the subsidiarity of individual rights with respect to an omnipresent and omnipotent “Spanish Nation”; see Portillo (2000): 94–302. As an original source of inspiration, see also Clavero (1991). More on this subject is in Chap. 3 of this book.

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alike—that is, the traditional estates—to be diluted and subsumed into a single legislative chamber legitimized as a sole sovereign body representing an all-encompassing political community.105 In short, the visible absence of a body stuffed by the privileged that could be taken for a moderating and balancing instance was a decisive precondition for the consolidation of a type of political community constituted beyond estates. In contrast to the emphasis on the confessional component of the culture, my interpretation highlights the relevance of the sociological imagination in the process of forging the first national Spanish community.106 Additionally, however, it displaces any pre-, meta-, or infra-political consideration and turns the attention to the language of and about politics. For one of the key emphasis in the holistic and organic image of the Nation that began to emerge once the nobility was discarded as candidate for an aristocracy derived from the necessity of blurring the popular component of the new constituent subject: otherwise the Cortes could resemble an estates-based assembly, but in the sense of exclusively plebeian and therefore dangerously imbalanced. In the words of the time, such a radical option threatened to define the resulting order as a pure democracy, and this urged to allow for a lighter term devoid of the political load of the concept of people.107 This explains the combination so common among the early liberals of the two semantics, of the nation and of the people, as 105  José María Portillo deems as discursively crucial in that context the narrative strategy of historical reconstruction pursued by Martínez Marina in his Teoría de las Cortes, which was published in 1813 in the wake of the proclamation of the Constitution of Cádiz and that addressed the empowering of the nation as historical subject; see Portillo (2000): 300–9. However, Martínez Marina’s strategy demands in turn a specification of its conditions of possibility: his awareness, together with many other early liberals, that no other collective subjects were available for weaving an historical narrative presenting them as legitimate candidates for constituent powers. Regarding this decisive figure in the intellectual and juridical shaping of early Liberalism, see Fernández Albaladejo (2007). 106  Otherwise, it also reaffirms, as Portillo aptly does, the relevance in the Spanish case of the “much tortuous connecting links between Enlightenment and revolution”; similarly, it elaborates upon the necessity of providing “major elasticity to the concept” of nation so as to “accommodate it” to the “forms of political, social, philosophical, or historiographical thought”; see Portillo (2000): 28 and 9, respectively. 107  Indeed, as a deputy pointed out towards the beginning of the constitutional debate, “true and royal sovereignty” was only admissible “in the Nation,” to the point that admitting the possibility of it being “either in the King or the people,” the constitution would be “destroyed” and only “despotic or democratic government” would ensue, respectively; Diario de Sesiones de Cortes (from now on DSC) [Journal of the parliamentary sessions] (15-08-1811): 1687, speech by deputy Pedro González de Llamas.

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recurrently interchangeable in discourse yet keeping a tension that, in favouring the hegemony of the former over the latter, also allowed for crucial distinctions between the community and the constituent subject, especially around parliamentary debates of importance.108 In short, the ambiguity in the use of this dual terminology was a main rhetorical resource through which the patres conscripti of Cádiz confronted the discourses that tried to discredit the new constitutional order as a democracy.109 It was not the only one. Pointing in the same direction was the effort they made to emphasize the monarchical nature of the new constitutional order. In principle, the definition of the form of government as a monarchy was predetermined by the weight of tradition and, even more so after the scenario starting in 1808, by the weight of the legitimist defence of the figure of the king. However, the way that the forgers of the consensus of 1812 characterized the monarchy reflected the added necessity of tackling a potential excess weight of democracy, in the first place because a unicameral and popular Cortes could be seen as possible origin of a destructive competition with the attributes of the king.110 On this basis, one of the ways enabled by the constitutional designers for redefining the monarchy was to tie it to the moral feature most genuine to the aristocracy: moderation.111 Obviously, this attribute was not predicated on the king but on the entire system, insofar as the capacity of the Cortes to make and modify the laws functioned as an ultimate guarantee that the new monarchy would not in turn drift towards despotism. However, its adjudication to the 108  An emblematic example was recorded in the debate on bicameralism reopened as the draft constitution was brought to discussion. Agustín de Argüelles rejected then that the “method” proposed by the commission for “national representation,” based on unicameralism and which he considered “entirely simple and popular,” should be labelled “democratic”; see DSC (12-01-1811): 1828; more on this issue in Portillo (2006b). Overall, however, historiography tends to replicate this terminological confusion of the time between nation and people without critically distancing itself from it sufficiently. 109  Indeed, in the opinion of the commission, by “religiously” sanctioning “the respective rights of the Nation and of the Monarch,” the “system of representation in the Cortes” had removed any taint of conspiring to “destroy the Monarchy” and “establish the purest democracy,” an option that would have degenerated into “the most frightening anarchy”; see DSC (6-06-1811): 1195, speech by deputy Argüelles. 110  In the tradition of political philosophy, the central feature shared by pure democracy and monarchy was unity; see more on this question in the Epilogue and Conclusion of Chap. 6 of this book. 111  Article 14 of the Constitution of Cádiz defined the “government of the Spanish Nation” as an “hereditary, moderate monarchy”; see Constitución (1836): 8, emphasis in the original.

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monarchy was possible in the first place because of the absence of an aristocracy that, formalized in a singular representative body, could demand to be the source and embodiment of moderation. This whole discursive chain demonstrates the centrality of the mixed constitution as a political grammar for the constituent process of 1812— and for reasons beyond rhetoric. And yet, its main supporters formally opposed to enshrining a mixed constitution as such—that is, they did not openly seek a system founded on the balance among monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. This paradox is primarily due to their need of distancing their discourse from an openly ideological use of the mixed government repertoire. Indeed, what characterized the most conservative deputies in the Cortes, even those opposed to the constituent process, was a closed defence of the mixed constitution as an achievable normative ideal.112 In response, their attitude forced the commissioners to completely detach their discourse from the logic of mixed government.113 This stance, however, could not displace the mixed constitution as grammar, even if the prevailing choices shared the conviction that a system based on the combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy was not feasible.114 112  Above all, it was the conservative deputies from the territories of the former Crown of Aragon who argued that, in order that “neither the King nor the people” prevail, “an intermediary force or power” was needed, and there was none other “more appropriate than the estate of the clergy and of the nobility”; see DSC (12-09-1811): 1820, speech by deputy Francisco Javier Borrull. The stance of Jovellanos and his followers, being more abstract, was equally ideological and normative. In Jovellanos’ opinion, the “best constitutional balance” was the division of representation into two bodies, an option of which “there is no example in any Constitution of Antiquity” but that had to be “recognised as the most precious discovery due to the study of and meditation on the ancient and modern history of societies,” in the absence of which “no government can last,” and so advocated “accommodating the essence of any mixed government.” The problem, according to this author, was that although it was well reflected in the English and American constitutions, the mixed government was not admitted “in the new theories of modern politicians (whose democratic inclinations have caused so many ills in our age),” in reference to the French Jacobins and their alleged counterparts in Spain; see Jovellanos (1811): lxxiii. 113  Agustín de Argüelles thought that the fact that “monarchy” and “democracy” could not be “combined” and that “the equilibrium or balance” between these two forms of government was “almost unattainable” was irrelevant to the drafting of the constitution, for this did not seek to “unite or amalgamate” those two forms of government but to establish what was rather “a monarchical system by all accounts”; see DSC (12-11-1811): 1827. 114  In fact, what appears to have prevailed is a discourse in which the mixed government was understood to mean the combination of monarchy and democracy, leaving aside the aristocratic dimension. Already before the summoning of the Cortes, liberal ideologue Álvaro Flórez Estrada outlined the choices of “Government we want to choose” as “whether

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Instead of referring to the already traditional approach by levels or dimensions, what gave the design of Cádiz its greatest aspect as a modern constitution was the emphasis on the separation of powers. But once again, this must be seen in its context as deriving from the fear of democracy as much as the fear of tyranny, two among the main tropes of the repertoire of the mixed constitutions.115 Other than that, the discursive axis of the constitution revolved around the concept of “representative government,” one of whose designers, the jurist Agustín de Argüelles, considered to be a “system unknown” in the historical past of the nation but which was no longer possible to “disregard absolutely.”116 In any case, by linking sovereignty to a national assembly on the one hand, and maintaining the monarchy as the form of government on the other hand, the constitutionalists of Cádiz were contributing to the unusual separation of the fields of order and representation. Moreover, the 1812 constitutional design also had decisive and enduring effects on the relations between representation and participation, both on an institutional scale and on a discursive and conceptual one. In principle, despite placing the sphere of representation at the centre of discourse, in reality the main focus of the system was clearly on participation. This was already made manifest in the form of the convocation of the Cortes: either the option for estates or for two chambers were ultimately rejected because the privileged lacked a reliable platform of participation from which to establish representation. Fulfilling the requirement of participation became even greater with the chosen unicameral format, since the national assembly reflected the democratic dimension of the constitution and this referred to quantity (and force), which could only be realized by some means of participation. On this issue, the crossroads of 1766 was reproduced: outwardly the institutional change had to do with representation, but inwardly this was impracticable without enabling and extending participation.

monarchical, whether democratic, whether mixed”; see Flórez Estrada (1810): 2. On his constitutional project, see Villacañas Berlanga (2004). 115  One deputy asserted that with the separation of powers, the constitution “forever closed the door to democracy and anarchy”; see DSC (10-06-1811): 1232, speech by deputy Antonio Oliveros. At the same time, it was established the possibility of royal veto to legislation voted in the Cortes, which was seen as a preventive mechanism against excess of power popular representatives embodying the democratic dimension of the constitution. 116  See Argüelles (2011) [1811]: 68.

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In the case of the constituent process that culminated in 1812, even before the Cortes convened, steps were already being taken in that direction with the so-called Consulta al País [Consultation to the Nation], a historical mechanism of participation that was completed with a crucial measure to empower the people as legitimate constituent subject: the decree on freedom of the press, which guaranteed the exercise of the right to expression, establishing civil citizenship.117 But above all, the design of the Constitution of Cádiz relied on the experience of the juntas, which had channelled a civic mobilization with a very wide social base. In order to legitimize this experience and relate participation to elections, the Regency resorted to the standing legislation on síndicos and personeros of the Commons: in effect, the designation of representatives for the constituent Cortes was carried out inspired in this legal tradition, and later the electoral legislation of the constitution adopted it with minor changes.118 This choice highlighted that, as in 1766, the resolution to the issue of representation was in developing the democratic component of the ­constitution; but on the other hand, the format of participation theretofore established was now radically transgressed—since a piece of legislation originally on the election of urban offices for the nonprivileged was being elevated to an elective framework of national scope and beyond estates-­ based criteria. In short, the political community thus outlined could no longer be considered traditional, but less even so the subject it empowered for political participation, which was radically redefined as a citizen. By contrast, in relative terms, the weakest link in this whole design was representation. Indeed, representation was addressed through issues regarding its moral standards, and was generally conceived in a negative way: the electoral legislation only highlighted the need to avoid choosing “persons [who are] less apt, whether for lack of talent or for other circumstances,” among which primarily stood out a fear of lack of “patriotic virtue.”119 In practice, however, this sort of anthropology of the 117  On the freedom of press in the context of the War of Independence and the constituent process of Cádiz, see Álvarez Junco and De la Fuente Monge (2009). On its complex relation with freedom of expression in a Catholic culture, see Fernández Sebastián (2011); and on its legal grounds, see Esquivel Alonso (2016). On the “Consulta al País,” the classical interpretation compares it to the well-known “Cahiers de dóleances” of 1789 France; see Artola (1975) [1959]: I, 329. 118  See Burguera-Ameave and Vidal Prado (2012). 119  Written so as to guarantee the means to make the “the general interest of the patria” prevail over “the particular one of individuals,” the electoral legislation stressed that its aim

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representative by default was combined with a much more proactive sociology of representation, for once the barriers of privilege came down, the recently empowered citizens could elect representatives of any origin or status, and this included the former nobility now integrated into the emerging citizenry. This rationale implied an imaginary of natural aristocracy according to which it was anticipated that the people would choose as their representatives those considered superior in culture and virtue in the community, which at once would allow these electors to legitimize themselves and re-legitimize the formerly privileged by choosing deputies from among their ranks.120 In this way, and to the extent that it was considered to be composed of the people and their representatives, the Nation of 1812 attained its organic and communitarian physiognomy, although it also exhibited attachments to rather conservative social imaginaries that place the entire experiment of Cádiz at a distance from a modern social revolution. In any case, even though an aristocracy seemed to find its space in it, the constitutional configuration remained altogether inclined towards participation. Not by chance, the chosen electoral format granted the exercise of the vote to an enormous proportion of the male population, who was only demanded to be in possession of a residence card, a fixed job, and a paid contribution. From the matrixes of meaning made available by the mixed constitution, the overall resulting  configuration dangerously approached a “democratic monarchy.”121 However, other supplementary was to prevent the eligible from “poorly neglecting [their] qualities and merits” and “believing by a guilty indifference that all were worthy and appropriate”; see Instrucción (1810): 1. 120  With the Cortes already assembled, in the reopening of the debate over establishing a second chamber, one deputy rejected the argument that defining a single camera implied designing a “democratic body” by showing that in the extant Cortes there were already “clergymen of the highest hierarchy” together with “grandees of Spain” and other “titles of Castile,” although “elected by the people” and not “by the grace or mercy of the King”; see DSC (13-11-1811): 1834, speech by deputy from Panamá José Joaquín Ortiz and Galve. In reality, the source of inspiration for this has to be taken back to the treatises on local government written in the wake of the crisis of 1766. Thus, according to Ibáñez de la Rentería, in the elections of urban offices, what “principally” counted as a “democratic act” was the choosing of “the nobles” as elected “from all of the people”; see Ibáñez de la Rentería (1790): 120. 121  Indeed, in the words of its main theoretician, although it established a monarchy, the 1812 Constitution could be defined as “democratic” given that “all the people, each citizen, influence at least indirectly and have an active part in the election of their representatives”; see Martínez Marina (1979) [1813]: I, 375.

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ingredients were activated that, although not very orthodox in doctrinal terms, favoured the aristocratic element. These added features of the design were devised by acting on the inherited corporate framework. Indeed, surely the most original yet contradictory feature of the constitutional constellation of 1812 was the maintenance of an entire series of Old Regime corporations, beginning with the Catholic Church but including especially others that were much more strategic socially and economically, such as the consulates of merchants, which were subjected to a general “arrangement” but maintained their privileges in fiscal and normative matters.122 Moreover, a common plan of reforms was applied to all other institutions, such as the army or the justice system, granting any citizen access to their ranks.123 Beyond the expanded right to specialized education, in each of these institutions the democratic dimension was promoted and developed, not only ending the barriers of exclusion and internal hierarchy but also projecting the incorporation of elective mechanisms for appointments and establishing procedures of participation starting from the local level.124 122  The consulates of merchants were maintained, with their jurisdictional prerogatives; they were however reformed and homogenized in their design to allow access to all merchants, independent of their level of income or branch of activity; see on this reform Petit (1984) and Sánchez León (2021b). On the Catholic Church, only reformed through suppressing the shameful Inquisition, yet maintaining an outstanding status in the politics and society of early Liberalism, see Alonso (2013). On this overall corporate profile of Cádiz, see Alonso (2016). 123  In fact, the free entry of all citizens into the military schools was debated and accepted in the Cortes, where it was as soon emphasized that “the blood and soul of the nobles are in no way different from those of the plebeians,” and provided that “all the difference between one class and another” could be attributed to “education,” at the very least “all should be free to pursue the career of honour”; see DSC (12-08-1811): 1627, speech by deputy García Herrero. 124  For Martínez Marina, in the name of “national sovereignty,” the people should “execute and do everything that they can do well and usefully for themselves,” so that “just as the people by virtue of the share of sovereignty that is theirs” administered the public treasury and elected mayors, regidores, and other officials of the municipal council—and even certain local offices like “doctors, surgeons, and teachers”—for the same reasons the “people” ought to name “their parish priest or priests,” and the provinces “their bishop, their governor, their intendant, and their judges” following “the method adopted for the election of delegates of the Cortes;” see Martínez Marina (1813): I, 133–34. In addition to this, in a reading of local units of citizenship that referred to the classical tradition of democracy, he considered the designation of offices by lot to be more appropriate than through voting as a bulwark against partialities and discord.

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The ultimate aim of this project of democracy-in-corporation was to breed a supplement of aristocracy for bringing stability to the entire system. Its basis was a perception inherent to the Catholic legal culture according to which, just as corporate bodies were more legitimate subjects than the individuals who nourished them, their representatives were equally a more reliable embodiment of virtue than common individuals.125 However, as part of that redesign, the very conception of these institutions and corporations had been subject to a profound process of redefinition, to the point that it can be spoken of Cádiz as a constitutional framework that contained a neo-corporate project hybridizing Catholicism and republicanism. In any case, this frame of multiple organs by way of intermediary bodies allowed imagining checks and balances between the national assembly and the person of the king. Seen in this way, the Nation of 1812 as an all-encompassing political community resembled but a great corporation of corporations, all of which shared the assumption of embodying a balanced relation among unity, representation, and participation—a micro-level imitation of the macro-general dimensions of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. However, this entire neo-corporate orientation of Cádiz could not but reveal its original lack of a legitimate aristocratic group. The goal of constructing one from the vacuum left by the nobility was a very risky bet and one that required time. In the short run, having defined a weak and problematic profile for  the representative, the so-called representative government of Cádiz exhibited clearly idealistic moorings. For its part, the pre-eminence of participation imbued the discourse not with the vision of social levelling but certainly of a type of equality in status that directly targeted not just the old privileged but the newly elected representatives overall. At the very least, it could be questioned whether “the status enjoyed by those of their class [of representatives]” made them “superior to the people”; moreover, from there a radical communitarian future could be imagined in which “all members ought to become heads” and therefore “the parents will be equal to the children, the magistrate to the lowliest of the plebe, and the priest to the people.”126 With the 1812 125  Although also with greater obligations, which helps explain the emphasis placed on the oath and the responsibility of the public and corporate officials in the 1812 constitutional design; see on this Garriga and Lorente (2007). 126  The author went on to say: “You unhappy [representatives]: this occurred in monarchies where the rights of the people are trampled on,” but “not in a republic like the one we plan to establish in Spain”; see El filósofo de antaño (1813): 10, emphasis in the original.

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Constitution in force, the prospect of anarchy continued to hover, both in the Iberian metropolis and in the American colonies.

Epilogue and Conclusion Between 1766 and 1812, the semantic fields of representation and participation experienced a double and successive redefinition that, in heading in completely opposite directions, rather than establishing a hierarchy between them in practice undid their traditional conceptual and institutional integration. In addition to this, the constitutional design of early Spanish liberalism imparted a dangerous mix of autonomy and protagonism to the field of order, as embodied by the monarchy in the figure of the king.127 Accordingly, it should not come as a surprise that with the end of the War of Independence, the return of Ferdinand VII would grant the legitimate monarch a capacity for independent action that quickly brought down the recently established constitutional framework. Nevertheless, such a major political shift had to be somehow justified, for which purpose a whole series of arguments delegitimizing the constituent order of Cádiz was mobilized. Thus, in the so-called Manifiesto of the Persians that paved the way for the sudden backlash from Ferdinand VII, a group of traditionalist delegates assumed that the period that began in 1808 had degenerated into a “revolution,” whose leadership, obeying a “spirit of imitation of the French Revolution,” had ended up imposing “popularity,” with the attendant risk of anarchy, not least due to the “exclusion” of “the nobility” from its design, whose lack of recognition “destroys the hierarchical order.”128 The division based on social estates was remade, although once again without invoking a noble corporate body. 127  As expressed by one of the main intellectual engineers of the 1812 Constitution, “[a] singular centre of sovereign power is the most opportune and efficient means of maintaining the union of citizens,” and to communicate “to all the parts of the political machine” the “movement” that is “the life of the social body,” just as it provides “to the laws the force and majesty they need in order to be respected,” avoiding “the injustices, disturbances, violence, insurrections, and popular tumults”; see Martínez Marina (1813): I, iii. 128  According to the argument of these deputies, a government based on both the nobility and the people in a single camera of representatives was impossible, for it dealt with “metals of such different natures” that “with difficulty they come together by their diverse pretentions and interests”:  the nobility sought out “distinctions,” while the people aspired to “equalities”; see Representación y manifiesto (1814): 8, 12, and 12–13, respectively. The document is known by that name because it begins with a reference to the myth that among

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Still, it remains intriguing that to produce a discourse of a return to the Old Regime, the reactionary writers availed themselves of the language that was at the basis of the very discourse to which they denied total legitimacy—which reveals that the grammar of the mixed constitution would survive the dismantling of the context that animated the first Spanish constitutionalism.129 Among those drawing on this repertory was the king himself, who in a decree officially repealing the Constitution of 1812 identified the experiment of Cádiz as a “popular government,” while claiming legitimacy for his new regime as a “moderated Monarchy,” although now duly bolstered by the traditional “fundamental laws.”130 Other supporters emphasized that the disorder inherent in the constitutive process had been that the “least enlightened part of the Nation,” albeit the “strongest,” had dared to give “laws to the wiser one, that by its lights and experiences should enjoy the right to command.”131 All of this was enough to signal that the insertion of the plebe into the people as occurred in 1808 also would not last.132 In short, a new redefinition was underway, one that would come to reaffirm the Enlightened legacy of a subject uncoupled from citizenship. And yet, the experience of the juntismo of 1808 and its ability to found a constitutive order survived—and not just among the numerous exiles who left Spain in 1820. For in 1820, coinciding with the failed attempts at rebuilding a transatlantic empire, the Constitution of Cádiz was Persians, when the enthroning of the new king was set to occur, a period of anarchy was decreed so that the people would introject the value of order. 129  Indeed, the legitimist delegates exposed in their manifesto to the king that in the Cortes of Cádiz, some “proposed a purely monarchical form, and others mixed, and others democratic.” And they continued, not without shameless sarcasm: “Some proposed a lukewarm monarchy; others a degenerate and fantastical monarchy; others a mixed government; others a monster of many Heads.” See Representación y manifiesto (1814): 9. 130  Ferdinand VII reasoned in the decree that the constitution had reduced the monarch to “a Chief or Magistrate, a mere delegated executor—but not King,” but his main argument was that at the convocation of the Cortes, “the Estates of the Nobility and Clergy were not called”; see Manifiesto del Rey (1816) [1814]: 4 and 3, respectively. Regarding the return to the Old Regime in 1814 in a comparative European perspective, see Simal (2017). 131  See Fiscal patriótico (April 29, 1814): 462. 132  In fact, there was a common feature between the traditionalists and the afrancesados. An important propagandist of José I, the abbot José Marchena, wrote, before leaving for France, that the subject whom “the demagogues call people [and] which those with prudence call vulgo or plebe” was guided “by a destructive instinct that leads them straight to their ruin, if those who rule them do not pull hard on the reins so that they violently pull them back from the precipice”; see Gaceta de Madrid (July 19, 1812): 849, cited in Artola (2008) [1953]: 67.

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reinstated in the peninsula during the so-called Trienio liberal [Liberal triennium], which should really be called “Trienio doceañista.”133 This new stage, which temporarily reinstated the hierarchy between participation and representation, ended by consolidating  the political culture of 1812 or doceañismo as a memory of constituent popular sovereignty that was to probe capable of influencing the discourse in the coming decades and of arming itself with its own language by reference to a tradition in the making—and therefore of redefining future contexts of Liberalism. The importance of that type of memory of struggles for liberties and of experiences of popular collective self-government converted into tradition is, of course, also implied in the redefinition of the post-Franco democracy of 1978 currently underway.

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CHAPTER 3

Subject: Education, Taxed Wealth, Capacity, Roots—Citizenship Criteria from the Enlightenment to Liberalism, 1780s–1840s

Political Crises and Communal-Based Criteria for Citizenship Although today our political rights are guaranteed by the mere fact of having the nationality of a country that recognizes them in its constitution, it often seems as if citizens belonged to completely different communities of identity: while some are mobilizing and actively demand for certain policies and reforms, others remain passive even though they are affected by the same issues than their fellow citizens; many go to the polls highly motivated to choose suitable representatives, while others do not even consider participating in elections. For some among these, the established frameworks of representation and participation appear as too narrow and ineffective, even counterproductive, and so they dedicate themselves exclusively to exerting pressure from outside the system through mobilization. In any crisis of representation, as in Spain and many other countries around the world today, the established referents of citizenship activate themselves yet at the same time are called into question. Beyond the conventional divide between civil, political, and social rights, the category of The first part of this chapter is a significantly modified version of Sánchez León (2001); it is also inspired by Sánchez León (2017a). © The Author(s) 2020 P. Sánchez León, Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5_3

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the modern citizen oscillates between two opposing anthropological perspectives: on one side there is the conception of the self-referential individual who is assumed to be moved only by the desire to maximize private interest; and on the other, the subject who thinks of himself or herself capable of choosing to defer to collective decision-making and feels morally committed to the public good.1 These two traditions of shaping and understanding citizenship, often referred to as civil and civic, are in turn related to the primacy of representation and participation respectively in the field of politics. And although discourse and practice usually appear interwoven, their institutionalization also reflects a certain hierarchy between them. This configuration of the political subject is necessarily very different from the time when there were no political rights to be exercised or only by a minority, and the contrast between historical contexts can be illuminating. The citizen condition has not always been the same, and conversely there are deep analogies between the various forms of citizenship that have existed over time. In this regard, the period before the establishment of democracy provides an important field of reflection because rights were then subordinated to obligations or to certain criteria of aptitude. Above all, citizens had to qualify for the exercise of political rights, and initially only a few were considered to be in possession of virtue, understood as the ability to place the collective interest above the individual. In any case, like today, the institutionalization of these features and conditions was dependent on a community of assessment and estimation as the ultimate guarantor for the stability in the meaning assigned to those citizenship criteria.2 This communal dimension of identity acquires more relevance in contexts in which citizenship, although present in discourse and even in collective political practices, was not enshrined in a constitutional text. This 1  See a synthesis of this dichotomy, which refers to incommensurable if not contradictory genealogies, in Leca (1990); a historical perspective on these two genealogies, in Pocock (1995). For a historical approach to the distinction between civil, political, and social rights as a classification of modern citizenship, see the classic work by Marshall (1949). 2  This approach is linked to the debate in philosophy and political science between liberals, republicans, and communitarians. From the seminal approach of Sandel (1982), it may be argued that every notion of citizenship requires a community that assesses and provides it with value, including civil citizenship despite the fact that it denies any supporting role to the community; a historical perspective on this is discussed in Sánchez León and Izquierdo Martín (2003). On the debate between liberals and communitarians, see Mulhall and Swift (1994) and Taylor (1989); on a defence of the republican civic ideal in communitarian terms, see Oldfield (1990).

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chapter is concerned precisely with those citizenship criteria between the Enlightenment and Liberalism, a time span in which regimes based on popular sovereignty and representative government alternated with others still based on the divine right of kings and on juridically differentiated estates. The period is important also due to the fact that it was then that the two anthropological traditions of modern citizenship, civil and civic respectively, were institutionalized and struggling for hegemony, and the very communities assessing their respective status were in the process of formation. In the European context, the two main benchmarks of political virtue that guaranteed the recognition of citizen rights in this scenario of epochal changes were property and culture.3 In practice, these two criteria normally hybridized each other, establishing variable hierarchies depending on spatial and temporal contexts. Seen from this transnational perspective, the case of Spain is remarkably striking. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, during the period of the late Enlightenment and the early Liberal constitutionalism, culture was established as a prerequisite for citizenship, usually through education, but to the detriment of property as a criterion for the recognition of political rights. Subsequently, by contrast, during the long reign of Isabella II (1833–1868) wealth—as specifically founded on fiscal obligations—was imposed as the exclusive criterion neglecting culture and education. The consequences of these contradictory outcomes cannot be overlooked, since both left their mark on promulgated constitutions, and had a decisive and lasting impact on the dynamics of Spanish political modernity in the wider sense. They also shared some common features relevant for their comparative study. On the one hand, in both cases the exclusion of political rights circumscribed the boundaries of a plebe that, by being disenfranchised, was subdued to biopolitical control through administrative governance.4 On the other hand, in both cases the legal definition of citizenship was made at the expense of other, alternative identity referents with a communitarian basis. Last but not least, this communitarian 3  Property was the mark of the civic ideal of citizenship in the republican tradition, dominant in the Anglo-Atlantic Enlightenment; see the classic work by Pocock (1975). On the other hand, culture as a criterion refers to the Franco-continental Enlightenment, culminating with the work of the Marquis de Condorcet; see Kintzler (1984) and Williams (2004), pp. 45–92. 4  On biopolitics, see Agamben (1998); on administration as a fundamental concept for the management of majorities deprived of citizen rights under Liberalism, see Raphael (2008).

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­ imension found a place in contemporary discourse, rendering possible its d study without projecting modern categories upon the past or invoking abstractions unrelated to the semantics of the period. In the case of late eighteenth-century citizenship based on education, enlightened Spaniards engineered a civil individual set apart from traditional cultural referents; this would leave its mark in discourse through the concept of “opinion,” which pointed to the complex magma of popular customs as an outer limit to the first modern definition of a civilian. In the case of citizenship based on property ownership of the Isabelline period, referents based on the recognition of community membership or status, which at the time revolved around the concepts of “capacity” and “rootedness” respectively, were also insufficient for its definition. In this context, citizenship was finally established by the State through the criterion of property, understood as mediated by the payment of taxes. However, over time this latter definition would become highly problematic, as it could not prevent other discourses in the public sphere from striving to link citizenship to capacity and/or rootedness. Impelled by mobilizations from outside the system, and especially around the experience of the sovereign juntas whose recurrence marked the entire Isabelline period, this sequence of contrasting referents contributed decisively to the split between representation and participation.

Interest Without Ownership: Citizenship Based on Education up to Early Liberalism The acquisition of culture is undoubtedly the central leitmotiv of the Enlightenment, and education was one of its main expressions throughout the West in the eighteenth century.5 However, the Spanish case stands out in this general picture because, as the end of the century approached, education was becoming an overarching category that traversed culture just as the traditional status of subjecthood began to be questioned. This contributed to establish education as an exclusive criterion of citizenship, but at the same time its expansion through the different fields and disciplines related to the forging of a citizen anthropology also led to a whole series of preconceptions and derivations that eventually left their imprint on the culture of early Liberalism. 5  See an overview in Winther-Jensen (2009), and a longer-term overview in Heater (2004); on the variety of meanings and roles of education in the Enlightenment, see Wilson (1988).

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At the origin of this dynamic was the profound mark left on the Spanish men of letters and enlightened bureaucrats by the so-called Esquilache Riots. As discussed in Chap. 2, unlike other commercially oriented nations and empires such as the British or the Dutch, in the Spanish Bourbon Monarchy the initial market reforms were met by an unexpected and effective popular mobilization that forced the reshaping of the entire reform agenda. In essence, after 1766 the Spanish enlightened elites were forced to abandon the path laid out by Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, which amounted to nurturing among the population an “imperceptible liking” for the new customs through exposure to the market. The imperative now was still to forge individuals capable of fostering their particular interest to the benefit of the common good and progress, but primarily providing subjects with guarantees of knowing how to discern their own interest in harmony with the needs of stability and order. This shift in priorities consolidated education as a key vector in the moral regeneration of Spaniards. In fact, over the next two decades Campomanes himself devoted his most innovative writings to this issue, while orchestrating the proliferation of the so-called Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País (Economic Societies of Friends of the Country) in the larger towns and cities, as basic spaces of sociability for a fledgling civil citizenship.6 The imaginary on the subject underlying this educational goal continued to conceive of an individual who had to be forged and adapted to the cultural and institutional framework of an Old Regime that went ahead with the expansion of commerce.7 Moreover, in a context in which republican tropes were permeating the enlightened circles and parallel with the expansion of the public sphere, high culture would be the exclusive conduit for the dissemination of the two languages of citizenship, the civil and civic, over the subsequent two decades.8 6  Indeed, Campomanes’s most important work of this period focused on artisans as part of the Third Estate and their need for a specific “popular education”; see Rodríguez de Campomanes (1775). On this conception of education, see Maravall (1987), who highlights the civil dimension of Campomanes’s project but denies his plan was truly national in scope, since it was based on the maintenance of the distinctions between estates; for a historiographic overview of education in the Spanish eighteenth century, see Perrupato (2017). On the Societies of Friends of the Country, see Astigarraga (2015). 7  A survey of this commercial expansion can be found in Pérez Sarrión (2012). 8  In comparison, the separation between the plebeian and the literate cultural spaces would not be so marked elsewhere, as shown by the exemplary case of France; see the classic work by Darnton (1982). On the proliferation of a language of political virtue in Spain during the second half of the eighteenth century, see Pardos (2013).

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After the death of Charles III in 1788 and the ascension to the throne of Charles IV, in addition to the loss of reformist momentum, the memory of 1766 continued to warn of the dangers of promoting trade due to its potential capacity to unleash popular disturbances; but added to this was a more novel perception of the risk  of degradation in customs and moral virtues imputed to the relentless advancement of trade. Defining citizenship in the face of this double hazard was the crucible of the writers of the turn of the century, the most prominent among whom was Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos.9 The starting point for Jovellanos was the legacy of an individualist anthropology transmitted by the previous generation of enlightened writers as a basis for the stage of commercial society. For him, the great difference between ancient and modern times was that “the strength of states” no longer derived “from virtue and valour” but from the “number and wealth of their members,” so that in the present “if the peoples were not wealthy” they could not aspire to “be free or fortunate.”10 Continuing the line opened by Campomanes, he would strive to develop a “science of the civil economy” which, combining “patriotism” with “public felicity” into a single set of maxims, would allow the citizen to harmonize “his own interest” with “common interest.”11 However, according to Jovellanos, the Bourbon Monarchy suffered from a clear imbalance in tackling this task. In his famous Informe de Ley Agraria (Report on the Agrarian Law) published in 1795, an important part of this state of affairs was attributed to laws that, formulated with excessive zeal for safeguarding the common interest, had ended up failing to “protect the interests of agents.”12 However, beyond the constrictions of the existing legal framework, the author pointed to other limitations for the expansion of private interest. The ultimate causes of the tendency to “distrust the activity and the intellect of individuals” were certain p ­ ersistent 9  On the figure of Jovellanos, see Galino Carrillo (2013); on his role as author of an anthropology of citizenship, see Fernández (1991); on his acquaintance with political economy, see Llombart (2012). 10  See Jovellanos (1845b) [1794]: 184. 11  See Jovellanos (1781): s.p. On previous versions of the civil economy, related to the work of the Neapolitan Antonio Genovesi, see Pabst (2018), and in comparative perspective, Robertson (2005): 325–76. On Genovesi’s influence in Spain, see Astigarraga and Usoz (2013). 12  See Jovellanos (2016): 45. On this masterpiece of the Spanish enlightened thought, see Llombart (1995) and Corredera (2015).

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“impediments” or “preoccupations” that, according to Jovellanos, belonged to “the moral order,” among which was a socially diffuse phenomenon that demanded to be tackled from the vantage point of the science of customs: that of “opinion.”13 Contrary to appearances, Jovellanos did not identify opinion with the burden of an atavistic past or the lack of enlightenment, but saw it as a phenomenon common to all cultures, to the point of considering that it “qualifies most of our actions.”14 Hence, in his economic-political reflection it figured as a synthesis of all the “moral obstacles.” The contrast between interest and opinion would serve Jovellanos to exclude social groups from his outline of a civil anthropology. The first displaced group were women, whose behaviour in the market epitomized the danger of unbridled opinion. He presented women as the “class most attached to their own habits,” more “capricious,” “ill-suited,” and “difficult to govern and correct,” and in his view the most vulnerable to the solvent effects of the market on public morality.15 In short, the entire female half of the population was not motivated by “particular interest,” and so women could not be considered full-fledged citizens. But Jovellanos also excluded the “public” from his civil classification, a category that comprised yet another subject of immense size, and whose behaviour in 13  In a teleological license, specialists tend to anticipate in the rise of the concept of opinion the “public opinion” of modernity; see Baker’s classic approach (1990): 167–201, and for the Spanish case, Fernández Sebastián (2015). The definition of opinion in Jovellanos was quite different from what we mean by modern public opinion: he did not consider it to be a reliable source of knowledge, nor did he give it any political legitimacy, limiting it to a moral and cultural phenomenon, albeit of a very broad social scope. 14  See Jovellanos (2016): 63. This notion places Jovellanos in the orbit of the French Enlightenment, especially in relation to the work of Jacques Necker, director general of finances under Louis XVI between 1777 and 1781, for whom opinion constituted an autonomous cultural dimension, difficult to qualify and extremely resilient, and upon which laws could not have a direct impact. On Necker’s contribution to the development of the concept of opinion, although in the sense of “public opinion,” see Burnand (2004); on Necker’s influence on Jovellanos, see Astigarraga (2000). 15  See Jovellanos (2016): 52. He attributed this to the rise of luxury which, “nourished” by vanity and above all by “mother” opinion, exposed consumption to a series of “conveniences” or conventions that went beyond the “real” usefulness of commodities, deriving rather from the “whim of the people,” women above all; see Jovellanos (2016): 54. Similar notions of the motivations of female behaviour can be found in all the literature of the Enlightenment, both in the Atlantic and European contexts and from moderate and radical perspectives, from John Millar in Great Britain to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France. For an overview of the debates on luxury in eighteenth-century Europe, see Berg and Eger (2003).

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the commodity market clarified the relationship between freedom of trade and the risk of subsistence riots. According to the enlightened writer, the price of bread did not reflect “its actual scarcity or abundance,” but was rather determined by a series of “alterations” imposed on one side by legislation, but above all by “opinion”: it was the idea that the common people formed from this abundance or scarcity that ultimately determined their course of action, so that the spread of rumour could easily lead to revolt.16 Nor should this “public,” sometimes referred to in the Informe and other works as “people,” be recognized as an autonomous, rational, profit-maximizing actor. The gilds were likewise discounted as a source of civil morality; much like other “moral and political bodies,” these too were governed by interest but, according to Jovellanos—reviving the critique of the previous generation of enlightened writers—gilds channelled a type of particular interest that had the effect of corrupting the social order. In his view, it was not civil individualism that prevailed in gilds, but a collective selfishness devoid of that “public devotion” only thanks to which “the good and prosperity of all became the object of the happiness of every citizen.”17 The same could be said of the noble estate, too: in this regard Jovellanos inherited a whole tradition of thought that had in its sights the nobility and other privileged members whose economic rationality was seen as the very antithesis of the joint promotion of private interest and public felicity.18 In sum, the Report on the Agrarian Law identified the homo economicus, but rather by default, tracing the contours of a civil society pressed in on all sides by a communitarian moral universe that was as obdurate as dysfunctional.

16  In his argument, price oscillations alienated the possibility of “real knowledge” on the abundance or shortage of grain. He therefore called for a policy that would avoid “setting anxiety in motion,” which “anticipates and augments the horrors of necessity,” ultimately encouraging riots; see Jovellanos (2016): 46 and 51, respectively. 17  See Jovellanos (2016): 103. For a survey of discourse critical about the gilds in eighteenth-century Spain and its colonies, see Sánchez León and Slemian (2021). 18  For Jovellanos, nobility was an “accidental quality,” for it had not been established “by nature, but by discretion”: it had been “invented by opinion,” being later “authorized by law.” From this perspective, he did not censure the nobility as long as it was “rich and wellappointed” to be able to contribute to “the defence of the State,” and therefore not have to live from work but from its assets; moreover, he also recommended “a limit on the excessive multiplication of its members”; see Gómez Centurión (1914): 12, 16, and 19 respectively. The text is from 1784. More on this issue in Baras Escolá (1993).

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There were no other social categories left wherein to find the civil citizen. After decades of enlightened engineering, the conclusion was that essentially the latter still had to be built. The situation demanded an anthropological discourse commensurate with the Herculean task of properly identifying the modern individual from among all those subjects moved by opinion. This was the purpose of his “Discurso sobre la economía civil y la instrucción pública” (Discourse on Civil Economy and Public Education) of 1797, in which Jovellanos, going beyond the standards of the time, placed education at the centre of moral philosophy and political economy, setting also as one of his goals the civic ideal of the political tradition.19 For this enlightened Spaniard, duties were paramount in the exercise of citizenship, but even more imperative was that individuals attained some knowledge of these, which could not be achieved without education. Consequently, education was enthroned as the precondition of virtue itself, and ultimately as “the first source of man’s individual happiness.”20 In sum, education was key to the production of the individual and the citizen, but, in line with the Catholic dogma on freedom of conscience, the subject thus engineered did not own all the conditions for autonomy nor the authority for self-determination: in contrast to the vindication of freedom of thought escorting the Enlightenment in other contexts, the “real interest” of the fledgling Spanish citizen had to be properly instilled from without.21 On the other hand, for this conception of citizenship property appeared as quite irrelevant, which distinguished Jovellanos’s approach from the republican tradition. In his vision, the economy and civic virtue both depended on a moral activity within the reach of every individual interested in “enlightening his 19  In his own words, “the main source of public prosperity,” normally allocated to agriculture, industry, trade, or a combination of these, had rather to be sought in education; see Jovellanos (2012) [1797]: 187, emphasis on the original. This status granted to education has led to characterize him as a “precursor to the theory of human capital”; see Fuentes Quintana (1999): 378. 20  See Jovellanos (2012) [1797]: 194, emphasis on the original. However, by education or “instruction,” Jovellanos did not understand an array of technical knowledge but rather regarded it as a political and moral technology to avoid building a “populous and rich nation, but at the same time corrupted”; see: 542. 21  More on the externalities of this issue, which particularly affected the education of children, in Varela (1988); on freedom of conscience as the outcome of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment project, see Israel (2013).

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reason with the knowledge that can perfect his being.”22 From here on, what was proposed was a nationwide programme of instruction overcoming also differences between estates. Its position at the summit of culture thus turned education into a powerful technology capable of instituting a brand-new anthropology in its own right. For instruction should not merely enlighten minds, but rather imprint character, and this biopolitical dimension central to the forging of citizens demarcated a rigid boundary between the latter and all the “subjects of opinion” identified in the process of consecrating education as a criterion. In so doing, what was being outlined was the sphere of the plebe, although within the logic of his discourse Jovellanos would refer to this group of non-individuals and non-­ citizens using a more strictly cultural term: vulgo. What is most important is that he considered that citizenry and vulgo were in a zero-sum relationship: each unit of increase in size of the former was to the detriment of the latter.23 However, there was a crucial difference between these two classification and identity referents, the civil and the plebeian. In stark contrast to the vulgo and any other subjects of the established order, civil citizenship did not rely on any pre-existing community. Therefore, despite its marked differences with the old noble estate, Jovellanos’s educated and self-­interested citizenry embodied a candidate for aristocracy as regarded from within the lexicon of the mixed constitution that appeared equally self-enclosed; moreover, its membership was in the short term so restricted that required institutional support in order to thrive. The greatest opportunity for this latter arose with the crisis of 1808, but in the new constitutional setting other anthropological currents would converge with Jovellanos’s civil conception of citizenship. Indeed, as we have seen, the royal vacancy gave way to the formation of urban juntas which, by arrogating sovereignty, activated a collective anthropology referring  rather to the civic language of the republican tradition. As a result, and against the background of a communitarian culture rooted in Catholicism, the constitutional culture nurtured in Cádiz would not stand out for its articulation of individual rights.24 However, at that point the  Jovellanos (1845c) [1802]: 558.  As early as 1777, in response to a letter about his play El delincuente honrado [The honest offender], Jovellanos stated that a cultured nation distinguished itself by the “propagation” of “good taste,” and stressed that in order to measure this one had to calculate the amount of vulgo existing in society; see Jovellanos (1963): 80. 24  See Clavero (2013) and Portillo (2000). 22 23

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anthropological model refined by Jovellanos was also sufficiently naturalized to ensure its insertion into the legal framework of early Liberalism. In fact, the influence of the semantics of education as a referent for citizenship would leave its imprint in one of the greatest singularities of the 1812 Constitution: in it, freedom of the press was placed in the section on instruction, as a colophon and subordinated to the provisions on education.25 This symbolized that in the emerging constitutional order, civil rights were placed under the tutelage of culture and education. In fact, freedom of the press as enacted earlier, in 1810, was already justified arguing that it was “the only remedy that may improve our neglected [system of] education.”26 In turn, this link between civil rights and education would favour a coalescence with the other concurrent anthropologies of citizenship, albeit producing expressive short circuits. Among the latter is the case of women, who were deprived of political rights by privileging in their case property ownership over culture.27 Much the same happened to domestic servants and all individuals considered to be economically dependent, such as journeymen and apprentices.28 In the American colonies, on its part, culture 25  Title IX, devoted to “public education,” contained Article  371, which read: “All Spaniards are free to write, print and publish their political ideas” without prior license, although with certain restrictions that awaited regulation; see Constitución política (1836) [1812]: 114. Subsequently, “chairs of civil economy” would be established at all universities in the country; see Decree 261, “On the establishment of chairs of agriculture, and economic societies,” in Colección de los decretos (1813): IV, 84–86. Although Jovellanos died before the promulgation of the Constitution of Cadiz, he presided over the first commission established by the Regency to advance the works in the field of instruction. 26  The sentence comes from the reflections by Álvaro Flórez Estrada in support of the decree on freedom of the press. He went on asking how were the fledgling citizens “to receive appropriate education in a country where they are not allowed to hear or say, read or write what they feel”; see Flórez Estrada (1810): 77 and 76, respectively. Education was a real obsession among the patres conscripti of Cadiz, to the point that José Canga Argüelles came to propose that, in addition to the legislative, executive, and judicial, an “instructive power” should be considered worthy of special attention from the sovereign to guarantee the “union” of those “ideas of citizens” he considered “useful to the country, and worthy of the greatness of man”; see Canga Argüelles (1811): 13. 27  Unlike France, in Spain Jovellanos’s approach had precluded this option by depriving women of the ability to reflect on the “roots” of their behaviour, and by presenting them as unable to “rise” to the level of “[abstract] speculations”: this was how an “enlightened” Marquesa expressed in some “Dialogues on the work of man and the origin of luxury” that he left unfinished; see Jovellanos (1965) [1787]: 148. More on the position of Jovellanos in relation to women’s education in Negrín Fajardo (2011). On the education of women in Spanish Enlightenment, see Kitts (1995). 28  See Clavero (1986).

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also functioned as sufficient criterion for the civil exclusion of African natives or their descendants.29 As a whole, however, the Cádiz constitutional framework was marked by the adaptation of the communitarian criteria referring to traditional vecindad, wherein domicile and employment subject to fiscal exactions were rendered sufficient to get the recognition of voting rights. This subordination of the civil condition to communitarian referents as perquisites of citizenship helped define the 1812 Constitution as “democratic,” a reputation that would resound in many other territories not only in the Americas but through the European continent.30 However, its diffusion would also bring in the problem of building a legitimate aristocracy within a constitutional framework that placed fewer conditions on voters than on those eligible to stand for election. In this sense, and precisely for preventing culture from completely displacing property, an attempt was made to seal the electoral system through a format of indirect election that in turn imposed an ownership threshold as perquisite for candidates to deputies. It was thus that property finally came to play a role in the definition of citizenship within the culture of early Liberalism, as a criterion of distinction between average voters and those eligible for election.31 In short, property ownership came to be associated with representation, while participation was linked to the criterion of culture. Now, behind this apparent autonomy that rather entailed a separation of spheres, there lurked a potentially broad participation marking out the overall design of the first conception of modern Spanish citizenship—and not 29  In fact, subjects “of African origin established in the overseas countries” were discriminated against in the 1812 Constitution on the basis of arguments invoking the complexity of “their different [legal] conditions,” but ultimately, in the words of the main intellectual architect of the new legal framework, due to the “state of civilization and culture in which most of them find themselves today”; see Argüelles (2011) [1811]: 81. 30  On the historical significance of the Constitution of Cádiz outside the Iberian Peninsula, for colonial and post-colonial America, see Mirow (2015); for Europe, the collection of studies in Historia Constitucional 13 (2012): 1–192 [https://dialnet.unirioja.es/ ejemplar/312268]. 31  In the words of Agustín de Argüelles, property had to be established as the eligibility criterion so that future representatives of the nation in the Cortes would see “the interests of each Spaniard united to those of the community” in such a way that would appear to them as “inseparable,” since property “is what most deeply roots (arraiga) a man to his homeland”; see DSC (28-11-1811): 23–24. However, the amount of wealth required to become eligible for election as a deputy was not defined in the constitution but reserved for the electoral law.

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only at the legal or institutional level, but also at the level of the collective consciousness.

Rent Without Culture: Political Exclusion Based on Property in Isabelline Liberalism The 1812 Constitution was diffused not only in space, but also over time, although it did not survive the changes in the transnational context of Liberalism. After its repeal in 1814 by Ferdinand VII, it was again in force during the years 1820–1823, which coincided with the loss of much of Spain’s transatlantic empire, so that henceforth the paths of representative government under construction in the Iberian peninsula and in post-­ colonial America diverged.32 For its part, in Europe the post-Napoleonic landscape was conducive to a profound transformation in the hegemonic orthodoxy of Liberalism, which would also affect Spain through the exile Liberals of 1823 up to their return a decade later.33 Everywhere, the settling of scores with the legacy of the French Revolution by a new generation of liberal ideologues and politicians formally placed at the centre of the emerging political science the ideal of a balance between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy as part of a more comprehensive programme synthesized in the formula of juste melieu.34 In essence, however, what the philosophy of reconciliation between opposing principles inherent in so-called doctrinal (doctrinnaire) Liberalism was trying to effect was to redefine the status of democracy in the imaginary of mixed government, subordinating it to a new aristocracy which, by proposing it now as elective and replaceable, was presented as fully compatible with popular sovereignty as the new basis for legitimation as much as adapted to the social mobility expected from the establishment of private property. In short, despite profound differences in nature, the discursive and institutional logic proposed came to re-establish the relationship 32  On the monarchical restoration of 1814 in Spain and its vicissitudes up to the military pronunciamiento that reinstated the Constitution of Cadiz, the classic work remains Fontana (2002) [1971]. On the restoration of the 1812 Constitution in both hemispheres, see Alonso (2015). 33  For an overview of the triangulation between Spain, Europe, and America of the Spanish exiled liberals in the 1820s, see Simal (2015). 34  On the rise of political science in the post-revolutionary context, see Morrow (2011); on the position of the mixed constitution in it, see Sánchez León (2017a, b). For the theory and practice juste milieu, see Starzinger (1991) [1965].

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between representation and participation that had existed prior to the crisis of 1789 in France and 1808 in Spain. This restructuring of relations between the elements of the mixed constitution, apart from reaffirming the position of the dynastic monarchy as guarantor of unity and the embodiment of the principle of order, entailed a profound redefinition of citizenship, since it came everywhere accompanied by the establishment of property as a criterion of distinction between civil rights for the entire population and political rights reserved for a minority of voters and eligible. This was bound to generate controversy, but not because the inequality entailed by private property was deemed incompatible with the legal framework based on equality under the law. Indeed, along the way an entire theory of society had emerged, centred on the concept of “association” and founded on the double assumption of a self-referential individual and of natural inequality between men: according to it, the right to freely dispose of one’s assets and resources would promote the maximization of collective well-being by virtue of cooperation between unequal individuals through the market.35 Of course, the underlying anthropology presupposed the exercise of rights by individuals, including the right to vote—leaving open for debate the question of how to justify that unlike private interest, public virtue was coming to be defined as an attribute exclusive of a minority.36 What the theory of association offered for this purpose of recasting an aristocracy on modern foundations was centred around the concept of “capacity.” The semantic field of capacity encompassed a compendium of moral and cultural attributes derived from education as a guarantor of a harmonious union of individual and collective interests.37 Part of its discursive force lay in its plural use as an all-encompassing noun for a series of 35  This theory was mainly the work of Saint-Simon and his successors, whose conception of Liberalism went beyond the political-constitutional framework and rose to the level of a theory of the entire social order; see Drolet (2008); for the reinsertion of the Saint-Simonians into the study of the main current of Liberalism, see Picon (2002). On the case of Spain see Sierra (2010a). 36  The question was raised but left unresolved by Benjamin Constant himself in his influential 1818 essay on “De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes” [The liberty of the Ancient compared to that of the Modern]; on Constant as an epitome of post-revolutionary Liberalism, see Fontana (1991), especially pp. 81–97. The designation of doctrinnaires has been widely diffused in Spain due to the influence of the classic by Díez del Corral (1984) [1945]; in reality, the authors included under this label were not systematic in their proposals to the degree that has been attributed to them; see Craiutu (2003). 37  On the centrality of this concept within the framework of classical Liberalism, see Kahan (2003): 153–71.

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professions—doctors, lawyers, engineers, artists, and so on—emerging in the vortex between applied scientific knowledge and labour market regulation outside the traditional gild organization. Deepening the consensus inherited from the Enlightenment about the moral superiority of non-­ manual labour, the so-called liberal professions would quickly attain a high status within the nascent civil society as an epitome of “middle classes” topologically situated between the old aristocracy of inherited privileges and the working people without full citizen rights. However, they were not granted the same constitutional recognition everywhere. In France, following the establishment of representative government in 1830, the debates over the constitutional recognition of mesocratic capacities got intensified among theorists, ideologues, and politicians. In the parliamentary discussions during the July Monarchy, property was from the outset the dominant criterion for obtaining political rights, but this was largely due to the widespread awareness of its relatively equitable social distribution, partly as a result of historical dynamics of centralization by the monarchy, but above all because among the sequels of Revolution of 1789 there stood out the dismantling of the jurisdictional framework that restricted the free disposition of property by the nonprivileged.38 However, as an example of doctrinnaire style, in the French electoral legislation in force during the reign of Louis Philippe de Orléans the capacities were given recognition, though tied to the possession of some degree of property.39 In England, on the other hand, drawing on a long parliamentary trajectory, the old landowners had maintained their political dominance while resorting to production for the market, which allowed them to stabilize an image as legitimate aristocracy; meanwhile, however, the public sphere was amplifying a social imaginary of classes with increasing capacity for political mobilization.40 In response to the growing ­tension between these two poles, the 1832 reform of the electoral system extended political rights to the urban middle classes and large rural tenants, thus 38  On the legal sanction of private property based on peasant holdings in the French postrevolutionary order, see Rosenthal (1992). 39  However, property was in turn seen as an expression of professional success. An overview of the relevance of capacities in the philosophy of French Liberalism at this time can be found in Rosanvallon (1985). 40  On the mesocratic imaginary in England between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Wahrman (1995); the framework of struggles for popular incorporation, in which class identity was shaped by a language of citizenship, can be found in the classic work by Stedman Jones (1984): 90–179.

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expanding the social bases of an aspiring elective aristocracy, although at the cost of postponing the project of more radical popular integration in favour of a rather moderate one founded on the social diffusion of wealth and culture with the advancement of market relations. In Spain, from 1833 onward liberals took inspiration from the examples of these two countries to undertake a critical selection from their own brief but intense prior experience; thus, after exporting their constitutional model in the first decade of the nineteenth century, they came to emulate in the following one the legal and discursive changes from the other side of the Pyrenees. But  Spain was neither France nor England. To begin with, in contrast to their French counterparts, the Spanish liberals were not having to settle accounts with a revolution such as that of 1789, especially in the field of property structures, where traditional powers remained much in force; and unlike the English, they could not draw upon a tradition of reforms aimed at political inclusion stemming from a vibrant civil society accustomed to popular mobilization in order to elicit institutional responses. Comparatively, the Spanish revolutionary cycle had been much more volcanic and oscillating in its aetiology, but at the same time showed itself much less inclined towards rupture and was less dynamic in its effects.41 For this reason, but also due to other concerning aspects, the revision of the legacy of Liberalism was regarded as particularly urgent. The last years of Ferdinand VII’s reign had witnessed popular mobilizations instigated by the authorities in the name of a traditionalist fundamentalism which had in fact served as a preamble to the so-called Carlist War, declared in 1833 by those opposed to any kind of accommodation between the Catholic Monarchy and Liberalism.42 Yet on the other side, the first political concessions of Maria Cristina’s regency in 1834 had been followed by urban uprisings in the form of juntas demanding a true representative government and reforms in favour of citizen participation.43 From the 41  For a comparative overview of the two examples, see Jaume (2003). On the influence of the English model on the political designs of Spanish Liberals, see Sierra (2009); on the influence of the French model, see Fernández Sarasola (2005). 42  On these mobilizations in the Spanish case, see Rújula Pérez (2019); in comparative perspective with Southern Europe, see París Martín (2018). For an overview of the last period of absolutist rule, see Fontana (2007); on the first Carlist ideology and its social base, see Martínez Dorado and Pan-Montojo (2000). 43  The urban juntas brought about the fall of the cabinet of the moderate Count of Toreno and its replacement by the reformist Juan Álvarez de Mendizábal. On the Count of Toreno,

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perspective of the mixed constitution, these two extreme tendencies appeared as the contemporary manifestations of “democratic monarchy” applicable to the unbalanced constitutional order of Cádiz. Yet, despite the stark differences, they could also be presented as a heritage from the kind of absolutist rule embodied by Ferdinand VII, for both showed the weakness, if not the complete absence of the virtuous and moderating element of an aristocracy. Reasoning from this evidence, a threat keenly felt by the surviving liberals of the first generation was that if the upcoming constitutional framework failed to establish an aristocracy worthy of the name, the monarchy was condemned to degenerate into a despotic government; yet  greatest among all liberals of the 1830s was a shared fear of risking an oversized democratic dimension in the constitution, because this could nurture any of the two opposite extremes of reaction and revolution, both of them having a popular base of support. In short, representative government was reborn marked by deep suspicion of the potential excesses of the people in any constituent process, the specificity of the context being in that this dreaded combination of monarchy and democracy was not seen as a legacy of the Old Regime so much as being rooted in the 1812 constitutional settlement. A consensus for reversing this situation was reached by the new political representatives in two successive phases and around parliamentary debates in which the most important leaders and rival ideologues participated: in the first phase, from the end of 1835, the Cortes debated an electoral legislation still under the so-called Royal Statute; in the second, in early 1837, another electoral law was discussed in parliament around the drafting of a new constitution to replace the one of Cádiz. Thus, in less than two years and in an environment marked by urgencies and emergencies, the foundations of political participation were laid for several decades.44 As see Varela Suanzes-Carpegna (2005); on Mendizábal, see Pan-Montojo (2000). These urban juntas in turn were born in the heat of anticlerical agitation justified by the perception that many clergymen were sympathetic towards the Carlist cause; see Moliner Prada (1997). 44  These parliamentary debates took place in the context of a double crisis, fiscal and institutional, which shaped the opposing ideological positions. In addition to the popular pressure and the influence of the Carlist War, in 1836 the reformist government headed by Mendizábal proposed and started implementing the sale of ecclesiastical lands, by which the property of the monastic orders was alienated, symbolizing the commitment to a new conception and structuring of property. On the political process of the sale of monastic property, see the classic work by Tomás y Valiente (1971). On the electoral system of the Estatuto Real

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in other contemporary European and American contexts, the overall agreement among the Isabelline liberals was to exclude the majority of the population from political participation. Although this meant completely altering the parameters for the recognition of citizen rights established by the 1812 Constitution, the blueprint for a very limited framework for participation and representation made headway without great difficulty. Thus, if during the first phase there were still some rather radical positions denouncing that “what you want is that the crowd should not take part in the elections,” by the second stage, even reputed progressives would stress that “birth alone” was not sufficient “to exercise political rights.”45 On the other hand, with regard to the other important issues marked differences of opinion showed up, although not as a reflection of entrenched ideological stances: rather the opposite, as the early liberal’s divide between exaltados and moderados broke down, it was rather the opinions expressed in these debates that functioned as a touchstone in the configuration of the two parties—moderado and progresista—that would dominate the political scene throughout the reign of Isabella II.46 This was so because what was at stake was not simply excluding the majority from the right to vote, but to institute a form of representative government that both adhered to the principles of the hegemonic political doctrine and adapted to the singularities of Spanish case. In this sense, unlike elsewhere in Europe, the tour de force that had to be carried out in this case was twofold: to reduce an electoral base that appeared to be excessively “democratic” and to eliminate the indirect electoral system that maintained collective political participation at the local level. The range of issues at stake would in itself complicate the discussion, and the outcome would also be affected by the absence of a single formula that could be adopted wholesale; under these conditions, although in principle it was only a question of undoing the constitutional legacy of Cádiz, the alternatives or Royal Statute in the wider context of nineteenth-century electoral legislation, see Caballero Domínguez (1999). On the Royal Estatute, see further ahead in this chapter; on a joint overview of the Royal Statute and the 1837 Constitution, see Pro Ruiz (2010). 45  See Diario de Sesiones de cortes (DSC) (17-01-1836): 462, speech by Count of Las Navas, and DSC (11-06-1837): 4013, speech by the deputy Salustiano de Olozaga, respectively. Luis Pizarro, Count Consort of Las Navas, was an exalted progressive friend of the romantic poet José Zorrilla, who in 1843 came to dedicate the play Sofronia to him; see Ovejas (1847): II, 482. For his part, Olózaga became leader of the progressive benches in those years; on this character, see Burdiel (2008). 46  On the case of the moderates, see Gómez Ochoa (2007).

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went further and in practice dismantled the entire conception of citizenship designed by their forebears since the Enlightenment. To a large extent it was inevitable to make profound changes in the inherited citizen anthropology, among other reasons because in the intermission the meaning of the concept of opinion had undergone a profound redefinition. After the Napoleonic period, in Spain as elsewhere the use of this concept had amplified in political discourse, ending up serving as a basis for a theory of popular sovereignty alternative to the “general will,” a baneful memory for liberals throughout the continent for its links with the Jacobin Terror. This drastic reorientation was already evident in the 1818 Representación written in exile by Álvaro Flórez Estrada and addressed to Ferdinand VII, in which the opposition ideologue offered a history of the Cádiz constitutional process that openly promoted opinion as the basis of the new political legitimacy.47 After this redefinition there was no room for the suspicion with which enlightened thinkers like Jovellanos had assessed opinion as the redoubt of traditional customs impervious to reason, so that the entire discursive fabric of citizenship based on education lost its main argument. On the other hand, when the possibility of electing representatives arose again in 1834, the political and institutional landscape was markedly different from that of 1808: now the initiative belonged to the Crown, whose Regent Maria Cristina began by promulgating the so-called Royal Statute, a kind of octroyée charter from which it was summoned a parliamentary assembly.48 Taking inspiration from the meetings of the ­traditional Cortes of the Old Regime but maintaining the indirect voting system of Cadiz, the summons established a very narrow criterion for eligible voters, confined to the so-called largest taxpayers, which in practice reduced the 47  After stressing that the “absolute” power of the Bourbons showed itself as “the most opposite” not only “to the enlightened [men] of the day” but also in the “general opinion” deemed as a force “whose torrent cannot be resisted for long,” he stated with absolute conviction that it would be the public opinion “that will restore the Spanish constitutional monarchy,” to the point that “it will destroy your person and your dynasty, if you persist in resisting it”; see Flórez Estrada (1820): 109 and 153–54, respectively. 48  The current consensus is that the Royal Statute, inspired in French initiatives from the Restoration period, is not a proper constitutional text; see Clavero (1989): 49–53; see also an assessment in Fuentes (2007): 90–95. Significantly, the Estatuto gave the elected representatives to the Cortes the traditional designation of procuradores rather than that of deputies (diputados) of the doceañista lexicon; the legislative chambers, for their part, were called Estamentos o Estates. An overview of contrasts between Spanish Liberalism before and after 1834 can be found in Burdiel and Romeo (2001).

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vote to a tiny economic elite usually with links to the local institutions. But, inspired by the new French and English models, it also included the novelty of extending passive suffrage to small property owners, rentiers, merchants, artisans, and workers with a certain minimum income, as well as a range of professional categories not subject to any income threshold, who, although denied the right to vote in contrast to the large landowners, were nevertheless eligible to stand for election at the provincial level. However, this format was not intended to last, because once the Cortes were assembled, the government that emerged from the parliamentary body prepared a draft for a new electoral law that dispensed with indirect suffrage and restricted the status of both elector and candidate to the largest taxpayers. For the ensuing debate, it was proposed that a cross-party commission of elected representatives should be appointed to elaborate an opinion before its submission to parliament.49 Interestingly, the majority of the commission challenged the two main points of the bill project; for its part, the cabinet’s reaction was to submit this ruling for debate in the Cortes, but alongside the opinion by the minority of the commission, which straightforwardly advocated for maintaining the electoral legislation of 1812 with a few modifications. The core of the discrepancy between the majority of the commission and the government’s proposal had to do with the narrow limits placed on representation in the draft legislation.50 In an attempt to broaden its base, albeit against doctrinal orthodoxy, the majority of the commission was in favour of partially maintaining the system of  indirect voting, because although they acknowledged it was “anachronistic,” given that in Spain “unfortunately” property was “scarcely and unequally distributed,” double suffrage—by maintaining the right to vote for a large majority—was essential to prevent the electoral law from becoming “unpopular” to the 49  For a follow-up to this debate, see Estrada Sánchez (1998) and (1999): 17–42. A general overview of the establishment of representative government in the first third of the century, in Peña (2010). 50  The projected bill considered direct suffrage to be “real progress,” as it was “the one that the most notable writers recommend almost unanimously” and which “experience has vindicated in several countries” by producing national representation “without fictions or false diversions.” On the other hand, in the government project, the suffrage granted “exclusively to the highest classes of society, to the richest and most enlightened” was justified by the fact that the “mission” of the future elected deputies was not “to represent the numerical population of the country,” but “the stage of its civilization and the knowledge of its true interests”; see DSC (21-11-1835): Appendix, 1 and 2 respectively.

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public opinion.51 At the same time, on the question of the social basis of the electoral body, although considering property as a “sign of capacity,” the majority of the commission found it necessary to extend voting rights to capacities “as such capacities” regardless of wealth, arguing that “the electoral vote should be granted” to all those who could be deemed to possess “intelligence to exercise it for the common benefit” as well as “the interest in acting uprightly.”52 This last proposal reflected the legacy of citizenship based on the education championed by Jovellanos, although somewhat less exclusionary; but the philosophy underlying the majority opinion also partook of the doctrinal principle of just melieu. However, precisely by combining this last criterion with the indirect electoral format, the commission’s majority opinion became the target of attacks by the government and from the parliamentary benches, based on the argument that, as one of its most vocal critics put it, it was proposing “to unite the principles of aristocracy, wealth, and knowledge with those of pure democracy.”53 As can be seen, the different and often conflicting positions were all combined by reference to the grammar of the mixed constitution, which is but a sign of the wide reception and institutionalization of this language in the political culture of post-1832 Spanish Liberalism. However, the speeches of parliamentary orators were often shaped by political science  in the making, which favoured stances constrained by non-negotiable principles and generally the predominance of the two great ideological orthodoxies.

51  See DSC (10-01-1836): 350, speech by deputy Joaquín María López, member of the commission. He justified his “mixed” proposal in that the system would allow “the people to be given the representation which is denied to them in the strictly direct format” but “without any of the drawbacks of unpopularity or the risks or dangers of a reckless or indiscreet suffrage”; see DSC (10-01-1836): 352. On the career of Joaquín María López, an important orator and leader of the future progressive party, see Moliner Prada (1988). 52  The argument clearly placed the criterion of property ownership as secondary to education and moral autonomy, but blurred this hierarchy by incorporating all three into a broad notion of “intellectual property,” which in turn allowed him to link capacities “with landed property,” as they argued that culture was ultimately only “productive” when it materialized in the form of property; see DSC (18-01-1836): 474, speech by deputy López. The position was in line with the imaginary of a “enlightened bourgeoisie” on the rise in other parts of Europe; see Kocka (1993). 53  See DSC (14-01-1836): 410, speech by deputy Francisco Martínez de la Rosa. About this leader of the moderados in transition and notorious for his orthodox doctrinal position, see Pérez de la Blanca (2005).

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Among the moderados, the proposal to maintain double suffrage was considered to be an unacceptable vestige of doceañismo that found no logical or historical basis. Paradoxically, however, their attack on the capacity-based approach was made using a doceañista argument: in the words of its main author, Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, the chosen format created a “kind of privilege” or “inequality favouring certain classes.”54 Despite the ideological contradiction, this stance prevailed among the majority of conservatives, who only accepted capacities to the extent that they were constrained by property thresholds. On the other hand, other conservatives aligned themselves with the commission’s majority opinion, arguing that the times required greater acknowledgement of the democratic dimension in the electoral framework, which they identified with the recognition of capacities. According to the main exponent of this line of thought, Antonio Alcalá Galiano, all “adequately educated men” should be able to vote and be elected deputies, which, together with his rejection of the “pure” conceptions of elements of the constitution and his commitment to its mixed versions, brought him closer to his ideological adversaries on the commission.55 Among the progressives, internal disagreements were even greater due to the weight acquired among the generation of survivors of the Cádiz experience by some tropes of the republican discourse, especially that of property as a sufficient condition for full citizenship. Certainly, many younger progressives were sensitive to a dynamic view of history in which “independent, enlightened, active” liberal professions appeared as the embodiment of “new interests” that deserved recognition in the electoral arena; however, like other conservatives, the most common position among them was that these categories should be undergirded by property ownership, to the point that the very notion of capacity was called into 54  See DSC (08-01-1836): 321, speech by Martínez de la Rosa, for whom the majority opinion also contained a “mestiza” [mixed-race] and “bastard” proposal. It is worth recalling that the constitutional culture of Cadiz rejected any form of class privilege when it came to access to the organs of the Body Politic and institutions in general; see Chap. 1. 55  This stance was obviously sustained by perpetuating his differences with the progressives, especially with the most nostalgic among the doceañistas: for Alcalá Galiano to be in favour of capacities was not to advocate for “democracy” in the sense of the “demos of the Greeks” or “crowd” or “popular power,” because the “classes” which formed the capacities “are not what is generally understood by the people”; see DSC (19-01-1836): 491. For an overview of the differences between conservatives and progressives in electoral matters during this period, see Sierra (2007).

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question.56 Some, following a more strictly doceañista approach, even questioned whether capacities reflected the democratic dimension of electoral legislation, arguing for broadening the social base of the voting body as much as possible without resorting to any categorization; while others were in favour of including as capacities other  social categories such as artisans and peasants, who also owned property but engaged in manual labour. These intersecting perspectives cleared the ground for a consensus among the progresistas on property ownership as the most generalizing criterion, and therefore in their political vocabulary the most “democratic”—of which it could also be said that it did not exclude capacities but equated them with property ownership. In this context, some members of the commission strained the debate by arguing that both the government’s project and the detractors of opinion of the majority in the commission were indulging in a sort of “worship for property,” thereby breaking the spirit underlying the majority opinion itself and presenting as alternatives or even counterpoints the criteria of capacity and ownership.57 In turn, this stance provoked a reaction from a different ideological perspective in the form of a closed discourse, epitomized by the old republican and renowned poet Manuel José Quintana, in favour of property as a sufficient resource for rooting the individual interest and also as an expression of natural inequalities that should be reflected in any electoral legislation.58 The approach ended up galvanizing the progressives.

56  See DSC (18-01-1836): 483, speech by deputy Saturnino Calderón Collantes. Behind these postures may be glimpsed a suspicion of the moral configuration of the liberal professions. On the reluctance to recognize the middle classes in the discourse of Isabelline Liberalism, see Sánchez León (2007). 57  In fact, the government accused the commission of having reduced the question “to deciding whether a rich fool should be preferred to a poor enlightened [man]”; see DSC (18-01-1836): 479, speech by Álvaro Gómez Becerra, Secretary of the Office of Grace and Justice; the expression adoración por la propiedad, in DSC (18-01-1836): 474, speech by the deputy López; others described his adversaries as “staunch supporters” of property: 479, speech by deputy Count of Navas. On this perception of property in Spanish Liberalism and especially in later historiography, see Congost (2007), esp. 11–35. 58  Turning to the commission’s majority argument, Quintana argued that property represented “interest directly, and capacity indirectly.” In his speech, he denounced the doctrines based on the idea that all men had been “naturally endowed with the same and identical rights,” instead defending a “natural aristocracy” as “necessary”; see DSC (10-01-1836): 362. On Quintana, see Dérozier (1978), and on his republican ideology, Valero (2013).

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In this way, the more formally orthodox stance from the republican tradition finally converged with the more doctrinal liberal orthodoxy, strengthening bridges between liberals already in the first phase of the debate on political citizenship and representation. However, its wide acceptance by the different families and sensibilities of Liberalism was largely due to the fact that the consensus in fact did not establish property as such as a referent for citizenship, but rather linked voting to fiscal wealth. Indeed, Quintana’s proposal identified property with direct suffrage on the one hand, but on the other with the public treasury, which he considered “the mainstay of order and the spring and nerve of the security and defence of States,” so that “the more beneficent” the “individual” was to “the fatherland” through “his intelligence, industriousness, application, and other civic virtues,” the more he discharged his duties. Synthesizing both the emerging civil definition of the individual and the civic one of the citizen with a long legal culture that throughout the Old Regime had identified the Commoner vecino and the entire popular estate with the payment of taxes, Quintana presented the treasury and its custodian, the State, as “common stock and deposit” made up of the contributions of taxpayers—although these he exclusively identified with the direct taxes paid by the large owners.59 From the perspective of political economy, the approach was untenable, in addition to obviating the situation inherited both with regard to the registry of wealth and the biased criteria for the collection of taxes.60 On the other hand, from the viewpoint of the republican tradition it was counterproductive, because given the distribution of the property and the established criteria for payment quotas, it would have yielded a tiny number of active citizens.61 Even so, the agreement went ahead with the  See DSC (18-01-1836), 362.  Indeed, the argument presented agrarian rentiers as members of “the industrial class, the producing class,” who in turn were subsumed into “the class [of] taxpayers,” which was said to be “primarily invested in public happiness” and therefore the only one that offered guarantees in exchange for the right to vote; see DSC (18-01-1836): 362. Interestingly enough, just a year earlier Álvaro Flórez Estrada had published an original and critical treatise on political economy in which he attacked “the lack of a prudent system of taxation” as the main cause “of the current backwardness of Spanish industry”; see Flórez Estrada (1835): I, 2. 61  From a less orthodox republican perspective but more suited to the goal of securing a broad social base for political citizenship, the alternative was to grant the right to vote to the large group of tax-paying tenants, an idea that took shape in an innovative radical proposal made by Álvaro Flórez Estrada; however, the writer not being a member part of the small 59 60

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a­ rgument that until more wealth was produced through the “industriousness” of the Spaniards, taxable property would retain its preponderance. Yet despite the parliamentary consensus, the electoral legislation of the Royal Statute never came into effect. Following its discussion and approval, the reformist government that had been its driving force fell, opening a political crisis that affected the legitimacy of the Regency itself. In an atmosphere of high tension due to the resurgence of the Carlist conflict— the capital itself and the Isabelline court came under threat of invasion at one point—there erupted a new popular mobilization in the form of urban juntas and the subsequent formation of militias. In that context Maria Cristina finally agreed to reinstate the 1812 Constitution, albeit on a transitional basis and with the aim of convening a new constituent parliament.62 The subsequent summons to the Cortes was issued in accordance with the electoral procedures established in Cádiz, which ensured much wider citizen participation as well as resulting in a more socially and ideologically diverse assembly. This was the start of the second phase of the debate, much more expeditious since the commission for constitutional reform began by completely dismissing indirect elections and continued to bypass the largest taxpayers.63 This double point of departure made it possible to establish more exclusive criteria of citizenship based on property and leaving capacities behind.64 Beyond this, pragmatism prevailed in group of elected parliamentarians, his arguments only entered into the discussion from outside the Cortes, through a series of newspaper articles; on his proposal, see Almenar (2012). 62  An account of the final phase of this process in Sanz Fernández (2012). A survey of the juntismo of 1836 from a popular perspective can be found in García Rovira (1989). 63  Paradoxically, however, the argument in favour of direct suffrage was now made by underlining its supposed aristocratic component: thus, it was considered to reflect “the tendency of all societies” to “recognize a natural inequality” that should be endorsed by the electoral system; see DSC (28-12-1836): 783–84, speech by deputy Diego González Alonso. For its part, the commission branded the electoral “principle” of the Royal Statute based on the largest taxpayers as “the worst” imaginable; see DSC (28-12-1836): 781, speech by deputy Agustín de Argüelles. 64  Argüelles, a member of both electoral commissions and from the doceañista old guard in transition to “doctrinnaire” liberal outlooks, passed judgement on the matter arguing that “in all countries property is taken as a sign of capacity, both to vote and to be eligible for election”; see DSC (14-06-1837): 4081. He further argued that the draft electoral law, “without mentioning any capacity, has included them all”; see DSC (10-06-1837): 3990. In contrast, a few months earlier, he had argued that turning “wealth” into “the only element of order” to grant voting rights would make it an “instrument of oligarchy” placed “at the disposal of a single class” that would come to command “in the shadow and at the expense of all others”; see DSC (19-01-1836): 502.

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the debate on the electoral legislation that accompanied the framing of the new magna carta, which established that the payment of contributions, albeit recognized as not being a sign of wealth, would be taken as its most reliable measure, and that capacity could best be ascertained based on the direct taxes payable.65 It was on this basis that the parliamentary majority rejected all the amendments proposed by critical deputies. In general, no new arguments were introduced in this second constituent debate, but rather the old ones were rehashed. Everything turned on the question of capacity, but now in order to distinguish it from a “legal” incapacity that served to deprive women of the right to vote even when they were large taxpayers; there was also debate on “intellectual” capacity as unrelated to living on a salary, so as not to extend the vote to high-­ ranking public officials merely on the basis of their office or occupation; and above all, the capacity represented by “industry” was addressed in order to reaffirm that voting rights should not be granted on the basis of qualities other than being a substantial direct taxpayer. At the same time, thresholds were adjusted to include urban rentiers, thus amplifying the definition of the taxpayer, which now appeared as a synonym for a property owner, and he in turn for a man of intellect.66 In sum, property ownership, wealth, and fiscal contribution were equated to capacity, intelligence, and interest. Beyond the fact that these could only be combined using metaphors and other literary tropes, the main deficiency of this approach, in open contrast to the citizenship debates leading up to the 1812 Constitution, was the connection made between all these material and cultural attributes and political virtue. Indeed, if at Cádiz a sharp distinction was drawn between voters and those eligible for election, reducing the latter to a few large landowners for fear of enabling morally unfit representatives, by contrast now there was a greater proportion of eligible voters, but enabled mainly by means of a

65  In short, tax payments were “a safe, prompt, and efficient indicator” that provided “an indubitable guarantee” as a reflection of “the exercise” of capacity; see DSC (02-07-1837): 4469, speech by deputy Francisco Castro y Orozco. 66  As stated in the draft electoral law, “property,” especially of the “patrimonial” kind, implied “an education” that was seen as “more prudent” so that, when it was “acquired by one’s own industry,” it proved “more than common intelligence”; see DSC (31-05-1837): Appendix, 3789.

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language of interest and intellectual capacity that presupposed that virtue was rooted in property.67 In any event, this new framework was established at the cost of drastically reducing the number of voters in comparison with the 1812 constitutional format. Indeed, despite the fact that the new electoral legislation, by instituting a direct election system, was presented as a resounding advance in citizen participation, its most notable feature was the exclusion from political rights of the vast majority of adult men. If education had once been a potent criterion for dividing society in two with respect to political rights, now fiscal wealth was presented as an even more powerful and effective means to that end, having a legal basis in property ownership; however, it was also a much more contradictory criterion. To begin with, the price of its institutionalization was to establish a separation between culture and property to a degree that even Jovellanos could not have imagined.68 Excluded as a referent for representative government, education was now not a precondition for either representation or participation; but furthermore, the only legitimate form of political participation reserved for new citizens in the full sense consisted of little more than choosing representatives. Certainly, this entire legal framework was established in order to consolidate an elective aristocracy that in the Cádiz constitutional framework had been the least well-defined and most unstable element or dimension; however, although unlike the anthropology developed by the late Enlightenment ideologues and early Liberals this new one based on fiscal property could be considered as already socially conformed, it firmly bound the very institutions of representative government to the effort of creating such an elective aristocracy ex novo.69 67  A member of the commission, Olózaga made this clear enough when he rejected the proposal to granting all members of the National Militia the right to vote, arguing that “skills and knowledge” were not acquired to the same degree “by shedding blood as by studying”; see DSC (02-07-1837): 4461. 68  Significantly, it was not even mentioned that the deputies had to know how to read and write in order to take office; there were even some who considered that this provision established in Cádiz did not seem so “necessary” or “exclusive,” since by “possessing probity, rootedness, and virtue,” voters would be “superior to those who know how to read and write”; see DSC (25-03-1837): 2319, speech by deputy Felipe Gómez Acebo. 69  This intent was evident in the definition of a second legislative chamber or Senate. Regarding this instance, as demanded by the constitutional commission, an “aristocracy of privileges” was not desirable but also not possible, since one does not “improvise in one day such an institution”—which ruled out a hereditary chamber; as for a lifetime one, any “political aristocracy” by royal appointment was no less unanimously rejected, which clarified as the

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But above all, the adoption of the property-based fiscal criterion made this fledgling aristocracy dependent on the state as its exclusive source of recognition.70 Indeed, beyond establishing a tiny new social elite, the problem of this emerging citizenship based on taxable property was that it was not answerable to the emerging civil society and its idiosyncratic criteria of evaluation and accountability. Seen this way, a new zoon politikon was born with Isabelline Liberalism, which, like that of the late Enlightenment, was detached from communal moorings, but unlike the latter, it lacked cultural autonomy, which in practice condemned the new class of representatives to entrench themselves within the state, favouring personal relations of dependence, and fostering corruption and oligarchic closure.71

Rootedness with Capacity: The Inclusive Citizenship of Evolving Doceañismo It might seem that, despite their differences, the 1837 constitutional framework and its predecessor shaped in the late Enlightenment were alike in that they excluded the same type of subject, whether for being poor or uncultured, but in any case for consequently lacking virtue. However, while this may have been true of citizenship as defined in the constitution of 1812, it was not applicable to the new anthropology. To begin with, among the citizens deprived of political rights there were now countless property owners, in addition to the majority of the liberal professions whose members fell below the fiscal threshold. Beyond their numerical weight, these lawyers, doctors, and so on, had an identity that did not necessarily have property as its main reference, and direct contributions only viable one an elective aristocracy; see the opinion of the parliamentary commission in DSC (30-11-1836): Appendix 1, 3. The risk inherent in this option was that the Senate would become indistinguishable from the lower house and, according to some stances, it would end up hosting a new “aristocracy of wealth” which, in the words of one deputy, would be “much more harmful than the existing one of birth” because being “new” it would be “less welcome”; see DSC (10-04-1837): 2631, speech by deputy Juan Jerónimo Ceballos. The solution adopted was to impose a higher tax payment threshold for senators than for deputies. 70  For a survey of the construction of the state as a distinctly modern institutional architecture of the nation in nineteenth-century Spain, see Pro Ruiz (2019). 71  In such a context, the introduction of the secret ballot that came along the new electoral legislation only increased the detachment of voters from their communities. On the oligarchic closure and its effects on the policy of Isabelline Liberalism, see Pro Ruiz (2001).

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even less so, customarily revolving it around their socio-professional status, which was also in a process of organizational and institutional transformation.72 In this sense, the new system divided the liberal professions into two, allowing a minority to attain political rights as taxpayers but at the expense of the majority, whose only reward was effort, privations, and lack of recognition in the name of a promise of inclusion in what appeared to be a rather distant future.73 Spanish Liberalism was thus established as a social order and not simply a constitutional framework; but it also thereby foreshadowed the problems of legitimacy facing the new aristocracy, since the system excluded numerous subjects who from socially dominant values were seen to embody interest, intellect, and virtue, and many of whom were also property owners. In fact, in the first phase of the debate, an opinion had been advanced that regarded the middle classes as the natural representative of the people devoid of  political rights.74 The interesting thing about the sociological imaginary shaping initiatives like that is that it presupposed that the liberal professions did not form a separate world but were imbricated in their local milieu, especially in the urban communities, with which they shared evaluative criteria about prestige and status. Moreover, these communities  were, through mobilizations such as the juntas, undergoing processes of politicization and citizenship building that brought with them new evaluative referents.

 For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Sánchez León (2007); in relation to electoral criteria, see also Sierra (2010b). 73  For Martínez de la Rosa, whoever could not “yet” pay “the required fee” was encouraged to enrich himself until he was able to do so, and thus to vote: as he endorsed in the chamber, “work, and you will become a voter: work harder, and you will be able to become a Deputy of the Nation; and if you advance your fortune further, you will be able to rise to be a Senator (Prócer del Reino).” Quintana, meanwhile, urged the “non-taxpayer class” to surrender “calmly to the use of its natural faculties in order to become possessor,” recommending him “wisdom, industriousness, and economy”; see DSC (15-01-1836): 438, and DSC (10-01-1836): 363, respectively. The progressives stood out in this future projection of full citizen inclusion; see Pan-Montojo (2006); on citizenship in modern Spanish culture as based on fiscal contributions, see Pan-Montojo (2007). 74  For the majority in the commission, with the insertion of capacities it was considered that the “middle class” was not only “well represented” but actually “the interests of all classes” would be “defended by it,” so that the measure would meet the expectations of “adherents of popular government”; see DSC (21-11-1835): Appendix, 2. 72

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These referents revolved around another concept that had come to the fore already in the constitutional debates of the 1837 Constitution in opposition to that of capacity: “rootedness” (arraigo). The meaning of rootedness was rather ambiguous, which allowed its rapid semantic evolution in the more open environment after the death of Ferdinand VII. With an etymology derived from the verb “to take root” (enraizar), it synthesized the relations between the subject and the community: rootedness was an inseparable condition of the person—hence it usually appeared in the expression “rooted person” (persona de arraigo)—and was something that had to be “recognized,” which made it inherently a point of reference open to collective assessment but at the same time impervious to objectification. In that sense, it could not be more different from tax payments, and although its meaning was in some way tied to ownership, this relationship was rather complex and open to interpretation.75 On the one hand, rootedness was opposed to the concept of movable and tradable goods, but on the other to the absence of any local bonds and moorings.76 Thus, the moral and cultural were combined with the material and economic in this concept so that, unlike the anthropology that was being instituted with the 1837 constitutional consensus, it did not contemplate property as an exclusionary precondition but as a necessary though not sufficient condition of inclusion; and unlike the anthropology inherited from the Enlightenment, it did not see education as a boundary but as a valuable resource in defining status within the community. This communitarian background is something that the new political representatives most critical of the emerging consensus around fiscal wealth were fully aware of: actually, one parliamentary speaker valued property to the extent that without it the person was “deprived of general appreciation and condemned to live in darkness.” He therefore defended local “public opinion” as a “fair determinant of merit 75  This was so regardless of the speaker’s ideological affiliation. Thus, among the moderados, the leader and ideologist Andrés Borrego distinguished between having an “independent fortune” and being “rooted in the province”; see Borrego (1837): 41. Among the progresistas, it was argued that property ensured “a rootedness that the mere farmhands (braceros) or day labourers do not have,” but without further qualification; see DSC (12-02-1837): 1482, speech by deputy Antonio Seoane Hoyos. In general, it was assumed that property was “basis of rootedness,” but not its only and necessary element; see DSC (10-09-1837): 3992, speech by deputy Pascual Fernández Baeza. 76  This double dimension was expressed by a parliamentary speaker when he asked how “public affairs” would be dealt with by “anyone who has nothing and is a mere cosmopolitan or inhabitant of the whole world, without roots anywhere”; see DSC (09-06-1837): 3976, speech by deputy Antonio María García Blanco.

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and virtue” which “by encouraging citizens to place their trust in it” ultimately determined “the amount of knowledge and skill that each one possesses.”77 Above all, through arraigo, a citizen anthropology of urban scope was ensured that gave value to the shared collective referents of personality, and in relation to a community that was no longer one of vecinos but rather in final transition to that of citizens.78 Seen in this way, “rootedness” belonged to the level and hierarchy of referents with which the 1812 constitutional culture had enabled citizen participation not conditioning it by property ownership. In addition, its emphasis on the social valuation of subjects recovered the doceañista spirit of a “natural aristocracy,” according to which the majority of the local inhabitants would choose those of higher status and wealth as  virtuous representatives of the community. On the other hand, far from being a relic of the past, this doceañista electoral traditions were neither obsolete nor in decline.79 In fact, the episodes of urban juntas and parliamentary debates that marked the second half of the 1830s, rather than entailing a temporary restoration of the citizen referents from Cádiz, actually stimulated an evolution, crystallizing in the concept of rootedness. In this context, the recreation of the National Militia during the Carlist War would bring into the discussion ways of combining rootedness with capacity and property alternative to the electoral orthodoxy and in practice increasingly contrary to its hegemony.80 Likewise, through issues such as the 77  In the words of one speaker, “good customs are almost always the exclusive preserve of people who have some roots”; see DSC (12-02-1837): 1479, speech by deputy Diego Montoya. 78  See DSC (18-01-1836): 483, speech by deputy Calderón Collantes. 79  This was expressed by the fact that in the first phase of the debate on political rights, those in favour of maintaining an indirect suffrage argued that removing it could undermine “entrenched habits, interests, and conveniences,” since, in this view, the country was “accustomed to exercising the prerogative of suffrage that was almost unlimited,” referring to the Cádiz tradition; see DSC (28-12-1835): 139, speech by the secretary of the commission Fermín Caballero. 80  At the parliamentary level, there was a debate over whether to include in the militia only those men who had “some roots” in the community against those who argued that it was enough to “be a citizen” in possession of moral virtue to enlist in the militia, which led to complaints against “letting everyone in” even if he was “an idle man without any known trade or stable occupation”; see DSC (23-01-1837): 1198, speech by deputy Gómez Acebo. Other speakers claimed that capacity was an inherent attribute of the commanders of the people’s army. The most complete study of the National Militia in this period remains that of Pérez Garzón (1978).

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regulation of freedom of expression, the very functioning of the new Isabelline institutional framework broadened the semantic field of arraigo by ­making it a requirement for both the guarantors of media proprietors and the people’s juries introduced as part of the reforms to the penal code. In sum, the diffusion of the concept of “rootedness” or arraigo not only redefined the sociology of the electorate, broadening its potential base, but also reconfigured the entire citizen anthropology, as it fostered identities that emphasized participation, both strictly political and more broadly cultural-evaluative; moreover, it envisaged a citizenship framed in a collective background. Certainly, the forms of representation it encouraged could be criticized from the perspective of the mixed constitution as unbalanced in favour of “democracy.”81 Moreover, one basic feature (and weakness) of this idea of citizenship based on rootedness and capacity was that it placed collective mobilization before participation and representation—both logically and chronologically. In other words, in order for the citizen anthropology of rootedness and capacity to be activated, a political crisis had to occur; in the meantime, demands for popular participation had to be nourished until a process of collective action was triggered.82 Overall, the definition of a counter-hegemonic idea of citizenship evolving from the legacy of doceañismo was closely related to the citizen mobilizations of 1835 and 1836. And although the promulgation of the 1837 Constitution aimed to preventing the recurrence of urban juntas, these reared their head again: first in 1839, on the occasion of the first municipal elections, which triggered a tense contest between the two major parties either in favour and against making the municipal governments more “popular”; and right after following a national election in which the end of the Carlist War—and thus the fate of the National Militia—was at stake. In the short term, these electoral processes and the 81  The moderado notable Nicomedes Pastor Díaz denounced in 1839 the proliferation among the ranks of the progressives of “apostles of the old democratic school” who, although they were “a very small minority,” in his opinion made use of the “invading fanaticism and still retain some of their doctrines” to mobilize the excluded at the local level in order to maximize citizen participation; see Pastor Díaz (1839): 4 and 3 respectively. 82  In this sense, it is not possible to confuse this citizenship in action with that represented by Carlist traditionalism, whose undeniable communitarian base was defined rather by the denial of citizenship status. This distinction was noted in the discourse by liberals. Thus, one speaker argued that in the areas controlled by the Carlist “factions” “there is no man of any wealth, rootedness, or representation” who has not decided to escape to the other side; see DSC (17-09-1837): 6057, speech by deputy Gómez Acebo.

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juntista movements that accompanied them led to the final crisis of the Regency of María Cristina and its replacement by General Espartero, signatory of the peace that ended the Carlist War and notorious for his progressive sympathies. However, in the new context cities quickly staged a dynamic of increasingly polarizing struggle between partisan orthodoxies bidding for hegemony.83 Thereafter, a new round of urban juntas in 1843 justified by the growing authoritarian bent of Espartero’s personal government could be interpreted as a threatening resurgence of the tendency to gravitate towards the extremes of despotism and anarchy; and in turn this verdict promoted a new consensus favourable to the conservatives according to which there were major imbalances in the prevailing constitution itself.84 In consequence, the constitutional reforms subsequently undertaken by the new parliamentary majority in 1845, against getting inspiration in the grammar of the mixed constitution, sought to realign representative government by further narrowing the social base of participatory politics.

Conclusion As in other European contexts, the construction of citizenship during the formative years of modern Spain was marked by the desire to define an alternative aristocracy to that of birth and privilege, but in this case the process was broken up into two successive cycles that between the Enlightenment and Liberalism dispensed with the communitarian foundations of prestige and status. In reality, the disjuncture between moral education and fiscal property opposed two referents which, despite being very different and even contradictory, both represented a repudiation of both 83  In particular, from a moderado perspective, it was declaimed that the most radical among the progresistas were willing to “vulcanize the deep abyss of the popular masses” and exploit the “half-knowledge (semisaber) and insurgent ambition of daring mediocrities (medianias)” in order to carry forth “their Jacobin politics and encyclopedic philosophy”; see Pastor Díaz (1839): 11 and 14 respectively. 84  The new diagnose would take as its starting point the fact that juntismo now appeared as a manifestation of “living anarchy within society”; see DSC (29-10-1844): 127, speech by deputy Fernando Calderón Collantes. For its part, the general consensus would revolve around the fact that in the 1837 Constitution “there were elements of disorder”; see DSC (1-11-1844): 184, speech by the deputy Alejandro Mon, Minister of Finance. Hence the urgent need for a readjustment that would preclude the “triumph” either of the “monarchical” or of “democratic principles”; see DSC (29-10-1844): 129, speech by the deputy Francisco Javier de Istúriz.

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the inherited collective referents and those emerging in the process of shaping modern civil society. Evidently, what Spanish intellectuals and politicians shared between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the fear of enabling a self-determined political subject whose values were rooted in the community. Behind their disdain and fear of popular citizenship, pervasive among the elites of Enlightenment and Liberalism was a deeply rooted prejudice towards the moral and cultural capacity of Spanish society as a whole. However, those same political processes and conjunctures also encompassed the recovery of the communitarian foundations of citizenship, in which the local juntas played a constituent role—despite the fact that  the referents of this communitarian citizenship ended up twice being excluded from the emerging constitutional consensus. Certainly, Liberalism was able to define an aristocracy with a claim to legitimacy, but the split that it brought about between representation and participation also established an irredentist culture of citizenship that built upon the legacy of Cádiz, and that would in turn provide the platform for the development of radical ideologies. However, this political lineage was destined to wander in the wilderness for some time, because in the near future any appeal to the people as a whole had to overcome the impediment of alleged incapacity and immorality with which an entire section of the population had been stigmatized. Above all, in the new landscape this plebe could not speak for itself: it could only be represented, and its tribunes would also be initially stigmatized. In the words of one deputy at the very outset of the ensuing debates, “the positive and true danger of freedom” was “mainly in the disorder that can result when exalted ideas gain a [mass] following,” that is, in the political representatives of radical persuasion motivated to mobilizing the crowd.85 Seen this way, the unintentional effect of the constitutional cycles of 1837 and 1845 was a greater complexity in the struggle for popular representation and for the very meaning of representation. 85  See DSC (23-01-1836): 554, speech by procurador Francisco Belda y Asensio, a former exalted doceañista on his way to becoming a moderado. A similar argument was put forward in that same session by the Count of Toreno, until shortly before the president of the cabinet, when he echoed the fear that “the people from the countryside” would not be favourable “to the progressive march” of representative government; but for him, too, the greatest danger was “the influx into the capitals of a portion of the extreme (exagerados) liberals” whose “excesses” can be “most harmful to the cause of our Queen and of freedom itself”—to the extent that “instead of going forward, we may be forced to take a step backwards that would cost the Nation, and all of us individually, very dearly”: 561.

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In retrospect, this order of things may appear as either entirely alien or simply unacceptable. In a twenty-first century democracy, no one is excluded a priori from the political body. Despite this, to act as a citizen is often the cause of great frustration, and certain forms of citizen participation continue to be relegated outside the system. Yet, the very possibility of levelling such criticism is an indication that also current citizenship is defined by referents that are not necessarily only those established by the laws and embodied by constituted representatives, but rather is founded on those rooted in shared values imbued with the social recognition of virtue.

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Mulhall, Stephen and Swift, Adam (1994). Liberals and Communitarians, Oxford: Blackwell. Negrín Fajardo, Olegario (2011). “La posición de Jovellanos en el debate para la admisión de mujeres en la Real Sociedad Matritense de Amigos del País”, Cuadernos de Estudios sobre el siglo XVIII 21: 149–71. Oldfield, Adrian (1990). Citizenship and Community: Civic Republicanism and the Modern World, London: Routledge. Ovejas, Ildefonso (1847). Obras de D. José Zorrilla, con su biografía, Paris: Baudry [available at www.googlebooks.com]. Pabst, Adrian (2018). “Political Economy of Virtue: Civil Economy, Happiness, and Public Trust in the Thought of Antonio Genovesi”, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 25/4: 582–604. Pan-Montojo, Juan (2000). “Juan Álvarez y Mendizábal (1790–1853): el burgués revolucionario”. In Isabel Burdiel and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (coords.), Liberales, agitadores y conspiradores: biografías heterodoxas del siglo XIX, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 155–82. ——— (2006). “El progresismo isabelino”. In Manuel Suárez Cortina (coord.), La redención del pueblo: la cultura progresista en la España liberal Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 183–208. ——— (2007). “Ciudadanos y contribuyentes”. In Manuel Pérez Ledesma (ed.), De súbditos a ciudadanos: una historia de la ciudadanía de España, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 483–520. Pardos, Julio A. (2013). “Epifanías de la opinión: condición de ciudadanía en monarquía de españa, aledaños de 1770”, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie IV: Historia Moderna 26, 45–76 [available at http://revistas.uned.es/index.php/ ETFIV/article/view/13623]. París Martín, Álvaro (2018). “Politización popular contrarrevolucionaria en la Europa meridional: reflexiones cruzadas entre Madrid, el Midi de Francia y Nápoles (1789–1850)”. In James S. Amelang et al., Palacios, plazas, patíbulos: la sociedad española moderna entre el cambio y las resistencias, Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch, 313–26. Pastor Díaz, Nicomedes (1839). La cuestión electoral en diciembre de 1839, y enero de 1840, Madrid: Imprenta de D. Lucas de Burgos [available at www.bne.es]. Peña, María A. (2010). “El camino español hacia la representación política”. In María Sierra, María A. Peña y Rafael Zurita, Elegidos y elegibles. La representación parlamentaria en la cultura del liberalismo, Madrid: Marcial Pons, 105–86. Pérez de la Blanca, Pedro (2005). Martínez de la Rosa y sus tiempos, Barceloca: Ariel. Pérez Garzón, Juan Sisinio (1978). Milicia Nacional y revolución burguesa: el prototipo madrileño, 1808–1874, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Pérez Sarrión, Guillermo (2012). La península comercial. Mercado, redes sociales y Estado en España en el siglo XVIII, Madrid: Marcial Pons.

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CHAPTER 4

Space: The Spectre of Plebeian Tyranny— Popular Participation, Radical Leadership, and the Revolutions of 1848

Historicizing the Semantic Field of Populism In May 2011, the international press reported on the camps set up in the main squares of cities across Spain as “The Spanish Revolution.”1 The term was surely meant in the metaphorical rather than conceptual sense. It was certainly not used to signify the defenestration of the country’s ruling class, nor to describe the takeover of the state by a well-organized counterpower: far from it, the word “revolution” was applied to a rather spontaneous citizen movement that took place in the context of a local elections campaign and that hardly made an impression on national politics in the short term.2 There is no question that the conventional 1   See among others http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/spanish-revolution-thousands-gather-in-madrids-puerta-del-sol-square/2011/05/18/ AFLzpZ6G_blog.html, http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/05/a-defiant-spanishrevolution/100070/, http://www.spanishrevolution.es/. 2  For a visual record of this protest, see the documentary by Martín Patino (2012); for another filmed overview, focused on participatory practices and the role of assemblies, see Amador (2012).

An original draft of the text of this chapter was presented at the XV International Conference on the History of Concepts (Buenos Aires, September 2012). I would like to thank the organizers for the invitation and the participants for their comments. © The Author(s) 2020 P. Sánchez León, Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5_4

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definition of the term “revolution” does not apply to 15-M, as the protest movement came to be called; even its main slogan—“Real democracy, now!”—is hardly drawn from the repertoire of twentieth-century revolutionary rhetoric.3 However, for many analysts the citizen protest of May 2011 has left a deep mark on the political dynamics of Spanish democracy in the longer term. In its wake, sustained citizen mobilization against the privatization of social services enabled the implementation of procedures such as assemblies and participatory budgets in municipal governments. Moreover, when confronting austerity policies implemented in response to the global economic crisis, new political parties inspired by 15-M emerged, proposing changes that challenged traditional parliamentary forces, such as the reform of electoral legislation or holding primary elections. Taken together, 15-M epitomizes the crisis of representation in Spanish post-Franco democracy. The tussle over its legacy, whether to claim or disavow it, has involved both old and new actors in debates that are still ongoing. It did not take long for these to be tarred with the brush of “populism,” a rhetoric that seems to abound everywhere in addressing the relationship between mobilization, participation, representation, and leadership.4 Despite its analytical power, in the current controversies the concept of populism is often used to make value judgments about emerging political leaders, which makes it a very loaded term that reveals more about the fears and prejudices of those who wield it than objective trends and realities. An illustrative example of this confusion is a news article published in the context of the emergence of the political party Podemos by José Álvarez Junco, a renowned historian and an expert on populism in the history of Spain and Latin America, who also acts as a public intellectual and opinion maker.5 In his piece, Álvarez Junco values positively the general contribution of populist forces as having “revitalized politics” by “denouncing political systems in distress,” and appreciates their ­commitment to making  See Koselleck (1985): 43–57.  Its application is not limited to emerging democracies but is also being used to characterize political trends in countries with a long history of democratic governance, such as Italy, France, or the United States; and, which is perhaps even more striking and paradoxical, it is applied to governments, policies, and political organizations at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. For a survey of the topic before the recent wave of populist diagnoses, see Albertazzi and MacDonnell (2008); another on current trends, in Goodhart (2018). 5  See Álvarez Junco (1987) and (1990). 3 4

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democratic institutions “[more] open, responsive, and modern.”6 On the other hand, however, he attacks five associated dangers of populism: the idealization of a “people” invoked as “a mere rhetorical construct” that “makes it possible to circumvent the necessary respect for the law”; the absence of concrete programmes, which allows populist leaders to “act as revolutionaries or as realists, as circumstances require”; the predominance of emotion over “rational approaches,” since in populist logic “the goal is not to make one’s listeners think but rather to mobilize them”; the use of a concept of democracy not in the sense of “rules of the game” for the contest between political options but as “government for the people” presented as “favouring the weakest” even at the cost of imitating the rhetoric employed by dictatorships; and, finally, the promotion of leaders “endowed with redeeming powers,” an aspect that in his opinion reveals “a vestige of religious messianism or the monarchical paternalism of the Old Regime.” One way to respond to this catalogue of flaws is to invoke the many authors who have cast the phenomenon of populism in a much more positive light, while acknowledging its analytical capacity.7 There is another option, however: to historicize the semantic field of what is referred to as populism today. As I show in the pages that follow, antagonistic ways of defining the relationship between popular agency and political leadership were already in vogue in a more distant past. More precisely, this oppositional approach was common before the rise of democracy, throughout the nineteenth century and accompanying the proliferation of discourse for or against universal suffrage. In fact, the sinister prospect of a small cabal of demagogues rousing a popular base or mob has been part of the history of Western philosophy at least since the Renaissance. It is therefore extremely pertinent to compare this rhetoric with the arguments against populism made today, now that democracy has become hegemonic worldwide. 6  On the one hand, he states that the phenomenon is not easy to define, and on the other, emphasizes that the concept is controversial, to the point that some have called for the “abandonment of the term [populism], as indefinable”; see Álvarez Junco (2014). On the semantic ambiguity of the concept, see De la Torre (1994) and Panizza (2005): 1–31. However paradoxical it may sound, the lack of consensus around the definition of concepts is considered to be a sign of their successful incorporation into discourse; see Fernández Sebastián (2004–2005). 7  See, in general Laclau (2005) and Canovan (1999). For an analytical and ideological use of populism in a positive sense, see García Linera (2009).

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A historical approach to populist discourse has an added interest because populism did not exist as a concept throughout the nineteenth century, and was coined only in the twentieth century.8 This does not mean that there was no available vocabulary to articulate the fear of a populace manipulated and mobilized by a political minority: it was provided by another concept, that of demagogy.9 What remains to be seen is whether the demagogy of the historical past was a functional equivalent of today’s populism. It should be noted that demagogy was then discursively intertwined with the concept of plebe or crowd. The history of the semantic of demagogy is inextricably linked to the displacement of the concept of the “plebe” by that of the “people.” What lies in between such process is the establishment of democracy. This chapter is a journey through the trajectory of definition and change in the semantic field of demagogy in the period of the rise of democracy as an imaginary. Demagogy took root in public discourse mainly thanks to conservatism, an ideology gathering momentum in the midst of the crisis of the Old Regime, and that has been defined as “fundamentally an assault on the possibility, and desirability, of democracy.”10 However, in the first half of the nineteenth century the debates surrounding demagogy, democracy, and the crowd were not limited to conservatives, and there were notable struggles over their meaning in other ideological milieus, even among those favourable to universal suffrage. In fact, demagogy, and its supposedly attendant threat of plebeian tyranny, is at the core of the complex relationship between liberal thought and democracy. Historicizing the semantic field of demagogy can therefore shed light on the conception of democracy in the twenty-first century.

Plebeian Tyranny, a Legacy of the Old Regime First, the process that led to the incorporation of the semantic field of demagogy in the language of modern politics should be outlined. In the vision of the cyclical succession of forms of government—the anacyclosis 8  On the development of the concept in Spanish political culture, which took place during the crisis of the 1875 Restoration at the beginning of the twentieth century, see Ucelay da Cal (1988). 9  For more on this, and as a complement to this chapter, see Sánchez León (2017). 10  See Herzog (1998): ix. Conservatism is defined less as a prescriptive ideological orthodoxy than as a negative reaction against other ideologies with which it coexists in any given historical context; see Freeden (1996): 317–47.

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or anakyklosis politeion imagined by the thinkers of classical Antiquity— democracy was by its nature destined to degenerate into demagogy, also named ochlocracy or simply anarchy. Used to convey an image of total destabilization that reached the very foundations of the social order, the latter term was eventually marginalized by Renaissance humanists in favour of more connotative synonyms. Among these, “plebeian tyranny” featured prominently in the discourse of the early modern period following Machiavelli’s use of the term to describe developments in medieval Florence.11 However, in general, demagogy and plebeian tyranny were scarcely addressed in political treatises, since they could only arise after the fall of democratic regimes, which in turn could only exist in self-governing urban communes. Moreover, democracy as a “pure” form of government was so discredited among the erudite that the term was often also used to refer to demagogy. On the other hand, these concepts were semantically linked to revolts and other social upheavals, the main difference being that demagogy did not evoke a random eruption of collective disorder but a formal, albeit ephemeral, political regime. Not by chance an indispensable prerequisite of plebeian tyranny was a conspiracy, which was necessarily planned by a minority of higher social and cultural standing, who made up the leadership; on the other hand, their mobilized base was presupposed to be of lower social extraction and for that reason predisposed to fall prey to uncontrollable emotions.12 As a consequence of this, another shared assumption was that a tyrannical government with plebeian support had no chance of enduring due to the inconstancy of the coarse multitude.13 11  In his Florentine Histories Machiavelli defined as a plebeian tyranny a process that unfolded in the wake of the Ciompi revolt of 1381, when the so-called Plebeian Party fell under the sway of Giorgio Scali and Tommasso Sforza, who began to abuse their power to the point that in just a few months “not only to good men but even to the seditious the government appeared tyrannical and violent”; see Machiavelli (1988) [1525], Book III, Chap. 20. 12  On this marked social cleavage in political mobilizations between the leaders and their base in early modern discourse, see Campbell (2004) and Mintner (2006). An exemption was Masaniello, the leader of the 1647 rebellion against Habsburg domination in Naples, who was himself one of the protesting lazzerati of plebeian extraction; see Benigno (1999). 13  Machiavelli argued that in Florence, as it was sliding into plebeian tyranny, “[t]he plebs (…) will for any accident, though the slightest, reverse itself,” so that its leaders felt themselves easily betrayed by “a multitude in which there was neither any faith nor any gratitude,” to the point that one of them “lamented for himself that he had trusted too much in a people whom every voice, every act, every suspicion moves and corrupts”; see Machiavelli (1988) [1525], Book III, Chap. 21.

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After being refined in the eighteenth century by drawing on the repertoire of the mixed constitution, this long-established perception of democracy underwent a profound change with the outbreak of the French Revolution and in its aftermath. In the larger cities of France, as the crowd emerged as a political actor to an unprecedented extent and came to be involved in political struggles for radical constitutional change, public debates, inspired by the modern conception of revolution, openly transgressed the boundaries of meaning that until then neatly separated order and disorder.14 Among the discourses that tried to make sense of the political dynamics unleashed since 1789, interpretations of a counterrevolutionary bent designated the period of Jacobin ascendancy as an instance of plebeian tyranny, a term that was rapidly adopted in narratives shaped by the emerging reactionary ideology to designate the final stage of the revolution.15 This new synonym for demagogy was markedly different from that inherited from Renaissance humanism: plebeian tyranny was not anymore seen as the natural degradation of a proper political system but was understood as the result of strategies undertaken by leaders aspiring to power. Moreover, the concept did not refer to a temporal phase but started to be applied to a self-reproducible regime founded on the mobilizing properties of ideas-­ forces that ignited the enthusiasm of the masses but at the cost of multiplying the possibilities of their manipulation.16 Indeed, this modern 14  A combined study of the process and the language of the French Revolution can be found in Reichardt (2001). For a classic study on the semantic changes in the concept of revolution during the early modern period, see Griewank (1979) [1949]. The most notorious concept that emerged from the Jacobin period of the French Revolution was that of the “Terror,” though its theorization is rather  a twentieth-century phenomenon; see Furet (1981). 15  In a passage of his Memoirs d’Outre-Tombe, Chateaubriand wrote that the “wild, capricious” and self-deceptive “freedoms of 1789, in falling back beneath the sceptre of the people” exposed revolutionary power to “a new plebeian tyranny,” which he admitted to be “fecund” and “true and full of hope” but also “much more formidable than the decaying despotism of the old monarchy”; and concluded: “the sovereign people” whenever it “turns tyrant, is a tyrant everywhere” and “displays the universal presence of a universal Tiberius”; see Chateaubriand (2005) [1822], Book IX, Chapter 3, section 1. The author revised the work in 1846. On the forging of the reactionary intellectual tradition, see MacMahon (2002). 16  After the fall of the Jacobins, Joseph de Maistre argued pointing to the French example that “every plebeian tyranny is by its very nature impetuous, insulting, and ruthless”; yet the one that had brought about the Revolution had had “to push these characteristics to excess.” In his judgment, “[t]he world has never seen a baser or more absolute tyranny”; see De

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modality of a radical and absolute tyranny found a powerful base of support among the lower ranks and the dregs of society.17 However, the most influential change brought about by the reactionary thought of the turn of the century occurred in the conception of leadership. The Revolution having suppressed the traditional estates-based statuses and juridical distinctions, popular leaders could now be drawn from a broader social spectrum. In practice, however, they tended to be recruited from groups emerging with the rise of the public sphere, much to the anxiety of reactionary ideologues. From their perspective, the still limited diffusion of culture facilitated by the Enlightenment had created a new type of manipulator of the masses, one who was educated but motivated by a desire to end the established order.18 In his memoirs, for example, Chateaubriand devoted an entire chapter to denouncing the proliferation of “orators” who, from his point of view, were “united only to destroy.”19 A similar interpretation had been elaborated on the other side of the English Channel at the outbreak of the constitutional crisis in Louis XVI’s France. Edmund Burke offered a more elaborate sociological approach: according to him, the danger came in particular from “the political Men of Letters”; he argued that these “[w]riters, especially when they act in a body, and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind,” to the point of becoming “a sort of demagogues.”20 Although with reflections such as these the precursors of reactionary thought were providing the outlines for the figure of the committed intellectual or ideologue, what they were actually trying to achieve is to describe the modern demagogue—although at the time the two figures could be Maistre (1990) [1796]: Chapter X, 87. On enthusiasm in relation to popular sovereignty in this context, see Moscoso and Sánchez León (2017): especially 58–69. 17  Chateaubriand described the “vanguard” arriving to Paris for “the September Massacres” of 1791 as a “population of cut-throats” identifiable “by their rags, their bronzed faces, and their air of cowardice and criminality, but crime under a different sun: in vultu vitium, with vice in their faces”; see Chateaubriand (2005) [1822], Book IX, Chapter 3, section 1. 18  See Eisenstein (1991). 19  See Chateaubriand (2005) [1822], Book IX, Chapter 3, section 2. 20  According to Burke’s Reflections in France just prior to the outbreak of the Revolution these “propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor, and the lower ranks,” while in their satires “they rendered hateful, by every exaggerations, the faults of court, of nobility, and of priesthood.” He also argued that these intellectuals, who had been despised by king Louis XVI, what they could not achieve “by any direct or immediate act,” they obtained by means of “a long process through the medium of opinion”; see Burke (1910) [1790]: 112–13. On this work by Burke in its context, see Sternhell (2009).

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indistinguishable in particular discourses.21 Be that as it may, this anthropological redefinition was soon arrested. Indeed, from the 1815 Restoration onwards, demagogy and plebeian tyranny, instead of permeating the official discourse now dominated by reactionary tropes, were actually displaced from the centre of the debate, eventually disappearing from all anti-revolutionary rhetoric. This evolution was not a sign that plebeian tyranny had ceased to be a threatening horizon of expectation, but rather concealed a process of semantic intrusion through which a substantial part of the field of demagogy was occupied by a redefined concept of democracy. In the classical tradition of political philosophy, democracy, although it was difficult to envisage its establishment not to mention its endurance, was nevertheless considered a legitimate form of government. This explained its natural degradation into ochlocracy, a term originally used to define the seizure of power by the populace, although in reality descending into the violence of mob rule.22 However, after the Restoration, the dominant interpretation inspired by the events in France in the early 1790s tended not to distinguish between democracy and demagogy, identifying both with the final stage of the disorder inevitably brought about by revolutions. Redefined in this way, democracy implied more than a political system, affecting the structure of the social order as a whole. Therefore, in subsequent decades the word would be used primarily to designate the outer limits of the system: on one side there could be an emerging liberal society or an enduring Old Regime; on the other, there was democracy, with its assemblies for collective deliberation and its tribunes, not just considered illegitimate institutions but seen as a political framework for the slide into anarchy.

21  Indeed, an entire historical process of social recognition separates that image from the presently conventional one of what an intellectual is; see Charle (1999). An important difference is that in that context there was no clear difference between literary authorship and political leadership, so that intellectual reflection and public oratory tended to overlap. 22  In the classical account by Polybius, democracy made the “populace,” whose nature is guided by a “senseless mania for reputation,” be “ready and greedy to receive bribes,” and so eventually it was “transformed into a government of violence and the strong hand,” because people accustomed to live out of the others’ goods “as soon as [they have] got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring” but of humble background, gathered around him for a final looting which foreclosed the experiment and brought the cycle back into personal tyranny; see Polybius (2013) [1889], Book VI, Part 9: I, 465–66.

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The Struggle over the Meaning of Democracy in Post-1812 Spanish Liberalism These general tendencies in the discourse manifested themselves in a quite specific way in Spanish culture in the transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The conception of plebeian tyranny as a form of extreme disorder and mob rule set in motion by an elite conspiracy was challenged as early as 1766. As shown in Chap. 2, the urban protests against the first wave of Enlightened reforms could not be imputed to the formal leadership of members of the privileged classes; on the other hand, attempts to account for this absence in turn triggered important transformations in the discourse that implied a partial re-signification of long-­ established semantics used to distinguish between order and disorder. Refashioned with tropes from the repository of the mixed constitution, however, the emerging orthodoxy after 1766 paradoxically granted popular riots a certain degree of legitimacy. Indeed, in the essays written in the wake of the fall of the Marquis of Esquilache, a new interpretation was taking shape according to which popular uprisings were only avoidable wherever subjects lived under “an absolute, but moderated authority”: in other circumstances, these desperate collective reactions should instead be blamed on the inability of the institutions to guarantee basic justice.23 In this emerging picture, riots functioned to some extent as a barometer, not only of social unrest but mainly of constitutional imbalances that prevented the routine channelling of popular demands through individual petitions and corporate representations. This narrative scheme lasted until the “mutiny of Aranjuez” that caused the fall of Manuel de Godoy as the strongman at the court, on the eve of the uprising against the French in 1808.24 However, with the outbreak of the War of Independence and the establishment of local assemblies ­(juntas) 23  In an emblematic essay written in its wake, riots appeared as the “forced consequence” of two political scenarios or “extreme” types of government: “unlimited freedom” and “despotic oppression”; see Romá and Rosell (1767): 267. A more detailed discussion of this can be found in Sánchez León (2011). On the conception of politics in this context in terms of extremes, and moderation as an alternative, see Backes (2010): 51–73; on the Enlightened reforms after 1766 as implemented to prevent disorder, see Moscoso (1988). 24  A chronicle published at the end of the War of Independence summed it up in these terms: “There has virtually never been a people whose plebe did not engage in tumult to manifest its hatred for the favourite”; see Llorente (1814): I, 16 (the author signed the book with the alias Nellerto).

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claiming sovereignty, popular mobilization became fully legitimized as a prerequisite for national self-defence, and therefore as a practice constitutive of order; at the same time, there was a discernible effort to dignify the plebs as part of the heroic and self-sacrificing people who could now aspire to have their capacity for self-government acknowledged. Accordingly, in the political context that would lead to the elaboration of the Constitution of Cádiz, demagogy and democracy were used interchangeably and as synonyms whenever early liberals  were accused of harbouring sympathy for the revolutionary experiment in France—to which they responded by distinguishing their proposals for monarchical representative government of Spain from the extremes of Jacobin plebeian tyranny and the monarchical tyranny embodied in Napoleonic government.25 With the absolutist Restoration after 1814, the entire semantic field of demagogy was directly subsumed in that of democracy, which in turn was identified with the 1812 Constitution as a “popular government.”26 Interestingly, this same equivalence was drawn by those among early liberals who felt uneasy with the constituent process.27 On the other hand, many liberals in exile would continue to argue that Cádiz had been anything but a democracy, and held on to this notion when a new opportunity to take power presented itself during the so-called Liberal Triennium (1820–1823).28 25  Thus, for example, during the constituent process of Cádiz, a parliamentarian, taking stock of the French Revolution, recalled the “infernal disorganizing spirit of demagogy and revolutionary democracy” which it “fomented from the very outset”; see Diario de Sesiones de Cortes [DSC] (06-10-1811): 1999, speech by the deputy Evaristo Pérez de Castro. 26  “Popular government” was the concise definition of democracy in the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy from its first edition of 1732, lasting until the middle of nineteenth century; see RAE (1732): 67. 27  Even before the Restoration, the future ideologue and moderate leader Antonio Alcalá Galiano read the contradictions of the 1812 Constitution in terms of an imbalance between the principles of a mixed constitution, having wanted to “found a monarchical government under democratic principles,” which he denounced as “a delirium of exalted imaginations”; see Alcalá Galiano (1813): 116–17. On the other hand, a much less well-known author lashed out from exile against the 1808 movement of urban juntas, which he considered “the origin of great evils in Spain” for having enabled “the dissolute man who flaunts his passions, and acts only to satisfy them” to become “the chief and director of the plebs.” These demagogues seemed to him “the most dangerous in times of public disturbance”; see Llorente (1814): I, 121. However, scholars have ruled out the element of conspiracy in the 2 May 1808 uprising; see Carantoña (2012). 28  Already in the famous Representación to Ferdinand VII made from exile, and that would serve as a blueprint for the doceañista  governments of the 1820–1823 period, its author

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However, during that three-year period, debates about the limits to popular participation marked the political agenda and raised the issue of limits on the freedom of speech. The touchstone was the parliamentary discussion of a law to regulate the so-called patriotic societies—informal debating clubs that in practice functioned as embryonic political parties: for some, these societies were indistinguishable from factions that, seen from the perspective of the republican tradition, represented a dangerous threat to the integrity of every form of citizen self-government; but in addition, since they were organized through autonomous deliberative assemblies, as far as their detractors were concerned the patriotic societies had to be impeded from serving as launching platforms for manipulative demagogues.29 Likewise, during this doceañista Triennium, the perception of the riots as a barometer of popular discontent came under strain due to the difficulties that the liberal authorities had in mobilizing popular enthusiasm in favour of the constitutional regime; and it became unsustainable after an entire decade, between 1823 and 1833, during which the popular demonstrations of support for the restored absolutism of Ferdinand VII— albeit hardly spontaneous—presented a stark contrast to the traditional link between obstructions in the representative system and popular recourse to collective protest, revealing instead a pattern of mobilization of a fanatical plebeian base in support of the established order.30 With the ascension to the throne of the infant Isabella II in 1833 and the establishment of a Regency headed by her mother María Cristina, a Álvaro Flórez Estrada flatly rejected the accusation that the Cortes of 1812 had been “composed of Jacobins of the worst sort,” arguing that they did not present “a single plan to constitute the Nation in a democratic government”; see Flórez Estrada (1820): 45 and 46, respectively, emphasis in the original. In the wake of this text, the Junta that took power after the liberal military coup (pronunciamiento) of 1820 stated that “our revolution does not resemble those of other nations” because it had not degenerated into “democratic anarchy, the fruit of all popular revolutions”; see “Manifesto” (1820): 1, emphasis in the original. 29  Thus, for example, a deputy wary of “the seductive eloquence of a demagogue,” was willing to “indict exalted speakers” to prevent them from “spreading among the unsuspecting listeners the poison of dangerous doctrines”—in view of which it was openly maintained that the right of “public discussion must reside exclusively in the Cortes”; see DSC (04-09-1821): 980–81, speech by Deputy Alonso Cañedo Vigil; on this figure, see Goñi Gaztambide (1980). Although the proposal undermined the freedom of expression, it would remain an approach taken by Spanish reactionary thinkers throughout the nineteenth century; see Rivera García (2014). 30  For a study on this type of traditionalist mobilization in the case of Madrid, see París Martín (2017). On the final years of the reign of Ferdinand VII, see Luis (2002).

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new political scene emerged that would culminate in the proclamation of a new constitution in 1837. In comparison with that of 1812, it restricted voting rights to a minority of male citizens, while establishing public opinion as a bridge between the represented and their representatives, as well as between citizens with and those without political rights. Yet it touched also upon the legitimacy of mobilizations. A precondition of this new state of affairs was that riots ceased to be considered legitimate under any circumstances. The episodes that served to entrench this redefinition of the boundaries between order and disorder were a series of popular attacks in 1835 against the regular clergy, whose members were accused of collusion with the reactionaries feeding the rising Carlist military factions. According to the parliamentary deputy Antonio Alcalá Galiano, although it was impossible to know if the assault on the convents had been “the result of a premeditated conspiracy, or of the fierce passions excited at that time,” the difference was irrelevant: the crucial thing was “to make the Spanish people understand” that “it is not only criminal when it obeys outside [extra-parliamentary] deliberations,” but also when “guided by a criminal ardour it allows itself to be carried away by its passions.” Above all, it was a warning that in the transition to a constitutional framework, the people should “respect [the] deliberations” of “their legitimate representatives.”31 With such admonitions, Spanish Liberalism rendered obsolete the traditional link between elitist conspiracies and popular mobilization, but on the other hand further reinforced the status of representation as the exclusive mechanism for negotiating the relationship between institutions and subjects inherited from the Old Regime, adapting it to the emerging notion of citizenship and a new order-disorder dichotomy. It is no coincidence that by that point the semantic field of demagogy had been distributed between the concept of democracy and that of anarchy, which was taken to signify the destruction of the entire society.32 With the concept 31  He wondered: “Well, would a murder attempted by people excited by passions of the moment, by fierce passions, be less horrifying than if it had originated in a conspiracy?”; see DSC (19-05-1835): 2552–53. On this popular anticlerical rising unleashed on the eve of the desamortización (sale of the lands) of the regular orders, see Moliner Prada (1997). 32  An instructive example is a parliamentary speech in which the orator said that if “citizens” were allowed to “aspire to everything,” in reference to the possibility of universal suffrage, the result would be that “disorder enters, demagogy thrives, and anarchy is enthroned”; see DSC (10-01-1836): 362, speech of the deputy Manuel José Quintana. On this individual, poet laureate and originally doceañista partisan accused by his detractors of being a demagogue, see Chap. 3. For similar semantic changes in the fields of demagogy, democracy, and anarchy in the French case, see Deleplace (2000).

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divested of its former meaning, its status was undoubtedly reduced, but it also became notably specialized. When demagogy was first included in the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy in 1832, its definition did not refer to a form of government, but to a type of manipulative leadership of the masses: “Ambition to dominate [at the head of] a popular faction” is how the meaning of the term was fixed by academics, although it was used much less frequently than the qualifying adjective demagogue.33 Thus, beginning in the 1830s, calling someone a demagogue was not to label them as an advocate of universal suffrage, but to tarnish someone as both a manipulative popular tribune and an anarchist. However, this was not the only relevant semantic process in the period following Cádiz. The aftermath of the 1814 Restoration triggered struggles for the appropriation of the meaning of other terms affecting the boundaries between order and disorder, but also for assessing the conceptions of popular political participation. Although initially with the intent of denigrating it, democracy was invoked with increasing frequency by writers from across the parliamentary ideological spectrum, further cementing its association with deliberation in a legislative assembly.34 Even more interesting, the debates between moderados and progresistas on overcoming or maintaining the 1812 Constitution helped to distinguish “democracy” from “popular government,” until then synonymous in all dictionaries. Although an interpretation of the political framed envisaged at Cádiz as an imbalanced democratic monarchy ended up prevailing, another convention emerged from these controversies according to which parliamentary monarchy, albeit subordinating participation to ­representation and drastically restricting the right to vote, constituted a popular type of

33  See RAE (1832): 239; see a longer-term perspective on this semantics in Sánchez León (2012). 34  The consensus between moderados and progresistas, just then in process of ideological definition, was rapid in this regard. Among the former, Juan Donoso Cortés understood “democratic government” as one in which “the masses dictate laws,” warning against the resulting weakening of “the spirit of our institutions”; see Donoso Cortés (1835): 19 and 40 respectively. On the figure and work of Juan Donoso Cortés, see below in this chapter and Chap. 5. On the other hand, for the first progressives, democratic government—which was to be considered “the worst of all”—was the one in which “a less enlightened and almost irrational part” of the population “wants to penetrate the sanctuary of laws,” and in which “uncivilized men” want to “be dictators and believe themselves enlightened enough to lead the great mass of the nation”; see Castillo and Mayone (1835): 176. On similarities and ideological differences between conservatives and progressives in this context, see Romeo Mateo (1998).

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government, and moreover a benign one since it avoided descent into plebeian despotism—inevitable according to the inherited definition.35 As representative government came to occupy the semantic space traditionally reserved for democracy, the latter in turn drifted towards the previous scope of demagogy. However, these movements between semantic fields could not be independent or unidirectional, but were largely regulated as part of a broader matrix that linked them to each other: the repository of the mixed constitution, adopted by the entire ideological spectrum of Isabelline liberals as the common language for devising all options for a balanced and enduring constitutional order. In this regard, a problem of Spanish Liberalism that would condition its historical dynamics may be traced to the fact that the 1837 Constitution made no provision for those institutions that according to the grammar of the mixed constitution should reflect the democratic dimension, above all the municipalities and the National Militia, which were left to future legislative efforts.36 This disdainful approach to the whole issue of popular institutions in the new constitutional settlement could be justified from prevailing liberal dogma by arguing that public opinion was a sufficient counterweight to possible escalades towards tyranny or degenerations into corruption of the system. However, despite the initial consensus on this issue among Isabelline liberals, ideologues of the emerging progressive party would call attention on the fissures between elected representatives and the prevailing public opinion, legitimizing a citizen response to situations of government unpopularity that implied favouring mobilization and participation over representation.37 Therefore, at the very least the cost of redefining the parliamentary monarchy as a popular government was that the political debates of the 35  On the coming into force of the 1837 Constitution, this position would become hegemonic even among the conservatives, whose ideologues already assumed that political parties were “a necessity of popular governments, among which are counted the representative monarchies”; see Campuzano (1839): 10.  An overview of the meanings and practices of representative government in Spanish Liberalism though focused in the central decades of the century, in Sierra, Peña and Zurita Aldeguer (2006). 36  On the deficiencies of the 1837 Constitution from the perspective of a genuine constitutional effort aimed at defining citizen rights, see Clavero (1989). 37  Thus, for example, in the wake of the 1835 juntista movement, the progressive leader Joaquín María López insisted that it was time to stop “fearing popular action,” which he considered to have been “judged so many times with atrocious injustice” and “has been slandered” with the label of “demagogic and disordering.” However, he then proceeded to invoke the doctrinal recipe of representative government: “Let us know the influence and weight of opinion, and throw ourselves into its arms, for she is the queen of the world”; see DSC (04-01-1836): 273. On progressives within Isabelline liberalism in general, see Pan-Montojo (2006).

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second half of the 1830s adopted a new terminological dichotomy popular/unpopular that, duly inserted into the conceptual repertoire of the mixed constitution, activated the claim for  its democratic component. This could be done with the sole aim of rebalancing the constitutional framework; yet it could also be taken further, reading the attributes of quantity and force that the concept of democracy assigned to the people from within the doceañista imaginary of 1812: in this case, even if contained within the language of mixed government, an emerging anthropology of the citizen as a mobilized and participatory subject could be deployed by radical liberals in the making, while being presented by conservatives as a threat, especially considering that the Regency of María Cristina was from the start marked by popular juntista uprisings. In response, the conservatives would insist that not only popular participation, especially in the wake of mobilizations such as juntas, but popular representation itself should be severely limited in order to prevent a constitutional imbalance in favour of the democratic dimension, which would in turn entail opening the Pandora’s Box of revolutionary disorder.38 This dire forecast explains the opposition of the moderados to the elective city councils and to the maintenance of the National Militia after the Carlist War, the main issues dividing the two parties during the crisis of the Regency of María Cristina. In that context, conflicting discourses were developed that, taking advantage of the conceptual repertoire of the mixed constitution, came to reduce the political struggle under representative government to a choice between aristocracy and democracy.39 38  Evaluating it from the perspective of the mixed constitution, for the moderado ideologist Andrés Borrego, the democratic dimension of Spanish Liberalism was “invasive,” and therefore easily activated by radicals and demagogues determined to make “an energetic appeal to democratic passions,” a strategy that according to him had had its “rehearsal” in the juntista “stirring” of 1836 that unleashed the process leading to the promulgation of the 1837 Constitution, and which some among the progresistas supposedly wanted to replicate in order to impose their radical agenda; see Borrego (1837): 10 and 40, respectively. For more on this matter, see Sánchez León (2006). 39  According to an anonymous tract of 1840, “two principles divide Europe, the aristocratic and the democratic.” As a summary of the discursive dynamics of that context, its author maintained that Spain at the time already had a “popular government,” by which he did not mean a democracy but actually a system based on “taking into account the interest of the nation,” so that “the echoes of public opinion give their respective representatives a special touchstone for judging all issues to be resolved by the Cortes”; see Anonymous (1840): 40 and 29 respectively. On the progressives during the Espartero Regency, see Díaz Marín (2015); on the figure of General Espartero, see Shubert (2018).

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During the Regency of General Baldomero Espartero (1840–1843), another set of increasingly contentious issues arose that helped to loosen the identification between democracy and demagogy. On the one hand, the rise of political parties, an indispensable part of the mechanism of representative government, favoured the emphatic rejection of the old terminology that denigrated any form of organization threatening the unity of the political body as a “faction,” which in turn was a key component in the conventional definition of demagogy.40 On the other hand, the emergence of party leaderships favoured their legitimate inclusion in the doctrinal scheme of the “government of opinion,” thus removing the longstanding stigma associated with the popular tribunes of the classical tradition.41 These issues were nothing but the practical embodiments of the fundamental debate about who could be or could not be considered a legitimate representative of the people, for which debate the analogy between demagogue and democrat was ceasing to be useful, since it was increasingly falling prey to a purely partisan rhetoric.42 At first, a political and discursive context like this favoured the progressives, and especially the most radical ones among them, some of whom were already self-described republicans. In fact, the latter were affirming their political identity by claiming democracy as a legitimate constitutional dimension that dignified the sovereign people, which they achieved  by distinguishing it clearly from demagogy as a dangerous form of manipulation.43 The conservatives for their part, likewise since the beginning of the 1840s, were no longer striving to equate democracy with demagogy; instead, they focused their efforts on elaborating a new discourse that 40  On the interplay between faction and party in the Spanish liberal culture of the first half of the nineteenth century, see Fernández Torres (2014). 41  Already at the beginning of the reign of Isabella II, it was claimed that in ancient Rome “the tribune was the only truly democratic weapon to combat equestrian arrogance and the predominance of the military,” offering an interesting comparison with the emerging context of civil liberties: “Lacking newspapers, their speeches produced the same result, [being] frequently deliveries of a bold opposition”; see Bastús (1833): 485, emphasis in the original. 42  Thus, for example, a progressive ideologue reminded his conservative opponents that during the 1820–1823 return to the 1812 constitutional legitimacy, their adversaries at the time accused them of being “democrats, disturbers, anarchists,” that is, paradoxically “the same insults they are hurling in the faces of their antagonists today”; see San Miguel (1838): 22. 43  A publicist of the first generation of republicans and democrats pronounced that “the animal called demagogue is the worst of animals”; see Príncipe (1845): II, 495, emphasis in the original.

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contained an alternative definition of democracy as non-political. In this understanding, as a result of historical vicissitudes Spain was already a democracy by the crisis of 1808: in the words of the moderado ideologue and leader Joaquín Francisco Pacheco, in the domain of customs “everything is democratic in our country.”44 According to this interpretation, it would be dangerous to automatically and precipitously transfer this supposedly hegemonic socio-cultural democracy to the sphere of politics, because of the extreme risk of disrupting the entire constitutional edifice of Liberalism, reaching into its very foundations as a social order.45 The argument seemed to imply that conservatives, precisely when they began to secure parliamentary majorities from 1844 onward, had conceded defeat in the war over meaning and had accepted the adoption of democracy into the vocabulary of representative government—but that was not the case at all. Quite the contrary, on the eve of the European revolutions of 1848, voices arose proclaiming democracy as nothing but a passing ideological fashion and a rather obsolete concept semantic.46

Spain and 1848 as a Watershed in the History of the Semantic Field of Democracy In the spring of 1848, several of the remaining political systems of the Old Regime and other more recent constitutional governments were shaken by an unprecedented wave of popular mobilizations that involved experiments in citizen participation outside the liberal format of representation,  The argument was that in Spain “all was inclined” to democracy “from ancient times,” but since the arrival of the Bourbons on the Spanish throne, “everything was assured and confirmed in this way”; see Pacheco (1843): 145–46. More extreme interpretations insisted that from time immemorial “even the rules of the monastic orders were eminently democratic in Spain,” which led to the affirmation that “religious practices” had contributed to “democratizing the country”; see Marquis de Miraflores (1844): I, xviii. Less simplistic and historical was the comparative approach of Antonio Alcalá Galiano, for whom while in the United States “equality reigns in society and in the laws,” in Spain it did so “despite the laws, and due to the democratic nature of the customs”; see Alcalá Galiano (1843): 46. 45  Pacheco admitted that “there is no human force capable” of containing “the torrent of democracy,” so that there was “a danger” in “wanting to slow it down more than the march of events allows”—but even more perilous was “desiring to advance it through disorderly agitations”; see Pacheco (1843): 146 and 140, respectively. 46  Indeed, a publicist considered that the “doctrines” that had put their faith “in the number” as the “the steering force” of society, although they may have formerly induced “hallucinations (…) in moments of enthusiasm or frenzy,” yet they “have fallen, true enough, into a sort of abeyance”; see Roca and Cornet (1847): II, 285. 44

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in addition to growing demands for universal male suffrage.47 Suddenly, the elements which different discursive and institutional processes had been separating and subordinating to representation came back together in a transnational mobilization capable of simultaneously influencing most European settings. The Spanish case once again stands out in this regard because Isabella II’s Spain was in principle unaffected by the general political crisis raging across the continent—largely due to the harshness of the pre-emptive repression orchestrated by General Narváez.48 However, despite the maintenance of order, the tremors were profound in the discursive and ideological terrain. To begin with, it is striking that what prompted these was not the fall of the monarchy in France and its replacement by a democratic republican regime, nor the agitation of the Chartists in favour of universal suffrage in Britain; nor the Central European revolutions, and their dreaded descent into disorder: what unleashed fears among the bulk of Spanish liberal elites were the events in Italy. In the heart of the Vatican states, a popular uprising resulted in a short-lived republic that, among other measures of self-government, divested Pope Pius IX of his temporal power and established a political system which, in addition to recognizing freedom of confession, instituted universal suffrage, and in a particularly telling way: by invoking the concept of “pure” democracy from the repertoire of the Western political tradition.49 This appearance of a republic in the very centre of the papal monarchy, a symbolic point of reference for all Catholics, had a profound effect on Spanish liberals, especially the most conservative among them. An entire confessional culture was suddenly reeling after the loss of power and authority of the pontiff over the city in which the heritage of Roman civilization had coexisted for more than a millennium with the hegemony of 47   On the Revolutions of 1848  in their European setting, see Haupt and Langewiesche (2001). 48  On the Spanish 1848 and the pre-emptive repression led by General Ramón María Narváez, see Cabeza Sánchez-Albornoz (1981); in its constitutional dimension, see Petit (2001). 49  The decree that served as a constitutional framework for the experiment in urban selfgovernment stated in its Article 3: “La forma del governo dello Stato Romano sarà la democracia pura e prenderà il glorioso nome di Repubblica Romana” [The form of government of the Roman State will be pure democracy and will take the glorious name of the Roman Republic]. This republican regime lasted barely five months, from February to June 1849; see Severini (2011).

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the Church. In a metaphorical but very meaningful way, the “city of God” seemed to yield place definitively to the city of men, and with it a whole universe of metapolitical and infrapolitical referents were kneeling down at the feet of political freedom in general and a participatory citizenry on the move in particular which empowered as well dangerous social forces in its wake. In effect, the city par excellence of classical Antiquity did not pass into the hands of a moderate, acquisitive bourgeoisie but into those of artisans and the “lower sort” of people rallying behind a programme of self-government developed and disseminated by radical tribunes. If this was terrible enough from the perspective of the Catholic creed in general, in the Spanish context the danger was all the more urgent due to the intimate analogy between two Catholic monarchies bound by historically rooted confessional ties. At the very least, the proclamation of the Roman Republic represented the failure of post-absolutist Spain as the defender of Roman Catholicism; but from more fundamentalist confessional positions, the establishment of democracy in Rome could in fact be identified with the failure of Liberalism as an alternative order to the Old Regime. Above all, from the perspective of the traditional political imagination in which forms of government succeeded one another in a cyclical fashion, the establishment of democracy could easily be interpreted as the prelude to an incipient plebeian tyranny, and thus one might expect that this could be presented in discourse as demagogy regaining prominence as synonymous with both democracy and anarchy. And so it was initially: in the parliamentary sessions dedicated to interpreting and evaluating the events that were taking place across Europe, the most conservative among the liberals used the concept of demagogy in reference to the first phases of the chaos into which nearby countries seemed to be descending, and Italy in particular. But its use did not stop there: the word acquired much more profound and ominous connotations as the Roman crisis of 1848 was revealed to be a signpost of the radicalization of conservative thought in an overtly anti-liberal direction. Indeed, led by a group of neo-­traditionalists who had emerged among the moderados following the inclusion of old Carlist reactionaries after the war, deputies such as Juan Donoso Cortés, recently appointed Marquis of Valdegamas, as well as the Marquis of Pidal, broke the consensus among conservatives by openly drawing a connection between the crisis in the Papal states and Pope Pius IX’s efforts to find an accommodation with Liberalism.50  On this trend among Spanish conservatives, see Urigüen (1986).

50

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This ideological split gave rise to a systematic interpretation of the Europe-wide crisis of 1848, which Donoso Cortés would expound in the Cortes over the subsequent months.51 According to him, the origin of the recent social and political revolutions should not be imputed to the surfeit of Liberalism due to the influx of democracy: rather, the root cause of the disorder was within Liberalism itself, which had set in motion an unstoppable logic as a result of which all social and political powers were conspiring to steer the entire social order towards anarchy, threatening the survival of humanity.52 In this ideological turn, revolution appeared as the natural consequence of the unfolding of modernity, demagogy assumed a central place in the discourse as a fundamental  concept, and republican Rome epitomized the debacle of modern liberty.53 The significance of this vision has been widely acknowledged in the history of political thought: profiting from a tradition established by authors such as De Maistre and Chateaubriand, Donoso Cortés was placing modern reactionary thought on a solid foundation.54 Observed from the ­context of its production, however, the discourse contained two clear contradictions that could be exploited by its ideological opponents. First, in Donoso’s argument, the leaders of the popular uprising in Rome, such as Mazzini, were defined as demagogues despite the fact that the civil and political freedoms they introduced were amply protected by representative 51  On the antiliberal radicalization of the thought of Donoso Cortés, see Díez Álvarez (2003) and Rivera García (2014). 52  Summing up his position, Donoso Cortés would affirm a few months later that “in Europe today, gentlemen, all roads, even the most contrary, lead to perdition,” clarifying that “some are lost by giving in, others by resisting”; see DSC (30-01-1850): 1219. 53  In his famous speech of 4 January 1849, Donoso Cortés took on the entire revolutionary trajectory: he stated that the “noise” of the “catastrophes” had been heard “through the mountains of Switzerland, along the banks of the Seine, the Rhine, and the Danube.” In sum, freedom had been “vexed, mocked, gravely wounded by all the demagogues of the world,” even reaching “the banks of the Tiber” and the Quirinal Palace (symbol of the Pope’s temporal power), “which has been its Calvary.” All in the name of a revolution that the Marquis of Valdegamas explained as a compendium of the features of plebeian tyranny inherited from a long tradition: “the germ of revolutions is in the overexcited desires of the multitude by tribunes who exploit and take advantage of them”; see DSC (04-01-1849): 170. This piece of oratory is what has become known over time as the “Speech on dictatorship,” and can be found in Donoso Cortés (2000): 45–58; the quotations in 52 and 49, respectively. The specificity of the definition of revolution it contains can be contrasted to the conventional one in nineteenth-century Spain; see Fuentes and Fernández Sebastián (2000). 54  On the European genealogy of reactionary thought and Donoso Cortés’s place in it, see Spektorowski (2002); on its Spanish lineage, see Novella Suárez (2007).

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government in Spain and other countries; and secondly, once established, the democratic Republic of Rome had not undergone a process of degradation towards anarchy or widespread disorder, rather being ultimately destroyed from without by a coalition of foreign military forces, including a small Spanish contingent. These inconsistencies facilitated alternative interpretations of the same events, which came mostly from radical parliamentarians within the progressive party. Specifically, the deputy Ordax Avecilla, responding to the accusation from the conservative ranks that “demagogues have jeopardised the fate of Italy,” turned the argument around: if “by that name one had to understand a breed apart from other men,” he reminded his fellow deputies that “whenever popular governments are being established, the men who put themselves at their head are always given that epithet,” adding that “we ourselves,” pointing to all of his colleague parliamentarians, “have also worn it on our foreheads.” Accordingly, he concluded that therefore the name “rather than a mark of infamy, can sometimes be a mark of glory.”55 The scene might have been regarded as purely anecdotal if not for the fact that the progressive leadership was at that time experiencing a major internal split in its ideological and political orthodoxy. In fact, just a few days earlier Ordax Avecilla himself had taken a lead role in the elaboration and proclamation of the Manifiesto Progresista Democrático (Democratic Progressive Manifesto), in which for the first time in Spanish history a political organization openly advocated universal male suffrage for “all adult Spaniards who are able to read and write, had a fixed address, and a profession or trade that did not render them beholden to the will of another,” and urging the creation of a Spanish Democratic Party—an initiative whose consequences would come to transform the political scene of Spanish Liberalism over the next two decades.56 The parliamentary intervention of the first leader of the democrats can thus cast in another light and acquires new significance. These more radical progressives engaged in a process of identity self-affirmation, by undoing the contrast between “demagogue” and “tribune,” managed for the first time in more than a decade to put conservatives on the defensive with regard to their maximalist position that reduced politics to  See DSC (19-05-1849): 2311.  The document, signed by a group of deputies originally affiliated with the progressives, and presenting themselves as “the extreme left of the Cortes,” in Artola (1974): II, 43; on this process general, see Peyrou (2008); on the semantic and disocursive changes it brought about, see Chap. 6 of this book and Sánchez León (2021). 55 56

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representation and citizenship to a minority with the right to vote. At the same time, by questioning the inherited equivalence between demagogy and democracy, these radical ideologues were empowering those among the progressives who drafted the first political agenda in favour of democracy.

The Transnational 1848 and the Protagonism of the Crowd as a Subaltern Group “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” The opening lines of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published at the beginning of 1848 on the eve of the continental revolutions of the so-called Springtime of the Peoples, has gone down in history as a pristine expression of a world of ideological, political, and social transformations to come.57 Yet it is also widely acknowledged that the impact of Marx and Engels’s pamphlet in particular, and of revolutionary socialism in general, was quite limited in the context of that crisis.58 The sequence analysed above allows a comparison between what appear to have been utterly different dynamics in the wake of the upheavals of 1848. If according to Marx and Engels revolutionary Europe was menaced by the spectre of communism, in countries like Spain the main fear of a large section of the liberal elite was aroused by another image: that of an undesirable combination of citizen mobilization and popular political participation channelled by leaders of radical factions; democracy and anarchy, according to the language of the time, which found in the concept of demagogy their nexus of signification that emanated a plebeian tyranny associated with the greatest disorders. At the very least, therefore, a comparative approach allows to identify a discourse surrounding 1848 that was far more important in its historical context than has been acknowledged by posterity. Moreover, on this point the comparison with Spain is especially interesting for another, more specific reason. The revolutions of 1848 and their aftermath produced two definitions of dictatorship whose influence on modern political philosophy would be enduring and profound: the one coined by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, and the one that  See Marx and Engels (2005) [1848]: 14.  See Stedman Jones (2005).

57 58

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has retrospectively given a name to Juan Donoso Cortés’s parliamentary intervention, the so-called discourse on dictatorship. Although these are approaches from the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they have in common that both emerged from the same context of political and constitutional crisis. In fact, it is clearly evident that the rhetoric of the two Germans, on the one hand, and of the Spaniard, on the other, exhibit a series of analogies that go beyond the formal, albeit not without some marked differences. To begin with, both are based on strong conceptual dichotomies: just as Donoso Cortés opposes religion to politics, action to reaction (and resistance), providence to revolution, demagogy to freedom, salvation to damnation, and so on, Marx and Engels contrast private property to communism, the bourgeoisie to the proletariat, the communists to the socialists, the masters to the slaves, and so on. A second analogy is the historical projection of their theories about order and disorder: for Marx and Engels, history is reduced to class struggle; for Donoso Cortes, against revolution and anarchy there are two possible forms of repression, “the religious and the political,” which alternate over time as “a law of history.”59 This historical perspective also impinges on their respective definitions of dictatorship. Donoso Cortés emphasized that, just as in the ancient world “there could be no tyrannies on a grand scale,” in the modern world “the way has been prepared for a gigantic, colossal, universal, immense tyranny,” represented by the revolution, and which can only be confronted by another form of dictatorship, the “dictatorship of the Government.” The analogy with Marx and Engels is clear: in both cases it is a unified and unrestrained power impossible to resist or bargain with.60 59  So that “when the religious thermometer rises, the thermometer of political repression falls. And when the religious thermometer falls, the political thermometer—political repression, tyranny—rises”; see DSC (4-01-1849): 171 and Donoso Cortés (2000): 54. This does not mean that for Donoso Cortés there is no historical evolution. On the contrary, it is precisely the changing physiognomy of plebeian tyranny which demands the use of another term such as dictatorship to describe an essentially new form of government. Despite its very different connotation, Marx and Engels would have probably agreed with this interpretation, given that they equated dictatorship with the takeover of power by a section of society “organized as a ruling class,” arising from class struggle: in any case, for them “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”; see Marx and Engels (2005) [1848]: 14 and 26, respectively. 60  According to Donoso Cortés, these are the two kinds of responses to the transformations which have allowed Liberalism to appear as the final stage of History; see DSC (04-01-1849): 171, and Donoso Cortés (2000): 55. Also for Marx and Engels the power of the proletariat is unstoppable: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its

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The differences between the two discourses are undoubtedly also clear beyond their very contrary proposals. The principal one is that while Donoso Cortés conceives social and political logic in a dual key of action-­ reaction, Marx and Engels in their essay take advantage of a studied knowledge of the Hegelian dialectic.61 This produces the paradox that Marx and Engels’s manifesto in favour of the revolution acquires a much more optimistic tone than the apocalyptic panorama drawn by the originator of reactionary thought, for whom dictatorship is the only alternative to unprecedented moral, social, and institutional chaos, a harbinger of civilizational collapse. Moreover, Marx and Engels’s approach being highly normative, it leaves much more room for contingency, since the final outcome depends on the organization and the seizure of power by the proletariat, in the same way that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not the definitive endpoint of History, but a crucial phase of the revolution.62 In any case, in both philosophies of history, the relationship between dictatorship and revolution is constitutive. The first time he uses the term in his essay, the Marquis of Valdegamas refers to dictatorship as a “fearful word,” but still “not as much as the word revolution, the most fearful word of all.” On the other hand Marx and Engels, although they do not oppose the two concepts, would surely have concurred with Donoso Cortés that in the modern age dictatorship could become a “legitimate,” “good,” “beneficial,” and “rational government form of government that can be claimed  in theory as well as in practice.”63 The difference, undoubtedly own grave-diggers”; the “fall” of the bourgeoisie and the “victory of the proletariat” are “equally inevitable”; see Marx and Engels (2005) [1848]: 21. 61  Compare Donoso Cortés’s approach to this passage from the Communist Manifesto: “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself” yet “not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians”; see Marx and Engels (2005) [1848]: 18. On Hegel’s influence on the Manifesto, see Stedman Jones (2005). An elegant synthesis of the critical appropriation of Hegel by Marx, inverting the former’s idealism in the name of a new materialism, can be found in Cohen (2000): 1–28. 62  Both are, in any case, highly decisionistic and voluntaristic. With regard to Donoso Cortés, see Beneyto (1993); on the somewhat naïve voluntarism of the founders of Marxism compared to the more exigent next generation from later nineteenth century, see Mayer (1993). 63  See DSC (04-01-1849): 167 and Donoso Cortés (2000): 46. Although as a concept dictatorship is present in the Communist Manifesto—for example, when its authors define the political objective of class struggle as the “elevation of the proletariat to the position of ruling class”; see Marx and Engels (2005) [1848]: 175—the term “dictatorship of the proletariat”

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pronounced, between their respective approaches has to do with the bearer of that legitimacy in the name of which the dictatorship is imposed.64 In any case, both discourses subjected the traditional concept of tyranny to extreme pressure that made inherited meanings obsolete, forcing semantic change. The source of this tension is the linear and future-­ oriented temporality contained in the concept of revolution. Indeed, both for Marx and Engels and for Donoso Cortés, the revolution is not merely a historical episode or period but a stage in transcendent historical dynamics that only become comprehensible by breaking with the cyclical nature of the anakyklosis politeion. With modernity, despite its different names and connotations, demagogy has ceased to be a circumstantial unrest, becoming not only a form of government but an entire social order, as fearsome in itself as it is potentially enduring. With this tour de force, both discourses are notable for leaving behind the baggage inherited from political philosophy. Since 1789, revolutionary episodes and their sequels in the form of tyranny could be thought of as an extreme outcome, but always within the schema of forms of government inherited from the ancient world. Instead, in the texts of these authors elaborated in the context of 1848, tyranny, no longer seen as a passing or temporary event, demands attention as a systemic phenomenon. Moreover, for these authors it is necessary to acknowledge not only the interrelated nature of parts or institutions but also the need for a single and systematic theory giving meaning to historical phenomena as a coherent whole—hence also the invocation of historical laws, as notable in Donoso Cortés as in Marx and Engels.65 Finally, in was used for the first time by Marx only later, in a private letter to Joseph Weydemeyer from 5 March 1852; see http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1852/letters/52_03_05.html.  On the interplay between democracy, dictatorship and revolution in Marx’s thought, see Moscoso (2019). 64  Even so, when Donoso Cortés rejects the idea that revolution can be a weapon wielded by slaves and servants, the analogy between the two discourses remains: the revolutionary processes are in his view “sicknesses” afflicting “wealthy peoples” and “free people”; see DSC (4-01-1849): 173 and Donoso Cortés (2000): 49. Except for the pejorative slant, this characterization is close to that of the Communist Manifesto, although the latter privileges the historical role of a single class, the “bourgeoisie,” in the accumulation of wealth and the attainment of freedom. 65  Although the former places divinity above the laws, this does not prevent him from making constant reference to the laws of History that one is obliged to account for in order to understand and prevent revolutions. For Donoso Cortés, the problem of knowledge lies in the fact that, although “the universe is Governed by God,” this is done “by certain precise and indispensable laws called secondary causes,” so that it is a mistake to attribute “the causes of revolutions” to “the mistakes of governments” because they have to do with “something

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the Manifesto as in Donoso’s parliamentary speech the reminting of the concept of dictatorship is the product of lexical and conceptual innovations of great consequence. The most important of these is the ushering in of the universe of “society” as a meta-conceptual entity that designates a total reality and at the same time has to be thought of in the same way, as a whole.66 This key contribution is what allows to give Marx and Engels and Donoso Cortes a prominent position in the history of modern political philosophy, since in both cases they anticipate ideological discourses and conceptualizations extended in twentieth-century social theory. However, to conclude here would be simply to reproduce a teleological historical analysis in which aspects of the past interest only insofar as they seem to originate what is later considered as common sense, and naturalized in representations and social institutions. As such, the approach obscures the fact that in the context of their production those attributes went rather unnoticed, and instead their public highlighted other discursive ingredients. What had been at stake until then in the debates within the public sphere of Liberalism was the inherited separation between a people capable of exercising sovereignty and political rights, and a part of society conceived as unfit. Even in 1848 the main struggle continued to be over the appropriation of the meaning of the concept of the people, overcoming the distinction between “people” and “plebe” or crowd that the liberal ideologues most readily reconciled to the status quo, while radical leaders sought to merge in a single all-embracing concept to the point of erasing their relation as asymmetric counter-concepts. In such a context, “the political” and “the social” intermingled in the discourses without a clear distinction. providential”; see DSC (4-01-1849): 168 and Donoso Cortés (2000): 47, 48, and 49, respectively. The critique is analogous to that of Marx and Engels when they contend that “[t]he theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer,” although in their case such conclusions expressed “actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes”; see Marx and Engels (2005) [1848]: 22. 66  New representations of the subject may be derived from this, such as the proletariat in Marx and Engels, or not so new, such as the individual endowed with free will in Donoso Cortés, but the important thing is that their underlying foundation is no longer political economy or natural law respectively, but a properly sociological imaginary that in turn demands a scientific knowledge of society and one that assumes a clear-cut separation between state and society. On the emergence of this conception of society, see Cabrera (2017): 59–82.

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Now, while both the category of “society” and that of the “people” were intended to be holistic, the crucial difference between them is that only the latter included in its semantics the constellation of formal institutions. Indeed, although as a concept it designated a whole configured by customs, heritage, and traditions—albeit more readily identified and described than explained—the concept of the “people” in Liberalism incorporated a constitutional dimension that the concept of “society” has never even aspired to comprehend. This specificity was lost, or rather relocated with the change occurred in the wake of 1848, which split those semantic fields in two: on the one hand there appeared the metaconceptual entity of “society,” devoid of any constitutional dimension; on the other, the “people” remained as a constitutional and holistic substratum, but devoid of metaconceptual features amenable to systemic inquiry and so thereafter marginalized as an object of empirical observation and theoretical reflection. This was the long-term effect of 1848, but not its crucible. What was at stake in 1848 was popular protagonism in the social and political arena at the crossroads between the Old Regime in decline and the representative government in ascendance: not the protagonism of the working class, then scarcely identified as such, but also not of the “people,” as nominally sovereign but in practice reduced to its representatives and only visible through the refracted lens of “public opinion.” Faced with the advent of an exclusionary representative government, what was revived in 1848 was the centrality of citizen mobilization—normally activated only in states of emergency through revolutionary uprisings—and its connection with popular political participation in decision making, for its part a vestige of the assemblies of the Old Regime and now revived and renovated parallel to claims for universal suffrage. The fusion of these two dimensions of citizenship—social mobilization together with political participation—is what was then implied by the concept of democracy, in a combination that does not correspond to its current identification with universal suffrage and its reduction to a strictly legal conception of the subject. For what the conjugation of social mobilization and popular political participation made possible was the recognition of a hitherto excluded subject: the crowd or plebe. In fact, the Communist Manifesto and the “Speech on dictatorship”—beyond addressing a longstanding and deep-­ rooted discussion of the relationship between order and disorder—were alternative, and largely opposed, responses to how to address the relationship between mobilization, participation, and representation of the plebe

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in the modern age. Certainly, given their radical standpoints, both Marx and Engels and Donoso Cortés overflowed the bounds of the established conceptions of the “people” and the “plebe,” and by doing so contributed decisively to the shaping of the modern concept of society. But it is precisely here that we must avoid the teleology of taking into account only those semantic dynamics with a future. For in the mid-nineteenth century there was also a discourse centred on the plebe. If it has not entered the historiographic record as a factor of primary importance, this is largely due to the fact that in 1848 no one penned a manifesto expressly in the name of the plebe, as Marx and Engels did for the proletarians; and there was also no formal “plebeian party” to confront the dictatorial repression demanded by Donoso Cortés. However, the presence of that plebeian subject, although often in the negative sense as it appeared in the concepts of demagogy and democracy, questioned the very foundations of the liberal institutions no less than the projections of the emerging Marxist socialism or Donosian reactionary anti-liberalism. On the European scale, the spectre was not so much communism but that of popular protagonism, through a combination of citizen mobilization and political participation of those excluded by restricted suffrage who were only allowed to be represented. This popular-based citizen anthropology and radical leadership was then called demagogy, and its horizon of expectation was that of a tyranny of the mob led by demagogues normally drawn from the minority with voting rights. These were the issues gathered under the banner of democracy in 1848, in Spain and in many other European territories that fought to bring down the Old Regime or protested  against the recently established limited-suffrage Liberalism: while many frightened observer-participants saw plebeian tyranny as imminent, others just as many felt themselves on the threshold of securing and advancing the long-awaited popular role in politics.

Conclusion It is beyond doubt that the European Revolutions of 1848 functioned as a watershed in the emergence of radical critique to Liberalism as both an ideology and a social order. In that sense, Spain, although it was not affected by the political events of 1848, participated prominently in the broader discursive and cultural processes propitiated by that context. In the wake of the European upheavals Spanish liberals experienced an internal rupture, accelerating the expression of more radical positions among

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conservatives as well as among progressives. In addition, the attempt to give meaning to emerging events in Europe gave rise to rapid evolutions in the meaning of fundamental concepts of politics. To begin with, the crisis of 1848 helped to redefine demagoguery in an enduring fashion. Proof of this may be seen in the subsequent (1852) edition of the RAE dictionary, where demagogy incorporated a second meaning alongside the already existing “ambition to dominate [by leading] a popular faction”: “the predominance of the plebe,” that is, popular political protagonism or, in the terminology of the time, plebeian tyranny.67 But also, to the extent that demagogy and democracy were a pair of contraposed concepts, to define demagogy in this way was to block the possibility of defining democracy in the same way, thus consolidating the distinction between the two concepts, and in the practice dignifying the semantic field of democracy. However, in the short term the cost would also be a sharper distinction between the “people” as the foundation of democracy, and the “plebe” as the bedrock of demagogy. On the other hand, this consequence of 1848 allows us to underline that the political vocabulary of Spanish Liberalism clearly distinguished demagogy with respect to the activities of popular protagonism and reactionary leadership. In other words, in that political the Carlists could not be labelled as demagogues or anarchists.68 This conclusion supports a general reinterpretation of the historical meaning of the Spanish liberal order that is critical of the Great Narrative of modernity. Post-Franco historiography has reiterated a narrow and self-referential vision of Liberalism inherited from  late nineteenth century that essentially considers it the result of a successful struggle against the forces of the Old Regime, corporate privileges, and the absence of civil and political liberties. A study focused on the uses of demagogy within a broader scheme of the 67  RAE (1852): 224. Note that this definition of the dangers of democracy differs from the contemporary one given by John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, which revolved around the commonplace of the “tyranny of the majority,” and which has generally been the one to interest twentieth-century scholars; on these authors, see Kahan (1992). A critical approach to this commonplace in Ros Cherta (2011). 68  Carlism was not seen as a prelude to disorder but rather as a military faction formed by enemies of freedoms claiming the return of the Old Regime. On the other hand, most liberals did not believe that Carlism had spread and was mobilized by tribunes of the plebe. In fact, in contrast to the way popular uprisings were conceived, in the Carlist conflict the crucial ingredient of conspiracy remained as its distinguishing feature, while lacking an autonomous popular base, except in the Basque Country, Navarre, and parts of Catalonia; on this issue, see Martínez Dorado and Pan-Montojo (2000).

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semantics of disorder shows that the fear of a radical uprising from below was a threat no less menacing to Spanish liberals than the return to absolutism. Likewise, the conclusion serves to shed an important light on the problems of citizenship in the present. The analogy between the positions on the ideological extremes defined by the current use of the concept of “populism” was impeded in the nineteenth century by the availability of distinctive languages; that is, it was not as easy as today to confuse the popular protagonism of the radical hue with its reactionary counterpart. For the purpose of this chapter, the conclusion makes it clear that the “demagogy” of the nineteenth century is not the “populism” of the twenty-first. They are not functional equivalents; that is, they are not the same thing in a different context: they neither possess the same semantic content nor occupy the same place in discourse. Not by chance they are separated by no less than a century of institutionalization of democracy based on universal suffrage. However, it is possible to establish at least one analogy between the two concepts, legitimate since, to a large extent, demagogy is the predecessor concept of populism, or at least their stories as concepts may be seen as communicating vessels, so that the discursive rise of one has meant the decline in the status of the other. What these two concepts have in common is that both are shaped by the fear produced by visions of popular protagonism in conditions of political and institutional crisis of the modern age. In that sense, adopting a historical perspective allows us to observe that in the nineteenth century all those who advocated democracy were accused of being demagogues. It is well known that the barriers instituted in the nineteenth century against popular inclusion in politics have broken down in the course of the twentieth century, making it clear that the arguments supported by its detractors were based on prejudices, however elaborate they were in intellectual terms. Today no one would come to equate democracy or universal suffrage with instituted disorder or anarchy. This shows to what extent these concepts have served in the past to elaborate prejudices against popular participation in politics. Yet despite evolution in this issue, the popular role in politics continues in our present day to arouse all kinds of fears and repudiations. That is also the spectre hovering over Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the real spectre hidden behind the label of populism.

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Works Cited Albertazzi, Danielle and MacDonnell, Duncan (2008). Twentieth-Century Populism: the Specter of Western European Democracy, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Alcalá Galiano, Antonio (1813). Máximas y principios de la legislación universal, Madrid: Imprenta de Vega y cia. ——— (1843). Lecciones de derecho político constitucional, Madrid: Imprenta de D. I. Boix. Álvarez Junco, José (comp.) (1987). Populismo, caudillaje y discurso demagógico, Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. ——— (1990). El emperador del Paralelo. Lerroux y la demagogia populista, Madrid: Alianza. ——— (2014). “Virtudes y peligros del populismo”, El País (13-11-2014). Amador, Alfonso (2012). “50 días de mayo (Ensayo para una revolución)”, Valencia: Lover Films. Anónimo (1840). La voz de Setiembre, Madrid: Establecimiento tipográfico [available at www.bne.es]. Artola, Miguel (1974). Partidos y programas politicos, 1808–1936, Madrid: Aguilar. Backes, Uwe (2010). Political extremes: A Conceptual History from Antiquit to the Present, Abingdon (Oxon) and New York: Routledge. Bastús, Joaquín V. (1833). Suplemento al diccionario histórico enciclopédico, Barcelona, Imprenta de Roca [available at: https://books.google.es]. Beneyto, José María (1993). Apocalipsis de la modernidad: el decisionismo político de Donoso Cortés, Barcelona: Gedisa. Benigno, Francesco (1999). Specchi della rivoluzione. Conflitto e identità politica nell'Europa moderna, Rome: Donzelli. Borrego, Andrés (1837). Manual electoral para uso de los electores de la opinión monárquico-constitucional, Madrid, Imprenta de la Compañía Tipográfica [available at: www.bne.es]. Burke, Edmund (1910) [1790]. Reflections on the French Revolution, London and New York: Dent and Sons. Cabeza Sánchez-Albornoz, Sonsoles (1981). Los sucesos de 1848 en España, Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española. Cabrera, Miguel Ángel (2017). A Genealogical History of Society, Cham: Springer. Campbell, Peter (2004). “Conspiracy and Political Practice from the Ancien Régime to the French Revolution”. In Barry Coward and Susan Swann (eds), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe, from the Waldensians to the French Revolution, Aldershot: Ashgate, 197–212. Campuzano, Joaquín Francisco (1839). Los partidos, Madrid: Imprenta de Don Miguel de Burgos [available at: www.bne.es].

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Canovan, Margaret (1999). “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy”, Political Studies 47: 2–16 [available at https://ams.hi.is/wpcontent/uploads/old/Jungar%20-%20Trust%20the%20People.pdf]. Carantoña, Francisco (2012). “El levantamiento de 1808”, Ayer 86: 25–44 [available at http://www.revistaayer.com/articulo/349]. Castillo y Mayone, Joaquín del (1835). Los esterminadores, o planes combinados por los enemigos de la libertad para dominar la especia humana, bajo el mentido pretesto de defensores del altar y del trono, Barcelona: Imprenta de R. M. Indar [available at: www.bne.es]. Charle, Christophe (1999). Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siècle. Essai d’histoire comparée, Paris: Seuil. Chateaubriand, Renée (2005) [1822]. Memoirs d’Outre-Tombe, translated by A.S.  Kline, Poetry in Translation [available at: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/klineaschateaubriand.php]. Clavero, Bartolomé (1989). Manual de historia constitucional de España, Madrid: Alianza. Cohen, Gerald A. (2000). Karl Marx’s Theory of History. A Defence, Oxford: Clarendon Press. De la Torre, Carlos (1994). “Los significados ambiguos de los populismos latinoamericanos”. In José Álvarez Junco and Ricardo González Leandri (comps.), El populismo en España y América, Madrid: Catriel, 39–90. De Maistre, Joseph (1990) [1796]. Considerations on France, translated by Isaiah Berlin, edited Richard A. Lebrun, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleplace, Marc (2000). L’Anarchie de Mably à Proudhon (1750–1850), Lyon: ENS Editions. Díaz Marín, Pedro (2015). La monarquía tutelada. El progresismo durante la Regencia de Espartero (1840–1843), Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. Díez Álvarez, Luis Gonzalo (2003). La soberanía de los deberes: una interpretación histórica del pensamiento de Donoso Cortés, Cáceres: Diputación de Cáceres. Donoso Cortés, Juan (1835). La ley electoral considerada en su base y en relación con el espíritu de nuestras constituciones, Madrid: Imprenta de D. Tomás Jordán [available at: www.bne.es]. ——— (2000). Selected Works of Juan Donoso Cortés, edited Jeffrey P.  Johnson, Westport: Greenwood Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1991). “The Tribune of the People: A New Species of Demagogue”. In Harvey Chisick, Ilada Zinguer and Ouzi Elyada (eds.), The Press in the French Revolution, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 45–60. Fernández Sebastián, Javier (2004–2005). “¿Qué es un diccionario de conceptos políticos?”, Anales 7-8: 223–40.

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Fernández Torres, Luis (2014). “Partido/facción”. In Javier Fernández Sebastián (dir.), Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano. II: Conceptos políticos en la era de las independencias, 1770–1870, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, VII, 129–42. Flórez Estrada, Álvaro (1820). Representación hecha a S. M. C. el señor D. Fernando VII, en defensa de las Cortes, Madrid, Imprenta de Villalpando [available at: https://books.google.es]. Freeden, Michael (1996). Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fuentes, Juan Francisco and Fernández Sebastián, Javier (2000). “The Concept of Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Spain”, The European Legacy 5/3: 353–64. Furet, François (1981). Interpreting the French Revolution, translated by Elborg Foster, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. García Linera, Álvaro (2009). La potencia plebeya: acción colectiva e identidades indígenas, obreras y populares en Bolivia, Bogotá: El Siglo del Hombre/Clacso. Goñi Gaztambide, José (1980). “El Obispo de Málaga, Cañedo, en el Trienio Constitucional”, Hispania Sacra 32: 193–227. Goodhart, David (2018). The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griewank, Carl. (1979) [1949]. Il concetto di rivoluzione nell’età moderna: origine e sviluppo, Florence: La Nuova Italia. Haupt, Hans-Gunther and Langewiesche, Dieter (2001). “The European Revolution of 1848: Its Political and Social Reforms, Its Politics of Nationalism, and Its Short- and Long-Term Consequences”. In Dieter Dowe et al (eds.), Europe in 1848. Revolution and Reform, London: Berghahn Books, 1–24. Herzog, Don (1998). Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press. Kahan, Alan S. (1992). Aristocratic Liberalism. The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books. Koselleck, Reinhart (1985). Futures past. On the Semantics of Historical Times, translated by Keith Tribe, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press. Laclau, Ernesto (2005). On Populist Reason, London: Verso. Llorente, Juan Antonio (1814). Memorias para la historia de la Revolución española, París, M.  Plasans [available at https://books.google.nl/ books?id=xEMLAAAAYAAJ]. Luis, Jean-Philippe (2002). L’Utopie réactionnaire. Épuration et modernisation de l’État dans l’Espagne de la fin de l’Ancien Régime (1823–1834), Madrid: Casa de Velasquez.

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MacMahon, Darrin M. (2002). Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-­ Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. “Manifiesto de la Junta Provisional a las Cortes” (1820). Madrid: Imprenta de Vega y cia [available at https://bvpb.mcu.es/es/consulta/registro.do?id=403878]. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1988) [1525]. Florentine Histories, translated by Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press. Miraflores, Marqués de (1844). Memorias para escribir la historia contemporánea de los siete primeros años del reinado de Isabel II, Madrid: Viuda de Calero [available at https://archive.org/details/memoriasparaescr01mira/page/n6/ mode/2up]. Martín Patino, Basilio (2012). “Libre te quiero”, Madrid: La Linterna Mágica. Martínez Dorado, Gloria and Pan-Montojo, Juan (2000). “El primer carlismo, 1833–1840”, Ayer 38: 35–63 [available at https://www.jstor.org/ stable/41324940?seq=1]. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (2005) [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. In Marx/Engels Selected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, I (1969), 98–137. [available at www.marxists.org: 14–34]. Mayer, Robert (1993). “Marx, Lenin, and the Corruption of the Working Class”, Political Studies 41/4: 636–49 [available at https://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1993.tb01661.x?journalCode=psxa]. Mintner, Terrance J. (2006). The Ideology of Conspiracy in Renaissance Florence, Madison [WI]: University of Wisconsin. Moliner Prada, Antoni (1997). “El anticlericalismo popular en el Bienio 1834–1835” Hispania Sacra 49: 497–541 [available at http://hispaniasacra. revistas.csic.es/index.php/hispaniasacra/article/view/646]. Moscoso, Leopoldo (1988). “Los límites de la profilaxis social en la Europa ilustrada del sur: un estudio comparativo”, Arqueologia do Estado, Lisboa: Crítica, 235–57. ——— (2019). Karl Marx y la Comuna: democracia, dictadura y revolución, Madrid: Postmetropolis Editorial [available at https://postmetropolis.com/ leopoldo-a-moscoso-karl-marx-y-la-comuna-democracia-dictadura-yrevolucion/]. Moscoso, Leopoldo and Sánchez León, Pablo (2017). “Encrucijadas del entusiasmo: la transmisión de la identidad revolucionaria, 1789–1917”. In Juan Andrade and Fernando Hernández Sánchez (eds.), 1917. La revolución rusa cien años después, Madrid: Akal, 53–82. Novella Suárez, Jorge (2007). El pensamiento reaccionario español (1812–1975): tradición y contrarrevolución en España, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Pacheco, Joaquín Francisco (1843). Estudios de legislación y de jurisprudencia, Madrid: Imprenta de la viuda de Jordán e hijos.

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Pan-Montojo, Juan (2006). “El progresismo isabelino”. In Manuel Suárez Cortina (ed.), La redención del pueblo: la cultura progresista en la España liberal, Santader: Universidad de Cantabria/Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 183–208. Panizza, Francesco (2005). “Introduction”. In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, London: Verso, 1–31. París Martín, Álvaro (2017). “Los voluntarios realistas de Madrid: politización popular y violencia contrarrevolucionaria”. In Pedro Rújula and Javier Ramón Solans (eds.), El desafío de la revolución: reaccionarios, anti-linberales y contrarrevolucionarios, Granada: Comares, 89–106. Petit, Carlos (2001). “1848: Tranquilidad constitucional de España”, Historia Constitucional 2: 201–12 [available at http://www.historiaconstitucional. com/index.php/historiaconstitucional/article/view/125]. Peyrou, Florencia (2008). “La formación del Partido Demócrata Español: ¿crónica de un conflicto anunciado?”, Historia Contemporánea 37: 343–72 [available at https://www.ehu.eus/ojs/index.php/HC/article/view/3022]. Polybius (2013) [1889]. The Histories of Polybius, translated by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh, London and New York: Macmillan [available at http://www. gutenberg.org/files/44125/44125-h/44125-h.htm]. Príncipe, Miguel Agustín (1845). Tirios y troyanos. Historia tragi-cómica-política de la España del siglo XIX, Madrid: Imprenta de D. Baltasar González [available at: https://books.google.es]. RAE (Real Academia Española) (1732). Diccionario de la lengua castellana, Madrid: Real Academia Española [available at www.rae.es]. ——— (1832). Diccionario de la lengua castellana, Madrid: Imprenta Real [available at www.rae.es]. ——— (1852). Diccionario de la lengua castellana, Madrid: Imprenta Nacional [available at www.rae.es]. Reichardt, Rolf (2001). La Revolución francesa y la cultura democrática: la sangre de la libertad, translated by Carlos Martín Ramírez, Madrid: Siglo XXI. Rivera García, Antonio (2014). “Nineteenth-Century Spanish Counter-­ Revolution: The Critique to Liberal Parliamentarism and the Praise of the Traditional Constitution”. In Kari Palonen, José María Rosales and Tapani Turkka (eds.), The Politics of Dissensus: Parliament in Debate, Santander: Universidad/Mac Graw-Hill: 127–47. Roca y Cornet, Joaquín (1847). Ensayo crítico sobre las lecturas de la época en la parte filosófica y social, Barcelona: Imprenta de A. Brusi [available at [available at: https://books.google.es]. Romá y Rosell, Francisco (1767). Disertación histórico-político-legal sobre los colegios y gremios de Barcelona, Barcelona: Tomàs Piferrer [available at: https:// books.google.es].

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CHAPTER 5

Time: The Fatalist Loop—Historical Culture and Popular Empowerment in the Mid-­ Nineteenth Century

Citizenship, Historical Culture, and Empowerment: Now and Then The status of time in civic culture is variable. Citizens frequently show a lack of interest in the past, while on other occasions they are passionately incited by it. Abruptly, historical accounts acquire an uncommon relevance, the present comes to be explained through the legacy and decisions of the past while possible futures are projected based on previous collective experience. In other contexts, meanwhile, references to the past are easily rejected as outdated, contributing nothing to assessments of the present—even hindering projection towards the future. Both attitudes involve imaginaries of time that are constitutive of citizen identity, so that both can be developed simultaneously and coincide in the same context, especially in the face of crises and political conflicts that

A preliminary draft of this text was presented to the workshop “Experiences of time in the 18th and 19th centuries” (Sao Paulo, April 2014) organized by the Grupo Historicidad of the network Iberconceptos (http://www.iberconceptos. net/grupos/grupo-historicidad). I am grateful to the organizers for the invitation and to the participants for their comments. © The Author(s) 2020 P. Sánchez León, Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5_5

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polarize public opinion.1 Thus, when the popular mobilization subsequently known as 15-M engulfed Spain in 2011, there was general talk of adanismo (“Adamitism”): it was understood that the emergence of a new collective subject was a sharp rebuke to the political experiences of several generations of activists, who were accused of having been unable to stop the degradation of democratic institutions that in turn has facilitated the return of the spectres of a bygone oligarchy and local electoral corruption or caciquismo. Yet at the same time another approach to the current problems has related the understanding of their true significance to their inclusion in an emerging critical perspective on the so-called regime of 78.2 Spanish political culture after 15-M is not original in this regard; it does however embody a latent tension typical of the condition of citizenship: on the one hand, the feeling that corruption is an almost natural phenomenon insofar as it appears to be deeply rooted in social mores; and on the other, the awareness that it has reached a point where it is both mandatory and possible to act collectively to prevent institutional degradation. The first is a rather pessimistic outlook and is usually accompanied by a flat image of the past according to which those above always impose and maintain their power on the rest, confirming that exploitation and domination have been a part of the history of mankind until the present time. The second, on the other hand, is a reflection of the optimism that often accompanies processes of increasing civic engagement and assumes that the present cancels out all previous experience, superseding it or rendering its legacy obsolete, to the point that looking back to the past can condition a future that is promising precisely because of what it leaves behind. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a rough balance was maintained between these two attitudes because historical accounts, although clearly influenced by the ebbs and flows of enthusiasm related to changing economic and political trends, remained tethered to the idea of progress.3 In the face of the crisis of this overarching cultural myth, the understanding of these psychosocial substrata becomes more necessary as they are also becoming more unpredictable. 1  A general essay on the relationship between institutional time management and the attainment of citizen rights can be found in Cohen (2018). 2  For a reflection on Adamitism in context of the Spanish 15-M movement, see FernándezSavater (2014). Examples of critiques of Spanish democracy framed in historical accounts of the 1970s are presented in Monedero (2011) and Rodríguez (2015). On this interpretive shift in the Spanish public sphere, see Juliá (2017) and Gustran and Quiroga (2019). 3  On this cultural myth, see Nisbet (2009) [1981].

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The purpose of this chapter is not to reflect on these referents of modern historical culture.4 Rather, it is a look at the historical culture that informed the first Spanish citizens in the nineteenth century, in order to show the importance that historical narratives had at that time in the construction of the meaning of popular participation in politics. The theme revolved around the field of what we now call public history, that is, the ways in which the work of historians addresses present-day problems and is directed to non-specialized audiences.5 In this sense, the chosen process pioneers the first appearances of professional historians in the public sphere. The focus of attention is limited to a contemporary concept that may at first appear inappropriate or irrelevant: fatalism. However, this is an epistemological term that addresses one of the fundamental dimensions of temporality in a world of citizens, in which contingency is at once assumed and needed to control: the causality of human events, both the historical and the foreseeable future ones.6 Fatalism is a neologism that has not received great attention from specialists: it hardly appears in the dictionaries of current political philosophy and does not figure prominently in manuals of epistemology.7 It is presently not one of the fundamental concepts of philosophical-political thought. By contrast, as I hope to show, his status was starkly different in the first half of the nineteenth century, and not only in Spain. Although over time it declined as a concept in the emerging science of knowledge, the term was used extensively in discourse. This offers an opportunity to address an overlooked but extremely important aspect of cultural change— the case of semantic fields that never become culturally central, and yet there is evidence of their prior extensive use and conceptualization. Fatalism is one of those stymied concepts whose displacement or 4  On pessimism as an attitude to knowledge and action, not necessarily entailing fatalism nor the adoption of conservative ideological postures, see Stevens and Michelsen (2020): 1–12; on enthusiastic optimism as a defining feature of modern revolutionary agency, see Moscoso and Sánchez León (2017). 5  On the emerging field of public history, see Sayer (2015). In the Spanish context public history is closely linked to the debates on memory, truth, and justice about the massacres of civilians during and after the 1936–1939 war; see an example of these debates in Faber, Izquierdo Martín and Sánchez León (2011). 6  A survey of the intellectual roots of fatalism is presented in Ruda (2016); a study of the fundamental shift in the approach to this issue, as accomplished by Machiavelli, in Forte (2002). 7  Its semantic field is more related to theology and classical philosophy; a summary of its historical uses in Rice (2018).

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­ arginalization in modern culture needs to be properly addressed. m Moreover, it also merits attention because of the light it may shed on the ways the meanings of terms and concepts used in public debates are appropriated by competing ideologies in their struggles for hegemony.8 In the case at hand, these debates took place in a context prior to the establishment of democracy, making the comparison with the present interesting and worthwhile. The Diccionario  of the Royal Spanish Academy defines fatalism as a “belief that all events are inescapably predetermined by fate,” and adds a second meaning as an “attitude of resignation to one’s inability to change adverse events.”9 Although its meaning refers to questions of causality and predictability, these two dimensions of knowledge intermingle with value judgements that diminish its scientific reliability, which surely justifies the subaltern position of fatalism within the modern culture of knowledge. The aim here is precisely to show how fatalism acquired this double connotation in Spanish culture, epistemological but above all moral, a process that may be said to have culminated around the mid-nineteenth century. However, the approach here adopted is not reduced to studying an episode in the history of science, but rather seeks to relate epistemological questions to ideological debates of the time. In the period that concerns us—that of historical Liberalism based on representative government and limited political rights—such disputes ultimately revolved around the limits of popular participation in politics. In that context, fatalism became a widely used term in the historical culture of Spanish citizens, since confronting the issues of causality encouraged thinking historically about tensions in the relationship between popular mobilization, participation, and representation. This hypothesis may be tested by recourse to the contemporary press, which is the main source of information for this study whose aim is to elucidate processes of appropriation and usage of fatalism by public writers of various ideological persuasions.10 In the mid-nineteenth century, the concept of fatalism featured in different spheres of culture—from aesthetics to the philosophy of history—as a trope within discourses defending the notion of free will in human behaviour against those who emphasized the role of telluric and  On this relationship in general, see Freeden (1998).  See RAE (2011). 10  The field that we are engaged in is, in short, that of pragmatics; see a survey in Ariel (2010). 8 9

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inexorable forces inscribed in historical processes. In this context, conservatives initially had a clear advantage in their use of the term as a way to stigmatize their political opponents who spoke for the excluded plebs, that is, the most radical progressives and especially the emerging republicans and democrats. However, around the middle of the century the semantic scope of fatalism was drastically altered: an interpretative framework came to the fore that, focusing on the moral dimension of political action, highlighted the role of the popular classes in history. These new conditions facilitated a pragmatic consensus that came to deprive conservatives of their discursive advantage, contributing in turn to the consolidation of an imaginary about time shared by all the strands of Spanish Liberalism, one that coalesced around the idea of progress. As part of that process, fatalism lost ground as a reputed epistemological concept. This shift was closely linked to the reactions provoked in the Spanish public sphere around the mid-nineteenth century by the political and journalistic activity of Juan Donoso Cortés, a pioneer of reactionary thought who was countered in the press by progressive writers experiencing on their part a process of ideological radicalization. The metaphor of a “loop” is thus meant to encapsulate the entropic dimension acquired by the anti-liberal discourse that was emerging from among the ranks of moderados, as well as the response it elicited from republicans and democrats on the rise from the ranks of progresistas.

Fatalism in the Intellectual and Ideological Debates During the Isabelline Period Fatalism made its first appearance in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy in its 1787 edition, defined as “the doctrine of those who insist on the inescapability of fate, or destiny,” and a fatalist was labelled anyone “who attributes everything to fate, or destiny.”11 The following edition of the dictionary, published in the early nineteenth century, gives very different definitions: fatalism is now “an error of the fatalists,” so that the semantic load is transferred from the noun to the subject that embodies it, who appears as “[he] who denies the freedom in man, and in God the government of the world according to the laws of his infinite wisdom and providence.”12 By 1817 the error is elevated to the status of an entire  See RAE (1787): 150.  See RAE (1803): 921.

11 12

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“doctrine,” and the fatalist becomes that “who sees fate or destiny as the only beginning and cause of all things.”13 This definition is maintained in all subsequent editions of the first half of the nineteenth century. The so-­ called Diccionario Nacional or gran diccionario of 1853 reveals yet another major conceptual evolution: fatalism is no longer just a doctrine but also as a “system” associated with the fatalist, a term that can be used interchangeably as both an adjective and noun.14 It is clear that the available normative definitions considered fatalism as an epistemological concept of some importance that evoked an entire system of erroneous knowledge. However, the subsequent evolution of the term did not continue in the direction of greater conceptual depth and clarity: by 1884 there is a clear reversal, with the reinsertion of a distinct moral dimension that took the definition back almost to the pre-liberal period.15 In all of the editions, except in the most comprehensive one of 1853, the pessimistic connotation is absent; what all the definitions have in common is their reference to the determinism-free will dichotomy, as well as a tension between the binomials doctrine-system and error-­ superstition. This, together with the fact that in the dictionaries of the first half of the century the focus is on the adjective “fatalistic,” signals the potential politicization of the concept; but overall, the semantic field of fatalism in the nineteenth century seems to revolve primarily around the relationship between religion and knowledge. 13  See RAE (1817): 412. The definition adds that it is used as both an adjective as well as a noun. 14  The first meaning given is: “The one who attributes to inflexible destiny, to irrevocable fate, everything that happens in the varied course of life, seeing it as the beginning and cause of all the effects that impinge on created beings in some way”; this is followed by a second one: “He who considers destiny as the arbiter of the world, fixing in advance the good or bad fortune of all creatures, thereby denying free will, believing each man’s portion of good or evil is a necessity”; see Domínguez (1853): 786. A second meaning of fatalism is added as a figurative use: “Constant misfortune in all undertakings, etc.” This dictionary, the work of Ramón Joaquín Domínguez, added more than 4000 common words, but above all took pains to introduce technical neologisms from the arts and sciences, of which more than 80,000 were included; see Iglesia Martín (2008). 15  Fatalism is now a “vain and superstitious doctrine, according to which everything happens through the inescapable determinations of fate or destiny,” or an “erroneous teaching of those who believe that a mechanical law chains all beings, none of which has any freedom or agency.” For its part, “Fatalist” has been reduced to “he who professes the doctrine of fatalism”; see RAE (1884): 490. This definition has been maintained in all editions of the dictionary until the end of the twentieth century.

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In this sense, the genealogy of fatalism does not refer to the subtleties of theology but to a rather more cultural domain within confessional discourse: the differences between civilizations, in which one of the main points of comparison was religion. In particular, fatalism was one of the terms that Spanish liberals applied to Muslims for their beliefs. As synthesized in an 1840 newspaper article, the Muslim in general and the North African in particular was seen as “fanatic, slave, and fatalist.”16 However, the underlying theme of these assessments was not the differences between confessions but rather broader contrasts between cultures. The meta-­concept at stake here was that of ethnocentric civilization, together with free will as a counter-concept of fatalism.17 On the other hand, the transposition of this microbehaviour to the macro-institutional level gave shape to one of the fundamental tropes of the imaginary of the mixed constitution, namely despotism as a form of government: it was considered that the Oriental did not recognize “as sovereign” the one who was the most able, but rather “the strongest,” and therefore he “worships as a God the one who commands him, recognizing him as divine by virtue of being strong”; hence “despotism” was “the only form of government that [the Oriental] conceives.”18 These excerpts illustrate that throughout the first half of the century the semantic field of fatalism had been loaded with meanings that went beyond theology and religious discourse. In fact, from early on the term was also extensively used in aesthetic theory, then in the process of adapting the artistic canon of Romanticism  to a monarchical-­constitutional  See Boletín de Cirugía (30-12-1840): 282.  A moderado press commentator summed up this thesis of the superiority of Christian peoples—equated with the West—compared to those of the East, identified generically with Islam but also with other confessions such as Mazdaism, by stating that “for the Asiatic, man is a being whose will is enslaved by God, that is, [he is] the slave of force,” which led the writer to conclude that “pantheism is his religion, and fatalism his dogma”; see La España (01-07-1848): 4. On the concept of civilization in Spanish culture from the mid-eighteenth century to this period, see Fernández Sebastián (2008). 18  Accordingly, “passive obedience is the only political dogma he proclaims”; see La España 63 (01-07-1848): 4. Another contemporaneous article, from a newspaper less inclined to the moderados, made the comparison between “modern societies” and “those that fall on the other side of the Cross.” In the view of its author, the latter were based on the negation of three elements that Liberalism, by contrast, affirmed: the unity of the human race, the distinction between civil and religious power, and free will; see El Español 996 (22-09-1847): 2. An example of the rhetorical function of “Asiatic” despotism in the articulation of Spanish Liberalism in the opening decades of the nineteenth century can be found in Simal and Martykánová (2015). 16 17

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order that was presented as an alternative to classical citizenship. The moderado ideologue and intellectual Alberto Lista, for example, in a newspaper essay published in 1839, stated that to the extent that “the Greeks believed in fatalism” it could be said that “they loved the republican government and hated the monarchic,” and hence their poets “inculcated that fateful principle and painted the Kings as hateful.” Against this, according to his view the “new playwrights” should develop a very different aesthetic, since “today’s society shares neither the beliefs nor the sentiments” of the citizens of the classical Greco-Latin polis. This identification of fatalism with the Western civic tradition had clear implications for the relationship between art and politics in general—and more particularly for the status of the creative artist, because in the aesthetic canon of Romanticism the artist was seen as a representative of the people, in the double sense of channelling but also of shaping the moral attributes of citizens.19 In that sense, a main concern for theoreticians such as Lista was that among the modern authors there were many who “in their dramas” still “aspire to instil” in the people feelings and values presided over by something “as deformed and squalid as immorality.” In particular, those who delighted in “watching horrors, detestable habits, crimes, and suicides” and “listening to invectives against the Kings and priests” were prey to “anachronism”—these, in his judgement, “should have been born in the time of Robespierre and Marat.”20 This attempt to disassociate from what appeared to be remnants of a conception of citizenship proper to the French Revolution was nothing but evidence of the fear that the latter was gaining adherents among the general public. In a context like that of the mid-1830s, marked by the emergence of urban juntas, what was really being exorcized with such discourse was the ideological sensibility of doceañismo, which Lista tried to combat by denigrating the authors that sought to inflame what he considered as base passions: the aesthetics of “ugliness” (feísmo) and exaggeration was thus related to political disorder and paced in a genealogy that ultimately led to the revolutionary Terror. For these intellectuals, adopting fatalism in literature meant to nourish in the public sphere a tradition of political culture that 19  On this issue, see Sánchez León (2006). On an overview of the historiographical debates on the canon of Spanish Romanticism, see Flitter (2005), whose interpretation highlights its conservative and Christian features, in contrast to those scholars who link it to militant Liberalism; see on these latter Navas Ruiz (1990). 20  See Semanario Pintoresco Español 13 (31-03-1839): 8.

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at the very least sat uncomfortably in the new constitutional order, and that needed to be cut off before acquiring greater popular role.21 It is therefore reasonable to assume that art theorists from the 1830s who most often resorted to the term “fatalism” were ideological conservatives. Faced by authors who constructed personas based on “the religious dogma of fatalism, and the political one of hatred for the monarchy,” moderados chose to promote others willing to conceive of a protagonist “unbound and unburdened by the Christian principle of free will.”22 In sum, they strove to establish a literary canon that would contribute to a new citizen anthropology capable of resolving the dilemma posed by the 1808 political crisis and its 1812 constitutional aftermath, which had resulted in aesthetic debates that revolved around the rather traditional extremes of destiny and freedom. This development of the concept of fatalism in the arts was marked by two important events in the first years of the regency of María Cristina: on the one hand, the publication and theatrical performance of the drama Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino [Don Alvaro, or the power of destiny] by the Duke of Rivas, released to great acclaim in 1835, and, above all, the suicide of the writer and journalist Mariano José de Larra in 1837.23 In the wake of the latter event, even the less conservative liberals deployed a battery of rhetorical devices to attract youth who, so it was feared, might be tempted to imitate the fate of someone who was now presented as a “man without religion” and a victim of his “fatalistic nature.”24 In an environment in which conservatives were taking over the reins of aesthetic orthodoxy, fatalism could be utilized to qualify the most radical options. This was so first of all because hopes for the future did not favour a pessimistic perception. Thus, in the wake of the 1837 constitutional debates an essay was published featuring a representative synthesis of the hegemonic imagination about time, stating that it was “absolutely impossible to hold back” the “triumph [of] liberal ideas” and “much less to prevent it [altogether].” However, inherent in this optimism was the risk of falling 21  On an overview of the influence of Jacobin republicanism on the political culture of Spanish liberalism, see Miguel González (2004). On the aesthetic theory of Alberto Lista, see García Tejera (1989); see also Metford (2006) [1939]. 22  See El Instructor 80 (08-1840): 15, emphasis in the original. 23  On the work of the Duke of Rivas and its status among the Schicksaldramen, or romantic dramas of destiny, see Caldera (1986). On the reverberations of the death of Mariano José Larra (1807–1837), see Navarro Domínguez (2006); on his stance as an artist in the aesthetic scenery of the time, see Álvarez Barrientos (2011). 24  See Eco del Comercio 580 (24-07-1844): 4.

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into determinism, so much that in relation to “the great social ideas,” its author proposed to find a balance between those who saw in history nothing but “the marvellous path by which societies progress towards their perfection” and those others committed “to the defence of the enlightened fatalism of our time,” which he identified with “those who see in each event, whether happy or calamitous, a visible human improvement.”25 In principle, then, the concept of fatalism was used without a negative tinge to underline the primacy of human will before the horizon of expectation that opened up with the new institutional framework and its promises of individual wealth and collective civilizational uplift. However, from early on there was also a perception of fatalism as a “negative passion” that was ingrained in the customs of the Spaniards and which could be a brake on the advancement of market relations. In turn, this engendered the sense of a cultural heritage as a result of which the “heads of state” had been carried away by “a certain fatalistic spirit,” and the assumption that it was “written” that “Spain will not attain the heights of other nations.”26 Nevertheless, confidence prevailed overall in that relying on the “inspiration of the people” was a sure means to leave behind a “historical fatalism” that “by mere verbosity some call intelligence.”27

Conservative Hegemony and Antipopular Prejudice Coinciding with a national and international context in which doubts began to arise about the fulfilment of the expectations of representative government, by the early 1840s the uses of the term fatalism only increased in the public sphere. These also began to change. They did so as liberals across the political spectrum felt that reforms were being blocked and both major parties were experiencing unexpected setbacks in government. In that context, the press was rife with critical assessments lamenting a “historical and revolutionary fatalism” that was preventing the parties from learning from their mistakes.28 The general verdict was that the three  See El Español 752 (23-11-1837): 3.  See Eco del Comercio (17-05-1835). The expression comes from an article on the state of mining in Spain. 27  See El Español 635  (29-07-1837): 2, emphasis in the original. The article, entitled “Property and Intelligence,” called for establishing these two referents as criteria for political participation. 28  See El Español 694 (30-09-1846): 3. This verdict applied to all political factions, but the “fatalism of revolutions” was associated primarily with the leaders of the progresistas, who were accused of having fallen prey to the myth of an inexorable “destiny of peoples”. 25 26

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processes crucial to the establishment of the “representative system,” those of 1812, 1820, and 1836, had ended in factional struggles and divisions among the liberals, a prelude to the “confusion,” the “disorder,” and in the final instance the “death of the institutions”; in these historical reflections, it was stressed that all parties, albeit “unintentionally,” had contributed to the “ruin” of those experiments in political freedom, which was only explicable by their being “impelled by the hand of fatalism.”29 By the mid-1840s, fatalism had become integral part of the discourse of Spanish politics and its ideological struggles. But the context also encouraged greater conceptual reflection on “fatalism” and its usefulness as a category for understanding different cultural traits. In this context, in a manner analogous to what had happened with aesthetics in the previous decade, the history of philosophy took centre stage in discourse, since it allowed focusing on the dichotomy destiny/free will. Thus, in an article titled “Fatalism,” published in 1842 and representative of the wide reception and social diffusion of the concept among the educated public, the history of culture was reduced to the belief that there are “events that in the essence seem inevitable [and] as if predetermined by Providence.”30 In the face of this use of the term, the conservatives benefited from their greater closeness to a Catholic confessional orthodoxy, then in the process of being reaffirmed as many among Carlist had ended up accepting the constitutional framework of Liberalism and were devoting their energies to struggling for hegemony in the public sphere.31

29  In this regard, the crisis that had brought an end to the progressive governments of the Trienio Esparterista or Espartero’s Triennium (1840–1843) was seen as the worst instance of “demoralization” and of “all kinds of evils and vices”; see Eco del Comercio 1145 (19-05-1846): 2. 30  The author reached as far back as the Chaldeans, and traversed ancient history and its “systems” up to Seneca, pointing out as “sectarians” those who still “maintained that fatalism is an eternal and unchangeable consequence of events” seen as “determined by divine will”; see Semanario Pintoresco Español 40  (30-10-1842): 6, emphasis in the original. Another essay, entitled “Religion and Morals” but dedicated to Stoicism in particular, stated that the latter was weighed down by “its dogma of fatalism,” which according to the author “subverted the rational basis of virtue”; see El Católico 287 (12-12-1840): 818. 31  Catholicism was defended not only against the followers of Muhammad but also before the Protestants of Northern Europe, whose doctrine of predestination was dismissed by a writer as an example of “fatalism,” being “the cause of so much controversy among the Muslims as it is among Christians”; see El Instructor 74 (2-1840): 17. On the re-confessionalization orchestrated by the moderados since the early 1840s, and which culminated in the concordat with the Vatican Holy See of 1851, see Alonso (2014).

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On the other side of the ideological divide, fatalism was not so openly denounced, although progressive authors shared in a common interpretive framework and focused on the same disciplines. An essay also from the early 1840s, from a newspaper inclined towards radicalism and underlining “the importance of the study of philosophy [for] the disciples of the doctrine of true progress,” traced modern individualism and socialism back to the seventeenth century, since when according to its author materialism and spiritualism had produced “two philosophical schools, two theological, two moral, two political and two literary [schools].” The origin of this split, however, had to be sought in “theology,” a discipline that since ancient times focused on  “notions of divinity rooted” from “two mutually exclusive principles”, namely: “Mystical or material fatalism on the one hand and pantheism on the other.”32 The revealing thing about this simple dichotomy is that the progresista author did not choose between one of the two options, and thus left the initiative in the hands of the conservatives, determined to discredit both fatalism and pantheism at once. Indeed, in that same context, the most overtly confessional press echoed accusations of blasphemy and heresy issued from Rome against a gang of so-called humanitarian writers who “create so much noise in our day” and among which he singled a select group of promoters of “pantheism” and “fatalism.”33 The issue at stake went beyond simple intellectual or academic controversy, since the defendants were in fact the followers of Pierre Leroux, a Saintsimonian philosopher who was an advocate of communitarianism and associationism—but also of democracy—in the France of the July Monarchy.34 In sum, among Spanish conservative liberals, fatalism was increasingly seen as of a sort of crucible of all “dangerous” doctrines, cultural and political. The nickname “fatalist,” on the other hand, had become the main criterion by which to judge contemporary political philosophers. By the mid-1840s, a consensus was already emerging among contemporary writers that was essentially a synthesis of the dominant reductionist

 See El Guardia Nacional 1732 (26-09-1840): 3.  See El Católico 1336 (11-11-1843): 3. 34  Leroux is considered the minter of the modern concept of socialism in French political culture, although he initially used the term in a pejorative sense; on his life and work, see Viard, J. (1982) and Viard, B. (2009). On the French Saintsimonian intellectual current, see Picon (2002); on its social and moral aspect, see Pimbeam (2013). 32 33

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interpretations in the fields of theology and philosophy of history.35 However, it was in historical writing that the use of the designation “fatalist” was most prominent in ideological struggles, as a disparaging label. This was due in part to the notoriety attained in those years throughout Europe by Adolphe Thiers, whose interpretation of the French Revolution was prone to being branded as fatalistic by his own countrymen as well as foreigners.36 Even a rather favourable assessment conceded that in the pages of his famous Histoire de la Révolution française, the leading role was given to “an irresistible instinct” that, although “essentially just,” was “violent in form,” and had in equal measure been driving “the assemblies,” “the parties,” and “the men.”37 The success of Thiers and his followers made them an easy target of the most conservative sectarians. Thus, a summary of a conference “on the different historical schools, from antiquity to the present day,” focused its attention on the now quite unabashedly named “French fatalist school,” which, in addition to Thiers, also boasted the prominent historian François-Auguste Mignet.38 While recognizing its value, the speaker stressed that the work of these authors “has in recent times caused great harm” through “the immoral and pernicious example of extolling crime,” but above all for “arguing for its inexorability, not as a just punishment of divine Providence” but “as a necessary link in the chain of events.”39 In

35  A book entitled El porvenir del mundo [The Future of the World], and which was advertised as serving to definitively overcome the “errors,” the “preoccupations,” and the “biases” of “all the authors of philosophical, religious, and political systems,” argued that the great figures in the history of philosophy, from Aristotle to Rousseau through Hobbes, Luther, Newton, or Mably, although “they have come close to discovering some truths” yet they had not “entirely dispensed with blind fatalism” or transcended the ideas inherited through “education and religious beliefs,” assuring its author to potential readers that his work had finally managed to reduce these to “clear and simple principles that form a body of convincing doctrine, clear, accessible to the people” and “impartial” with regard to every “party, school [of thought], or belief.” 36  Published in twelve volumes beginning in the 1820s, the work has traditionally been considered  by twentieth-century historians as typical of the “liberal interpretation” of the French Revolution; see Hobsbawm (1990), pp. 50–56. On Thiers himself, see Valance (2007). 37  See Diario Constitucional de Palma 16 (16-04-1845): 3. 38  On the latter, see Knibiehler (1980). 39  See Revista Barcelonesa 23 (23-01-1847): 10. In charge of the conference was Antonio Benavides y Fernández Navarrete, a jurist who shortly afterwards would be appointed Minister of the Interior and later would become president of the Royal Academy of History; see Peiró and Pasamar (2002): 120–21. According to Benavides, the pernicious effects of this

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light of this rebuke of determinism, it was not difficult to surmise a connection between popular mobilizations, disorder, and criminality. In addition to growing control over the teaching of classical disciplines, conservatives in the 1840s assumed the role of moral arbiters of the customs and manners of the middle classes. They did it through the discursive use of the concept of fatalism in another cultural domain then in vogue, located between the moral dimension and the science of human behaviour: phrenology.40 As in other liberal cultures of the time, phrenology was becoming a fairly popular fashion among the wealthier and middle classes. However, in Spain its promoters and practitioners were soon subjected to persecution on several fronts, from the pulpit to the court. Condemned as an offence against morality and a medical fraud, the discursive polemics between the promoters and the detractors of phrenology also reached the non-specialized press. The latter accused the phrenologists and their advocates of being “materialists” and “necromancers,” but also “fatalists.” The former for their part adopted a defensive posture, and instead of claiming an independent space for scientific knowledge, they were willing to subject science to a reinvigorated theological doctrine of providence.41 In the wake of these debates, rather than being attacked in the name of religion, determinism was in fact re-appropriated in a way that placed the religiously providential as a telos of the scientifically secular.42 Thus, a text from the early 1840s proposed a stylized analogy to explain the “coincidence revealed by contemporary history” between religion and social change, according to which, just as “the power of God” shone “especially in the

determinism that had been infiltrated in philosophy by advocates of revolution had to be counteracted with the penal code in hand. 40  Phrenology studied the relationship between brain structure and the human character, and in its vulgar versions claimed to offer insights into human personality based on a study of physical features, especially the face; on the cultural impact of this trend, see Cooter (1984). In Spain, and especially in urban Catalonia, it had adherents and practitioners who were struggling to achieve for the new science the same status attained by chemistry or mathematics; see Nofre Mateo (2007). 41  The conclusions of one of these debates were published in several Catalan newspapers, in which the defenders of phrenology finally ceded ground, accepting that God “demands of us—since he has given us reason and the desire to know—that we should discover His sacred will not only through revelation, but also through the objects that surround us, and that we should obey Him, submissive and reverent”; see Revista Balear 20 (17-03-1844): 3. 42  On the nineteenth-century accommodation between religious beliefs and worldly institutions in various fields of social and civil life, see Ahlstrom (2004) [1972] and Burleigh (2005).

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tempests of the sky,” it was in revolutions that “his providence was most clearly evident.”43 Speeches of this kind anticipated the convergence between the theological and scientific epistemes and the search for synthesis between their conceptions and hierarchies of causality. However, in the short term, the offensive launched in the public sphere by militant Catholic writers continued, reaching beyond historical narrative and explanation up to the very core of the established conception of time in Liberalism. In a representative article published in El Católico as early as in 1842, its author noted the tendency to assume that every century had unique “spirit” that gave meaning to it. Yet he cast doubt on whether the current century was “so uniform and constant,” blaming the lack of interpretative unity of the times, not on the freedom of opinion or the complexity of the ongoing social and institutional changes, but on the liberals’ obsession with leaving their mark on the present; for, unlike their forebears, who in his opinion had had a no less “clear mission” and an equally “transcendental outlook,” but had not purported to “permeate everything with their spirit,” the moderns fell into discord when they took matters into their hands that depended upon divine providence alone.44 To the extent that discord was the main foreseeable outcome of democracy in such discourse, this reasoning contained an implicit political dimension; but in addition, rather than looking back on the past this kind of discourse aimed at predicting the future. Thus, the article concluded by imagining a time ahead when individuals “would march meekly and without design under the finger of God,” freeing themselves from having to “scrutinize the secrets of the future.” Such security in the face of the challenges of a dynamic society and a morality threatened by the temptations of enthusiasm was grounded in a strong religious faith, which Catholic moralists believed they could offer with claims of efficacy to those who wanted to place themselves away from both the “frivolous and inconsequential man”—“fatalistic in everything,” to the extreme that they “are not even the absolute lords of their own actions”—as well as from  the

43  To the point that, according to its author, if providence “did not exist” it would be necessary to “invent it to explain the vicissitudes of Spain in these last ten years,” since on more than one occasion “even the greatest among sceptics has turned his eyes heavenward with a shrug”; see El Católico 1250 (17-08-1843): 1. 44  See El Católico 984 (9-11-1842): 1.

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“alleged philosopher” who denounced “Providence” for the injustices that were an attribute of modernity, especially in form of “inequality.”45 This latter “social issue,” increasingly spoken of in the Spanish public sphere from the mid-1840s, marked the limits of a discourse that, given the unfulfilled predictions of abundance and improvement, offered a rather traditional inventory of religious maxims hardly acceptable to an increasingly learned audience.46 Nevertheless, the drift of this discourse could not easily be controlled even by the Catholic writers who mostly aired it. Before the revolutions of 1848 broke out, the confessional press had even criticized the policies of moderado majorities in the government for being based on an unacceptable “doctrine of accomplished facts” that could be qualified  as “a new fatalism” which conferred “a providential existence upon all facts,” forcing the good Christian “to resign to recognizing it as such.”47 Faced with this sort of “practical atheism” that threatened to destroy “the belief in eternal and immutable laws,” the approach implied a rather odd combination of fatalism and providence amounting to a disquietingly pessimistic discourse on the future that awaited representative government.

The Discursive Loop of Juan Donoso Cortés in Context This range of discursive tendencies was to be shaken by the events of 1848 and their aftermath. However, it should be noted that despite the utter disturbance of the political order throughout much of the continent, the tide receded quite rapidly. There was a relatively swift return to normalcy, judging by a newspaper article scarcely a year after the beginning of the revolutionary cycle, in which it was claimed that “terror” was “disappearing from the political atmosphere,” giving way to “a comforting and benevolent optimism” that also had “all the symptoms of being a  See El Heraldo 1322 (8-10-1846): 2.  The author suggested that economic differences should not be seen as a passing “disturbance” but neither as a “disorder of nature” or a “counter-principle,” but as the opportunity to identifying through them “one of the ends of Providence with regard to the direction of moral world, which is at stake in this life of preparation and testing for a better world.” On the emergence of the semantics of the “social question” in the first half of the Spanish nineteenth century, see González (2013); about its insertion in the public debate, see López Alonso (1992). 47  See El Católico 1742 (04-01-1845): 1. 45 46

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spontaneous outbreak in the public opinion” for being “the product of a universal feeling,” much more typical of the “noble propensities of the human heart” than the “fatalism” of a few months prior.48 It would seem that the Spanish public sphere showed in this context a remarkable capacity for self-containment and self-regulation, partly at least because the newspapers related to the conservative government had no interest in agitating public opinion with dire forecasts. As described in Chap. 4, it was in those convulsed months that Juan Donoso Cortés delivered his seminal “Discourse on dictatorship” in the Cortes, in which decisionism is mobilized to defend the concentration of power in the head of the body politic in response to the fear that the mob unleashed by demagogic tribunes would end up dismantling the entire social order. The concept of fatalism is conspicuous by its absence in this pamphlet. However, over the following two years Donoso Cortés published a series of texts full of dark forebodings about the fate of Liberalism and humanity as a whole. What is striking about this is that the moderado party, which Donoso Cortés was a member of and over which he exerted significant influence, retained a solid majority in parliament over the years that followed. His ideological stance had undoubtedly been shaped by the European events of 1848, but it became evident at this time that the author followed his own ideological trajectory, increasingly detached from its political context, to the point of coming to stand against the dominant position within his own party.49 In Donoso Cortés’s apocalyptic forecast, the concept of fatalism came to occupy a central place. However, this was not because he sought to flirt with fatalism—his stance was rather based on a radical advocation of free will as the singular heritage of Catholicism, of exceptional value in the face of the challenges of the modern world. However, this extreme demand for human freedom led the Marquis of Valdegamas to analytically decouple it from providence, turning away from the prevailing view in the liberal intellectual milieu, both within and without the Catholic sphere.

 See La España 482 (4-11-1849): 3.  The metaphor of the intellectual loop is useful for making sense of the phenomenon. An analytical tool for understanding it is the category of “path dependence” developed by evolutionary thinkers: once a course of action has been undertaken, subsequent actions are constrained by past decisions, which predefine future choices; see Mahoney (2000). 48 49

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In fact, his views had been crystallizing prior to 1848. A year before the European crisis Donoso Cortés caused astonishment in the press not accustomed yet to his increasingly extreme positions when he identified revolutions with a conservative force, and stated that in the Spain of the moderado parliamentary majorities the revolution had been installed in power, the result of which was something that could well be described as anarchy.50 Thereafter the tone kept rising towards a crescendo. The stance of Donoso Cortés expressed in his texts of the months following the spring of 1848 is summarized in a letter addressed to the Count of Montalembert, published in the national press when the tide of upheaval was finally receding. By emphasizing the perverse effects of modern society’s loss of a moral compass, Donoso Cortés essentially rewrote the history of the previous 300 years as a period of extreme contradiction: great discoveries in the sciences and the arts that went hand in hand with the abandonment of theodicy, so that the present century ended up picking “the bitter fruit” of the “exaggerated individualism of the Protestant reform,” which had ultimately given rise to “a foolish fatalism.”51 This fatalism attributed to third parties was certainly a common trope among Catholic propagandists. Elaborating from this, the ideologist went on to point out that in the final instance fatalism could not be imposed, since it “is not and can never be a complete system,” but was on the contrary “the denial of every system, and the destruction of every doctrine” in the face of free will, the attribute that distinguished man from inferior beings, allowing humans to interpret providence for salvation. What was quite new  in this discourse, however, was the Marquis’s repeated insistence on the fact that, in the social, institutional, and moral conditions produced by the Liberal order, man was condemned in advance—a claim that went beyond even the most extreme views of the most traditional

50  The intervention elicited an ironic observation from one commentator on the parliamentary session: “After the moderado newspapers had told us that their men had drowned the revolution; after Mr. Donoso had told us, in the preliminary speech of the draft reform of the Constitution [of 1845] (…) that with the constitutional reform the revolutionary elements had been extirpated, now it is said in a public [forum of] parliament that the revolution is as strong as power, and anarchy as order…”; see La Esperanza 747 (03-03-1847): 1, moderado appears underlined in the original. 51  The effects of this moral disorder were extreme, felt “in every order of ideas, in metaphysics, in science, in history, in politics, in literature, and in customs”; see La España 391 (22-07-1849): 2.

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conservatives at the time.52 In fact, just a few days after it was published, the press that used to welcome the Marquis’s texts was driven to call out the “mistakes of Mr. Donoso Cortés” in contrasting Catholicism and philosophy in this manner.53 Yet things would still get worse. 1850 began with a parliamentary debate between former minister and conservative deputy Antonio Benavides and the Marquis as part of the discussion on annual budgets: the former defending the government’s position, and the latter criticizing it. The progressive press did not spare any epithets in response to Donoso Cortés’s claim that, despite the apparent respite from popular uprisings, Europe faced a looming, certain, and inevitable catastrophe: “The image painted for us by the Marquis has left us frozen with fear, and he appeared like the angel of death announcing to the people the end of the world,” commented one journalist. He added that he did not understand how a man “so religious and such a good believer” could devote himself to preaching “fatalism in the political order,” a doctrine that the commentator considered “the most baneful, the most anti-Catholic” and that cast “peoples as well as individuals into the abyss of despair.”54 Even more remarkable is that in the following days a conservative deputy, Luis González Bravo, while referring to Donoso Cortés as “an eminent speaker who looks at the issues from the most elevated perspective” went on to reproach him for drawing a panorama of “endless social cataclysms” derived from a “fatalistic law” by which the only possible diagnose 52  For example, a text from the Catholic press of the early 1840s, entitled “Atonement and Regeneration” and that took the intervention of Providence to the extreme in human affairs, justified the greatest hardships as part of a grand design: “After the iron that cuts, comes the balm that heals, and until the doors of the abyss are closed over us, after the atonement, regeneration always comes.” Summing up: “God made the nations curable”; see El Católico 1250 (08-17-1843): 2, emphasis in the original. Previously, its author had asserted that “to understand the law of expiation is to understand but half of the designs of Providence.” 53  More specifically, they amended his view by reminding him that, speaking of the original Sin, the Bible “does not say that the corruption of man after the Fall was radical, essential, universal, as Mr. Donoso assures us and the Protestants teach, claiming that fallen man cannot, relative to divine things, think, believe or want anything”; see La España 398 (31-07-1849): 3, emphasis in the original. 54  See El Clamor Público 1713 (31-01-1850): 1, emphasis in the original. A few days prior, another newspaper described Donoso Cortés as “the soothsaying and fatalistic deputy who insists that the triumph of evil over good is certain and indisputable,” anticipating that “the glory in the [parliamentary] debate” would be claimed by his opponent; see El Observador 601 (21-01-1850): 3.

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was that “there is no cure for the patient,” in reference to modern society produced by Liberalism.55 As can be seen, Donoso Cortés’s position forced even his own ideological brethren to mobilize new discursive resources that in turn included value judgements on temporality. Behind this sudden disagreement among conservatives was the need to adapt their discourses to the post-1848 panorama. According to a commentary in the moderado press, it was necessary to begin with the acknowledgement of “the dire influence” that “revolutionary principles” had been exercising over peoples and nations, “perverting their ideas and customs and provoking the serious conflicts that now threaten us.” According to the writer, among these pernicious principles were individualism, selfishness, rationalism, and the advent of democracy, all rejected as “incompatible in their extreme development with the existence of societies”; among them in the foreground at present was the so-called social issue, the result of a “transformation [among] the most complete and universal in modern history,” in the face of which there was no point “awaiting the inevitable catastrophe with arms crossed and [an attitude of] grim fatalism.”56 However, such adminitions failed to alter the course of the Marquis of Valdegamas, who continued with his campaign of apocalyptic declamations, although with counterproductive effects. The final break occurred in May 1850, when the press in general echoed an article published in the French newspaper L’Ami de la Religion and that would circulate widely throughout Spain and Europe. The title spoke for itself: “Fatalism among Christians.”57 Directed against Donoso Cortés, it elicited a written response from the latter that was published in at least three major newspapers in Madrid and Barcelona. Donoso defended himself against the accusation of being a “fatalist” with philosophical-theological disquisitions in which he further emphasized the independence and superiority of 55  Distancing himself from this approach, the orator admitted that the said patient was indeed in a very serious condition, and that “perhaps in the time scale there is no cure,” but in the very next line he insisted that “in the time we have to live, if it does not have a cure, there are [available] at least very powerful palliatives”; see La Esperanza 1645 (06-02-1850): 1. 56  See El Ancora (2-04-1850). In words from another newspaper of the contrary persuasion, “the question of work is the great social question, and by social we mean it is the great question of our time”; see El Clamor Público 1169 (07-03-1848): 2. 57  Its author was a French Catholic, royalist, and conservative, François-Joseph de Champagny, Marquis of Cadore, founder of the Revue Historique and perennial candidate for the French Academie in his capacity as a historian; on the journal L’Ami de la Religion, see Dougherty (1991).

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free will over divine will. However, he did not confront the main objection made by his French colleague: that he was a “fatalist” not so much for his recourse to inexorable fate in explaining past events, but because his discourse exuded pessimism about the events to come. This crucial shift in the connotation of the term was appreciably favoured by the irruption in this context of another temporality, as exceptional as it was of utmost urgency: that of the biological cycles of the royal family. Indeed, in January 1850 the Royal Household announced that Queen Isabella was “expecting.” In a liberal culture that was heir to the organicist and Christological matrixes such as the Spanish, it did not take much for the news to activate the secular metaphor of the king’s two bodies, equating the hope of an heir with the reproduction of society as a whole. In fact, the event was received in the press as a manifestation of a Providence that called for the regeneration of institutions and the overcoming of obstacles standing in the way of a promising future for Spain and humanity as a whole.58 Apart from this, that year the entire press (and not only its conservative sections) was replete with reflections on 1848 as belonging to the past, not simply due to the linear passage of time but because, observed through the oblique prism of that fateful year, the present appeared ever more as perhaps unpredictable but not fraught with fear, so that in the words of one opinion maker, in 1848 “the horoscope for the present year [i.e. 1850]” would have anticipated a “very different [state of affairs] to what has transpired in actuality.”59 From this perspective, it was legitimate to imagine that the public was, if not yet at the dawn of a new era, at least able to clearly discern a before and after, having left behind the worst of the revolutionary upheaval. This disjunctive left no room for the controversial arguments of the Marquis of Valdegamas. Indeed, the debate within the conservative ranks was settled by adopting a rather eclectic stance on the relationship between determinism and free will.60 Around the middle of the century, texts that 58  The opportunity was taken to extend congratulations to all those who “do not see [the world and its future] through the prism of fatalism or happiness,” and who “like us, have faith in human consciousness, in the science of government”; see La Época 290 (14-02-1850): 2. On the metaphor of the king’s two bodies, corporal and symbolic, see the classic work by Kantorowicz (2016) [1957]. 59  See El Áncora 169 (18-06-1850): 1. 60  An editorial that summarized the history of the two systems of causality, that of free will and fatalism, proposed this means of reconciling the two: “Humanity marches along the

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reaffirmed the referential universe of Christianity in moments of tension abounded, emphasizing its capacity to “deploy, in the context of great crises, all the resources of its intrinsic power to save societies that were under its aegis.”61 In this literature, religion was seen to be a “slow” but also “constant” and “imperishable” agent, which made it ideal as “a guard against the ravages of destructive elements that are gradually introduced” into modern society. Thus, against an anarchy that was discernible in the short term, religion appeared as a long-term safeguard, so that, rather than pessimism, there was a conviction among outspoken Catholics that they would be able to mould liberal institutions and moral habits to reflect the natural order of Creation. True enough, Donoso Cortés’s polemical columns and parliamentary speeches unleashed a tidal wave in the Spanish public sphere of the mid-­ century, overflowing the retaining walls of its captive audience. But they also focused the attention of their adversaries. As Valdegamas’s articles were reprinted and commented on in the press, the opposition orchestrated a veritable “witch-hunt” against this celebrity ideologue, promoting replies and elucidations loaded with irony.62 The progressive press also scoured foreign publications for commentary that would cast the so-called “prophet of Extremadura” in a bad light: for example, a reference from The Times was extrected  in which, after mentioning that according to the “theories” of Donoso Cortés, “Europe was headed towards its doom”—unless, that is, divine punishment restored the principle of authority—it was said that the recent parliamentary speeches of paths indicated by Providence and undergoes transformations and changes that are the result of infinite causes and countless accidents; God distributes in time the most suitable men to fulfil their respective destinies; it is up to men not to ignore them and to carry out their mission fully to avoid great misfortunes for themselves and those to come”; see El Áncora 95 (05-04-1850): 1. However, the article went on to sum up the epistemological tensions of the times, arguing that “in the historical and social sciences” there were “two systems that are equally exclusive and extreme”: one “imputes everything to the will of man,” and another “subordinates everything to the force of things”; after denominating them respectively as “the system of immobility” and “the system of fatalism,” the article concluded that both “entail serious dangers if they are applied to the current circumstances.” 61  See El Áncora 45 (14-02-1850): 1. 62  For example, a press release on the construction of “imposing cemeteries” in large European cities made the tongue-in-cheek observation, in a veiled reference to Donoso Cortés, that the “immense capacity” of these new osuaries “seems to confirm the impression of one modern writer and orator that the end of the world is nigh”; see El Popular 1156 (05-03-1850): 4.

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Valdegamas were the “masterpiece of a man whom despair has completely deprived of his reason.”63 Even more, this campaign had some not easily foreseeable consequences. In particular, it enabled the re-appropriation of the concept of fatalism in very different senses on opposite sides of the ideological divide. Thus, an article in the progresista press wondered what might happen if one day the military power lauded by the moderados as a bulwark against revolution were to be infected by popular enthusiasm and “fraternize and join forces with the revolutionary mob.” The text ended with a question that openly invoked the recent ideological drift of Donoso Cortés: “Will we descend into barbarism as the celebrated Marquis of Valdegamas has so emphatically warned us?”64 The implied negative response indirectly served to uphold the value of popular political mobilization and participation with a view to the future.

The Semantic Turn of Fatalism in Historical Narrative Surely unintentionally, Donoso Cortés did much to sink the fortunes of fatalism as a modern epistemological concept in Spanish culture. But the evolution of this semantic field did not depend solely on the controversies that raged in the press around 1850. In the meantime, the use of the concept of fatalism was extended to other discursive fields, where it was also often simply conflated with pessimism. Notable among these were the critiques of inherited customs that began to appear as an impediment to modernization despite the Copernican change in the political constitution resulting from the establishment of Liberalism. Already in the debates of the 1830s, behind the identification of the Muslim creed with fatalism was an insecurity as quintessentially modern as it was seen as uniquely Spanish. Thus, one commentator, speaking of current affairs, conceded that in general “there is a certain fatalism that one must adhere to.”65 Far from having been eradicated among the  See El Clamor Público 1779 (16-04-1850): 1, emphasis in the original.  And he replied: “The future of European societies does not seem so sad and bleak,” claiming that if governments replaced “justice with arbitrariness, discussion with censorship, the satisfaction of legitimate needs with resistance,” the peoples “would not sink into barbarism, but would advance towards their perfection and prosperity”; see El Clamor Público 1753 (16-03-1850): 1. 65  See La Revista Española 289 (4-08-1834): 3. 63 64

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Spaniards by being part of  the Christian culture, fatalism seemed to be inherent in the character of the people, and assumed to be the product of a long collective experience of insularity and self-absorption. In fact, it was argued that ingrained in Spanish culture was a series of prejudices that prevented it from joining the ranks of the major European nations, not least a foreboding of failure in the face of great challenges. Fatalism joined here with a concern with the “fanaticism of simple people” that threatened to maintain the commons stupefied with the imminent end of the world, inhibiting more optimistic attitudes, and nobler and more useful sentiments.66 Meanwhile, literary texts were published with characters or situations that popularized the term “fatalism” as a fashionably erudite disparagement used to refute pessimistic superstition.67 These usages of the term were largely aimed at the lower social strata. An article on the promotion of innovation in agriculture, after pointing out that farmers habitually rejected change based on the maxim—“if it was good enough for our grandparents, why not for us?”—observed: “This fatalism is engendered by the lack of incentive, which in Spain impedes every kind of progress.”68 However, the term was by no means confined to deal with the habits of a single social class, and seemed to invoke a truly national vice. Accordingly, there took hold increasing talk of a “ministerial fatalism” that along with “the most frightful anarchy in the administration” was considered by many as the cause of “the ruin of the country.”69 Although often in a more connotative than denotative sense, in these contexts the term had also become synonymous with pessimism. In general, the crisis of credibility of Liberalism starting in the second half of the 1840s favoured this widespread shift towards negative usages of the term. However, the relative decline in the perceived epistemological worth of fatalism would be largely due to the outcome of debates among progressives or liberal radicals. These polemics, which took place in an environment marked by a conservative monopoly on the use and meaning of the word, made it increasingly difficult to identify the concept with a historically deterministic way of thinking.  See El Clamor Público 1750 (13-03-1850): 2.  A decade earlier, the magazine Recreo literario published a written account criticizing superstitions that “although quite extravagant, they are still ingrained in persons of good judgment and education.” Its title, “Thirteen at the table, or the fatalist,” makes clear the chosen example; see Recreo Literario (1838): 102. 68  See El Español 964 (14-08-1847): 2. 69  See El Espectador 1373 (20-11-1845): 2. 66 67

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At the outset these debates were a settling of accounts with the so-­ called fatalist school of French historians of the revolution. Among other reasons, the change in perception among progresistas on the question of causality was due to the political trajectory of the most notable members of that school. Thus, the works of the inconstant Adolphe Thiers—who had re-emerged in the twilight of the July Monarchy with views far removed from his initial pro-bourgeois revolutionism—were now judged rather differently, so that, at the same time that his historical narrative was revealed as a rhetorical strategy motivated by personal fame, his status as a philosopher diminished.70 Seen from this emerging critical view, fatalism was nothing more than the distortion of a salutary principle of knowledge that had been placed at the service of a sort of modern revolutionary theodicy overly indebted to the Old Testament, and insensitive to the human costs of the struggle for freedom. At the height of the crisis of 1848, the settling of scores with the fatalistic tradition had been consummated among the ranks of the progressive liberals. Their main press organ—El Clamor Público [The Public Clamour]—that year included a caustic account of the political activity of the chameleonic Thiers that also passed judgement on his masterpiece. The author “is not a friend of the defeated,” claimed the article, and “defends them no longer when they are out of the limelight.” The conclusion was openly critical: “For [Thiers], faults or crimes, glory or disaster, everything is the work of fatalism. Nothing belongs to man, everything is the work of destiny.”71 Although the argument was not particularly original in the field of epistemology, the interesting thing is that the writer concluded with an assertion at the heart of which was an entire social and political imaginary: in his works, “one will search in vain for a word of sympathy towards the people.” Indeed, the recent experience of the European 1848 had revealed a feature that made the “fatalist system” 70  “Where are the doctrines of fatalism that some judges, said to be impartial, claimed to have found in the first work of Mr. Thiers? It is hard to sustain [this accusation]; perhaps a polemical argument in the History of the French Revolution has been taken for a system of philosophy or politics”; see Diario Constitucional de Palma 16 (16-04-1845): 2. This critique of a historian of the present time willing to “excuse pointless crimes with an irresistible fatalism” was not an isolated example, but would be reiterated and go as far as classifying him as “head of a school”: although it was admitted that his work had merely revived “ancient theories,” it was pointed out that the problem was that “the disciples, as always happens, have outdone the teacher”; see Revista Barcelonesa 12 (25-04-1847): 8. 71  See El Clamor Público 1559 (26-07-1849): 4.

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completely unacceptable: its “coldness” in the face of the collective protagonist’s struggle for freedom. In sum, harm attributed to these authors was less in their works than in those who had been inspired by them to justify the marginalization of the majority of the population in the great political processes of modernity. From this  settling of accounts with fatalism progressives could strive for  a new consensus not only around historical causality but also with regard to the imaginary of time as a whole. On its part, Donoso Cortés’s fatalistic diatribes created an especially propitious environment for proposing alternative meanings of the concept. To do this, however, the three elements deployed in the Spanish debates over the concept of fatalism— human freedom, theological providence, and modern science—had to, if not quite resolve their mutual theoretical contradictions, at least hybridize discursively in a more convenient fashion. The texture for this new amalgam would come largely from the addressing of the past, since history was the scientific discipline in which theodicy could be reconciled with the imaginary of popular protagonism in History.72 Indeed, the task of bringing all these pieces together into a coherent narrative framework fell to a historiography presented as deontologically rigorous, yet without compromising its ideological bent, since in general revisionist historical accounts emerged from the liberal progressive and radical camp—including the democrats and republicans.73 The ground was prepared by José Amador de los Ríos as early as the mid-1840s in a series of publications that had a wide reception in the press. Reflecting on major historical figures and processes such as the reign of Peter the Cruel in the Middle Ages, he reasoned that those who followed “the fatalistic school in history” would say that “don Pedro was assassinated because that had to happen infallibly,” to which he responded by “partially rejecting the proposition” that the Castilian king had died because “Providence wanted the Spanish people to undergo such terrible trials, before showing its greatness to the world.”74 72  For a study of the relationship between the Romantic paradigm of action and the historical imagination in the Spanish case, see Flitter (2006). 73  An analogous process took place in France, gradually taking hold over the first half of the nineteenth century; see Furet (1994). 74  See El Laberinto (16-03-1845): 7. There is still no scholarly monograph on the work of this famed and prolific author, surely the greatest literary critic of the central decades of the

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The refutation of fatalism was only partial in this discourse, but precisely for that reason it was also able to incorporate elements of the providentialist argument. On the other hand, this eclectic solution did not undermine the author’s progresista alignment, and he was at pains to stress that it was still possible to extract from past events “lessons, invariably rewarding for the future,” which he understood in line with the “spirit of nationality that inspires all peoples.” Certainly, this identification with the nation mitigated the strictly popular slant of the narrative, but other texts and authors from the mid-century would be more explicit in this regard, while taking the same approach to the issue of causality. The same year, 1850, saw the publication of El levantamiento de las Comunidades de Castilla [The Rising of the Comunidades of Castile], a work by Antonio Ferrer del Río destined to become a classic, and extracts from which appeared in the press—including the introduction, which contained passages such as the following: God save me from admitting fatalism in history! I do not want to spare myself the trouble of investigating the causes of the events: I heartily abhor the system of celebrated writers who report without indignation the greatest cruelties and show no enthusiasm in the presence of the most sublime and meritorious acts.75

In short, the historiography to come should be loaded with value judgments, advocating for an empathetic and ardent history whose narrative “projects the feelings of a Christian, of a Spaniard.” Although the national and confessional communities appeared again as equated for the historian, the author immediately emphasized that the reader of his narrative was none other than the “man who is interested in the fate of the largest class, which is the most unfortunate.” What was championed, in short, was a history for citizens at large, in which there was evidently no room for Spanish nineteenth century; see the chapter dedicated to him in Sáinz Rodríguez (1989), pp. 221–34. His most well-known historical work was on the prominent role played by Jews and Muslims in the Iberian Middle Ages; see López Vela (1999) and Friedman (2011). 75  And he continued: “to place on the same level the personages that feature in a given epoch (…) is not a sign of the historian’s superiority, but impotence: this is not being impartial, but faithless”; see La España 670 (15-06-1850): 3. Ferrer del Río had been a translator of Thiers, as well as a disciple of Alberto Lista. In a sense, therefore, his career brought together the opposite sides of the debate among liberals on aesthetics, morals, and politics, and with history now in the foreground, allowing him to occupy an intermediate position; see Tano (1968).

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distinguishing between a supposedly heroic and morally virtuous “people” and an abject and debased “plebe,” singled out for exclusion. Although always within a Catholic cultural framework, this was a conception of history as magistra vitae, a narrative that, by giving it a leading role in its own past, would empower and at the same time inculcate in the people morals in general, and civic values in particular.76 The philosophy was clear: writing a history, whether “separating moral truth from human actions” or “not recognizing the exalted hand of Providence in everything” was but to guarantee in advance the failure of the enterprise. This historiographical agenda amply satisfied the demands of deontological rigor of the time. In this sense, Ferrer del Río had no qualms about insisting on the value of discrepancies  in interpretation and public disputes, as long as these took place among experts. However, the key to the success of his agenda was that its synthesis of freedom and providence made it possible to place the concept of progress at the centre of all historical narratives.77 Starting from there, encompassing all ideological stances that were not strictly nostalgic or reactionary, a new consensus could be established that would bring all liberals together around a narrative framework whose externalities went beyond the cultural field, contributing to overcoming the discredit of the institutions of representative government in the wake of the authoritarian drift of the late 1840s. But if this rapid proliferation of narratives were not sufficiently indicative of the paradigm shift underway, in 1850 the press also welcomed the publication of the first of the twenty volumes of the Historia general de España [General History of Spain] by Modesto Lafuente, a magnum opus of liberal-minded national historiography.78 Its “Discurso preliminar” or prologue, reproduced in various cultural magazines, opened with what was still the burning topic:

76  On this narrative framework for historical writing, inherited from the early modern period but that flourished particularly in the nineteenth century, see Koselleck (1985). 77  Thus, even if the defeat of the Comunidades of Castile put an end to the long-standing freedoms of the realm, and ushered in a long-lasting authoritarian imperial era under the Habsburg dynasty, it was evident that “since then civilization has achieved great conquests” that “do not exclusively depend” on the “caprice of kings,” as well as other advances by means of which “progress has made great strides around the world—even in Spain;” see La España 670 (15-06-1850): 3. On this historical episode in the work by Ferrer del Ríos, see Gascón Pérez (2007). 78  On this author, see López Vela (2004).

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Humanity lives, society marches on, peoples experience changes and vicissitudes, individuals act. Who drives them? Is it fate?79

Like Ferrer del Río, the progressive Lafuente demanded a narrative of the past charged with “feeling,” but in his case he also called for “reflection,” because in its absence “we would see the innocent die without love and tears, and we would recount without indignation the crimes of the wicked; in fact, there would be neither criminals nor innocents.” The exhortation was conclusive: “Let us discard the grim system of fatalism; let us grant more dignity to man, and higher ends to the great thought of creation.” On the other hand, although his training in epistemology was far superior to that of Ferrer del Río, Lafuente also did not fail to underscore the role of divine providence in the vicissitudes of a Spanish nation that was lost in the night of time. In fact, in the preamble to his work he pointed out that the problem was  that some among those  unable to understand the meaning of providence have “confused it with fatalism.” This being the case, and notwithstanding the fact that the “holy books” (!) also served the same purpose, there was “nothing better” than to rely on history to “discern” providence, as history “teaches us to recognize it by that chain of events that propels mankind towards the end for which it has been destined.” In short, humanity had a destiny that ultimately referred to its creator and could only be glorious. At first glance, it seemed that the idea was to ascribe to the historian the work of divinatio of the Creator’s will, but in fact Lafuente was content with the historian acting as a pedagogue to his fellow citizens in matters related to the past. Be that as it may, the important thing is that with the proposed synthesis fatalism was confined to those who insisted on denying that “political progress is an essential emanation of social progress,” as much as the latter was “an invariable consequence” of the former.80 Fatalism as a system, even as a doctrine, was definitely on the decline. At the same time, and even more emphatically, the new discursive hybridizations resulted in such a degree of consensus

79  And he added: “Are we to presume that human society is left in the hands of fate, governed only by physical and necessary laws, by the blind forces of nature, without a guide, without an object, without a noble end, worthy of such a great creation?”; see La Ilustración 31 (3-08-1850): 7. 80  See El Ancora 73 (14-03-1850): 2.

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that in the following decade the term “fatalism” was no longer even invoked to denigrate one’s political opponents.

Epilogue and Conclusions As if immune to all these processes, the “prophet” of Extremadura did not abandon his crusade. Donoso Cortés ended the year 1850 publishing an article that has intrinsic value for the study of temporality in Spanish liberal culture. Its title was “Progress.” Contrary to the dominant trend among his contemporaries, for the Marquis of Valdegamas this word, “written on the banners displayed by all the seminaries of revolution in the world,” was worthy of every opprobrium.81 In this treatise Donoso Cortés made no distinction between the motives for appropriating the term on the part of not only the liberals and the socialists, but even “the adherents of tradition.” In his view, the latter were no less committed in their pursuit of progress, only they went about it by turning to the past: according to him, both his former allies and his eternal adversaries “worship the same God.” In reality, mistaken as they were in not knowing how to interpret the signs of the world in order to apprehend the theodicy “they all scatter in disarray and in different directions.” He concluded, with a mixture of disdain, condemnation, and prognostication: “let them run and turn your eyes away from them, since they are all heading for the abyss,” both the “progressive” and the “socialist” “schools” and, finally, “all the schools that call themselves liberal” because “all have the same banner, and on that banner is written the word: progress.” To the extent that they were building a new consensus in relation to the imaginary of time, the past, and the future, there is no doubt that Donoso Cortés contributed to bringing all Spanish liberals together on the same side and against him. However, the Marquis would reap no benefit from that dubious privilege. His Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo [Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism] appeared in 1851, in which the concept of fatalism is the basis of the negative association between liberalism and egalitarianism—and anarchy, as its necessary consequence—; yet the influence of this work was not enough to prevent the waning of the author’s fame and celebrity, and from the end of that year he was no longer even a parliamentary deputy. He died in Paris a little over a year later.  See La España 811 (27-11-1850): 4.

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The episode related in this chapter—little known within the context of the career of the forerun architect of anti-liberal thought—contains a double paradox: Donoso Cortés’ media campaign rather swiftly put an end to several decades of conservative hegemony on the use of the term “fatalist” to denigrate their opponents; at the same time, it greatly undermined the very status of this concept in the liberal public sphere. A first conclusion is that, in this context, the influence of a thinker said to have played a prominent role in the history of modern political philosophy was not counterproductive to his goal of moulding the ideological perceptions and sensibilities of his fellow citizens. In a more general sense, the aim of this chapter has been to highlight the capacity of the public sphere to define, shape, and in this case reorient the content of the historical culture of citizens. There is no doubt that, like so many other contemporaneous polemics, the 1850 debate in the Spanish press took place among the intellectual elites, and yet its effect was to make a decisive contribution to dignifying the space of popular participation in politics. In this sense, the public sphere of the mid-nineteenth century in Spain, if not participatory, proved to be at least representative of emerging ideological sensibilities that were fighting for the political inclusion of disenfranchised citizens. True enough, what this particular public history debate attained was of greater significance than it could appear at first glance. Not by chance, on one hand somehow the position maintained by Donoso Cortés epitomized the values and referents of the traditional monarchy in its “pure” form as understood from the repertoire of the mixed government, though remoulded in an utterly modern language of politics; while on the other, the narrative framework outlined by the Spanish historians of the mid-­ nineteenth century abounded on the traits of the democratic dimension of the constitution, by showing a generic and indistinct people solving the main historical crossroads of the community by putting into action its attributes of quantity and force. It should be recalled that these two conceptual dimensions of monarchy and democracy had been accused for decades of being impossible to combine in a single, synthetic semantic formula, not to mention to become  constitutional guidelines. And yet now the tension between these supposed-to-be extremes was, if not being analytically resolved at least sorted out in discourse, starting from historical narrative. Indeed, the emergence in the public sphere of a basic consensus around questions of historical causality decisively contributed to the recovery of an agonist perception of the subject of politics, based on

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which it was possible to uphold the protagonism of the people in politics as a morally dignified and sovereign collective entity. In this process, however, religious tropes from a Catholic repertoire of morals and dogmas also played a crucial role as bridges or go-betweens. Other than this, in undermining the hegemony of the moderados, the discursive capacity of radical writers greatly benefited from the semantic hybridization that they proposed between freedom, providence, and science.82 In turn, this dynamic sentenced the fate of fatalism as an epistemological device while producing other, more crucial cultural and ideological externalities. A few years later, in the wake of the 1854 Revolution that is analysed in Chap. 6 of this book, the republican Francisco Pi i Margall published his La reacción y la revolución [The Reaction and the Revolution], a work in which he settled scores with the culture of radical liberalism that had emerged in the previous decade to carry it further and towards new horizons. Its first chapter addressed nothing less than an ambitious “Theory of freedom and fatalism, explained by general history and contemporary Spanish [history].” One should not be misled by the author’s use of the term, though: it actually performed as a mark of the decline of fatalism in the realm of knowledge. Indeed, the fatalism invoked by Pi i Margall was already fully combined with “the freedom of man.” However, this by itself did not solve pressing epistemological problems: on the contrary, in his opinion this focus exacerbated the “conflict” between them. To overcome it, the started by drawing  a sharp distinction where others had chosen to maintain a traditional assumption: without prejudging the existence of divinity, he set aside “Providence with God” which in his opinion was too often wrongly blamed for the misfortunes of men. In his scheme, on the other hand, the intervention of fate in human vicissitudes was not due to any transcendent arbitrariness but to the mediation of man himself.83 82  A telling piece of evidence is that El Siglo—a hitherto progresista journal, but where the manifesto of the Democratic Party was first published in 1849—had as its motto the phrase “Christianity, Science, Continuous Progress, Democracy”; see Seoane (1977): 287. 83  This was so “because of his limited faculties and the impetus of his passions,” but above all due to the “voice of his interests,” which in the author’s opinion “misleads his intelligence,” inducing him “to oppose what may be his fortune and perhaps that of his children” and turning him “at every step into the enemy of that need that weighs on the whole of his race”; see Pi i Margall (s.a.) [1854]: 19, 20 and 21, respectively. There is no properly speaking scholarly study in post-Franco historiography of the intellectual and political formation

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What was posited between providence and freedom was therefore a vast field of phenomena, including revolutions, whose operation “is a law” and “like all laws, inevitable.” Yet, what was being proposed was not the substitution of a rhetoric of freedom with one of necessity. The original contribution of this epistemological tour de force was that according to Pi i Margall man is not “condemned to suffer the evils that afflict him,” since “his freedom is inculcated,” so that once “the law of humanity is known, human relations will march in step with the destiny of the race.” What he preferred to rename as “social fatalism” was, in short, but a myth produced by the institutionalization of ignorance. In this way, through the mediation of science, freedom and fatalism would one day become “identical,” overcoming the current perception of their incompatibility in the minds of citizens. In the meantime, however, it was necessary to shed light on “the social law of the species” that was embodied in fatalism. The starting point for this was for Pi i Margall to distinguish between man as an individual and humanity as a group, since they obeyed “different laws,” and therefore were “subject to different conditions” that demanded distinctive study.84 This was already a clear vindication of science, specifically social science. In sum, the struggle over fatalism in the Spanish public sphere had thus resulted not only in epistemological reflection on causality but also in the development of a scientific image of the social as a field of observation.85 This outcome allows a final conclusion. The growing discredit of the concept of fatalism for giving meaning to issues of time and account for the fortunes of humanity took place—in Spain and plausibly also in other of this leading figure of Spanish nineteenth-century politics, in part because the academic focus has been on his role as President of the Republic as late as 1873, and the ideology he developed from the 1860s onward, but partly also because approaches to his figure tend to lack epistemological distance and interpret his ideas for current ideological purposes either in favour or against them. See more on this in the conclusion of this book. 84  This was the source of his commitment to fostering the historical culture of citizens, because “the great lessons are found in great history” for “it is there that traces of the individual are most rarely encountered, and rather more often [those of] the species [as a whole]”; see Pi i Margall (s.a.) [1854]: 22. 85  A genealogical perspective on the emergence of this semantic field is presneted in Cabrera (2018). To the extent that it was the so-called socialist republicans like Pi and Margall who gave rise to this field, they would remain at the forefront of the theoretical reflections on the liberal society and its historical transformations, an issue that had clear implications beyond the intellectual sphere, though also an issue that still awaits appropriate academic attention.

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strands of European Liberalism around the middle of the nineteenth century—precisely as the imaginary of democracy entered the public sphere, which in turn fostered a redefinition of the political role of citizens in the collective destiny of the community. In trying to substantiate this thesis, this chapter has tried to show that changes in ideas have a complex relationship with political processes, so that short circuits can occur between them, as well as significant appropriations of concepts and discourses that have their own separate genealogy. This conclusion allows one final comparison with the present. Although deterministic and fatalistic discourses about historical dynamics in the short or long term are also proliferating today, and the feeling is taking hold that power is a reality that is essentially everlasting and immovable, the question of causality does not appear today in the same terms as it did in the nineteenth century. It is logical that this is so, since between then and now there has occurred nothing less than the progressive deterioration of the idea of progress as the telos of human history. This should enable us to understand that, despite initial appearances, the current interest in the past does not necessarily have to do with a nostalgic escape from the present: on the contrary, in a context in which the present has become undeservedly self-referential, it makes perfect sense to search for future alternatives in past human experience.86 In short, it is a way of exorcizing the fatalism that is surfacing today, affecting citizen consciousness. On the other hand, the contrast between the course outlined in this chapter and the present also allows us to argue that today’s media intellectuals, regardless of ideological persuasion, are no more capable of controlling the public sphere in which they intervene as experts or authorities. This proverbial inability to escape the contingencies that preside over the struggles for discursive hegemony in the modern world is an argument against today’s talking heads who want to pass off their moral pessimism as a reasoned and coherent epistemological stance.

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——— (1803). Diccionario de la lengua castellana, Madrid: Viuda de Joaquín Ibarra [available at www.rae.es]. ——— (1817). Diccionario de la lengua castellana, Madrid: Imprenta Real [available at www.rae.es]. ——— (1884). Diccionario de la lengua castellana, Madrid: Imprenta de Gregorio Hernando [available at www.rae.es]. ——— (2011). Diccionario de la lengua castellana, Madrid. Espasa-Calpe [available at https://dle.rae.es]. Rice, High (2018). “Fatalism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fatalism/]. Rodríguez, Emmanuel (2015). Por qué fracasó la democracia en España. La Transición y el régimen del 78, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños [available at https://www.traficantes.net/sites/default/files/pdfs/Por%20qu%C3%A9%20 fracas%C3%B3%20la%20democracia%20en%20Espa%C3%B1a%20-%20 Traficantes%20de%20Sue%C3%B1os.pdf]. Ruda, Frank (2016). Abolishing Freedom. A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Sáinz Rodríguez, Pedro (1989). Historia de la crítica literaria en España, Madrid: Taurus. Sánchez León, Pablo (2006). “Aristocracia fantástica: los moderados y la poética del gobierno representativo”, Ayer 61: 77–103 [available at https://dialnet. unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=1962722]. Sayer, Feve (2015). Public History: A Practical Guide, London: Bloomsbury. Seoane, María Cruz (1977). Oratoria y periodismo en la España del siglo XIX, Madrid: Castalia. Simal, Juan Luis and Martykánová, Darina (2015). “Ferdinand and the Sultan. The Metaphor of the Turk and the Crisis of the Spanish Monarchy in the Early Nineteenth Century”, Contributions to the History of Concepts 10/1: 1–26. Stevens, Tim and Michelsen, Nicholas (2020). Pessimism in International Relations. Provocations, Possibilities, Politics, Cham: Springer. Tano, Amalia R. (1968). Antonio Ferrer del Rio como biógrafo y dramaturgo, PhD dissertation, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. Valance, Georges (2007). Thiers: bourgeois et révolutionnaire, Paris: Flammarion. Viard, Jacques (1982). Pierre Leroux et les socialistes européens, Arles: Actes Sud. Viard, Bruno (2009). Pierre Leroux, penseur de l’humanité, Aix-en-­ Provence: Sulliver.

CHAPTER 6

Identity: Enraged Citizens or Subaltern Crowd? Popular Mobilization, Representation, and Participation in the Spanish Revolution of 1854

The Limits of Representation in Modern Citizenship Mobilization, representation, and participation are dimensions of modern citizenship and a constitutive feature of democracies. Moreover, they are also a feature of the struggles for recognition that take place outside the parliamentary system, including those that aim to radically transform it. In both cases they may be addressed as abstractions derived from empirical phenomena, but they may also be studied in the discourses of the institutions, organizations, and the actors involved. Actually, when these institutions, organizations, and actors are capable of reflecting on those concepts for making sense of the world and the people’s behaviour, the effects on political and institutional processes under way become manifest. Thus, when in 2012 the 15-M citizen movement rallied behind the slogan “They do not represent us!” it ushered in a new political era in Spain, marked by the awareness of a crisis of representation that has driven innumerable expressions of citizen outrage as much as most policies designed to either quell or channel such popular indignation. As in other global democracies subject to similar pressures, in the wake of the 15-M there has also been an attempt to expand and diversify the forms of citizen participation. Likewise, it has been put to the fore the question of how to achieve unity

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among the different ideological sensibilities and their related political and social organizations critical with the so-called regime of 78. Similar processes also took place in nineteenth-century Liberalism, although with the difference that, in the absence of universal suffrage, the conditions of participation were markedly different and this, in turn, affected the status of representation. This latter was assigned a central place in the legitimacy of the entire system, but, by the same token, it became the focus of critiques for its alleged increasing rigidity or distortion. Under normal circumstances, it was considered that when enfranchised citizens elected deputies, it was as if the entire people had voted, or at least a large moral majority; however, when parliaments and other elective assemblies failed to give representation to political sentiments widely extended through the public opinion—acting as ultimate guarantor of the legitimacy of representative government—the entire system suffered, exposing itself to political crises of unpredictable outcome.1 This preponderance of representation not only limited the available channels for the expression of popular indignation, but also relegated all collective forms of citizen participation to the outside of the system, leading to outbreaks of popular violence that not always provoked institutional crises and instead contributed to accentuate the instituted cleavage between the respectable people and an abject plebs who elicited contempt and fear. Now then, since political parties were not yet purpose-built vehicles for the aggregation of interests but rather loose coalitions based on broad political alignments, ideological sensibilities with discursive capacity maintained considerable autonomy of action. As a result, in situations of political crisis the most radical among them found increased opportunities to represent the disenfranchised majority, and if they were able to harness popular outrage and coordinate collective action, the likely upshot would be a constitutional crisis.2 In such contexts, a key role was played by conceptions of what representation was and should be, what unity meant, and even what constituted participation. In the summer of 1854 one such crisis occurred in Spain, culminating in a social upheaval that contemporaries described as a “revolution,” which in turn gave way to a constitutional process lasting until mid-1856.3 This  On the role of public opinion in Spanish Liberalism in comparative perspective with other contemporary national frameworks, see Fernández Sebastián (2008). 2  On the conceptions of political parties in Spanish liberalism, see Fernández Sarasola (2010). 3  The episode and the following period, known as Bienio Progresista or Progressive Bienium (1854–1856), do not wield a record of academic literature suitable to its relevance as a landmark in the modern history of Spain. A classical account that remains as most 1

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event tested the capacity of the opposition forces to mobilize and represent excluded citizens, as both old and new political actors strained the available semantic and discursive resources with a view to placing Spanish Liberalism on an entirely new footing. This historical episode holds great interest not least because it marked the first irruption of democratic ideology on the stage of modern Spanish politics, and its most vocal adherents played a leading role in the revolution and its aftermath. Its importance lies also in the fact that the conceptions of unity, representation, and participation then under display may be compared with those deployed by other social and political movements, both then and in the present day, in order to highlight analogies and differences. This chapter departs from the general statement that in modern social and political protests of all kinds, popular political participation can be seriously compromised by the prevailing sense among many citizens of not being adequately represented, not just by the institutions of the established regime, but by emerging leaders and organizations as well. The opposition and insurgent forces, on the other hand, may come to fetishize unity of action in their rhetoric while avoiding public discussion on how to attain this unity, for what purpose, and among whom. This double threat is usually devastating for the possibilities of popular mobilization and participation to achieve a true institutional transformation. This much is true for both the twenty-first and nineteenth centuries. However, a thorough comparison of institutional crises in classical Liberalism with those erupting under democracy up to the present requires to supplement analogies with differences between the two. To begin with, differences have to do with the fact that in the former period, the political exclusion of the majority of the population allowed, on certain conditions, a revival of the category of people as an inclusive political subject by re-­ shaping its boundaries to include the plebs; this in turn tended to arouse the enthusiasm necessary for citizen mobilization to go beyond the limits of the restrictive parliamentary system, favouring experiments with alternative forms of participation drawn from traditions of popular political culture.4 However, this always took place under the concurrence of radical insightful and still reliable is Kiernan (1966). On the meaning of the concept of revolution in this Spanish and Latin American context, see Zermeño (2014); on its complex and ambiguous semantics Europewide, see Woloch (1996). 4  On the concept of “enthusiasm” as a political sentiment and an essential ingredient in nineteenth-century revolutionary mobilizations, see Moscoso and Sánchez León (2017); on its interaction with “exaltation” as a measure of political radicalism in the political culture of Spanish Liberalism, see Sánchez León (2021a).

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leaders and organizations that justified their existence as representatives of the outraged people and who strove for establishing the conditions of popular participation as well as the unity of the emerging political forces. Given that those leaders and their organizations partook in the learned culture of the elites, a gap could open between them and the people on the move, affecting not only the coordination of the struggles but also the understanding of what each meant by participation, representation, and unity. This chapter examines a mid-nineteenth century institutional crisis in Spain in order to address the question of who speaks in the name of the people, and to which extent language imposes limits on our understanding of the identity of the latter. It starts from the political culture embodied by those claiming to be representatives of the excluded and outraged people in Isabelline Liberalism. Yet it also deals with the fundamental problem is how to account for an active plebeian culture in a historical context in which by definition the crowd could not speak for itself but others had to do it in its name. For that purpose, it profits from first-hand accounts of the participation of the “plebe” as integrated into the “people” in a revolution that ushered the old Spanish liberal order towards a constituent process.

The Value of Unity and the Meaning of Democracy Among the Early Democrats In 1849 a group of deputies originally aligned with the progresistas published a “Manifiesto progresista democrático” [Progressive democratic party manifesto], initiating a profound redrawing of the political map of Spanish Liberalism that would last for decades.5 This public emergence of a democratic party is quite unique in the European and American context: the discourse in favour of democracy was normally first articulated in the sphere of civil society, gradually coalescing therein before coming to question the range of established parties in representative government.6 The 5  An account and interpretation of this incident in Peyrou (2008a); for a European perspective, see Peyrou (2011). 6  In Great Britain, the debates on electoral reform were preceded by a long struggle in the public sphere led by so-called Chartists; see Stedman Jones (1983): 90–178. In France, the process of synthesizing traditions and experiences that facilitated the demands for democracy was even more prolonged and detached from parliamentary life during the July Monarchy; see Collina (1990). In the United States, the Democratic Party instituted in the 1830s

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decision by the pioneering Spanish democrats to emerge as a splinter group breaking off from an existing parliamentary party demands an assessment of their reliance on the establishment of Isabelline Liberalism. Democracy was certainly not a new word in Spain by 1850.7 It had been part of the Western philosophical-political lexicon since Antiquity, employed to define a form of government that recognized the deliberative capacity of all male heads of household in exchange for their active engagement in the institutions of self-government. However, by the eighteenth century and especially following the works of Montesquieu, it was considered less in that “pure” form and more as one of the three components of any constitution: democracy—which expressed quantity and force, as well as representing the influence on the institutions of the socially and juridically subordinated sections of the Commons—was one of the essential elements in any political system that aspired to avoid or at least delay degradation, in the form of either corruption, tyranny, or both. Thus, rather than a category used to define a certain form of government, democracy was part of a broader grammar for a political imagination shared especially by educated publics. This alone did not necessarily favour the development of radical discourses. On the contrary, based on the conceptual repository of mixed government, by the end of the 1830s Spanish liberals of various stripes had come to agree that Spain had inherited from the Old Regime a waning aristocracy, denatured after a century-long trajectory of failure of self-­ organization and the royal co-optation of commoners into the ranks of magistrates and officers of state. Partly due to this, the constitution of 1812 had been labelled as a kind of “democratic monarchy” unbalanced towards the extremes, if not burdened by an outsize “democratic” dimension, to the point that, without the necessary counterweights and limitations there was a risk that popular political leadership could derail the new liberal order as a whole.8 The emphasis Isabelline liberals placed on procedures that favoured representation thus fulfilled the double objective of emerged from a split within the Republican Party, but in a rather exceptional single-party context that in fact fostered autonomous citizen mobilization which ultimately shaped Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party; see Wilentz (2005): 301–29. A general overview in Innes and Philp (2018). 7  On this concept within the political culture of Spanish Liberalism, see Fernández Sebastián and Capellán de Miguel (2018); see also Capellán de Miguel and García Ruiz (2010). 8  See Chaps. 2 and 3 of this book; see also Sánchez León (2006) and (2021b).

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trying to engender a new aristocracy from a reduced electoral body, and of diluting the threat of excessive influence by the democratic component of the constitution; yet this scheme had to be implemented at the cost of minimizing and even repudiating participation. Another consensus was established among progresistas and moderados in the 1830s, though. This was a shared vision of Spain’s “traditional constitution” as strongly centred around the figure of the monarch and Catholic religion. Based on this historical legacy, Spanish liberals tended to value unity as the most important feature of political systems or, to state it in contemporary terms, they perceived disunity as a symptom of collective weakness and the forerunner of political conflict, social disorder, and ultimately the decline of civilization. The outbreak of the first Carlist War (1833–1839) served only to entrench the perception of the existence of an internal enemy opposed to Liberalism, thus introducing into politics a fundamentalist confessional imagery—forged over centuries of Peninsular conquest and subsequent European wars of religion—and which became a marked feature of the identity of liberals of every stripe.9 Moreover, this in turn was overdetermined by a contradictory perception of political parties, which were seen as both a necessary feature of the system yet at the same time as a potential source of fragmentation and further discord in a political space that required cohesion above all.10 The strongly moral valuation of this suprapartisan political unity rapidly gave way to a rhetoric among moderados and progresistas calling for the overcoming of internal divisions and the coming together of all liberals as a sine qua non condition for the stability and future prospects of the post-­ absolutist order. This discourse was inflected by a politically imprecise, though not socially irrelevant, ideological sensibility—doceañismo—fostered by the mythification of the original constitutionalism of 1812 and that stood for the unity of wills and objectives among all defenders of liberty, and that tended to reject political parties.11 The rise of the democratic political sensibility and discourse is closely related to the evolution of this trope of unity shared by all Spanish liberals. Already in 1843 the first self-proclaimed democrats welcomed “all” their 9  On Carlism, see Lawrence (2014). On its ideology, see Martínez Dorado and PanMontojo (2000). 10  On this contradictory conception of political parties in Isabelline Liberalism, see Fernández Torres (2014a) and (2014b). 11  More on this perception of pristine unity in Sánchez León (2015): 280–88; on doceañismo as ideological sensibility, see Sánchez León (2017a).

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political rivals, especially the progresistas, “under the aegis of our regenerating banner”;12 two years later, the democratic playwright and ideologue Miguel Agustín Príncipe went further and declared in one of his works that his objective was none other than “the reorganization and harmony of all the liberal fractions.”13 Even declarations in favour of universal suffrage prior to 1849 were not put forward for founding an alternative political ideology but rather as “a new flag” designed “for all liberals, of the old and new vintage.”14 Issues of identity and organization were intertwined in this rhetoric, something that has not been sufficiently highlighted by specialists. The traditional interpretation of the emergence of the first Spanish democrats usually reduces the list of radical options to only two—republicans and democrats—and makes little distinction between their respective self-­ identifications.15 Yet a full appreciation of contemporary partisan identities must take into account the contribution of doceañismo, which operated across and below the surface of formal party divisions in the making. Furthermore, the assumption of a confluence between republicans and democrats deserves to be critically examined. The scholarly literature assumes that the tropes of the republican tradition—including the critique of despotic or corrupt deviations from the newly established power— directly and naturally favoured the evolution towards a range of republican political alignments, based on the defence of popular sovereignty as an independent source of legitimacy—and in turn normally identified with support for universal suffrage.16 12  The proposal was included in a new journal, El 1° de Septiembre, that was ultimately never published; see Peyrou (2008a): 175. 13  Príncipe (1845): viii, emphasis in the original. The declaration appears in the introduction to his acclaimed Tirios y troyanos, subtitled Historia tragi-cómica de la España del siglo XIX [Tragical-comical history of nineteenth-century Spain]. 14  See Eco del Comercio (27-03-1845), cit. par Peyrou (2008a): 169. 15  See among others Castro Alfín (1987), Miguel González (2007), Peyrou (2007) and (2008b), and Moliner Prada (2010). 16  There is too much teleology in these links, which derives in turn from a retrospective approach that relies on categories based on examples and traditions of European radicalism— Jacobinism, humanitarianism, or demo-socialism—that blur the specificity of the Spanish case; see especially Miguel González (2004), (2006) and (2007). However, I borrow this author’s notion of “cultural magma,” which I rename as identity magma. Other more descriptive studies, even though they acknowledge that the boundaries between republican and democratic alignments were initially very imprecise, tend to reproduce in their accounts the mixture of tropes and terminology that pervades the radicals’ discourse in that context.

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The emergence of the democratic and republican identities still demands an explanation beyond mere acknowledgement. The first step in this direction would be to understand that what was at stake at the time—between the end of the Carlist War in 1840 and the debates that marked the promulgation of a new constitution in 1845, which established an even more restricted suffrage—was the theory and practice of sovereignty as the foundation of representative government. For most of the more radical liberals the objective was to give the people more space and prominence in political life and the constitution, but this did not normally imply claiming an alternative founding of representative government. What many of the new radicals lamented when calling for “more democratic” fundamental laws was the absence of popular sovereignty worthy of the name, but they did not advocate universal suffrage.17 In sum, they envisioned an institutional architecture with a broader electoral base that would place the democratic component of a mixed constitution on a clearer and firmer footing, rendering the latter worthy of that designation. Seen in this light, democrats and republicans did indeed have plenty in common, albeit not precisely regarding the most innovative part of their discourse—universal male suffrage—but an underlying shared identity, a kind of second-order sensibility that needs to be duly isolated and relocated in context. Among the first wave of self-proclaimed democrats there were in fact quite a few who could be defined as doceañistas, who imagined democracy as more of a restoration than a novelty.18 However, this sensibility was also quite present among the most extreme progresistas, and would be the cause of internal tensions provoked by sections of the party that were getting radicalized. On the whole, however, the emergence of the democratic party seems to be primarily related to the breakdown of internal consensus within the progressive party on how to regain the 17  The consolidation of this “democracy” demanded the deployment of a variety of policies and institutional reforms, from the re-establishment of trial by jury and a popular militia— both introduced during the 1830s but dispensed with after 1845—administrative decentralization in favour of municipal self-government and transparent and fair elections. Public declarations in favour of universal suffrage were also included in the agenda, but normally intertwined with other issues such as the defence of individual rights and the enforcement of equality under the law; see Peyrou (2008b): 208–29. 18  This memory weighed heavily upon the first generation of democrats, to the extent that when the journal Eco del Comercio reappeared in 1845 as an organ of the new ideology, its editors declared that the publication “would invariably support the constitutional options most in line with” the principles of democracy, citing as an example “the one proclaimed by the people in 1812”; see Eco del comercio (14-10-1845).

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i­nitiative in the face of successive moderado majorities.19 It was therefore not the outcome of an unbridgeable ideological divide, but rather the result of a disagreement over means and strategies for the progressives once it had passed into the opposition in parliament. But for this very reason the issue that enabled the convergence of all radical sensibilities, whether or not under the progressive umbrella, would not be universal suffrage but rather the unity of all liberals. This question is so central to the origin of the democratic political identity that it had rather paradoxical effects on the fledging party. Instead of forming a breakaway parliamentary faction, the deputies who signed in 1949 the manifesto expressly sought to remain within the ranks of the progressive party.20 Thenceforth, the succession of governments dominated exclusively by the conservatives actually extended the debate on unity further, to the entire political spectrum.21 Subsequently, a shared experience as persecuted opponents, sometimes even forced into exile, placed progresistas and demócratas alike in the position of victims of an increasingly authoritarian regime; in due course, the repressive escalation drove them from the early 1850s to get involved in conspiracies for military pronuciamientos and, if necessary, to claim for citizen insurgency. Moreover, growing internal discord within the moderado camp drove some conservatives to rally as well behind the rhetoric in favour of reviving the lost unity. Certainly, this process encouraged the bridging between political divides, but came at a cost for the self-proclaimed democrats. The price of their tactical alliance with other parliamentary forces was not only ideological moderation but the absence of a clearly defined doctrine that would distinguish it from the agenda of progressives.22 This initial lack of 19  On this period, known in Spanish historiography as the Moderado Decade (1844–1854), see Beltrán Villalva (2005). 20  Their public appearance was followed by the dissemination of a pamphlet—signed by over 2000 individuals—in which they committed themselves to “rebuild” the “collective personality” of the progressive party so that it would “represent something in the modern world”; see Peyrou (2008a): 216. 21  From the beginning, moreover, the issue of unity was seen in maximalist terms: the manifesto spoke explicitly of the “fragmentation and dissolution” affecting “the Spanish political parties” in general, and not only the progressives. See Artola (1974): II, 37. 22  In fact, the first board established by the party labelled the new formation partido progresista democrático (progressive democrat party), and the young ideologue and leader Sixto Cámara diagnosed in 1850 a “very dense doctrinal fog” with regard to democracy. Behind it was a genuine recognition of the centrality of the political-ideological field of progresismo. This helps understand that another of its leaders—Nicolás María Rivero—called in that same

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a­utonomy in outlooks among the early democrats was replayed at the organizational level when in 1853 president Bravo Murillo’s cabinet tried to impose a new press law that set the Spanish public sphere ablaze, laying the groundwork for a broad coalition of all the opposition parties, including sectors among the moderados.23 The reaction against the legislation first brought together leaders of democrats and of the two major parties; then, in the face of the government crisis that at the beginning of 1854 elevated Luis Sartorius, count of San Luis, to the presidency, it led some of them into hiding and to get involved in a conspiracy to organize armed uprisings coordinated by allied sectors of the military. Altogether, democrats were far from monopolizing these initiatives. For example, the young radical Cristino Martos wrote a detailed chronicle of the events that led to the pronunciamiento of General O’Donnell in June 1854  in which he gave the democrats a rather minor role in the Madrid conspiracy compared to progresistas and moderados.24 Another chronicle of the conspiracy in Zaragoza depicts the democrats as acting more independently, but still within a scenario dominated by conservatives and progressives.25 This subordinate position of the democrats in the preparations for the political crisis of 1854 does not only reflect their fewer organizational and media available resources, but also the fact that they had previously identified with the liberal discourse of unity. This trajectory would also determine their course of action in the following weeks.

context for a coalition with progressives “in union, but not in confusion”; see Peyrou (2008a): 224 and 226, respectively. 23  On the policies of this cabinet, see Pro Ruiz (2006). 24  Much like other observer-participants, the author foresaw the possibility for political change in “the alliance of all honourable men from all parties.” Although he had progresista loyalties, in the chronicle he declares himself a democrat; see Martos (1854): 13 and 212, respectively. 25  Its author does not deny the democrats’ involvement, but he dismisses it with pithy disdain: he claims that moderados and progresistas did not “even spurn the efforts of the democrats.” United in “the most amicable fraternity,” all conspirators are portrayed in his chronicle as moved by “the aim of rising in arms in order to cement forever in our country a good representative system”; see Borao and Clemente (1855): 13. The author, a historian and future rector of the University of Zaragoza, had an inclination for the progressives.

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Seville, 1854: Radical Identities Without Party Representation In June 1854, a group of military officers led by General Leopoldo O’Donnell rose in revolt, placing the troops under his command at the service of an army ready to enter the capital, Madrid. A skirmish with the palace guard took place at the outskirts of the city, in the village of Vicálvaro, but neither side was able to prevail, effectively blocking a strictly military solution to the crisis.26 This was followed in early July by uprisings in provincial capitals—Barcelona, Valencia, Valladolid, and Zaragoza—in the wake of the proclamation known as the “Manzanares Manifesto,” in which the rebel officers tried to break the impasse by calling for the appointment of local governing juntas, thus setting the stage for the intervention of mobilized citizens.27 The main source for analysing the events that followed is a series of accounts by participant-observers. These stories are of interest here not so much for the information they contain, but rather because of the way in which this information is evaluated and imbued with meaning, allowing to apprehend the discursive value given to unity, representation, and political participation in such critical context. An example of this literature is an anonymous pamphlet describing the events in the city of Seville between the end of July and the middle of August 1854.28 Its author—identifiable only by the initials “E. Ft.”—starts summing up the Sartorius cabinet in one word: “unpopular.”29 This 26  The most detailed description of the Revolution is still in Urquijo Goitia (1984), albeit focused on the events in Madrid. 27  Penned by the moderado Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the manifesto included a rather generic call for ending corruption, tyranny, and patronage, and urged fiscal moderation and administrative decentralization. Yet it also called for the establishment of “Juntas de gobierno” which “must constitute themselves in the free provinces” as a first link in the chain that “will establish a permanent foundation for the liberal regeneration that we seek”; see the document in: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifiesto_de_Manzanares. The formation of these juntas has been studied by Lecuyer (1982). For local studies, on Zamora, see Urquijo Goitia (1991); on Alicante, see Zurita (1990); on Ciudad Real, see Inarejos (2011); and on Lorca, see Ruiz (1982). 28  On the city of Seville during the period of Isabelline Liberalism, see Álvarez Rey (2006). 29  Among the causes of this unpopularity the author points out Sartorius’s “reckless disregard for the fundamental law of the State, his boasts of electoral corruption, his arbitrariness in the exercise of administrative functions, his attacks on freedom of the press, his daring to demand taxes without due authorization, his custom of conferring public offices with no end other than prostitution or more norm than favouritism,” all of which taken together in his

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characterization suffices to justify the urban uprising in Seville, which was preceded by a series of measures taken by the local authorities as O’Donnell’s army, after the skirmish outside Madrid, descended upon Andalusia: the spread of fake news and the seizure of civil authority over the city by the captain general. These events function in the narrative as tropes by means of which the unknown author reveals the growing fracture between local institutions and public opinion, which is from the beginning identified with the “people,” and this in turn with the population as a whole, without exception. On its part, the spring of action of this popular subject is “unity,” and in the narrative it is accompanied by a capacity for collective reflection and deliberation independent of political parties.30 On 19 July, according to the anonymous account, the Sevillian populace took to the streets with chants calling for freedom, for the 1837 Constitution, and for general O’Donnell, and urging the formation of a junta de gobierno that “universally trusted, would lead to the recovery of all our sacred rights.”31 This is followed in the narrative by a description of an extraordinary meeting of the city council, which, “attended by some people known for their liberal ideas,” agreed to designate a provisional junta.32 This new auxiliary junta quickly became subject to interference and obstruction by the military leaders, so that a few days later its members resigned their offices to General Serrano, whom O’Donnell has left in charge of the captaincy general. At this point there is a decisive break in the narrative, when “individuals known for their advanced opinions then set out to create another junta, no longer advisory or auxiliary, but ­formally governmental in nature.” According to the account, following opinion “slowly fostered, in the bosom of an almost always peaceful nation, the germ of a necessary revolution”; see Anonymous (1854): 3. 30  There is not a single reference to the crowd/plebe dichotomy in the entire narrative. The key concept in the whole narrative apparatus is a certain “popular instinct” that neither allows itself to be manipulated nor does it at any point renounce its capacity to make an independent assessment of events. According to the author, this psycho-social feature is the product of a “universal” state of “indignation” due to which the decisions taken by the authorities have “the opposite effect to what was expected”; see Anonymous (1854): 13. The expression “popular instinct”; see Ibid.: 4. 31  Anonymous (1854): 21. The Seville uprising took place after decisive events had already taken place in the capital, which are accounted for in the next section of this chapter. 32  In the author’s opinion “the yearning for the restoration of the Junta was very rational in those moments” when “anarchy reigned” in much of the country and the state lacked the means to maintain order, so that “each locality had to see to its own government”; see Ibid.: 29.

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General Serrano’s approval its proponents issued a public call for a citizen assembly in a central square of the city, although formally presented as a summons to all members of the “liberal party.”33 Up to this point, the chronicle may seem to be inspired by democrat or republican viewpoints, and the shared discourse of liberal unity. In fact, the junta that emerged from this assembly was clearly dominated by democrats and republicans.34 However, the author of the chronicle finds these ideas and rhetoric rather insufficient. He points out that the junta’s demands did not “contain democratic principles properly speaking,” being instead riddled with “the trans-Pyrenean [French] terminology of [18]48.”35 In sum, the republican aspect of the new junta is reviled as being motivated by the emulation of a foreign rhetorical model. On the other hand, although his stance seems more weighted towards pure democracy—whose foundations, as he asserts, “we respect even if we do not profess them”—he is clearly not a supporter of the democratic party, nor of the junta gubernativa. It is true that the author defends the junta as a legitimate institution of local self-government, but what is interesting is his justification: “[there is] nothing more natural than following the precedents established in other cases of the same kind.” This argument, added to the vindication of the popular militia and the representation of the people as an organic entity, places the story squarely in a vernacular tradition of citizen self-government that ultimately harks back to 1808 (and thus to doceañismo), and in which the juntas were a legitimate expression of sovereignty in extraordinary circumstances—the product of citizen mobilization in response to an abuse of power, which also serve as avenues for popular political participation.36

 See Ibid.: 41.  In their first public address to the people of Seville, on 2 August, the elected members of the Junta not only committed themselves to “the indisputable principle of national sovereignty” and the “national militia, organized in such a way as to be the most unshakeable guarantee of the liberties of the people,” but also called for “the expansion of the suffrage, so that the Nation may be truly represented”; see Ibid.: 52, emphasis in the original. 35  The author openly mocks the Jacobin rhetoric: he censures the Junta for adhering “to the February trimurti [of 1848]: Equality, Fraternity, Liberty, as if they were Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, or Osiris, Isis, and Horus”; see Ibid.: 41. 36  It should also be noted that the author openly disputes the military’s right to subordinate citizen leadership. He has no qualms about referring to General O’Donnell as a “dictator” for having tried to undermine the power of the junta, infringing “the right to govern itself that the people had reconquered with his pronunciamiento”; see Ibid.: 33. 33 34

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One of the characteristics of this tradition is that participation—albeit not very explicitly or self-reflectively, or in the deliberative sense—was placed above representation. Indeed, this chronicle is interesting not least for drawing attention to the representational deficit of the new governing authorities: the author recounts that only around thirty vecinos appeared at the deliberative assembly, “a very meagre number to represent one hundred thousand souls.” Despite this, and after an election “lacking in formalities” and in which “no system” was adopted for the voting procedure, all the proposed candidates were elected. Behind this critique of procedural aspects is a substantive understanding of citizen participation: the anonymous author believes that the assembly that gave way to the new junta was animated by a “vain legality” that had no qualms about “taking the people of Seville as present” when it was far from being represented.37 This renders his critique extreme even from the democratic perspective: the discourse seems to go beyond the imaginary of the mixed constitution, albeit stopping short of an open call for popular sovereignty. In reality, the conception of democracy revealed in the pages of the chronicle is closer, on the one hand, to the tradition of the open concejos of medieval Castile, in which a general assembly of vecinos chose their public officials and collectively decided the tenor of municipal policy; and on the other, to the language of estates that had undergirded the legitimacy of the Old Regime, based on social ranks and distinctions.38 However, at no point does the anonymous author pronounce himself in favour of a restrictive electoral format based on property ownership, income, or education: the

37  Emphasis in the original. The question gives rise to a more general reflection: “Where the majority is, everything is; where there is no majority, there is nothing […] Where the corresponding number is not gathered, the resolution is illusory, and everything that is based on it is fictitious”; see Ibid.: 42–43. 38  In other words, the chronicle does not draw a sharp distinction between vecindad or traditional neighbourhood and modern citizenship. The author in fact complains that the summons for the assembly was not made based on “quartiers” (barrios) or “parishes” and argues that a call “by classes, so that each social group would have directly elected a member of the Junta, or a deputy indirectly” would have produced a more fully representative body—in contrast to the “necessarily tumultuous meeting” like the one that in his opinion took place, which was “attended by only a few, and most of them barely qualified.” This is clearly an amalgam of the vestiges of the legislation of 1766 on the designation of Diputados del Común and Alcaldes de barrio, and the indirect suffrage of the electoral law of 1812. On the relations between citizenship and vecindad in Spain in the first half of 19th century, see Sierra (2010).

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yardstick is civic patriotism, albeit framed in terms of other more conventional moral values.39 There is no doubt that the discourse of this anonymous writer is shaped by a series of tropes and themes that invoke the culture of the first liberal constitutionalism, in turn sensitive to the adaptation of participatory mechanisms inherited from the Old Regime. Yet to dismiss it as little more than an expression of political nostalgia would be an error and a misunderstanding, because what is in principle a doceañista stance reveals itself eminently adaptable. The author includes, for example, reflections on the theory of consent and the separation of powers.40 This, together with the explicit repudiation of the French republican tradition, speaks to the inadequacy of conventional  academic labels. The axis of the anonymous chronicler’s ideology is a sharp contrast between principles and interests, articulated as a critique of political parties, but one that goes beyond the strictures of doceañismo: the focus is not on the pernicious effects on liberal unity, but rather the apparent inconsistency between the rhetoric and the practices of the leaders and representatives of all parties.41 This is a crucial distinction, because it is through this prism that the chronicler analyses the 1854 urban uprising in Seville. Indeed, the anonymous author insists that, despite the emergence of a new legitimacy embodied by the Junta, the stark chasm in political representation between the dominant parties and a mobilized citizenry persisted in the Sevillian revolt. Moreover, this had decisive consequences for the process, since under such conditions the “noble instincts” of the people “were not properly harnessed,” the “revolution” was stymied, and “scepticism” was allowed free rein.42 This verdict clearly differed from the usual political diagnostics of Isabelline Liberalism, while at the same time showing a

39  He considered it sufficient that candidates for public office should possess “virtue, known patriotism, and social rank”; see Ibid.: 44. 40  Thus, for example, when criticizing the appointments of judges by the new junta, he affirms that to carry out its function, the judiciary “needs to move freely, [and] enjoy independence, not move with the tides of politics, and most of all to rise above partisan miseries”; see Ibid.: 60. 41  For the anonymous author, the conclusion of the whole process is that “nobody was able to represent the principle they had invoked” due to the intervention of “those few agglomerations that we naïvely call parties,” in which “the principles count for nothing, and the interests are everything”; see Ibid: 79. 42  See Ibid.: 80.

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manifest capacity on the part of the author for interpreting the events engendered by its crisis.

Madrid, 1854: Plebeian Identities Without Discursive Representation Ideologically radical literature produced in the context of the 1854 Revolution is characterized by its inclusive representation of the people in action. However, the modern concept of representation has two different meanings that do not feature in the same manner in this literature. On the one hand, to “represent” is understood as making something present, that is, reflecting or revealing the nature of a person or the content of a thing; on the other, to “represent” also means to occupy the place of another, acting or speaking on his behalf—that is, to be like another.43 The analysed work embodies this second meaning of representation quite well: its intention is to make the author and the popular protagonist appear to the reader as comparable or interchangeable with one another, so that the writer’s voice is taken for the legitimate expression of the people, and vice versa. However, in this anonymous account this dimension of representation is confused with the other: the author wants the audience to accept his characterization of the people as an authentic image, and a true reflection of the people’s performance in the crisis. However, he concludes that the people were not adequately represented by the political leadership that emerged during the mobilization. This question of the limits of representation can also be asked in relation to the chronicle itself: it is worth asking if the story truthfully reflects the people in action, that is, if the representation of the people given in the account conforms to actual citizen participation and deliberation in the context. In this case it would be a qualitatively different problem: that of the limits of the discursive representation of the people. These two aspects may be analysed together in another work written in the heat of the Revolution of 1854. This is Las jornadas de julio [July Days], a chronicle of the events in Madrid from mid-July to the beginning of August, in which the author—who writes under the enigmatic pseudonym Un Hijo del Pueblo [A Son of the People]—claims that a 43  These two meanings correspond to Pierre Rosanvallon’s conceptions of “descriptive” and “constructive” political representation, as well as with Frank Ankersmit’s “aesthetic” and “mimetic” approaches; see Rosanvallon (1998) and Ankersmit (1996), respectively.

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military-led revolt was followed by a second revolution that, in his words, “belongs to the people” and without which “we would not have obtained freedom.”44 The analogies between this and the anonymous Sevillian chronicle are marked: the Sartorius government and the dominant moderados in general are criticized, and unfavourably contrasted with a people guided by its “good judgment” and “acting by their own inspiration”; in both cases public opinion is equated with popular citizenship, and the people with the population as a whole, who choose to stand for revolution as the events unfold. The differences between the accounts are no less significant, however. A major one is the more optimistic interpretation of the process by Un Hijo del Pueblo, for whom the Revolution “was not cut short or interrupted by anyone” but “stopped of its own accord when it had reached the point that it had wanted to reach,” so that from his point of view “it has duly accomplished its mission.”45 But there is a second difference that has to do with the limitations of leadership in the midst of political crisis. It is true that the anonymous writer from Madrid also underlines problems with the representation of the popular masses by partisan leaders, both old and new. In the latter case, however, the deficit is more broadly applied and more profound, extending to all organized ideological groupings. Indeed, as Un Hijo del Pueblo repeatedly emphasizes, especially in the decisive moment of the urban insurrection, “the people had no leaders; it was acting on his own inspiration.” This is not a simple mythification of the popular masses acting spontaneously: the author stresses the importance of both “organization” and “leadership.”46 However, this is 44  Un Hijo del Pueblo (2018): 6. Las jornadas de julio is a truly surprising text, starting with the vicissitudes surrounding its publication. It was commissioned by an editor as a sequel to a chronicle written by the radical progressive Cristino Martos—whose account ended with the Vicálvaro military skirmish and the Manzanares manifesto—and they appeared together in the same volume despite being written by different authors. There are notable differences between the two, however, especially with regard to their ideological slant, much more radical in this latter case. A recently published new edition of the chronicle is the one cited here; see the introductory study by Sánchez León (2018). 45  Un Hijo del Pueblo offers this interpretation in the conclusion of the work, after listing what he considers to have been the achievements of the Revolution: “Restoration of the old liberties, eradication of immorality, arbitrariness, and abuses, and taking the path of reform”; see Un Hijo del Pueblo (2018): 25, 31, 124, and 125, respectively. 46  A little earlier, the author acknowledges that “if the people had had leaders, the barricades would have been erected immediately,” preventing the unhindered advance of the

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s­ ubordinated to the autonomous moral capacity of the people to engage in coordinated collective action without falling prey to manipulation, either by “the agents of the counter-revolution” who “strove to goad the people into excesses that would justify armed and bloody repression,” or “tribunes of all sorts,” who “with enthusiasm and disinterest” would speak “with ardour in the name of liberty.” The citizen uprising in the capital took place before that of Seville, on 17 July. That day, a rumour spread that Queen Isabella II’s mother, María Cristina—faced with a threat of prosecution over her and her husband’s malfeasance and corruption—was about to leave her palace-residence without an official announcement. A crowd gathered around the gates to prevent her departure, and attempted to storm the premises when troops of the Civil Guard intervened and a skirmish broke out. The same scenario was repeated in other parts of the city as mobs attacked the dwellings of key members of the cabinet and speculators notorious for having amassed wealth through kickbacks on public contracts, such as the Marquis of Salamanca.47 As the armed confrontation escalated, “the people” started to “construct barricades” that soon extended through many streets of the city.48 It is only once this independent popular mobilization has taken shape that “some leaders from the most advanced parties” begin to appear on the scene, although still forced to acknowledge the citizens’ capacity for self-organization, which made the actions of the “political bigwigs (santones)” seem “insufficient” and perhaps even “worthless.”49 According to the narrative, “the people had risen above all the parties, they were just the people, nothing more” relying on their growing capacity for organization and on popular solidarity: many vecinos offered furniture and mattresses to shore up the barricades in preparation for a new round of fighting that would take place the next morning, 18 July.50 troops, and “giving the people a better chance to resist.” The absence of leadership is therefore recognized and condemned. On the other hand, the author stresses that this representational deficit was decisive in determining the course of events, since according to his interpretation the people understood that they stood alone and could only count on themselves for the defence of their liberties; see Un Hijo del Pueblo (2018): 31 and 32. 47  On this figure, the epitome of the first wave of capitalist speculators, see González Solano (2014). 48  On the erection of these barricades, and the social composition of those who manned them, see García Monerris and Pérez Garzón (1976). 49  See Un Hijo del Pueblo (1854): 75–76. 50  See Ibid.: 76 and 75, respectively. The scenes of confrontation with the troops give way to a rhetoric and tales of heroism, courage, and self-sacrifice.

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So far, the author seems to be writing from the same ideological perspective as his anonymous Sevillian counterpart. An important difference, however, is that Un Hijo del Pueblo stresses the lack of legitimacy of the authorities emerging in the context of the crisis. This is already evident when, given the seriousness of the situation on the streets—with open confrontations between armed citizens and regular troops—some “patriots” decided to establish a so-called Junta de Salvación, Armamento y Defensa [Council of Salvation, Armaments, and Defence] that claimed leadership of the popular mobilization, coordinated the armed response, and reoriented the crisis to the political arena. Faithful to the liberal slogan of unity, it brought together reputable progressives as well as committed democrats. The Junta would quickly get the approval of the courtiers and the queen, who handed over the military command of the capital to its president, General Evaristo San Miguel, a radical progressive with a long political career. However, this Junta was accused by the author of promptly adopting “a contemplative and conciliatory attitude that satisfied no one, not even the least demanding,” which in the author’s eyes explains the emergence of a second independent source of authority. In the city’s southern neighbourhoods—the current quartiers of La Latina and Lavapiés—a so-called Junta del Sur [Council of the South] was established, a sign, according to the author, that many barricades had rejected the “promptings” of the Junta de Salvamento “for the popular forces to disperse and return to their homes,” despite the fact that the regular troops showed no intention of abandoning hostilities.51 The inability of General San Miguel to impose his authority on the Junta del Sur allowed the armed citizenry to resume the struggle on the morning of 19 July. The outcome of this new round of fighting was a decisive victory for the civilian forces on the barricades, although it came at a high cost—nearly eighty of civilians were killed in contrast to less than thirty of the regular troops. A new scenario opened 51  See Un Hijo del Pueblo (2018): 116. The author defines this second Junta as “diametrically opposed in intention” to the Junta de Salvación: whereas the latter was apparently “in favour of liberal unity, the merger, the compromise,” the Junta del Sur instead “wanted the revolution to go as far as it could,” the only limit imposed being “the throne and the dynasty” of Isabella II. The author even has one if its members address the following words to the supporters of the other Junta: “your motto of Liberal Union is a lie with which you want to deceive the people: we do not recognize your authority, and not a single man from our district obeys you”; see Ibid.: 119. On the Liberal Union, a political party to emerge from this political crisis, see below.

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up in the aftermath, with military and popular forces seeking to stabilize the situation and forge a new political settlement; the barricades, however, remained in place for several days. This last part of the narrative is especially interesting because it brings into focus the limitations of the democratic leadership in trying to assume effective control over the popular movement in Madrid. The crisis of representation is most sharply outlined in the description of the so-called Círculo de la Unión [Circle of Unity]. Un Hijo del Pueblo dedicates the last chapter of his work to describing the operation of this forum for debate, its formation and practices, and weighs its influence on the revolutionary process.52 The chronicle recognizes that the Círculo, although “born of a few enthusiastic youth,” nevertheless “very soon embraced a considerable number of patriots.” The author also notes that its creation was guided by an elevated “idea” inspired by “the zeal for the patria and for freedom”: to take up “the banner of the union of all the parties.”53 It goes on to describe, however, how this ideal was betrayed “by being put into practice by men who only think of their own ambition and profit.” Indeed, according to the author, “the democratic and open” form of admission attracted many “of those exploiters of circumstances,” and people who were only looking for “popularity” and fame that would help them secure a privileged position.54 Yet the most alarming thing for the author is that the “ripples from the Círculo had reached the barricades” and were threatening to replicate the same outcome there. Paradoxically, instead of fostering the cohesion of the popular power, the Círculo de la Unión appears as rapidly “transformed into an element of disunity,” acting as a “solvent”  On the Círculo de la Unión, see Peyrou (2008a): 267–83, and Urquijo Goitia (1984).  This space—in the narrative also denominated as a “club,” a “political [debate] society,” even a “meeting” (sic)—aimed explicitly at “aiding the Junta Superior, taking charge of the revolution, encouraging it if necessary, and ensuring” that it did “not go astray”; see Un Hijo del Pueblo (2018): 153, emphasis in the original. 54  According to the author, this underlying rationality on the surface coincided with a revolutionary rhetoric and gestures, so that “in its aspect, one could find the carmagnoles, the Phrygian caps, the pikes, the fateful countenances, the sparkling eyes” as well as “speeches by tribunes” inspired by “the French Revolution of 93” and expressing ideas “capable of reaching the furthest revolutionary extreme.” Just as in the work of the anonymous Sevillian chronicler, the rhetoric openly disavows the French republican tradition. According to Un Hijo del Pueblo, those “who clearly understood the real tendencies, and needs of the Spanish people” contemplated “that association with caution and even fear” see Ibid.: 154 and 155, respectively. 52 53

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that turns the rhetoric of unity into the very inverse dynamic of fragmentation reaching beyond inter-party relations and compromising their capacity for representing a mobilized citizenry.55 Indeed, at the beginning of the work Un Hijo del Pueblo had signalled that the issue of unity among liberals was posed from the start, but only as a slogan “for the struggle”; however, once turned into an end in itself, it reveals the inherent limits of all party identities for aptly representing the people in action. The final expression of this deficit is the Círculo itself, about which the author concludes that there “all the interests that are stirring among us were represented,” all “but the people,” since “nothing that was said there, nothing that was projected there was applicable to the Spanish people.”56 However, this kind of Tower of Babel of radical Liberalism would not last long: in just a few days, according to the chronicle, the Círculo “fell mortally wounded by public opinion.”57 The latter appears in turn embodied by the popular barricades where, despite attempts to control and dominate them by different forces, the popular unity was  maintained, guaranteeing its independence of action until the arrival to the court of General Espartero, one of whose first decisions was precisely the creation of a national militia that made them expendable. The narrative ends at this point, underscoring that the people had been the protagonist of the entire revolutionary process, but calling on citizens to remain alert for a possible reaction. It is clear that the crux of the whole story is the limits of political representation in the popular revolution. Yet in the author’s ideological framework these are not fixed—that is, he does not resort to anti-party or populist rhetoric. Certainly, Un Hijo del Pueblo stresses that the Revolution “has not been made by any party, but by the people, the sovereign people”; nevertheless, the parties do have a political role, and a quite crucial one within the proffered system of popular citizenship: that of representing the aspirations of the people.58 Consequently, the  See Ibid.: 155 and 156, respectively.  See 9, 156 and 157, respectively. And he concludes: “there was nothing but parties, and parties whose systems are useless for being old and spent”; yet the author underlines that “the democrats were represented” in the forum as much as the other political groupings. 57  See Ibid.: 158. 58  “It is absurd to believe that the people belongs to this or that party. The people only support and give strength to that party which better represents popular rights.” And he 55 56

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l­imitations in the representation of popular citizenship are not a natural and necessary effect of the party system but rather a contingent outcome of the changing relations between people and parties, or between the represented and their representatives. This perspective distances Un Hijo del Pueblo from the political culture inherited from Cádiz, forcing the author to explain why the parties across the Spanish liberal spectrum, including the most radical ones such as the democrats and the republicans, were unable to represent the mobilized citizenry in the crisis of 1854. The answer he offers is interesting first of all because of the prior emphatic assertion that popular demands were clear and explicit from the outset.59 Why, he asks rhetorically, was not a “government worthy of inspiring confidence in the people” established from the beginning? The main problem, according to the author, was the fact that “those who thought only of self-sacrifice, without hope for future rewards” had “no political significance, no representation before the people, [and] no means of action”: in short, “they were utterly impotent.”60 Thus, according to the author, there were leaders in the movement capable of channelling the aspirations and demands of the people, but they lacked influence within the party organizations and its leadership. The assessment confirms the shortcomings of all parties across the political spectrum, including republicans and democrats, in their role as spokesmen for the people in action. The critique of the discursive hegemony of unity and the pre-eminence of participation over representation are the common features of the two chronicles of the 1854 Revolution analysed here—of Seville and of Madrid, respectively—which also in both authors discourages a demócrata or progresista affiliation, as well as unqualified doceañista identification.61 As his continues: “But the people are neither white nor black; it is but the people. It is no more than the gathering of thousands of honourable men who eat the bread they earn with the sweat of their brow”; see Ibid.: 125. 59  “It cannot be said that the character of the popular movement was strange or difficult to understand: the people spoke loudly and one had to be deaf not to hear, and stupid not to comprehend”; see Ibid.: 34. 60  See Ibid.: 34 and 36, respectively. 61  Despite resorting to an alias to dissolve his identity into that of the main protagonist of his account, the author’s identity is known. Behind the pseudonym Un Hijo del Pueblo was Agustín Gómez de la Mata, a doctor from the town of Ciudad Real in La Mancha, who would later be elected a deputy for the progressive party; see Inarejos (2011): 19 and passim. I am indebted to this colleague for putting me on the right track with regard to the identity of Un Hijo del Pueblo.

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alias indicates, Hijo del Pueblo (Son of the People) at once identifies with the popular protagonism in the mobilization and dignifies it. The ­difference with the anonymous Sevillian is that the author from Madrid does not present the people as an organic and harmonious whole with a single moral disposition. The plebe as a group is given a role in the events that enable the triumph of the popular revolution in the capital. It appears first in the acts of violence against property that accompanied the first phase of the uprising. The account of the assaults on the residences of the Queen mother and the Marquis of Salamanca does not spare any epithets in regard to subjects whose appearance is sharply contrasted with that of the “people.”62 In any case, the boundary between the people and the plebe is not clearly demarcated in the chronicle. Thus, while blaming the mob for its excesses, the author acknowledges that, although made up of the “dregs of society,” in practice it “mingles with the people once a revolution breaks out.”63 Yet, rather than tainting the people with the moral traits of the plebe, the intention is to counter those who have tried “to make the revolution responsible for things that it has not done.”64 However, the “plebe” is also present in this chronicle in another way: not as separate from the “people,” but excluded from the conception of citizenship instituted in liberal Spain, based on either education or property—referents without which the author outlines the contours of a plebeian citizenship, in a rhetoric that clearly reveals the limitations of the discourse of Isabelline Liberalism as a means of representing the people. For instance, the narrative details several acts of popular justice that allegedly took place at the height of the popular uprising. One involved 62  The immorality that supposedly characterized “that separate society that is never seen when the rule of law prevails, and in the light of the sun” means that its portrayal borders on the animalistic: the chronicle presents the assailants of private homes as a “ragged, fierce [people], with hard and angular faces,” and hands like “the claws of a bird of prey”; see Un Hijo del Pueblo (2018): 45. 63  The author is at pains to point out that, when the mob is unleashed, the people “punishes with its executive justice when caught in any crime,” but admits that the citizenry in action also benefits from the situations created by the crowd. For instance, the account of the burning down of Maria Cristina’s palace underlines that in such “attacks” the people “did not take part but as mere spectators,” yet eventually acknowledges that they intervened “as simple assistants and in good faith.” And explains: “The people did not oppose those bonfires, and this was very natural: it had to feel and felt an immense pleasure in watching burn the opulent apparatus of those miserable who had converted the sweat and the tears of the destitute into feast and luxury”; see Ibid.: 45. 64  See Ibid.: 126.

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the execution of two police informers. Un Hijo del Pueblo does not hesitate in describing each one of these executions as a “murder,” yet he also recalls that the informants’ deaths “according to public opinion, were just.” What he laments is the “vast distance between righteousness and being executed as they were,” without a fair trial. On the surface, this would seem to be a typical identification of the plebe with the excesses of the revolution.65 Yet the interesting thing is that according to the author, this shedding of blood does not reflect the pre-eminence of the mob. In his view, terror “never emanates from the acts of the people” but rather “from the scoundrels that lurk among all peoples”—and even these do not act alone, but are spurred on by another “class of depraved and ambitious men […] fanatical and feeble-minded leaders who do not believe that freedom can be achieved except by killing, killing, and always killing.”66 Far from rehabilitating the centuries-old tradition that linked popular revolts to conspiracies devised by elite groups, this justification rather grants legitimacy to a notion of popular justice embedded in a veritable conception of citizenship. In effect, “the punishment of criminals” echoed by the author was not an exclusively popular or extemporaneous demand: on the contrary, it was part of the measures in response to the general call for “morality” in all the competing discourses that foreshadowed the crisis of 1854.67 Un Hijo del Pueblo thus equates summary justice with a deliberative and autonomous form of citizen participation legitimized by the revolutionary context.68 In 65  This popular justice is interpreted as the gateway to revolutionary terror, though. The author underscores that the population “abhorred to death these miserable who had blindly served for a base salary such miserable governments” and “had caused many misfortunes, had ruined many families, had committed many crimes.” Yet in the very next line he warned that “it began with the killing of great criminals: later, others who were less criminal would be dragged to their death, and it will continue until a few miserable, drunk of blood, will demand new executions every day to quench their thirst”; see Ibid.: 129. 66  This may be interpreted as a revival of the rhetoric against revolutionary demagogy and anarchy, but from an original standpoint, for the author invokes “public opinion” as the ultimate source of authority for these executions, according to which the death of these two informants was just, while on the other hand “rebelling […] vigorously” against the firing squads; see Ibid.: 132. 67  See Ibid.: 34. 68  This episode has also been studied in Zozaya (2012). The author offers an interpretation focused on the popular thirst for vengeance that is not substantiated by Un Hijo del Pueblo’s discourse, which has a clearly political dimension beyond merely reflecting a moral economy; for a contrasting view, see Labrador Méndez (2018).

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doing so, the account offers a glimpse of a political culture that does not easily fit with the political forces in play, but neither within the existing framework of ideologies and sensibilities in the Spanish Liberal order. It also seems to identify with it a proportion of the population that cannot be dismissed as marginal or a minority. As proof of this, there is a third execution the account of which is very different in tone and content. It is that of Francisco Chico, portrayed as “one of the main cogs of that machinery whose activity had so bled and demoralized the nation”: he was apparently a “veteran police officer” who had risen through the ranks to become the “long-time chief of the court police,” a post from which he had been orchestrating the repression of the political opposition and the popular classes in general, while illicitly enriching himself.69 The chronicle narrates that his execution took place on 23 July at noon, in the Plaza de la Cebada, where he was brought in procession from the Mostenses square, located quite a distance away in another part of the city. Un Hijo del Pueblo describes the “singular crowd of people” that formed a “roaring and shrieking tumult,” and that according to what he affirms “consisted of at least 10,000 people” including “men, women, children and old men of all classes and conditions,” many of whom were armed. According to his account, the “vanguard” of the procession was made up of “a multitude of ragged, barefoot, dishevelled rogues with cynical and weather-beaten features”; next “between a troop of armed men” came “two horsemen […] playing two old bugles as well as they could,” and behind them “a man with a long pole at the end of which, like a banner, hung an oil portrait,” followed in turn “by another, carrying the carcass of a plucked chicken hanging from the end of another stick.”70 In the wake of this procession came “a man on foot, pale, stupefied, shoved by the armed men surrounding him and with all the appearance of a miserable man on his way to being tortured.” This was a certain Mendal, alias Cano, Chico’s doorman. Beside him was a woman “carrying a plate and a cup, apparently with chocolate, which she stirred with a stick,” and then Francisco Chico, carried “on a mattress, on top of a ladder […] in shirt sleeves, with a Greek bonnet.” Although he was “apparently ill,” he was “serene, as if he were the object of popular acclaim, looking all around, and in disdainful silence.” As he passed by, the crowd  Un Hijo del Pueblo (2018): 132 and 133, respectively.  See  Ibid.: 136. The episode is corroborated in other contemporaneous sources; see Ribot and Fontseré (1854): 119–22. 69 70

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called for his death. Once taken behind a rampart, the former police chief was shot. The plethora of detail gives the narration an air of truthful report beyond literary verisimilitude. The inclusion of the prisoner’s via crucis strongly suggests that the event happened as described. At this point the account of Un Hijo del Pueblo becomes valuable not only as a form of contemporary discourse, but as factual evidence. Initially, his view of the popular action is somewhat patronizing;71 but at a certain point the author suspends judgment and limits himself to documenting a popular culture that is both very tangibly real and yet difficult to grasp. Thus, commenting on the plucked chicken that was part of the processional repertory, he openly admits: “we have been unable to ascertain what the chickens were meant to symbolize in such a pitiful and terrible way in that tremendous procession: doubtless it was death that was being represented, and the headless chicken was used for lack of a [human] skull.”72 Un Hijo del Pueblo’s frank admission of his inability to understand the rationale behind the street ritual and its symbols makes the narration symptomatic of the limits of representation of the people mobilized in 1854. This ritual seems to reveal the imprint of a political imagination that has little to do with the mixed constitution, or the common law tradition, or any other high cultural tropes, but rather draws upon the universe of carnival and its notions of time, nature, and the inversion of social roles and hierarchies. The passage makes evident the endurance of this repertoire of ritual actions and meanings in Spain of the mid-nineteenth century, and its persistence among the inhabitants of the capital city and the seat of the royal court—but above all its continued vitality in a scenario that the author unhesitatingly presents as a struggle for the recognition of citizen rights.

71  He tries to exonerate the majority of the population by suggesting that “to have tried to contain that flood, would have been tantamount to committing pointless suicide.” He also points out that the men on the barricades “took up arms” when they saw the procession arrive, but upon learning that it was Chico the informant on the way to his execution, “the barricades gave way” and nobody prevented its passage or “dared to commit to such a bad cause”; see Un Hijo del Pueblo (2018): 137. 72  See Ibid.: 136. The episode also shows the limitations of available categories: the concept of a “moral economy” does not take into account that the codes of that plebeian culture are as difficult for us to apprehend as they were for a witness such as Un Hijo del Pueblo, who relied on the conceptual repertoire of historical Liberalism.

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This suggests that popular culture in the period of Spanish Liberalism was enriched if not shaped by a particularly self-assertive plebeian substratum that moreover possessed an undeniable political and even civic dimension. The link between these two layers—plebeian and traditional on the one hand, citizen and modern on the other—is a spacious semantics of justice that could accommodate, on the one hand, discourses about public morality among the higher social strata, and, on the other, social practices imbued with egalitarian notions and an evidently deliberative charge among the lower orders. The fact that we are dealing with a ritual and not merely a discourse, in turn, suggests that we are confronted with a deeply socially rooted culture. Above all, however, this episode reveals the author’s limitations in accounting for a reality that is confounding even for him, and not in a moral but in a purely epistemological sense. Un Hijo del Pueblo’s capacity to give meaning or translate the symbolism of the popular procession is clearly circumscribed. In the absence of a shared semantics, the author finds it difficult to construct an understanding of events in common with their protagonists. From this point onward, only prejudices remain operative, and no longer the tropes of a political culture embodied in a righteous “people,” who in this part of the narrative are rather designated as plebe. Along the way, the reality of this subject-become-subaltern escapes the witness-observer, and with it the identity of the key protagonist in the resolution of the 1854 crisis, which has been deprived of political representation but also of discursive recognition.

The Aftermath of the Revolution: Unity Beyond Monarchy In the absence of mutual understanding among the opposition forces and a substantial part of the mobilized citizens, the resolution of the political crisis of 1854 was carried out “from above,” by deferring to the leadership of a figure both popular and acceptable to the various parties. The popular militias were disarmed at the end of July 1854, just a few days following the arrival of General Baldomero Espartero in the capital to take up the reins of the provisional government on behalf of Queen Isabella. Espartero decreed the formation of a new militia that made popular military regiments redundant, and despite some armed resistance, the barricades were finally dismantled. Subsequently, the local juntas in other cities and towns

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ceded their authority, first to a central Junta and then to the provisional government, which decreed the holding of an election for a parliament tasked with drawing up a new constitution. As in previous moments of rupture from 1808 onward, the rhetoric of unity marked the entire process of 1854, including the post-revolutionary political scene, although by then it was a unity conceived around representative order and government, not the autonomous revolutionary organizations.73 In the following months, the rhetoric of unity did not diminish: on the contrary, it became the main leitmotif of the public sphere as a whole.74 In fact, a new party emerged, the Liberal Union, whose manifest raison d’etre was the reunification of all the disparate strands of Isabelline liberalism. The new organization took shape in anticipation of the forthcoming election, drawing in mainly politicians from conservative ranks as well as some progressives, which allowed its leaders to occupy the centre of the political spectrum—and thus increase its leverage and ability to form coalitions in the years that followed.75 The new parliament inaugurated in the fall of 1854 welcomed the first unionista deputies, as well as democrats, already outside the ranks of 73  This tension between unity around the state and unity around the revolutionary forces was a general, Europewide concern for radicalism at the time; see Moscoso (2019). 74  Indeed, it became an object of obsessive reflection. One poignant example is the work titled La autonomía de los partidos [The autonomy of parties], pretentiously subtitled Explicación del alzamiento de Julio por las leyes inherentes a los partidos mismos [Explanation of the July upheaval based on the laws inherent in the parties themselves], in which the author claimed to have identified the internal logic of political parties in a natural tendency towards mutual exclusion, the destabilizing and disorderly effect of which eventually set into motion a centripetal force that led to their reunification in new inclusive formations; see Ribot and Fontseré (1856). Originally a progressive and a follower of Espartero, the author had republican inclinations; he had been elected as deputy for Barcelona when he wrote the piece. 75  Despite its declared aim of incorporating all the ideological sensibilities in favour of representative government, in practice the Unión Liberal was far from achieving the unification of the different political families and affinities, not to mention all the different ideological strands of Spanish Liberalism—nor did it foster competition among the different political options. From the outset advocating for the maintenance of the status quo, unionism successfully manoeuvred first to shatter the progressivist coalitions, then decisively contributed to staving off constitutional reform, and finally had the choice of either ruling by majority or supporting new conservative coalitions. In sum, the new party made the political landscape more complex, but did not contribute to greater pluralism; on this organization, see Durán de la Rúa (1979) and Martínez Gallego (2001). Its motto “conserve by progressing” shows, beyond the oxymoron, the ideological limits of the language of Spanish historical Liberalism, which only had room for two separate, opposing or intertwined, conceptual lines.

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progressives, and some republicans, all of whom participated in the constitutional debates that took place over the following months. Despite this, universal suffrage was not part of the discussions over the new constitution, although the question of monarchy was broached.76 The main feature of the parliamentary culture of the so-called Progressive Biennium (1854–1856) was the absolute centrality  of the grammar of the mixed constitution. Indeed, far from showing signs of decline, the triad monarchy-aristocracy-democracy shaped the discourse of all ideological factions, beginning with the radical deputies, who deployed a battery of arguments to define, re-establish, and expand the democratic component of the constitution, in the Senate as well as the lower chamber, in other bodies such as the national militia or in jury selection, and even in the institution of the monarchy itself—which the democrats aspired to “democratize” through measures controlling the activities of the Royal House to help boost its “popularity.” For their part, progresistas and unionistas refined the aristocratic dimension of the upcoming constitution, especially, but not only, in the composition and structure of the Senate, while conservatives poured their energy into defending the monarchy as the necessary bulwark of unity. Overall, the result was surely the most balanced constitutional text in the history of Spanish Liberalism with regard to the three elements of the mixed constitution, combined with the more deeply rooted tradition of a Catholic legal culture that gave pre-­eminence to the diverse institutions of the state as corporations. Democracy undoubtedly acquired greater institutional and semantic scope, but was duly subordinated to the whole and to the principle of harmony with other elements, being especially delegitimized in its “pure” form, that is, as a political system in its own right.77 76  Using a procedural question—whether the Queen could put her signature on official documents before having settled the foundations of sovereignty in the new constitution— democrats and republicans forced the first parliamentary debate in Spanish history on the merits of monarchical vis-à-vis republican forms of government; on this, and the 1854–1856 constitutional debates in general, see Sánchez León (2021c). 77  Sufficiently representative of the dominant consensus is the account of democracy in the monumental history of Spanish institutions by Manuel Colmeiro, first published in 1850 and reprinted in 1855, amidst the constitutional debates. In its pages the author claimed that “in the earliest age of a people the simplest forms of government appear, such as democracy or monarchy, and only later are there middling terms and mixed forms, in response to greater needs, or as fruit of a long experience in the affairs of State”; see Colmeiro (1855) [1850]: I, 43. A profile of this intellectual and his work is presented in Martín Martín (2013).

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None of this eliminated conflict from the legislature, which put growing pressure on Prime Minister Espartero. He was finally forced to resign just as the lower chamber was debating the electoral legislation that would serve as the basis of the constitution, proposing to extend the suffrage beyond the narrow limits established by the two previous charts, although still far from the threshold established by that of 1812. However, the Cortes sessions ended abruptly with the call for new national elections, and the new parliamentary majority declared itself against the promulgation of the already drafted constitutional text—thanks to the corrupt machinations of the president of the provisional government, the military officer and unionist O´Donnell. Thus, and insofar as the deputies of the Unión Liberal ensured stable governance without modifying the political system, the 1845 Constitution remained in force during the rest of Isabella II’s reign.78 The Revolution of 1854 thus resulted in a frustrated constituent process. In this context, the inability of the first democrats to secure a space for autonomous political action and articulate a distinct ideology was decisive for the final outcome of the crisis that came to an end in 1856. It did not however foreclose future possibilities for action. Divergent interpretations of the revolutionary process allowed some radical liberals to take a critical view of the consensus around political unity, and to usher in a new period that would engender discourses critical of the established form of representative government. From the very outset of the political upheavals of the summer of 1854 there was disagreement among republicans and democrats over the course being taken. Thus, for instance, Francisco Pi i Margall called for more independent popular self-organization, against views among the majority of the radical leaders. Fernando Garrido for his part considered that with the dismantling of the barricades the revolution had been “annihilated and sold out.”79 Such attitudes were initially marginalized, but as the 78  The 1854 Constitution figures in Spanish constitutional history as the “unborn” (nonnata); on the significance of this constituent process, see Mateos and Merino Merchán (1994); on the problems of governance during the Progressive Biennium in general, see Urquijo Goitia (1997). 79  Pi i Margall published a controversial pamphlet as soon as the uprising in the streets was over, on 21 July 1854, entitled “The echo of the revolution,” in which he bluntly rebuked the people, reminding them that the victory of the barricades “you owe to no party” but only “to your own efforts, your patriotism, your courage.” However, this discourse with a doceañista flavour became the basis for an openly democratic programme: after rhetorically asking,

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expectations raised by the constituent process were increasingly frustrated, a shift occurred in the discourse and activism of the radical liberals that enabled the social success of their ideology in the years that followed.80 As the parliamentary debates in the constituent Cortes gathered momentum, other democratic and republican ideologues ventured beyond the framework of the mixed constitution. Certainly, the rhetoric and the discourse of “pure” democracy were not new in the liberal public sphere: now, however, radical ideologues were developing a theoretical argument in which democracy, rather than monarchy, was the basis of the sought-­ after unity. In effect, instead of  continuing to focus on the contrast between monarchical and republican forms of government, in a true tour de force the republican discourse came to present the institution of monarchy as unable to provide the coordination and act as the unifying linchpin of the body politic. This new discourse was pioneered by Fernando Garrido in a pamphlet titled El pueblo y el trono (The People and the Throne), written as the popular uprising was in its death throes. Far from rejecting the monarchy in principle, Garrido began by assuming that “all institutions have their raison d’être,” so that the monarchies were also “originally an element of progress” because “they pulled society from amid a horrible anarchy.” However, its historical task of laying the foundations of civilization had been transcended with the advance of freedom, so that in the present it was possible to achieve without the aid of the monarchical element the “fusion of all peoples and all races in one big family,” an aspiration that the author identified with “the dogma of democracy.”81 The approach was shaped by the characteristic features of the monarchy in the grammar of the mixed constitution. Indeed, Garrido championed the republic precisely because it fitted into this scheme of history: monarchy, he argued, by resisting the advancing spirit of the times, appeared as a source of discord and disunity and therefore an “obstacle to progress.” At this point, the attributes traditionally assigned to the monarchical principle were completely subverted: “Monarchy and national sovereignty are “[a]re you not, at the very least, as deserving as the one who most intervenes in the government of the nation, in the government of yourself?,” pinned his hopes on a popular militia that would serve as a guarantee for “the convocation of a Constituent Cortes elected by all citizens without distinction, that is, by Universal Suffrage”; see Pi i Margall (1854). Fernando Garrido’s phrase in Kiernan (1966). 80  An account of this evolution can be found in Peyrou (2008a): 351–416. 81  See Garrido (1854): 10, 11, and 12 respectively.

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mutually repelling, like force and the law, or violence and reason.”82 On the other hand, the federal democratic republic that Garrido was advocating would bring greater and more authentic unity of the forces of progress and of the entire nation. As unity was now associated with popular sovereignty, monarchy was assigned meanings previously considered antithetical to it, such as the exercise of force and irrationality.83 Yet the grammar of the mixed constitution remained as the underlying common reference for these conceptual redistributions: just as force, an essential feature of the people in this tradition, was now attributed to the monarchy, the people in turn could be reinterpreted as being animated by reason, thus granting a decisive legitimacy to democracy as a self-sufficient form of government. Despite seeming relatively minor, these semantic changes were in fact crucial. They reveal a fundamental rupture in the discourse of the first Spanish democrats. Following the political and institutional crisis of representative government in the mid-nineteenth century, they facilitated the convergence between republicans and democrats, on the one hand, and between these and the vestiges of doceañista sensibilities, on the wane since 1854. In a wider discursive sense, it became possible to imagine stable and wholly popular governments, or what until then was disparagingly labelled as “pure” democracy, which makes it a milestone in modern Spanish politics.84

 See Ibid.: 9.  This discursive trend that equated democracy with unity had its own genealogy. In the classical tradition, “pure” democracy, that is, understood as an autonomous political form not mixed with others, and therefore as an order in its own right, had to be responsible for the unity of the system. In fact, the usual symbolic image of democracy was an open pomegranate, which made it possible to distinguish the grains of which it was composed, all equal to each other—since the distinctive value of democracy was the tendency towards equality among its members—and at the same time appeared as preserved in a single receptacle, the fruit, that assured their unity. Now, the classic representation of democracy placed unity in a radical tension with disunity, an opposite extreme potentially derived from the equality of views of all participating members with the capacity for opinion and deliberation; accordingly, in the representation by Cesare Ripa in his famous Iconology, democracy was depicted as a woman who is holding a pomegranate in her right hand, although in her left hand she is holding several snakes symbolizing discord and disunity; see Ripa (1779) [1593]: II, 10 and Plate LV, Fig. 210. 84  In line with this approach, see Thomson (2010). 82 83

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Conclusions It is striking that the first revolution in Spanish history in which the imaginary of democracy played an important role as a horizon of expectation did not produce in its own time a narrative inspired by democratic ideology. This shows not only discursive limitations but also a lack of conceptual resources to wage a successful struggle for narrative hegemony. The absence during the Revolution of 1854 of a narrative of the events from a democratic or unionist perspective is undoubtedly the clearest indication of the limitations of the new political forces in representing the meaning of popular mobilization. As we have seen, it was the doceañista sensibilities in transition that were preponderant, although, paradoxically, these narratives were usually elaborated by authors originally associated with the progressive party. On the other hand, the prevalent doceañista narratives did not further the political or organizational success of this ideological sensibility, an absence that signals its process of dissolution. This conclusion should not lose sight of the most important contribution of the Revolution of 1854 to what is the underlying concern of this book: the event created the conditions for a decisive conceptual differentiation between the fields of representation and participation, in turn actively separating them from the sphere of unity. Indeed, the need to make sense of fast unfolding events gave rise to narratives in which participation was openly counterposed to representation, and both in turn strove to sustain the unity of a mobilized citizenry. This differentiation between the two fields may be seen as the most modern aspect of the 1854 process in the realm of political language.85 Yet it also highlights that Spanish Liberalism was by then far from producing a solid hierarchy among them. Likewise, the use of the concept of “revolution” to give meaning to the process initiated in July 1854 can also be considered modern. In this case, however, it cannot be said that the widespread use of the term reflected or fostered significant semantic transformations comparable to those that had occurred contemporaneously in the international language of radical ideologues around 1848. By virtue of this deficit, 1854 did not constitute a social but a political revolution, and one that was ultimately frustrated, which has contributed to its disparagement in the narrative of Spanish modernity, pejoratively labelled “La Vicalvarada,” as equating the whole 85  In this sense it fits with recent interpretations of the diversity and radicalism of popular political participation in the 1848 Revolution in France; see Hayat (2014).

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process with the rather minor military skirmish outside Madrid. However, the Spanish Revolution of 1854 perfectly fits within a scheme that combines a crisis in existing forms of representation with experiments in new forms of participation enabled by the irruption onto the political stage of mobilized citizens. In short, it exemplifies the profound shift in the established boundaries between order and disorder derived from the reintegration of the plebe within the people. Furthermore, in this chapter I have shown that in Spain the first advocates of democratic ideology were less committed to a political system based on universal suffrage than to providing an alternative basis for unity in competition with other political and parliamentary groupings on the liberal spectrum. I have also underlined that the democrats proved incapable of providing leadership to the popular masses in the crucial days of 1854. In sum, the specificity and complexity of the scenario resides in the fact that, on the one hand, the democratic leaders were hegemonized by their conservative and progressive rivals, and on the other hand, the social bases mobilized around the political crisis did not sufficiently identify with democrats. From the perspective of the old theory of popular disorders, 1854 was undoubtedly preceded by a conspiracy, but this was neither decisive in the unfolding of events nor could it predetermine the outcome. The poor performance of these emerging political ideologues and agitators was, on the one hand, due to the fact that their identification with the notion of unity derived from their sense of weakness, which made them cling unwaveringly to that referent at the expense of other aspects of their agenda. On the other hand, with regard to the popular movement, the rhetoric of unity made the democrats strongly dependent on the party form as a vehicle for organization, just when it was being subjected to criticism in the barricades by independent popular leaders and by observer-­ witnesses elaborating a discourse inspired by doceañista tropes critical with the performance of parties. This conclusion has consequences for the study of classical Liberalism and the emerging democratic trends in mid-nineteenth century Spain. Probably the most questionable historiographical assumption regarding the 1854 Revolution—extendable to all major protest movements during Isabella II’s reign—is that the democratic and republican leaders were exceptionally well-positioned to act as representatives of the demands of the excluded populace and a conduit to self-governing institutions, despite their lack of success prior to 1868. To begin with, this perspective has a rather problematic lineage: it is a legacy of the historiography of the Franco

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era, with its vested interest in exaggerating the authority of the first democrats over the masses unleashed against the established order.86 The ­curious thing about this assumption is that it has not come under critical scrutiny by historians since the transition to democracy: on the contrary, specialists on the subject have rather underscored the supposed synergy between the democratic leadership and its base, differing from historians of the Francoist era only inasmuch they acknowledged the legitimacy of the popular political demands. This perspective is tainted by myth, to which the limitations of social and intellectual history have undoubtedly contributed—unable to discern, respectively, between the different segments of the popular classes in liberal society and the ideological options available in its public sphere. Above all, it reproduces the common assumption of the Spanish political culture of the last quarter of the twentieth century, which has found it hard to acknowledge the possibility of deep cleavages between representatives and the represented in a parliamentary system in general and in regard to the supply of political parties in particular. This uncritical approach is at the base of the transposition to the past of an image of the people as well represented by the formal ideological alternatives available, first in the culture of Liberalism and later in that of democracy. In this sense, the assumption is compatible with the meta-narrative of Spanish modernization, a process seen as led by social, political, and cultural elites.87 A better understanding of the nineteenth-century democratic ideal and of those who identified as democrats should be based on the acknowledgment that the context of their emergence was presided over by enormous difficulties encountered by all the political forces—established and emerging ones—faced with the challenge of representing and thus motivating a sufficiently large minority, not to mention a social majority. Further improvement would be gained through critical reflection on the fact that, although they called themselves democrats, a significant number of the radical liberals of the mid-nineteenth century Spain did not easily fit into the category of promoters of democracy as conventionally understood today. 86  Its first academic articulation is in the works by Eiras Roel, recently republished with several changes and additions though unchanged in its basic tenets; see Eiras Roel (2015) [1961]. 87  Moreover, this meta-narrative reproduces contemporary prejudices against a crowd equated with either disorder or stubborn adherence to tradition; see a critique on the narrative framework of modernization focusing on nineteenth-century Spain in Sirera (2015).

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So much for the representatives; but the matter becomes yet more complicated and intriguing with regard to the represented. If, according to the opinion of qualified witnesses, the barricades of Madrid and other Spanish cities in 1854 were not the work of followers of a democratic party or republican sensibility, then it needs be recognized that an important segment of the citizenry—not necessarily in numbers, but certainly relevant among those actively mobilized—did not ground their identity in the culture of Liberalism, or at least not only therein. This places those excluded citizens mobilized against corruption and abuses of power in a subaltern position. The problem is that it is not possible to know if the revolutionaries of 1854 were more or less democratic-­ minded than their representatives, or whether they had a different political identity from that of their self-proclaimed leaders. What can be determined is that their identity—undoubtedly rooted in popular culture, but with an evidently political and civic dimension—was not adequately represented by the most radical liberal leadership. The struggle for recognition by the first self-proclaimed democrats in the political space of Liberalism was carried out in this way at the cost of maintaining the exclusion of a crucial part of their potential base of support: the old split between the people and the plebe was actually reproduced, if not deepened and magnified. In a more general sense, it is possible to conclude that a plebeian substratum is always present in the crises of modernity, though it is more often noted rather than actively understood and integrated in the narratives of these recurring phenomena. What I have tried to show here is that without the concurrence of that substratum there is no active citizenry: we are not dealing here with two separate cultures, one civic and the other plebeian, but rather with their mutual interaction or hybridization, which produces a mobilized citizenry in general and demands for popular political participation in particular, and which manifests itself differently in each historical context depending on the dynamics of hybridization. Not being sensitive to this issue is apt to mislead scholars as well as aspiring radical political leaders, ensuring that calls for reform never result in a new constituent process. This is not a problem unique to the past: it is also evident in the social mobilizations of the twenty-first century in the wake of the crisis of democracy in Spain and in other countries. The obvious difference is that the category of the “plebe” is no longer part of our political vocabulary, making it impossible to generate a discourse that, by reincorporating it in the

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“people,” would unleash a mobilizing force capable of reshaping the boundaries of the system.88 It is perhaps for this reason that the 15-M movement has not been able to set in motion a constituent process in twenty-first-century Spanish democracy. Yet the issues of unity, representation, and citizen participation have surfaced and have been faced in our own time. They are still with us.

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——— (2018). “Introducción. Nuestros ancestros ciudadanos y su identidad política radical”. In Un Hijo del Pueblo, Las jornadas de Julio [de 1854] (una crónica anónima de otro 15M en el pasado ciudadano español), Madrid: Postmetropolis Editorial, I–LXII. ——— (2021a). “Exaltación y entusiasmo: el tiempo en las identidades revolucionarias del liberalismo hispano”. In Fabio Wasserman (ed.), Tiempos críticos. Historia, revolución y temporalidad en el mundo iberoamericano (siglos XVIII y XIX), Buenos Aires: Prometeo (forthcoming). ——— (2021b). “La constitución mixta: una gramática elemental para la imaginación política en el paso a la modernidad”. In Francisco A.  Ortega, Rafael Acevedo, Pablo Casanova (eds.), Historia conceptual transatlántica: metodologías y nuevas perspectivas de análisis. Grupos de trabajo de Iberconceptos, Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia (forthcoming). ——— (2021c). “Constitutional imagination and ‘Catholic’ Political Anthropology: The Grammar of the Mixed Government in the Mid ­Nineteenth-­Century Crisis of Spanish Liberalism”. In Xavier Gil Puyol (ed.), Constitutional Moments. Founding Myths, Charters, and Constitutions through History, Leiden: Brill (forthcoming). Sierra, María (2010). “Identidades políticas: ciudadanos, vecinos y padres de familia”. In María Sierra, María A. Peña y Rafael Zurita, Elegidos y elegibles. La representación parlamentaria en la cultura del liberalismo, Madrid: Marcial Pons, 351–74. Sirera, Carles (2015). “Neglecting the 19th Century Democracy, the Consensus Trap and Modernization Theory in Spain”, History of the Human Sciences 28/3: 51–67 [available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ abs/10.1177/0952695115579588]. Stedman Jones, Gareth (1983). Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomson, Guy (2010). The Birth of Modern Politics in Spain: Democracy, Association and Revolution, 1854–75, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Un Hijo del Pueblo (2018). Las jornadas de Julio [de 1854] (una crónica anónima de otro 15M en el pasado ciudadano español), Madrid: Postmetropolis Editorial. Urquijo Goitia, José Ramón (1984). La Revolución de 1854 en Madrid, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. ——— (1991). “La revolución de 1854 en Zamora”, Hispania 177: 245–86 [available at https://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/16868]. ——— (1997). “Las contradicciones políticas del bienio progresista”, Hispania 195: 267–302 [available at https://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/16865]. Wilentz, Sean (2005). The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, New York, Norton and Co.

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Woloch, Isser (1996). “The Ambiguities of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century”. In Isser Woloch (ed.), Revolution and the Meaning of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century, Stanford (Ca.): Stanford University Press, 1–30. Zermeño, Guillermo (2014). “Revolución en iberoamérica (1770–1870). Análisis y síntesis de un concepto”. In Javier Fernández Sebastián (dir.), Diccionario político y social del mundo iberoamericano-Iberconceptos II, Madrid: UIniversidad del País Vasco/Centro de Estudios políticos y Constitucionales, 9: 15–48. Zozaya, María (2012). “‘Moral Revenge of the Crowd’ in the 1854 Revolution in Madrid”, Bulletin for the Hispanic and Portuguese Historical Studies 37/1: 18–46 [available at https://digitalcommons.asphs.net/bsphs/vol37/iss1/2]. Zurita, Rafael (1990). Revolución y burguesía: Alicante (1854–1856), Alicante: Ayuntamiento de Alicante.

CHAPTER 7

Recognition: Vulgar as a Political Concept— Discourse and Subjects of Corruption in the Public Sphere of Limited Suffrage

Democracy and the Figures of Corruption in the Public Sphere As in other countries, the sense of a crisis of representation in Spanish democracy has taken hold in a broader context of economic crisis that is a reflection of global processes as well as national dynamics in the medium and long term.1 As elsewhere, in line with this crisis of the economic model, a consensus has crystallized in Spain with regard to the unbridled rise in social inequality: beyond the fact that the number of millionaires has increased while masses of the unemployed have been evicted from their homes over non-payment of rent or mortgages, the social structure of the post-Franco democracy seems to be under intense

1

 See an overview in Etxezarreta (2019).

A first version of this chapter was presented at the workshop “‘Hellenes’ and ‘Barbarians’: Asymmetrical Concepts in European Discourse” (University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, 3–4 October 2014). I thank the organizers and participants for their comments. © The Author(s) 2020 P. Sánchez León, Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5_7

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pressure.2 Likewise, public opinion seems persuaded that widespread corruption is the source of the degradation of the democratic political system.3 In this context, there have been some experiments in coining new terms with which to account for ongoing processes. Among them is the dissemination in the post-15M public sphere of the term “caste” to define the plutocracy that acts as a nexus between economic and political powers considered to be behind the crisis and that, in addition to hindering possible redistributive solutions, encompasses the logic of political corruption.4 Given the rather limited social uptake of the word, it is pertinent to reflect on the conditions under which representations of inequality become rooted in a culture, which normally occurs within the triangle formed by the exercise of political power, social customs, and forms of enrichment considered to be illegitimate.5 The question addressed in this chapter arises from the fact that the new inequality brought about by the era of globalization is at pains to call upon a defiant language, in contrast to what was the case in the nineteenth century. At that time, well-defined notions of inequality, such as those around the concept of oligarchy, were firmly integrated in the political-­ philosophical tradition so that, in certain contexts, their use contributed decisively to generating public consensus against the subordination of the collective interest to the particular degrading representative government.6 Equally or more important, the language of nineteenth-century politics contained a concept to designate those who, because of their supposed 2  For a long-term overview, see Martínez García (2013). Undoubtedly, what has suffered a clear setback is the middle class understood as social representation, which since before the transition to democracy had occupied a hegemonic position in the nexus between citizen equality and legitimate social inequality; on this issue, see Sánchez León (2014). 3  According to the scale from national polls, corruption has been the second main concern for Spanish citizens since 2013; for its part, in the 2017 report by Transparency International on 180 countries, Spain has fallen to forty-second place compared to the thirtieth place it occupied in 2012; see introduction to Riquer et al. (2018): 1. 4  See Montero Bejerano (2009); see also the foreword by Íñigo Errejón to Stella and Rizzo (2015) [2007]. 5  On the other hand, some related metaphors have been much more successful, such as “revolving doors” (puertas giratorias) to refer to the collusion between private powers and public servants that lies at the heart of political corruption; see on this https://www.publico. es/economia/trama-puertas-giratorias-58-ex.html. 6  On the concept of oligarchy in Antiquity, see Caire (2016); an approach to the concept within the general scheme of Ancient forms of government, in Bobbio (1976).

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moral degradation, were excluded from participation and from the benefits of the system: the crowd or plebe. Certainly, neither the plebe nor oligarchy were at that time categories with analytical capacity comparable to others nowadays at the disposal of social scientists, after a century and a half of academic development: both were essentially moral concepts, albeit intermingled with social and political elements, which gave meaning, in one case, to the negation of the people as a legitimate embodiment of sovereignty, and in the other, to an institutional regime characterized by the exclusive exercise of power by a minority devoid of virtue. This chapter focuses on the semantic interactions of the moral, the political, and the social in these two concepts, with one another and in their relations with other concepts. For plebe and oligarchy were themselves counter-concepts, of those of the people and the aristocracy respectively. Their study from a prospective and comparative approach affords an understanding of the dynamics of anthropological and sociological thought in the period immediately prior to the establishment of universal suffrage and democracy, the development  of the language of social classes, and the emergence of academic social theory. Such a study is possible without imposing presentist notions of the relations between these concepts because in the nineteenth century they happened to revolve around a common concern rooted in contemporary discourse: corruption, which became an intersectional trope in the wider culture of Isabelline Liberalism, especially after the experience of the frustrated constituent process of 1854–1856. Corruption was certainly not a discursive novelty; on the contrary, it was inherent in the imaginary of the mixed constitution, where it appeared as a great innate threat to citizen self-government derived from the privileging of private interest over the collective. However, in mid-nineteenth century Spain, political and social corruption acquired an unusual centrality in discourse to the extreme of becoming the point of tension in the relations between representation and participation on the eve of the overthrowing of the Bourbon monarchy.7 Until then, the crises of representation of Spanish Liberalism had been triggered mainly by discourses centred on the drift of the system towards tyranny. This manifestation of the predominance of particular interests 7  A recent survey of corruption in the contemporary history of Spain, but which reproduces a stereotyped chronology, starting with the Restoration of 1876 and leaving out the long and decisive period covered here, is presented in Preston (2019).

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over the collective appealed to fundamental freedoms instituted by representative government, so that, as exemplified by the case of the Revolution of 1854, its denunciation facilitated widespread collective mobilization. However, discourse opposed to corruption was more complicated to elaborate and its social uptake was more haphazard, since it did not appeal directly to freedoms but to the standards of civic virtue; for this matter, the people could not be accounted for as a bulwark of virtue while it remained split in two by the plebe in the collective imaginary, and while in turn the latter was seen as constitutively immoral and corrupted by its living conditions. In view of this, the established definition of a plebe helped to underpin the legitimacy of representatives as a modern aristocracy embodying virtue in a world of equals before the law, based on whose public activity the owners of private property could freely promote their private interest while the people were reduced to a purely generic entity or a metaphorical notion of sovereignty. These basic features common to all European and American Liberalism were exacerbated in the Spanish case because here the aristocracy appeared initially as a very weakened inheritance that needed to be regenerated or recreated with care through representative government, while the “plebe” was not always easily distinguishable from the “people.” The first section of this chapter summarizes the tension within this triad of concepts—people, plebe, and aristocracy—up to the crisis of 1854. In the wake of the frustrated constituent process of 1854–1856, the disposition to exclude the plebe from the people as a legitimate subject of politics shifted from parliamentary debate and the political press to a less openly ideological disciplinary field—aesthetics—in a process that is encompassed in the subsequent chapter subheading. In the debates over the contents of the adjective “vulgar,” Spanish liberals ended up adopting positions that blurred the meaning of “plebe,” promoting instead an all-encompassing image of the “people” and its members as fully legitimate citizens. On the other hands, the increasing unrepresentativeness of the political system made its so-called modern aristocracy become identified with an oligarchy according to the classical definition, thereby undermining the legitimacy of the Liberal order as a whole.8 This issue is dealt with in the third part of the chapter, by describing a process that brought into question the inherited hierarchy of citizenship criteria and referents. Ultimately, the semantic inversion from an 8  On the evolution of the concept of aristocracy during the post-Napoleonic Restoration on a European scale, see Sánchez León (2017).

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immoral plebe to a socially vulgar and politically corrupt oligarchy came to signal the exhaustion of the format of representative government established more than a quarter of a century earlier, and with it its repertoire of concepts and categories for defining social, moral, and political subjects.

Aristocracy, People, and Plebe Until the Rise of Democratic Discourse The Spanish case is illustrative of the difficulties of Liberalism in stabilizing the concept of the “plebe” as an asymmetric counter-concept of the “people,” but also of the efforts by intellectual and political elites to institute clear lines of demarcation between them, in a trajectory that is inseparable in turn from the vicissitudes of a conception of aristocracy constitutive of representative government as a social order. As seen in Chap. 2, the emergence of popular councils or juntas in the wake of the dynastic and political crisis of 1808 completely erased the difference between the people and the crowd inherited from the Enlightened reformist discourse; meanwhile, the 1812 Constitution elaborated a comprehensive rhetoric of the nation embodied in the electoral format of indirect universal suffrage, and staged a “democracy-in-corporation” that overflowed the boundaries of the Old Regime’s society of estates. Missing from the  consequent  constitutional design of a “democratic monarchy” was an aristocratic dimension, which tried to be supplied by supplementing the deputies with the heads of the corporations of the new Body Politic: the problem was that in turn the new elected representatives lacked both sufficient group identity and enough time to institute a hegemonic culture of political virtue. Ferdinand VII’s return and fierce repression of the promoters of the Cádiz experiment prompted reflection among many of the liberals who, from exile in France and England—dating from the two periods of 1814–1820 and 1823–1833—joined the ranks of the European liberals advocating a limited or qualified suffrage. In the subsequent dynamics of Spanish Liberalism from the 1830s onwards, in searching for a balance inspired by the ideal of the mixed constitution, the issue of aristocracy regained ground, albeit with certain particularities. The core of the argument shared by most Isabelline liberals was that, if the goal was to avoid the drift towards tyranny or anarchy—due to the over-­preponderance of monarchy or democracy, respectively  in the country’s constitution— Spain had to recreate an aristocracy virtually ex nihilo, as it was thought to

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be lacking for historical reasons, and to do so with an urgency and resolve that called for the involvement of representative institutions. The issue came to the fore even before the drafting of the 1837 Constitution which enshrined political rights only for a minority of citizens. After the adoption in 1836 of a first electoral law still under the Estatuto Real [Royal Statute], the young Juan Donoso Cortés published a pamphlet outlining the importance that should be given to the aristocracy in what amounted to a theory of popular sovereignty. To this end, he distinguished modern societies “as observed in their normal state and at rest,” or “in a febrile and exceptional state”: in the latter, which was proper to revolutions, there was no room for an aristocracy, for in them “all selves are suppressed” and “a single being appears radiant and crowned”: the people.9 But for Donoso Cortés the revolution had already taken place. In the emerging post-revolutionary scenario, “society is presented to us as an aggregate of individualities,” so that it could not be said that “the people as an absolute unity” existed anymore, and therefore “cannot claim sovereignty” as such.10 Recovering the original meaning of aristocracy in the Western political tradition, for him it was always a question of “conferring political power on the best from among the good,” which in that context implied granting it “to the most independent and enlightened among the enlightened and the independent.”11 For the then conservative ideologue, a government by what he interchangeably called “the new social intelligences” or “the legitimate aristocracies” was quite different from the “Government of democracy,” which he considered an  illegitimate “Government of force,” but his proposal was also distinct from the pure aristocratic government of tradition, because “the aristocracy is tyrannical and exclusive, and always tends towards the re-concentration of power.”12  See Donoso Cortés (1835): 33.  The argument was framed in discussions on whether to maintain or abandon the system of indirect election inherited from the political culture of Cádiz, which in practice approached universal suffrage in the first round of voting. In the opinion of Donoso Cortés, the mistake of the supporters of this system was that they believed that “in the normal state of societies the people are a being, when they are only an aggregate of beings; that is, a name”; see Donoso Cortés (1835): 34. On the conception of society as an aggregation of individuals in this context, see Cabrera (2017). 11  After which he pointed directly to “the proprietary, commercial and industrial classes”; see Donoso Cortés (1835): 48, emphasis in the original. 12  He thus confronted the censorship of those who claimed that “direct election is not popular, because it dispenses with the masses,” an argument to which he responded by asserting that the post-revolutionary government should not be “the government of the 9

10

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This discourse was by no means exceptional: in fact, in those years the plea for a modern aristocracy was formulated by all the emerging political branches of Liberalism, even from the opposite ends of the parliamentary spectrum. Thus, in the debates on the 1837 Constitution, during the discussion on whether to establish a Senate, Evaristo San Miguel—who at that time oscillated between loyalty to the emerging progressive party and nostalgia for the political culture of Cádiz—published a pamphlet with the emblematic title “Aristocracy.” In it he stressed that, although an aristocracy common to all societies, since the French Revolution the concept had enjoyed “very little esteem,” since its natural condition was the tendency to be “tumultuous,” the effect of a desire for power that had plagued European history with conflicts with  the monarchy and  the people.13 However, it was important not to confuse the old aristocracy with its “disorders and violence” and  the one he acknowledged in the present: the difference between them  was that in post-absolutist Spain the status of aristocrats now applied only to “individuals, and in no way to classes.”14 In short, although from different ideological positions, all publicists shared an individualistic and aggregative perception of post-revolutionary society which allowed for the role of an aristocracy society. Their conclusions differed, however, because for San Miguel the problem left unresolved by the representative government in the making was that “laws do not strictly speaking create an aristocracy,” but rather “at most, they recognize and sanction it,” so that when conflicts arise between the political system and public opinion, “between power and discontent, no permanent aristocratic body will act as conciliator.”15 Somewhere between these extreme positions was found the bulk of progresistas and moderados. Among these, Antonio Alcalá Galiano in his Manual de derecho constitucional [Handbook of constitutional law] of 1843 asserted that, due to its monarchy’s historical capacity of co-optation masses, but that of the social intelligences”; see Donoso Cortés (1835): 26 and 40 respectively. 13  See San Miguel (1837): 1. On this same debate in France, see Jaume (2008). 14  See San Miguel (1837): 6. 15  San Miguel explicitly opposed the Senate, which he defined as a representative body of “certain privileged and exclusive classes,” expressly denoting the “theory” favourable to dividing “the legislative body into two sections with equal faculties” but one with “a different origin from the other” and for life, or hereditary; see: 1 and 4–5, respectively. On the Senate in Spanish nineteenth-century constitutionalism, see Flaquer Montegui (1995).

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relative to its European counterparts, in Spanish society “poor commoners were more frequently elevated” to high posts and eventually to privilege, which in turn called for new mechanisms of social differentiation.16 Although the progressives did not express such disdain for these and other externalities arising from the intervention of the people in politics, they subscribed not only to the myth of a monarchy that had democratized access to public offices and honours, but also the fear of a blurring of the boundaries between an  elective aristocracy, the people, and the plebe, being persuaded that Spain continued to suffer the effects of a legacy of reactionary and traditionalist fanaticism that could be easily revived. In sum, despite  their diverse and contradictory ideological biases, in both liberal families the dangers of a morally corrupt plebe mobilized against the achievements of representative government either by defect or excess were underlined first during the Carlist War (1833–1840), and later under the Regency of General Espartero (1840–1843), setting the ground for the establishment of a strong distinction between people and plebe in all spheres of discourse.17 The 1848 revolution in Europe created the conditions for new discursive openings on both sides of the ideological spectrum. In this context, Antonio Alcalá Galiano once again rejected, as deceptive and fallacious, the mythography of a self-governing populace.18 For him, the popular tribunes were dangerous in that their objectives implied a return to the values of freedom of the Ancient, whose austere ethics of civic virtue openly contradicted the spirit of the new political anthropology founded on individual liberties, market relations, and, in sum, the legitimate

16  Alcalá Galiano (1843): 139. The interpretation was neither novel nor exclusive to the moderados. As stated in 1835 by an evolving adherent of the doceañista ideology: “There is no Monarchy, whatever its special form of government, in which there has been more equality among the classes and fewer distinctions have been made” than that of the Spanish Habsburgs and Bourbons; see Diario de Sesiones de (DSC) (11-05-1835): 2497, speech by the deputy Agustín de Argüelles. 17  As one deputy described it, among the Carlists “there are hardly any people other than the plebe,” while the Isabelline side had “all the cultured part of the Nation, the generality of commerce, the owners and the enlightened part”; see DSC (22-06-1837): 4229–30, speech by deputy Aniceto de Álvaro. 18  In a synthesis destined to be invoked for decades to come by the Spanish conservatives, “the crowd will not rule on its own, even if it appears to be doing so, but will act following its tribunes, who will be both its flatterers and its rulers”; see Alcalá Galiano (1849): 31. See on this issue Sánchez León (2012).

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inequality of modern social classes.19 Interesting  about this speech was that in it the plebe appeared as a vestige of a backward past in the process of being overcome, and thus condemned to be swept away by progress in the long run of history; for the author the problem was in the short term, because the tribunes suffered from the delusion of imagining that the ­persistence of the crowd signalled a resurgence of the plebeian estate of the old regime. However, this more elaborate theory about the dangerous role of the tribunes and of popular participation in a modern society could be easily attacked as a social discourse: the image of the plebe as a sort of obsolete fossil embedded within a dynamic and fluid modern society destined for prosperity was rapidly being disconfirmed by economic trends; in fact, the social mobilization around 1848 had brought to the fore an awareness of the effects of uncontrolled economic development on the rise of social inequality, with the proliferation on a massive scale of poverty and dispossession.20 The rise of the “social question” in the public sphere made it more pressing to distinguish between moral and socio-economic incapacity, which in turn helped to blur the contours of the conventional image of the crowd. The final attempt to establish a fully asymmetric definition of people and plebe in the political language of Spanish Liberalism took place around constitutional debates from 1854 to 1856. Although it was no surprise that the conservatives would move in this direction, in this case the discursive initiative was taken by speakers and politicians of the new partisan formations, although the decisive counter-arguments would also emerge from their ranks. In trying to discredit democratic discourse, minister Patricio de la Escosura—originally a moderate but later a member of the Liberal Union—said that he spoke in the name of the “true people,” that “group of industrious men who, with the blood of their veins and the sweat of their brow,” sustained “the weight of the State” and fostered “public wealth.” He contrasted this with, on the one hand, 19  He thus drew attention to “how contrary the doctrine of absolute equality is to the progress of the human lineage”; see Alcalá Galiano (1849): 89. 20  One of the first to address this issue was Ramón de la Sagra, who linked the new forms of poverty to the “influence of the manufacturing industry,” drawing attention to “the degree of pauperism” as “nations” became “more industrial”; see Sagra (1840): 119 and 143, respectively, and in general 119–45. A survey of this issue of pauperism, in the context of the origins of social citizenship in Spain, is presented in González Rodríguez (2013); on Ramón de la Sagra, see Núñez de Arenas (2019) [1924].

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that “plebe” who in 1823 had actively supported “restoring despotism with its proscriptions and scaffolds,” but also that other “plebe” who in 1844 “had raised the odious fortress of tyranny over the ruins of freedom” by provoking urban uprisings at the end of Espartero’s Regency.21 However, such arguments could now be much more easily subjected to critical scrutiny. Thus, deputy Francisco García López, a member of the democratic faction, replied to his colleague proposing a reflection in line with the d ­ emocratic demand for greater popular participation in representative government: when “the intervention of the people” became “necessary,” he argued, the people were presented as “heroic” and there was “nothing […] to fear from it”; by contrast, once the political representatives and the powerful became “masters of the situation” and it came to “distributing the spoils,” then the popular protagonist “becomes a repugnant mob.”22 This observation perfectly synthesizes the hegemonic status of representation within Spanish liberalism to the detriment of both popular participation and citizen mobilization; however, it also points to the growing loss of legitimacy of all essentialist vocabulary in reference to the plebe in political debates following the political crisis of 1854. In that sense, with calls for democracy on the rise, reflection on the relations between people and plebe was gradually turning into the issue of the attributes of political representatives as candidates for a legitimate aristocracy. Thus, when the leader of the democratic deputies José María de Orense wondered in 1856 whether it was “dangerous to give the people” the right to “universal suffrage,” he chose to give a negative answer, but only provided that the people could choose as its representative “a person distinguished by his knowledge, his enlightenment, his birth, or his wealth.”23 Indeed, for many democrats only virtuous representatives were able to contain the possible negative influence of the plebe on the people as a whole, hence the need to create space in the public sphere for new voices embodying moral probity. Moreover, for them a good representative could even get the plebe to overcome its cultural and moral limitations, successfully emulating the behaviour of a virtuous people, which clearly  See DSC (24-01-1856): 10163–64.  See DSC (24-01-1856): 10181. According to the records of the parliamentary session, the president of the chamber had to instruct the guards to silence the massive and continued applause with which the audience reacted to this speech. 23  See DSC (22-01-1856), p. 10065. On representation in this and the following decade, see Sierre, Peña and Zurita Aldeguer (2006). 21 22

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indicates that the concept of the plebe was losing its ontological foundation as much as any possibility of being related to any fixed social constituency. In reality, the very opposite argument was increasingly being floated: deficient political representation, presided over by vice and particular interest, dragged the people down, degrading them to the point of making the citizens indistinguishable from the immoral mob, overflowing the floodgates that kept social corruption in check and threatening to lead to degeneration the entire social order. Following this twist, the issue of aristocracy became the focus of attention, and for reasons that were no less urgent, but contrary to the original dreams of recreating it as epitome of post-revolutionary society.

Aesthetics and Corruption After the Failed Constituent Process of 1854–1856 Given the limitations in stabilizing distinctive meanings for the popular with respect to the plebeian in political philosophy and parliamentary oratory, from the 1850s the debates surrounding the natural corruption of what was considered morally and socially inferior moved to another field in principle alien to political disputation but more essential to the fabric of liberal society: that of aesthetics. For conservatives, interest in the arts remained closely linked to their anxiety over popular tribunes, though observed through a different prism: the extent to which creators, through their works, came to represent the people.24 Since the 1820s, the moderados had devoted themselves to the distillation of the Romantic canon. Behind their defence of the poetic imagination was a genuine crusade against the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral self-determination of the artist—as captured by the concept of enthusiasm—justified by the fear of charismatic poets emancipating their audiences, against which they prescribed the adherence of creative works to strict conventional standards, proposing in sum an aesthetic programme that reduced its objectives to offering entertainment to the public, or alternatively pursuing the ideal of pure beauty. 24  The stance came to be in some cases avant la lettre. In one of his aphorisms elaborated in this context, the conservative poet and essayist Ramón de Campoamor stated: “When the public writer comes to formulate public opinion, he is chosen from among the peoples by a great universal suffrage”; see Menéndez de Rayón (1861): 128. On the figure of Campoamor, see Lombardero (2019).

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Until the mid-1840s, aesthetic reflection was for the most part a preoccupation of conservatives; however, artistic expression itself was dominated by their progressive adversaries. Although the so-called exalted liberals of the first generation privileged poetry above other genres, over time it was drama that attained the greatest prominence, an evolution in many cases experienced during exile. Among the progressives, and over time also the emergent radicals, there was a predilection for tragedy because it enabled playwrights to subvert the inherited classicist canon and explore new expressive literary forms characterized not only by strong emotions but also moral values with a clear political dimension, such as denunciations of tyranny and the defence of liberty.25 Over time, styles, tropes, and themes adapted to a growing sensitivity to social issues, with the problem of inequality usually refracted through the ideal of political virtue.26 However, until the mid-1840s this aesthetic commitment was practiced more than theorized, and when it finally became the object of reflection it did so in a context where political expectations were collapsing after the Regency of General Espartero. In fact, the main contribution to an aesthetic theory of radical bent did not appear until 1846, and amid an unprecedented wave of censorship of theatrical plays. In the wake of conservative attacks on the proliferation of so-called political dramas, a newspaper article by the playwright and devout democrat Miguel Asquerino left for posterity a strong affirmation of the social role of the artist: “the great poets have always been the ones who have pointed to the calamities afflicting mankind.”27 This stance endorsed the common artistic practice among radical authors, who put imagination in the service of denouncing social ills, or in political harangues to generate enthusiasm; however, the counterpoint of his argument was that, although he widely acknowledged 25  Already at the beginning of the Isabelline period, the poet and playwright José de Espronceda claimed an aesthetics centred on truths that would be “pronounced with enthusiasm by the peoples, repeated with joy by victorious, free peoples, and secretly stirred in the hearts of the oppressed”; see his article “Poesía” [Poetry], in El Siglo 2 (24-01-1834): 3. On Espronceda, see Marrast (1974), and on his political attitudes, Billick (1981). 26  See Rodríguez Sánchez de León (2003). 27  He added that creators were also “the prophets” of the “revolutions that have erupted in the world of ideas.” On the other hand, in his view the alternative proposed by the moderados was to reduce theatre to a “servile instrument of corruption” or to a “puerile spectacle”; see “La política debe entrar en la comedia” [Politics must enter comedy], Eco del comercio 1162  (07-06-1846): 3. On the figure of Miguel Asquerino, see Sánchez Escobar (2003).

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the influence of the theatre on “the actions of citizens” in the street, Asquerino also thought that artistic and literary works should be “mainly” directed at the public officials and those in power who governed “the destinies of the republic.”28 This commitment to challenging political representatives epitomizes the aspiration among some progressive and early radicals to reshape the modern aristocracy with the supplement of cultural capital provided by artists critical of the status quo. This objective was balanced with a markedly populist thematic focus, in an all-encompassing sense that usually blurred the boundaries between the people and the plebe.29 Thus, in a second opinion piece he authored, and having first emphasized that the theatre “rebukes by delighting,” Asquerino asserted that in a truly dramaturgy “all classes, without exception, [must] have a place,” in order to be able to see reflected in it “their virtues” but also their “weaknesses and absurdities.”30 This apparent social and moral democratization through aesthetics avoided specifically targeting the plebe, and instead was directed towards the institutions, albeit this time essentially to demand financial support.31 In short, despite their very different conception of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, moderates, progressives, and radicals in principle shared the conviction that it was in the arts above all that the moral quality of the citizen was given expression, and more specifically where an essential part of the legitimacy of the modern aristocracy resided. 28  His stance was clear: “we subordinate literature […] to the sublime science of governing and making men happy,” and in that sense “nothing moralizes the people more effectively than the example of those in charge of directing them”; see Eco del comercio 1162 (07-06-1846): 3. 29  Its superiority as a vehicle for socialization of values was based on the fact that it “presents a series of practical examples that have more effect than long disquisitions on philosophy and morality.” An example of populism, focused on the work of the playwright, novelist, and publisher Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco, has been studied by Miralles (2011). 30  See “El teatro español” [The Spanish theatre], Eco del comercio 1163 (09-06-1846): 2. In the first article, he had pointed out that the themes proper to the dramatic author should be “political as well as social vices.” 31  In his opinion, the “advantages” of drama and comedy as moralizing vehicles “have not been exploited in Spain as they should have been.” Among other measures, he called on the state to exempt theatrical entrepreneurs from taxes and regulations which they believed were the ultimate impediments to their development. The context of the articles by Asquerino was the controversy over the future opening of the Teatro Español, a great project of a state theatrical institution that would preside over the stage at the national level, eventually frustrated shortly after being inaugurated in 1849; on its vicissitudes, see Gies (1994): 175–90.

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Events in the wake of European Revolutions of 1848 only underscored the relevance of this issue, in the context of an ongoing status realignment among literary genres. In effect, as in other parts of Europe and the post-­ colonial Atlantic, in the 1850s Spanish literary production was becoming dominated by the novel. On the one hand, novels were more accessible and easier to read, and their publication in instalments facilitated dissemination among a semi-literate population; but above all their organization around plots made them especially suitable for the transmission of moral and ideological standards. On the other hand, emerging social identities could aspire to be represented in them, although they were also more easily mouldable by authors interested in conveying ideas appropriate to ongoing social changes.32 The rise of the novel gave wings to the most radical aesthetic orientations, at least in the view of conservatives, whose initial response to the genre was defensive, offering a rather narrow and contradictory range of reflections. Until then, the moderados had decisively opted for imagination against the imitation of reality as the basis of their aesthetic approach. However, in his opening speech before the Royal Spanish Academy in 1860, Cándido Nocedal, a veteran conservative ideologue, politician, and literary critic turned the discourse on its head. Concerned about the degradation of the Spanish language in general, but in particular claiming against the infiltration of plebeian usages in the novels that were flooding the market, he protested against what he defined as “literary abortions.”33 His position in favour of a moralizing aesthetic did not hide his unease 32  And this despite the proliferation of subgenres formally removed from the present. Folkloric novels, for example, breaking with the temporal axis that separated classical Antiquity from modernity, made it possible to introduce current affairs by presenting the immemorial conceived as immutable and essential to a culture, a people or a nation, and so also timely. For its part, the historical novel also brought to the fore the moral dilemmas of the present through naturalization and anachronism. Finally, the costumbrista novel combined all these characteristics and focused attention on contemporary social types, which enabled the portrayal of moral standards. A general study on the Spanish novel during the reign of Isabella II can be found in Ferreras (1987). Foreign novelists from Walter Scott to George Sand, Balzac, and Merimée were already widely known among Spanish audiences in the mid-century; see an overview of their reception in Roas Deus (2001). 33  Nocedal defined them so because he considered that typical novels narrated “improbable facts” that “not only do not commonly occur, but there is no means of them happening in the human sphere”; and he wondered: “How can that which is not possible or likely be exemplary?”; see Nocedal (1860): 381, 375, and 377 respectively. On the Spanish culture of the fantastic between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Roas Deus (2006).

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with the dominant contents of the genre: the rising novelistic literature should avoid devoting itself to showing the “iniquity of the great and goodness of the small,” to nourishing the “humble classes” with “envy, hatred, [and] despair,” and to portraying “all the monarchs as tyrants, all the wealthy as misers, and all the powerful as heartless.”34 Obviously, Nocedal glimpsed behind the publication of novels the long shadow of democratic and radical ideologues dedicated directly or indirectly to “spreading ideas and systems,” but the dreadful effects of this activity were not for him so much a possible awakening of enthusiasm but rather the corruption of “many [simple] people,” whom he saw “condemned to the perversion” of their customs.35 In another scenario, such a reproving stance would surely have led to debates between irreconcilable viewpoints; however, in this case there was not an open struggle for hegemony, but rather attempts at mediation in a disagreement that was often a reflection of the divergence between ideals and practices. The construction of a new canon suited to the growing popularity of the novel thus reflected a context in which new ideological sensibilities embodied by democrats, republicans, and unionists complicated intellectual exchanges; interestingly enough, theoretical reflection was going to revolve around a topos that combined moral reflection with aesthetics: the distinction between the popular and the vulgar. Indeed, if formerly the debate between moderados and progresistas had been mainly over the meaning of the affective, as an echo of the fears and hopes of a plebeian tyranny, these were now focused on the vulgar as an expression of the possibilities and limits of the people’s corruption.36

34  For, in addition to being “false in every sense, and therefore bad in a literary sense,” this aesthetic course involved turning ingenuity “into a barbaric lever of social upheavals” and a “tremendous battering ram that knocks down all the Christian virtues to the ground”; see Nocedal (1860): 386. 35  Nocedal gave as an example the institution of marriage, in his opinion too frequently mocked in social novels, but it was especially against the authors who, in their novels, “strive and endeavour to place the poor in open struggle with the rich”; see: 385. On the styles of the costumbrista novel, see Fontanella (1982). 36  The issue was particularly appropriate from the perspective of language and literature fields, which in those years witnessed the proliferation of historical accounts and diagnoses of degradation. In fact, the corruption of the language was the subject of the inaugural speeches to the Spanish Academy not only by Nocedal but also by Antonio Alcalá Galiano (1861) among the moderados and Antonio Ferrer del Río (1860) among the progresistas.

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In 1860, Juan Valera, also from conservative background, was invited to respond to Nocedal’s presentation on the aesthetics of the novel.37 Already a reputable literary critic, he demolished the basis of the discourse of his colleague and ideological ally. Valera openly rejected the normative approach to the novel, according to which it should be “woven from real life events.”38 For him this was precisely the means of limiting it “to the pedestrian and the vulgar,” even if unintentionally. His alternative was to give the novel the attributes of poetry according to the previous generation of moderado theorists of aesthetics, defending the role of imagination as the foundation of all artistic works. This meant starting with the acknowledgement of the vulgar as it appeared in reality, but without reproducing it literally: because of their poetic dimension, novels should aim for more than verisimilitude, especially when it came to the base and low, supplying also a moral “ideal.”39 By defining an intermediate space between the pure imitation of the vulgar and its outright rejection, a cleavage emerged among conventional postulates based on ideological and political alignments. Valera criticized the pessimistic approaches coming from conservative perspectives, which he considered biased by prejudices that resulted in an anti-aesthetic programme; however, he also identified limits of good taste in the simple reproduction of the real, and above all in the imitation of the base, a mythification which, in his view, was not exclusive to the democrats and republicans, but was actually cultivated by many different authors. Above all, he assigned a crucial role to the vulgar as a criterion for distinguishing between good taste and bad, thus outlining an aesthetic programme in which this whole repertoire of subjects, tropes, and styles had to be given recognition, though in order to be selectively integrated. 37  Nephew of Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Valera was also a militant in the moderado ranks, but he was a flexible individual and ideologically difficult to pin down or categorize, capable of moving across ideological divides and find common ground with both unionists and progressives, and even democrats and republicans. On this figure and his thought, see Lombardero (2004). 38   See Valera (1928a) [1860]: 159–60. On the construction of this canon, see Lissorgues (1994). 39  He agreed with Nocedal that a novel should be “plausible,” but criticized his colleague for having confused “vulgar” and “scientific” with “artistic or aesthetic plausibility”: novels should be truthful, but not stick to the truth of science, since they implied different epistemologies, and were judged by different audiences; see Valera (1928a) [1860]: 163 and 175, respectively.

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Two years later, in 1862, Juan Valera himself was elected to occupy a chair at the Academy of Language. The title of his inaugural speech is eloquent enough: “Popular poetry as an example of the point of convergence between the vulgar and the academic idea of the Spanish language.” He turned his attention first to the vices afflicting the language, which in his opinion influenced not only the uncouth plebe but also entire sections of the educated public.40 According to Valera, ideology should no longer be the main cleavage in aesthetic positionings since republicans, ­progressives, unionists, and moderates shared some common ideas, above all their attribution of a “democratic character” to artistic creation, which enabled the proliferation of the style of “those who desire and seek the vulgar, confusing it with the popular,” a trend that he considered incredibly dangerous in that it “not only debases and demeans speech but also the spirit.”41 According to Valera, this vice of speaking in vulgar to give representation to the plebe originated in the misunderstanding of the character and history of popular poetry, usually described as impersonal and therefore considered more authentic. In his original reasoning, this assessment did not prove, however, that “the great and primitive popular poesies” were the work of the “vulgar” nor that they had “a plebeian origin.” Maintained and even increased over time, the distinction between popular and cultured poetry had a counterproductive effect: it expressed and at the same time encouraged cultural degradation, either of the audience, which “must be told only ancient, commonplace things, and in humble style, in order to reach them,” or of the artist, who “has to become anachronistic, domestic, or base,” to the point of turning poetry “into a relic or bad prose.”42 The conclusion was original, but at the risk of transgressing a whole series of well-established cultural and disciplinary boundaries: for Valera, the conventional separation between the rational and the irrational, high and low, vulgar and cultured dimensions of discourse were no longer useful, especially when they were used as a  criterion for making other

40  Valera’s starting point was that what had taken place with the development of civilization was not the enlightenment of the people but rather “the dissemination of knowledge,” and this had necessarily given rise to “a very imperfect and vicious knowledge,” which ultimately referred to “a lack of respect for authority”; see Valera (1928b) [1862]: 263. 41  See Ibid.: 280 and 281 respectively. 42  See Ibid.: 285–86 and 286–87 respectively, emphasis in the original.

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ideological distinctions.43 With this development came an entire deontology: the poet, as representative of the people, had first and foremost to avoid the “most transcendental error” that derived from the desire to be “popular”: to “lower [himself] to the understanding of the most vulgar among the vulgar, and even lower than that.”44 The alternative programme was to produce a style that would help elevate the taste and outlook of the plebe. However, this should be done avoiding a utilitarian and normative approach to the social role of literature. For Valera hated the pretence of “making theory useful,” putting it “at the service of something,” since in practice this meant “transforming it from noble to plebeian, and from lady to maid”: in short, creative artists of all kinds had to refrain from “teaching morality, religion, politics, philosophy, even economics” to their fellow citizens.45 At first glance this might appear like a reinforcement of moderado positions against ideologically inspired works of art, but in reality it was an obituary for an entire historical pretension. By insisting on the distinction between the popular and the vulgar, Valera’s proposal confirmed the unviability of the language rooted in Spanish Liberalism when it came to establishing an ontological and normative distinction between the people and the plebe. In contrast, his commitment to a selective approach to plebeian speech functioned as a preliminary to a more ambitious programme for the integration of the people through culture. The effect produced was not only the proliferation of an all-encompassing and integrative image of the people, but also the blurring of all internal barriers within culture, thus revitalizing in a completely novel way the organicist popular imaginary transmitted by doceañismo, just as this political-cultural sensibility was 43  Against the mythification of medieval poetry, Valera’s defence of the classics, considered as a whole from Antiquity and through the Renaissance and beyond  up to the Baroque, broke the conventional distinction between high literary culture and poetry normally defined as popular, since his thesis was that these works “were also formed by reflection and study,” see Ibid.: 291. 44  And he left for posterity a sentence fraught with possibilities, but also highly demanding and contingent: “The great popular poets that have ever lived have not lowered themselves to the vulgar (vulgo), but have raised the people to themselves”; see Ibid.: 297. 45  There was one last mistake to “crown them all”: anachronism. In fact, recovering the intuitions of his uncle Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Valera mocked the writers who “to identify” with the common people tried “to feel and think” as they imagined that in other times “it was felt and thought.” This was from his point of view the “falsest” of the genres, the most “full of affection, of artifice and of lies” even though “some” celebrated it as “popular, pure (castizo) and spontaneous”; see Ibid.: 298–99.

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disappearing but to serve as a basis for democratic and republican ideological standpoints. For their part, the theorists of these ideological tendencies continued to focus their reflections on the theatre. This was partly because its leading authors did not distinguish between genres and worked in both of them, in addition to poetry and increasingly journalism; but it was also due to their struggle against the authorities, especially  after the failure of constituent process of 1854–1856, when  these embarked themselves on a policy of repression of what they considered “perverse social tendencies and baneful moral teachings” of the theatre, unleashed whenever authors tried to profit from “political upheavals.”46 Romantic theatre was evolving under the influence of the playwrights of the 1840s who, like Asquerino, did not disdain the use of plebeian types and speech, only now they felt legitimized and able to enter a more political terrain. Indeed, since the 1854 crisis and its aftermath, what the democratic and republican authors did was to reorient works or themes of history by imbuing them with more overt social critique and introducing thinly veiled references and tropes related to current political issues, intermingling the portrait of the underworld with vulgarisms and readily understood metaphors that were often pioneered in the novel.47 Although it anticipated the perspective adopted in the late 1850s by Valera, the representation of the plebe in this vein went in a completely opposite direction to the selective inclusion of the plebe through acculturation, instead giving it full recognition within a people united in a triple sense, socially, morally, and politically. This aesthetic and institutional reorientation of the theatre was reflected in the discourse of its promoters. The same year that witnessed the debate 46  It was indeed Cándido Nocedal, as Minister of the Interior, who between the end of 1856 and the beginning of 1857 centralized the institutional management of the censorship of theatrical plays and strengthened the service with officials, who were tasked with ensuring “the decorum of the public with the same zeal as a good father would have for the innocence of his children”; see Lalama (1867): 20. An overview of theatrical censorship in Spanish liberalism can be found in Gies (2011). 47  A pioneering example of the former is the piece Jaime el Barbudo [James the bearded] by the leading republican Sixto Cámara, which premiered in 1853. An example of a resurgence of current issues is Un día de revolución [A day of revolution] by the democratic ideologue Fernando Garrido, a drama on the popular role in the Revolution of 1854 that pointed to the moral depravity of the rich and powerful. It premiered in 1856 but was then censored; see Gies (1994): 310–22. Scholars of political thought tend to limit their interest in the theatre to highlighting its role as a vehicle for democratic or republican propaganda; see Morales Muñoz (2006).

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between Nocedal and Valera, one of the longstanding proponents of the radical’s dramaturgical trend, Tomás Rodríguez Rubí, gave his inaugural speech before the Royal Academy.48 In it he posed a dilemma that only becomes meaningful in a context, following the failure of the constituent process begun in 1854, of awareness of the growing degradation of the collective moral fabric by the functioning of representative government: when “corruption is housed” in society “or rather in some part of it,” and “cynicism” comes to “penetrate the core of the social body,” he wondered “what the theatre should do […] if not use the colours that society itself provides in the palette?”49 The answer allowed Rodríguez Rubí to recover the legacy of radical Romanticism, but he did so by refusing to choose between the two conventional positions that presented the theatre, either as a “school of customs” or as a “reflection” of these, because from his point of view there was no quality work that would not combine both.50 This updated agenda also affected what remained the main concern on the Spanish stage: the lack of “protection.” However, emphasizing that theatre “cannot be governed by laws proper to industry,” he argued for using a rather novel lexicon on economic ambition and illegitimate profit: according to Rodríguez Rubí, if industry imposed itself on art, theatre would become “agiotista,” a term that began to refer to wealth obtained in a spurious way through speculation and favouritism.51 Faced with this archetype of the entrepreneur only motivated by private interest, Antonio 48  A truly prolific author—he wrote more than fifty dramas between 1840 and 1857— Rodríguez Rubí embodies the crossroads faced by the second generation of radical playwrights, very critical of the paradigm of emotive Romanticism, but who in practice continued the inherited sentimentalist trend, distinguished by the recourse to historical narratives as a mere backdrop to addressing current issues with clear political intent, such as corruption; on this author, see Cantero García (2001–2002). 49  See Rodríguez Rubí (1860): 18–9. For a survey of political theatre at the end of the reign of Isabella II, see De la Fuente (2013). 50  In the context of this argument, he also recovered a genealogy that referred to the doceañista poet Manuel José Quintana, in the wake of whose “masterful work” he inscribed his own as “the best conservator of the tones, turns and idioms of the language, character, uses and customs of peoples”; see Rodríguez Rubí (1860): 10, 14, 8, and 9 respectively; emphasis in the original. 51  The reasoning was that the overwhelming desire for profit was ultimately counterproductive for the theatre even as a lucrative activity, because “the speculative transaction (agio) carries with it the exaggerated praise of the exchanged thing; exaggerated praise produces disenchantment in the public, and the disenchantment of the latter, its stepping out of the market”; see Rodríguez Rubí (1860): 27. On the semantics of agio and agiotista, a terminology extended in political language in the subsequent decades, see Battaner (1977): 277–78.

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Ferrer del Río, in a response to his colleague’s speech, declared that the activity of the theatre should be directed by and for “men” willing to “learn […] to be free […], exalted by true virtue […], lovers of their homeland” and “fully aware of their own rights.”52 Despite similarities with previous iterations, this discourse no longer called for the imitation of Ancient civic models; instead, it focused its attention on modern society and its moral drift rooted in an unrestrained greed that was decried as the cause of increasing inequality and the corruption of popular customs.53 With the advent of the 1860s, this shift in the ethics and subject matter considered proper to the artist would become more marked. In his popular Proverbios ejemplares [Exemplary proverbs], Ventura Ruiz Aguilera, the epitome of the poet’s claim to be a bulwark of public-spiritedness, aimed his pen at a “God” extended according to him among those who declared themselves atheists: “egoism,” a countervalue that appeared as proper to the individual who dedicates himself to “eating at the expense” of the homeland without solidarity with those who have been deprived by injustice.54 Double moral standards, increasingly denounced as accompanying the spread of corruption, put pressure on artists and producers of ideas in general. This was the assertion of the republican ideologue Emilio Castelar, an increasingly prestigious figure among the opposition, when in an essay he inquired after the thinkers and artists who in the past had been able to “die in the hope that the corruption of the world” at least “had not touched their souls.”55 Bringing in the example of late imperial Rome, he pointed out that, amid the degradation of the people to the status of plebe, there appeared an essential “marvel” called upon to transform the world: the emergence of Christianity, a phenomenon that revealed how “the

52  As well as “vehement,” “upright,” and “magnanimous in all their passions”; see Rodríguez Rubí (1860): 38. 53  On this issue, see Cantero García (2001–2002). 54  Ruiz Aguilera’s proverbs were elaborated through reflections and stories based on popular rhymes and sayings, which he considered “precious materials” for building the “foundation” on which “later artists of genius can raise columns, vaults, and statues,” since it was his philosophy that “the greater the abundance of idioms, all the more picturesque, purer, more lively and more eloquent is the speech of a people”; see Ruiz Aguilera (1864): 67, and ii and iii of the prologue to the book, respectively. 55  The reference was explicitly to the Stoics in the context of the decline of the Roman Empire, which for him had become irreversible as the people became corrupt in their customs because of a “patriciate” for which “everything, even the most sacred, could be bought and sold for gold”; see Castelar (1862): 73 and 140, respectively.

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corruption of customs” could coexist with the “cleansing of ideas.”56 The message was clearly addressed to modern artists and thinkers, who, unlike their Ancient counterparts, could be expected to aspire to more than simply staying above the fray of general degradation by engaging in the fight against the sources of corruption. Thus, the journalist and essayist José Castro y Serrano urged the creation of a “Ministry of Moral Affairs” in support of the work of the erudite, which he understood as a struggle against every new vice that arose “due to moral phenomena of any sort” in society, so that if the “writer” wielding “his powerful weapons” would attack it, corruption would get dismantled, or at least rendered shameful by relegating it “to a particular social group” that would for the majority of the population stand for “a focus of corruption” or “a warning and a lesson.”57 In short, the committed artist’s duty was to stop thinking of himself as being part of an increasingly delegitimized aristocracy.

Semantic Inversion in the Discourse on the Aristocracy A common denominator to the various agendas on aesthetics is that they all favoured a consensus on the value of education. Even in Valera’s case, although his programme seemed to keep creation separate from instruction, it contained an overt defence of education for the lower classes. On this question the conservatives were the ones who had to make the greatest adjustments. To begin with, in the 1830s they had rejected the idea of citizenship based on education proposed by the Enlightened and the early liberals, replacing it with property ownership as an exclusive criterion for granting political rights. Moreover, for a long time afterward they argued that true education should be essentially moral as an excuse for preventing any national and popular education policy. Regarding the events of 1848, Antonio Alcalá Galiano was of the opinion that the radical liberals had ended up falling into a “notorious contradiction”: on the one hand, they “painted the people as wretched, 56  See Ibid.: 137. In this way, Castelar appropriated the Christian tradition in order to link its cultural sources with republican democracy as an aspiration for the humanity in the future. On the convergence between radicalism and Christianity among the early Spanish democrats and republicans, see Barnosell (2012); on the case of France, which was quite influential in this respect over the evolution of Spanish republicans, see Berenson (1984). 57  See Castro y Serrano (1862): 238.

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brutalized, and uncouth,” but on the other, they assumed that it was “full of noble thoughts and generous affections,” which led them to mistakenly conclude that it possessed “the dose of enlightenment sufficient to make good use of the power that it conquered.”58 In an attempt to place himself somewhere between extreme idealization and degradation, the conservative notable had nevertheless to admit that the main obstacle to the dignifying of the people was their lack of education.59 The change in the political landscape since 1854 favoured an agreement between moderados, unionistas, and progresistas that culminated in the so-called Moyano Law of 1857, an eclectic legislation that, in exchange for maintaining the influence of the Catholic Church on the curriculum and the selection of teachers, established compulsory childhood education and emphasized the dissemination of science.60 However, in this context, the old conservative notable Francisco Martínez de la Rosa still had to devote a dissertation to combating the prejudice of “some” from his own ranks who continued to believe that “enlightenment” was harmful “to the morality of peoples.” Contrary to these and his own former beliefs, he now supported the extension of education even “to the lowest classes.”61 The focus on education clearly favoured progressives and radicals of all kinds, for whom it was not only an unwavering aspiration but in reality acted as the semantic bridge that brought together all facets of culture in a common objective. Already the aesthetic discourse of early democrats like Asquerino was based on the conviction that “the greatest enemy of  See Alcalá Galiano (1849): 34.  The limitation of this stance is that it also recognized that it could not wait until education allowed the plebe to qualify for the  exercise of  rights and participate in deliberative processes, which made it urgent for the plebe to agree to be represented as it was. In his own words, the purpose of education was to clarify to the plebe “where its obligations are and where its real benefit”; see 35. 60  For an overview of education in nineteenth-century Spain, see Viñao Frago (1994); on adult education, see Guereña (1991). 61  However, his motivations were anything but philanthropic. Only he was now willing to admit that if the “notions” acquired by the people were “false” and “disrupt the eternal principles of good and evil,” this was due only to the “poor quality” of teaching; see Martínez de la Rosa (1857): 5, 6, and 11 respectively. However, his main focus of attention was the “middle classes,” which he was in no doubt would obtain “material advantages” under the new legislation, especially “certain professions” which he considered lacked specific knowledge and resources to obtain them. For the bulk of the people, he called for “solid and simple” instruction, but properly “suited to their ability,” the only way in his opinion to ensure that they obtained “tangible advantages in living conditions”; see: 11 and 12, respectively. 58 59

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despotism is enlightenment,” claiming theirs as a programme against those rulers and ideologues who wanted “a poor and ignorant people, wealth [concentrated] in few hands, and those who possess them, defiled and degraded with luxury and vices,” to which he opposed what amounted to a profession of faith: “to instruct, to moralize the people is the object of our literature.”62 More generally, the coming into force of the 1857 legislation fostered an unusual interest in reflecting on the links between education and representative government. Eduardo Bernot, a republican critic of the state of the moral and physical education of the people, argued that in a country where “there are only the poor and the rich,” and where the latter “by [the law of] economic gravity must be on top of the former,” at least it should be demanded that “such leaders of others possess the greatest possible aggregation of morals and enlightenment.”63 The fact that the standards of culture and virtue of the wealthy classes and political representatives left much to be desired was not a novelty, nor was the link between a call for improved education and universal suffrage. In fact, it was already prominent in the so-called Catecismo político de los progresistas demócratas [Political catechism of progressive democrats] prepared by Victoriano Ametller in the early 1850s. However, even in this assessment, the utility of culture in the reproduction of the representative government remained paramount.64 Just a few years later, in the wake of the 1854 Revolution, the discourse had evolved substantially, to the point that hindering access to education could now be described as an act of tyranny. In his popular but censored Catón político [Political cato] published in 1856, the republican Roque Barcia, after making the assumption drawing from natural law theories 62  He explicitly referred to theatre as a “sacred chair of morality” and “tribune of right principles,” but also as a “school of good customs”; see Eco del Comercio 1162 (07-06-1846): 3. 63  See Bernot (1862): 22. Beyond this concern for the cultural formation of leaders, the essay, which resonated widely at the time, recommended a formal education from childhood to adulthood for all minors without distinction with regard to income or gender; on this author, see Jiménez Gámez (1985). 64  The author predicted that in a desirable “system of popular election” to come, in which “all Spaniards” were “eligible,” “education” and “instruction” would serve to “guarantee the success of the elections” at the municipal and national levels. Published in exile in France, the work claimed to “gather some democratic ideas and propagate them” exposed “in a vulgar way so that they are accessible to the most backward classes of the people”; see Ametller (1850): 30–31, 24, and 3 respectively. On Ametller’s role later  in the events of 1854 in Zamora, see Urquijo and Goitia (1991).

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that the human being “is born with an intelligence that requires education,” pointed out that “whoever is free to think is free to learn”; but this led him to issue a profoundly radical warning: “whoever restricts one’s right to education” also thereby “inhibits his very nature as a being with natural rights.”65 Such a discourse completely dissolved all social considerations, laying out in its place an all-encompassing imaginary of popular citizenship that included the old Enlightened notion of education but, unlike the latter, no longer conceived it as a means to separate the subject from the sources of popular culture: on the contrary, in this discourse, education was understood precisely as the vehicle that would guarantee the rootedness of the individual within a community of shared citizen values. Presenting education as a natural right had another added effect, because in a scenario in which popular culture was getting rid of the stigma of plebeian corruption on the one hand, and on the other republican political culture was demanding the right to vote for every adult male, it became much more feasible to bring together in a single discourse two referents inherited from citizenship—education and communal rootedness—until then kept in a subordinate position. This in itself did not have to affect the relative weight of the hitherto preponderant criterion of property. However, the latter was also greatly destabilized because of the growing identification of the property qualifier with the closure of the system. Property as such was not at all questioned in the republican discourse. In Ametller’s catechism, for instance, “respect for property” was included along with “personal security,” “individual freedom,” and “equal rights” among the “social guarantees” in the face of tyranny.66 Nor was its unequal social distribution seen as problematic at the outset. What was pointed out with increasing indignation was the link between certain manifestations and sources of ownership, and the entrenchment of corruption. The general complaint was that, despite formal equality before the law, “privilege” was still rampant in the social and institutional order of limited suffrage, because to obtain it one needed “only an order of the supreme

65  And he went on: “in the inalienable immunity of his being as a man”; see Barcia (1856): 23. 66  See Ametller (1850): 21 and 22 respectively.

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government,” so that “through error or malice” privileges ended up being granted to “incapable persons or those without merit.”67 Already at the beginning of the 1850s, this discourse did not apply only to “privileges” but extended to all “titles,” thus equating inherited with newly acquired privileges as politically constituted forms of private property granted arbitrarily and not subject to accountability.68 The interesting thing is that, when it came to naming the minority suspected of accessing property by spurious means, the pioneering discourse of the republican Ametller did not resort to the usual social categories of class, but instead invoked a concept in which the political occupied a prominent place and was intertwined with the moral: that of aristocracy.69 This recourse to the repository of the mixed constitution was both a sign and a product of the fact that the “abolition” of the privileges Ametller proposed as an alternative did not entail any legal reform of property rights or implementing redistributive policies, but contented himself with demanding something as consubstantial with the liberal order as “the equal rights of all individuals in society.”70 In short, redolent of doceañismo, the denunciation of inequality fostered by privilege focused on the limitations and obstacles that property imposed on the exercise of citizen rights. This diagnose made it possible to draw a link between the limited suffrage regime and the advancement of corruption, thus making its eradication dependent on the establishment of popular governments, and to present the existing aristocracy as devoid of morals and reduced to a mere social reality or distinction—albeit without calling for the end of aristocracy as such.

67  Even “for reward of intrigue or crime.” In other words, this form of ownership relied in “a dominant influence in public affairs” to the point of depriving “others even of their rights,” reproducing “the monopoly of government and jobs in favour of a few”; see Ibid.: 7. 68  The notion of “politically constituted forms of private property” is taken from Robert Brenner, who applies it to the socio-institutional orders of the Old Regime founded primarily on extra-economic relations, both in connection to land as well as access to public offices and other forms of fiscal redistribution; see Brenner (1993): 652. A usage of the category as a basis for the history of Western political thought can be found in Wood (2012). 69  In fact, in Ametller’s catechism there was an extensive digression on the subject of “aristocracy,” though in a strictly numerical way, defined as “the smallest part of the people”; see Ametller (1850): 7. 70  In short, any aristocracy was “contrary to the democratic order” because its defining characteristic was “a principle of inequality,” adding that its flaw that “it is not constituted by the will of the people.” The definition he gave of equality was the “abolition of privileges in favour of some to the detriment of others”; see Ametller (1850): 7 and 6, respectively.

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By the end of the decade, instead, the issue was dealt with in a very different way by the republican ideologue Emilio Castelar. His controversial essay La fórmula del progreso [The recipe for progress] opposed the “life-­ giving principle of this civilization,” which was “freedom,” to another “principle,” which he considered by contrast “shattered by civilization,” and which was none other than “privilege.”71 But this was merely a prelude to a deep reflection on the existing aristocracy and its historical ­destiny. As his colleague Fernando Garrido had done in the same context with the institution of monarchy, Castelar pondered the past of the aristocracy by pointing out that “like all human institutions” it “has had its time”; but then sentenced that “the aristocracy everywhere invariably decays.”72 This was not, however, the profile of a natural or historical evolution: in fact, the author denounced an effort to “resurrect the aristocracy” in Spain by the conservative party, which “forgetting its revolutionary origin” and finally “ignoring the spirit of the century,” had committed itself to “erecting again, stone by stone” the “edifice” of the traditional order demolished by the “revolution.”73 The swan song of the Spanish aristocracy thus contained devastating evidence of the entire programme designed to institute a higher-rank ruling minority appropriate to the liberal order based on representative government: by updating and renewing the hereditary principle of  the privileged, the old nobility had finally contaminated the profile of its modern counterpart, at the cost of turning the latter anything but legitimate in its claim to inhere moral attributes.74 Beyond the death knell of the institution, the concept itself was being emptied of all meaning. Just as in Fernando Garrido’s speech the monarchy had been stripped of its unifying and coordinating role as defined in the ideal of mixed government, in  See Castelar (1858): 22.  And even more so in Spain where in his opinion the aristocracy has already “died” following “a tempestuous and unhappy life”; see Ibid.: 23. 73  Which in turn was seen as part of the design of “Providence”; see Ibid.: 25. 74  Certainly, the 1845 Constitution still in force promulgated under the moderado majorities had favoured the identification of the aristocracy with the language of the Old Regime and the traditional hereditary nobility. However, Castelar elaborated his criticism at a normative level: in his opinion, the aristocracy “rests on three great errors,” one “philosophical,” since believing in the aristocracy implies that “virtue, genius and talent are hereditary”; another “economic,” since to accept aristocracy is “to accept the [traditional] entailed [property],” and thus to “distort property”; and finally the “social,” since accepting the entails implies assuming “the privilege within the family” through unequal inheritance patterns; see Ibid.: 24. 71 72

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Castelar’s version the aristocracy was deprived of its defining features as a select minority and the embodiment of virtue. His deployment of  the imaginary of the mixed constitution was to put into question the anthropology of representation of limited-suffrage Liberalism; and as in the case of Garrido with the  monarchy, the  functions and values of the aristocracy  were transferred to the third level inherent in any constitution— democracy—and in favour of its natural subject, the people, understood in an ontological way, without internal fissures and politically empowered. This was his “recipe for progress”: “Democracy” in capital letters, that is to say, as an autonomous and self-sufficient political system based on universal suffrage, which on the other hand, according to the ideologue, should not be described as an enemy of order or property.75 The fact that this discourse against the aristocracy was not pronounced as extremist or threatening at that time is evident from the reaction of his political opponents: Valera did not directly address it in his reply to Castelar’s essay, and while Campoamor did defend the aristocracy, he focused on what he perceived as Castelar’s misuse of the term corruption to qualify the state of affairs in the early 1860s.76 This indicates to what extent republican and democrat ideologues were successful in providing crucial interpretive resources for denying the liberal political and social elites recognition as a legitimate modern aristocracy; and how disseminating such interpretations via the public sphere played a decisive role in making civil society a source of social recognition criteria autonomous from the state. The endpoint envisioned in this discourse of democracy to come was the vision of the social order as a set of self-constituted associations that guaranteed citizens an identity and a sense of belonging to the community, outlining an alternative institutional framework to the prevailing representative government format. The concept of association displayed in this rhetoric was not at all novel to this context; on the contrary, it had  In contrast to the old doceañismo, this alternative did not contain any nostalgia for the past but was radically oriented towards the future: in fact, Castelar tried to avert his formula for progress even from the frustrated 1856 Constitution, which he designated as “confused, anarchic, indecipherable”; see Ibid.: 50 and 51, respectively. 76  In a fictional dialogue with Emilio Castelar, he took the opportunity to defend “the best” over “the majority,” declaring: “do not forget this truth,” that “the weaknesses of the grand are never as great as the corruption of the small”; but he felt obliged to adopt this extreme stance to the point of becoming increasingly indefensible, thus concluding in favour of “Absolutism over Anarchy”; see Campoamor (1862): 80 and 134, respectively. For Valera’s reply to Castelar, centred on the moral crucible deriving from the temporality of progress, see Valera (1864). 75

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been going hand in hand with the sociological reflections of Liberalism in Spain and abroad.77 The novelty was to redefine association as the natural space of democracy, emphasizing its constituent capacity and extending it beyond the state corporations, as done by the doceañista tradition, into the very articulation of civil society.78 From a genealogical perspective, this sociological imagination was nourished by the Cádiz tradition of democracy-in-corporation, of which it is a sort of wholly civic version.79 What matters is that, as it overflowed the boundaries of the state, this alternative project of democracy-in-association questioned the established definition of citizenship, based on landed property, which had made possible the entire edifice of limited suffrage. Thus, the internal hierarchy established among the referents of citizenship was decisively undone, just as other discursive dynamics were amalgamating education and community rootedness in a new synthesis. Of course, the resulting range of options overflowed the framework of limited-suffrage Liberalism, calling even more into question the institutional anchors of its project of a modern aristocracy. However, what is really novel about this discourse is that for the first time it privileged the conceptual and institutional dimension of participation over the traditional one of representation.  The “spirit of association” permeated the public sphere of Spanish liberalism since the 1830s, although its meaning oscillated between the communal and the entrepreneurial, disposing of all political dimensions: one author defined it as “the natural tendency towards the union of persons or things, with the aim of seeking their profit and well-being,” capable of making man “renounce the store of egoism that he acquires in his careless education, and force him to love society with all its joys”; see Guillamás (1837): 3 and 4, respectively. On the language of association as the foundation of the liberal order, see Cabrera (2017). A transnational survey of associative dynamics inspired by that language is presented in Hoffman (2003). 78  This included the defence of association as a form of organization against corruption: Fernando Garrido considered it beneficial “to the organization and morality of families,” as opposed to “the misery and ignorance of the greatest number,” whose disorganization offered “a great incentive to corruption”; see Garrido (1864): I, 12. 79  This had been the feature of discourse during the debates over the stillborn 1856 Constitution, which reinforced the 1812 idea that plebeians could enter all corporations and institutions without distinction; see Sánchez León (2021). On the other hand, Castelar’s invocation of the legacy of Cádiz was undisguised: for him, what the first liberals drafted and proclaimed was nothing but a “democratic Constitution” in which he found “the germ of all rights, of all ideas that are today the symbol of democracy.” In short, he portrayed them as pioneering “democrats” who inscribed “in the conscience of the people” a Code that “the people always venerate” and “a name that repeats itself from generation to generation”; see Castelar (1858): 39. On the memory of the 1812 Constitution in the nineteenth century, see Moliner Prada (2012). 77

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In fact, in democracy-in-association, participation at least acquired autonomy as an indispensable procedure for assessing membership and community integration, and could even be considered the constitutive mechanism both of association as such and of the political personality of its members.80 However, the anthropological engineering that prescribed this discourse blurred in its wake the epistemological protagonism of the collective. Indeed, in line with the rise of a discourse by republicans focused on individual rights and education, the hegemonic conception of association was unabashedly individualistic in its philosophical foundation.81 On the other hand, the discourse of association democratized aptitude, linking it closely with participation and observing it through the prism of creativity. According to Castelar, every man “is an artist,” but in order to develop their capacity, artists had to “also realize the principle of association” by actively seeking the cooperation of talents against the competition of the market: as he declared, “man needs association,” both “to learn” as “to teach”—in short, for “the realization of his moral purpose” in society.82 The combined effect of these discourses on association restored political virtue as the foundation of sociability, dignifying collective interest, although by ontologizing the individual citizen identity as the basis of every self-governed community.83 However, although it came to question the legal, sociological, and moral principles of liberal political representation, the imaginary of association could not democratize aristocracy. Rather, this discourse promoted a scenario for the construction of a new legitimate aristocracy, suited to the demands of universal suffrage. Seen in 80  Although not in the case of Castelar, for whom the “first” and “fundamental” association was “the State,” since its purpose was “the realization of rights”; see Castelar (1858): 92. But there were other possible candidates for the first and fundamental form of association, such as the municipality, as much as there were “aggregationist” in contrast to “organicist” theories on the origins of human association which would in the coming years give rise to republican debates between centralists and federalists; see Villacañas (2004). 81  This would eventually shape the internal polemics among democrats and republicans, increasingly divided over the status of private property; an overview of this issue is presented in Peyrou (2011). On the issue of individualist identities under Spanish Liberalism, see Ginger (2004). 82  For association was for him “the great principle of human brotherhood”; see Castelar (1858): 94 and 95, respectively. 83  The elevation of the individual as an ontological subject and bearer of inalienable rights would define Spanish republicanism in the second half of the nineteenth century, acquiring its maximum expression in the 1869 Constitution, the first in Spanish history to establish universal male suffrage; see Serván (2005).

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this way, the autonomy obtained by participation would only stabilize in a new synthesis with the advent of representation. All these tendencies and tensions were woven through the political discourse of the final years of the reign of Isabella II, but it was in the field of the arts that they manifested themselves most clearly and decisively. To begin with, in the wake of the 1854 Revolution there emerged a form of theatrical play that tried to distinguish itself from the traditional comedy: the so-called high comedy, which, while maintaining a profoundly moralistic message, was no longer addressed to the public in general  but to the “middle classes” in particular, anyway largely deprived of the right to vote.84 The middle class was not a new category in the liberal vocabulary: rather, new cultural subgenres as the high comedy contributed to successfully overcome the negative moral profile drawn about them by Spanish doctrinaire ideologues, who used to present the middle classes as uniquely prey to selfishness as deriving from its small size and lack of collective identity, which in the view of many conservatives prevented many among its ranks from putting collective interest before the individual.85 Recuperating it now as a whole category for a programme focused on inalienable individual rights, in practice the republican message was linked to the aesthetic programme of the more conservatives like Valera, helping to consolidate the middle class as an aspiring natural representative of the people both among the promoters as well as the critics of democracy.86 In short, as in politics and society in general, in the arts of the future democracy the separation between the represented and their representatives would still be maintained, only now the democratic and republican tribunes could greatly increase their chances of successfully leading a citizenry in the process of empowerment, leaving behind the limitations experienced in this regard on the barricades of 1854. On the other hand, in the genre of fiction authors could make their characters take more committed critical positions, but above all voice more imaginative alternatives. Thus, for the protagonist of one novel, 84  The genre abandoned anachronistic historicism as much as romantic emotionalism and addressed an audience whose main concerns were both emancipation and material progress; see an overview in interaction with the comedia de costumbres [Comedy of customs] in Gies (1994), pp. 231–91. 85  On the mesocratic imaginary in Spanish Liberalism, see Sánchez León (2007). 86  Valera was fully aware that he was founding an aesthetic canon with a social scope based on cultural elevation and political moderation; however, he preferred to label it unambiguously as “bourgeois,” linking it to the commonplace of boredom in modern everyday life and presenting fiction as one of its remedies; see Valera (1928b) [1862]: 170.

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“corruption that comes from above” and was “like a deluge of mud that penetrates to the depths of society”;87 its author, however, expressed the general conviction that corruption was a problem that could be overcome if addressed with the appropriate institutional means. It was no longer assumed that corruption was the natural and unavoidable effect of an unbalanced constitution according to the scheme of mixed government; rather, it was now stressed that democracy alone could regenerate customs and representative government: accordingly, the protagonist of the novel defined as democrats “all worthy and honest men” whose material interests “do not rely on irritating privileges that bind them to the old and discredited institutions” or “live on the budget,” converted as this was “by almost all governments” into “the basis of their sustenance and element of power and immoral corruption.”88 Literature was filled with openly political expressiveness. However, it was a long way from this to define and disseminate an entire negative anthropology of representative government, and a task that these literary tropes could not succeed in achieving on their own. To achieve this, the concept of aristocracy had to be used to modify the relationship between culture and morality. Certainly, this task was in part undertaken in all the discourses of the liberal public sphere regardless of the ideological affiliation of the authors. Abounding in an old commonplace of doceañista cultural origin, the moderado Alcalá Galiano had already rewritten in his Manual of 1843 that, as co-optation of commoners into public offices progressed throughout the early modern period, Spanish culture as a whole had been tinged with popular features and elements, a process which also affected its elites, to the point that finally “the nobility became vulgarized.”89 In short, due to historical vicissitudes, the vulgar had become a generalized cultural trait whose traces could be found in all levels and spheres of Spanish society in the nineteenth century, including the wealthy, educated, and apparently refined people. This convention not only persisted but was furthered since the mid-century as the constituent debates of 1854–1856 reinforced the old assumption that Spain was by virtue of its history and culture a “democratic” country. In this context, Juan Valera’s aesthetic proposal functioned as an accelerator of semantic change by opposing popular to vulgar and defining the latter as an all-­encompassing  See Suárez (1863): 64.  See Ibid.: 108. 89  See Alcalá Galiano (1843) [1843]: 65. 87 88

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trait with which to distinguish the unacceptable, negative, and inherited side of culture, undoing at the same time all remission to the lower social strata. On this basis, and while the plebe ceased to be an instrumental concept with which to give meaning to the part of the people excluded from citizenship, a semantic reversal could take place, so that the aristocracy was imbued with the meanings hitherto attributed to the plebe. This decisive process had as its protagonist the institutional space most susceptible to criticism, for being perceived as beyond the control of the representative government and at the same time appearing as key to the concentration of the networks of corruption: the royal court.90 This instance was formulated first and most clearly in fiction, though. In a novel published by the political chameleon and writer Patricio de la Escosura, the “theories of the French revolution” had taken deep roots in its protagonist Simon de Valleignoto, an early liberal convert, thanks to his knowledge of the “atmosphere of the palaces,” which had made him find out that “the excesses of the plebe” were “forced consequences” of “the corruption of the courtiers.”91 Read in the context of the early 1860s, this rhetoric not only denied that there was a legitimate aristocracy in office but that the political elites surrounding the court circles amounted to something dangerously close to an oligarchy, its counter-concept in the tradition of the mixed constitution. The ultimate expression of this tendency would be the satirical cartoon Los borbones en pelota [The Bourbons nude] published in instalments in the mid-1860s.92 It portrayed the 90  On the relationship between politics, the court and corruption at the end of Isabella II’s reign, see Núñez-García and Calero Delgado (2018) and Núñez-García (2019). The classic study on the status of European royal courts in the era of Librealism  remains Mayer (1981).  An overview of the moral profile of political representatives under Isabella, see Sierra (2010). 91  In the novel, titled El patriarca del valle [The valley´s patriarch], the witnessing of court corruption appeared as “much more capable of inspiring democratic ideas in generous souls than the declamations of the tribune”; by the way, the character was portrayed as “one of the many liberal visionaries in good faith, selfless innovators, good-naturedly implacable,” who made up “the sect known today as the doceañistas (sic)”; see Escosura (1861–1862): I, 109, emphasis in the original. This author, who had been a progressive ministry and was now on his way to becoming a unionist deputy, may be added to the long list of Spanish liberal politicians who dedicated themselves to fiction writing with some success; on his literary endeavours, see Cano Malagón (1988) 92  See the study of this work in Burdiel (2012): 42–74; and in line with the interpretation presented here, along with a gender dimension, see Burdiel (2018). On the pioneering insertion of political pornography into European culture in the context of other pre-revolutionary scenarios, see Hunt (1993). On political satire in Spanish Liberalism up to this period, see Fuertes Arboix (2014).

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particular moral economy of the courtesan oligarchy, striking a blow at the very source of privilege founded on private interest and the corruption of the public, but above all revealing vulgarity as presiding over certain group practices indistinguishable in their motivation from the low passions historically attributed to the plebe. Such a world, an extreme expression of passion unleashed by ambition and greed, and epitomized in uncontrollable and openly immoral excess, could not comprise any aristocracy, for beneath that vulgarity of customs was concealed the most absolute inability to place the collective interest over the individual. In short, as the plebe disappeared from discourse, oligarchy was brought in. The alternative to that corrupt, arbitrary, and vulgar courtesan oligarchy crowned by the monarchy was already fully outlined in the arts: a newly dignified mesocracy, with the middle classes as a new model of a legitimate aristocracy that demanded political and civil rights so that, overcoming limited suffrage, it might bring together participation with representation in a representative government based on male universal suffrage.

Conclusion: The People/Oligarchy Dichotomy and the Limits of the Vocabulary of the Mixed Constitution In a pioneering essay, albeit one that has not inspired specialists to more profound reflections, historian Manuel Pérez Ledesma distinguished and characterized the relevance of three dichotomous images of the social order in the public sphere of the Spanish nineteenth century: rich/poor, people/oligarchy, and exploiters/exploited. His approach was that, throughout the nineteenth century, the trichotomous images of society in the vein of aristocracy/middle class/people, predominant according to him in the traditional world and in conservative ideologies, had been relegated in favour of dichotomous representations showing a growing breakdown in the social order representations around the rise of radical discourses critical of the limited-suffrage regime and the unrestricted advancement of relations based on private property. Pérez Ledesma was interested in the hierarchy between these dichotomies, but also in  their evolution towards  the lexicon of modern social classes; in this sense, although he pointed out that they in part overlapped but also succeeded one another chronologically, he assumed that the transition to the

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language of the social was mainly related to the discourse expressing the work experiences of the first wage labourers.93 What these pages have shown is that the issue is somewhat more complex, since to begin with there was a prior double semantic process that must be taken into consideration. If the people/oligarchy dichotomy was to be instituted in the discourse of the Liberal public sphere, it was necessary first to overcome the one that internally distinguished the people from the plebe or crowd, opposing one to the other; in turn it was also needed to downplay the discourse of historical Liberalism that legitimized a modern aristocracy based on restrictive political rights, a process indispensable for recovering the concept of oligarchy for wider social diffusion. This implies that, of the three mentioned by Pérez Ledesma, the people/ oligarchy dichotomy is the most central to the nineteenth-century liberal order, its tension being deeply rooted in language through the repertoire of the mixed constitution. However, it also implies that the perspective he adopted in favour of the social must be revised, since the mixed constitution offered an imaginary about society, but it did so from the primacy of politics and not directly from a fully separated cultural field of “the social.” In this regard, the debates over corruption were decisive, although, as shown in this chapter, they were less explicitly shaped by political discourse but rather operated at the intersection of aesthetics and morality. On the other hand, in line with the approach of Professor Pérez Ledesma these processes of semantic change have been treated here as political phenomena both in their nature and in their effects, arguing that they touched on the central issue that for a century had conditioned the whole conformation of modern citizenship: the relationship between representation and participation.94 Moreover, it is possible to conclude that the double process, of the plebe being subsumed in a comprehensive and dignified people and of the semantic conversion of the legitimate aristocracy into an illegitimate oligarchy with plebeian outlooks, contributed  See Pérez Ledesma (1991).  In full agreement with that which informs book, Manuel Pérez Ledesma’s epistemological and theoretical approach is that these dichotomies are neither superficial rhetoric nor simple reflection of underlying material realities but powerful “mental constructs” that define the subjects’ ways of acting, to the point of “having a decisive impact on the social structure itself,” thus contributing “decisively to the permanence or change in society as a whole.” In his schema, “such representations are part of reality in their own right, which only acquires its definitive configuration through them”; see Pérez Ledesma (1991): 60, 87, and 88 respectively. 93 94

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decisively to articulating the other two dichotomies disseminated by the public sphere pointed out by Pérez Ledesma. The first, rich/poor, which already existed, was foregrounded by acquiring a more neatly  political profile; the second, exploiters/exploited, was itself to a large extent an unintentional effect of the overflow of the language of the mixed ­constitution derived from this double process. Certainly, the semantic transformation of the once virtuous aristocracy into a vulgar and corrupt oligarchy took place essentially within the language of the mixed constitution; but by coming to nurture a concept of democracy reloaded with the attributes of aristocracy and monarchy, it left a semantic space for the emergence of a new terminology from the beginning of the 1860s around the concepts of “bourgeoisie” (also through a reminted definition of middle class) and “fourth estate” (eventually the proletariat). In Pérez Ledesma’s scheme these two groups of concepts were the ones that eventually made possible the dichotomy exploiters/exploited, which retained a strongly political content since the reproduction of the two social groups was regarded as still shaped by the influence of state mechanisms. In short, however much the experience of the first wage labourers was crucial for the emergence of new discourses of social critique in Liberalism, the semantic coinage of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat ultimately depended on the availability of a confrontational lexicon that was not produced ad hoc by the first factory workers, but was essentially inherited from the struggles for civic dignity of the mid-nineteenth century, to be later only partially re-signified. This development was not inevitable. If these historical questions seem compelling to us, it is because today corruption is also widespread, but there seems to lack a similarly strong semantic link between discursive criticism and available political concepts regarding the social subjects as victims of corruption. These are issues that, in the modern world, shape the relations between representation and participation, and, more generally, the limits of order and moral dignity of citizens.

Works Cited Alcalá Galiano, Antonio (1843). Lecciones de derecho político constitucional, Madrid: Imprenta de D. I. Boix. ——— (1849). Breves reflexiones sobre la índole de la crisis por la que están pasando los gobiernos y pueblos de Europa, México: Tipografía de R. Rafael [available at https://books.google.es].

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Castelar, Emilio (1858). La fórmula del progreso, Madrid, Establecimiento tipográfico de J. Casas y cia. [available at https://books.google.es]. ——— (1862). La civilización en los primeros siglos del cristianismo, Madrid: Imprenta de José Cañizares [available at https://books.google.es]. Castro y Serrano, José de (1862). Cartas trascendentales escritas a un amigo de confianza, Madrid: Imprenta de Fortanet [available at https://books. google.es]. De la Fuente, Gregorio (2013). “Introducción. Los estudios sobre el teatro político en la España del siglo XIX”, Historia y Política 29: 13–43 [available at https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=4495644]. Donoso Cortés, Juan (1835). La ley electoral, considerada en su base y en su relación con el espíritu de nuestras instituciones, Madrid, Imprenta de Don Tomás Jordán [available at www.bne.es]. Escosura, Patricio de la (1861–1862). El patriarca del valle, Barcelona: Librería de Salvador Manero [available at www.bne.es]. Etxezarreta, Miren (2019). “Bosquejo sobre la evolución de la economía española”, en Pablo Sánchez León (coord.), Karl Marx y la crítica de la economía política. Contribuciones a una tradición, Arre (Navarra): Pamiela, 301–35. Ferrer del Río, Antonio (1860). “Reseña histórica de la fundación, progresos y vicisitudes de la Real Academia Española”, Madrid: Imprenta Nacional [available at https://books.google.es]. Ferreras, Juan José (1987). La novela española del siglo XIX (hasta 1868), Madrid: Taurus. Flaquer Montegui, Rafael (1995). “La representación en la España constitucional: unicameralismo y bicameralismo”. In Miguel Artola Gallego and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (coords.), El Senado en la historia, Madrid: Secretaría General del Senado, 83–112. Fontanella, Lee (1982). “The Fashion and Styles of Spain’s Costumbrismo”, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 6/2: 175–89 [available at https:// www.jstor.org/stable/27762159?seq=1]. Fuertes Arboix, Mònica (2014). La sátira política en la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Fray Gerundio (1837–1842) de Modesto Lafuente, San Vicente del Raspeig (Alicante): Universidad de Alicante. Garrido, Fernando (1864). Historia de las asociaciones obreras en Europa, o las clases trabajadoras regeneradas por la asociación, Barcelona: Imprenta y librería de Salvador Manero [available at www.bne.es]. Gies, David T. (1994). The Theatre in 19th-Century Spain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2011). “Spain”. In R.  J. Goldstein (ed.), The Frightful Stage. Political Censorship of the Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Europe, New York: Berghahn Books, 162–89.

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Ginger, Andrew (2004). “The Qualification of Collective Absolutes and the Individuality of Persons and Events in Mid-nineteenth-century Spain”, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 10/2 (December): 123–45. González Rodríguez, Josué L. (2013). “Del individuo pobre a la pobreza como problema social”. In Miguel Ángel Cabrera (ed.), La ciudadanía social en España. Los orígenes históricos, Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 131–68. Guereña, Jean-Louis (1991). “L´Enseignement pour adultes en Espagne. Législation, projects, et réalités (1838–1874)”, Perséé 49: 49–88 [available at https://www.persee.fr/doc/hedu_0221-6280_1991_num_49_1_2457]. Guillamás, Manuel de (1837). Memoria sobre el espíritu de asociación aplicado a la agricultura, a la industria y al comercio, Palma de Mallorca: Imprenta Nacional [available at www.bne.es]. Hoffman, Stefan-Ludwig (2003). “Democracy and Associations in the Long Nineteenth Centuries: Toward a Transnational Perspective”, Journal of Modern History 75/2: 269–99. Hunt, Lynn (1993). The Invention of Pornography. Obscenity and the Origins of Pornography, 1500–1800, New York: Zone Books. Jaume, Lucien (2008). Tocqueville. Les sources aristocratiques de la liberté, Paris: Fayard. Jiménez Gámez, Rafael (1985). La cuestión educativa en Eduardo Benot, Cádiz: Diputación Provincial de Cádiz. Lalama, Vicente de (1867). Índice general por orden alfabético de cuantas obras dramáticas y líricas han sido aprobadas por la Junta de censura y censores de oficio para todos los teatros del Reino y de ultramar, comprendiendo los años de 1850 a 1866, Pinto: Imprenta de G. Alhambra [available at www.bne.es]. Lissorgues, Yvan (1994). “El naturalismo y la novela”. In Francisco Rico (dir.), Historia y crítica de la Literatura española, Barcelona: Crítica, 5/2, 243–62. Lombardero, Manuel (2004). Otro Don Juan: vida y pensamiento de Juan Valera, Barcelona: Planeta. ——— (2019). Campoamor y su mundo, Barcelona: Planeta. Marrast, Robert (1974). José de Espronceda et son temps. Littérature, société, politique au temps du romantisme, Paris: Éditions Klincksieck. Martínez de la Rosa, Francisco (1857). “Discurso pronunciado por el Exmo. Sr. (…) el día 16 de noviembre de 1857 con motivo de la apertura de las cátedras del Ateneo Científico y Literario de esta corte”, Madrid: Imprenta de Tejado [available at https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009352016]. Martínez García, José Saturnino (2013). Estructura social y desigualdad en España, Madrid, Catarata. Mayer, Arno J. (1981). The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War, New York: Pantheon Books. Menéndez de Rayón, Damián (1861). Los pensamientos de Campoamor, extractados de sus obras, Madrid: Imprenta de M. Rivadaneyra [available at www.bne.es].

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Miralles, Xavier Andreu (2011). “‘El pueblo y sus opresores’: populismo y nacionalismo en la cultura política del radicalismo democrático, 1844–1848”, Historia y Política 25: 65–91 [available at https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/ Hyp/article/view/41660]. Moliner Prada, Antoni (2012). “La memoria de la Constitución de Cádiz en la España del siglo XIX”, Ler História 62: 71–86 [available at https://doi. org/10.4000/lerhistoria.578]. Montero Bejerano, Daniel (2009). La casta: el increíble chollo de ser político en España, Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros. Morales Muñoz, Manuel (2006). “Inaugurando la modernidad. Teatro y política en el liberalismo democrático”, Baetica. Estudios de Arte, Geografía e Historia 28: 615–26 [available at https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/ articulo?codigo=2242541]. Nocedal, Cándido (1860), “Discurso del Exmo. Sr. Don Cándido Nocedal”. In Discursos leídos en las recepciones públicas que ha celebrado desde 1847 la Real Academia Española, Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, II: 371–402. Núñez de Arenas, Manuel (2019) [1924]. Ramón de la Sagra, reformador social, Pamplona, Urgoiti. Núñez-García, Víctor Manuel (2019). “Las élites en palacio. La monarquía y la corrupción en la corte isabelina”. In Raquel Sánchez (coord.), Un rey para la nación. Monarquía y nacionalización en el siglo XIX, Madrid: Sílex, 283–310. Núñez-García, Víctor Manuel and Calero Delgado, María Luisa (2018). “Corrupción y redes de poder en la Corte isabelina”. In Borja de Riquer et al. (dirs.), La corrupción política en la España contemporánea. Un enfoque interdisciplinar, Madrid: Marcial Pons, 519–30. Pérez Ledesma, Manuel (1991). “Ricos y pobres; pueblo y oligarquía; explotadores y explotados: las imágenes dicotómicas en el siglo XIX español”, Revista del Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales 10: 59–88. Peyrou, Florencia (2011). “‘Mientras haya mendigos e ignorantes, la libertad es una utopía’: ciudadanía y socialismo en el movimiento democrático español (1840–1868)”, Bulletin d’Histoire Contemporaine de l´Espagne 46: 71–90 [available at https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=3787285]. Preston, Paul (2019). A People Betrayed. A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain, New York: Harper Collins. Riquer, Borja de; Pérez Francesch, Joan Lluís; Rubí, Gemma, Toledano, Lluís Ferrán y Luján, Oriol (dirs.) (2018). La corrupción política en la España contemporánea. Un enfoque interdisciplinar, Madrid: Marcial Pons. Roas Deus, David (2001). La recepción de la literatura fantástica en la España del siglo XIX, Barcelona: Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. ——— (2006). De la maravilla al horror. Los inicios de lo fantástico en la cultura española (1750–1860), Vilagarcía de Arousa: Mirabel.

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Rodríguez Rubí, Tomás (1860). “Excelencia, importancia y estado presente del teatro”, en Discursos leídos ante la Real Academia Española, Madrid, Imprenta de Matute y Compagni, 5–29 [available at www.bne.es]. Rodríguez Sánchez de León, María José (2003). “Teoría y géneros dramáticos en el siglo XIX”, en Javier Huerta Calvo (coord.), Historia del teatro español, Madrid: Gredos, II, 1853–94. Ruiz Aguilera, Ventura (1864). “Al freír será el reír”. In Proverbios ejemplares, Madrid: Librería de Don Leocadio López, I, 15–113 [available at www.bne.es]. Sagra, Ramón de la (1840). Lecciones de economía social, dadas en el Ateneo científico y literario de Madrid, Madrid: Imprenta de Ferrer y cia [available at https:// catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009289794]. San Miguel, Evaristo (1837). Aristocracia, Madrid: Imprenta de Don Miguel de Burgos [available at www.bne.es]. Sánchez Escobar, Ángel F. (2003). Vida y obra de Eduardo Asquerino (1824–1881): un escritor comprometido con su tiempo, Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española. Sánchez León, Pablo (2007). “La pesadilla mesocrática: ciudadanía y clases medias en el liberalismo histórico español”. In Manuel Pérez Ledesma (ed.), De súbditos a ciudadanos. Una historia de la ciudadanía en España, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 135–64. ——— (2012). “El reverso del orden y el orden de los conceptos: democracia y demagogia en el liberalismo hispano”. In Manuel Pérez Ledesma (ed.), Lenguajes de modernidad en la Península Ibérica, Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 216–48. ——— (2014). “Desclasamiento y desencanto. La representación de las clases medias como eje de una relectura generacional de la transición española”, Kamchatka 4: 63–99 [available at https://ojs.uv.es/index.php/kamchatka/ article/view/4145]. ——— (2017). “El espíritu más allá de las leyes: orígenes constitucionales (y metafísicos) de la imaginación sociológica, después de 1815”. In Julio A. Pardos et  al. (eds.), Historia en fragmentos. Estudios en homenaje a Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 847–58. ——— (2021). “Constitutional imagination and ‘Catholic’ Political Anthropology: The Grammar of the Mixed Government in the Mid Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Spanish Liberalism”. In Xavier Gil Puyol (ed.), Constitutional Moments. Founding Myths, Charters, and Constitutions through History, Leiden: Brill (forthcoming). Serván, Carmen (2005). El laboratorio constitucional. El individuo y el ordenamiento, 1868–1873, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y constitucionales. Sierra (2010). “Las influencias legítimas (y las corruptoras)”. In María Sierra, María A. Peña y Rafael Zurita, Elegidos y elegibles. La representación parlamentaria en la cultura del liberalismo, Madrid: Marcial Pons, 411–50.

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Sierra, María; Peña, María A. and Zurita Aldeguer, Rafael (2006). “La representación política en el discurso del liberalismo español (1845–1874)”, Ayer 61: 15–45. Stella, Gian Antonio and Rizzo, Sergio (2015) [2007]. La casta. De cómo los políticos se volvieron intocables, Madrid: Capitán Swing. Suárez, Francisco (1863). Los demócratas o el ángel de la libertad, Ferrol, Taxonera editor [available at www.bne.es]. Urquijo y Goitia, José Ramón (1991). “La revolución de 1854 en Zamora”, Hispania 177: 245–86 [available at http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/16868/3/UrquijoGoitia_JR_Revolucion_1854_ Zamora.pdf]. Valera, Juan (1928a) [1860]. “De la naturaleza y el carácter de la novela”. In Obras escogidas, XIII: Ensayos, Madrid: Biblioteca nueva, I, 156–94 [available at www.bne.es]. ——— (1928b) [1862]. “La poesía popular como ejemplo del punto en que deberían coincidir la idea vulgar y la idea académica sobre la lengua castellana”. In Obras escogidas, XIII, Ensayos, Madrid: Biblioteca nueva, I, 258–304 [available at www.bne.es]. ——— (1864). “La doctrina del progreso con relación a la doctrina cristiana”. In Estudios críticos sobre literatura, política y costumbres de nuestros días, Madrid: Librerías de A. Durán, I, pp. 63–118 [available at www.bne.es]. Villacañas, José Luis (2004). “La idea federal en España”. In Manuel Chust (ed.), Federalismo y cuestión federal en España, Castelló de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I, 115–60. Viñao Frago, Angel (1994). “Segunda mitad del siglo XIX”. In Buenaventura Delgado Criado (coord.), Historia de le educación en España y América. 3, La educación en la España contemporánea (1789–1975), Madrid: SM/ Morata, 261–64. Wood, Ellen M (2012). Liberty and Property. A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment, London: Verso.

CHAPTER 8

Epilogue: Decline and Fall of the Liberal Monarchy, 1865–1868

Ten years after the popular mobilization that erupting from outside representative government had forced a reassessment of the limitations imposed on political participation, the Isabelline political system was under even greater pressure from the public sphere in favour of an expanded suffrage. Along the way, a frustrated constitutional process had prevented further enlargement of what from the perspective of the mixed constitution was understood as the democratic dimension inherent in all major institutions. By the mid-1860s, the concept of democracy was being already legitimately used by its supporters to denote a form of government in its own right, and a series of cultural processes had considerably relaxed the asymmetry between people and plebe which had been the basis for the political exclusion of the majority of the population. Finally, although its authoritarian tendencies were apparently softened, over the regime presided over by Isabella II now hung the disquieting spectre of political corruption. Yet the system was not completely unresponsive, and in fact could still take the lead in the sphere of reforms. This was reflected in the drafting of a new electoral law that widened the definition of eligible voters and those who could stand for election. The legislation, promoted by a coalition government of moderados and unionistas, came into force at the beginning of 1865 and, in addition to lowering the income threshold for voting and removing it completely as a condition of standing for election as a deputy, granted the right to vote to the majority of the liberal professions: in effect, Article 19 of the new electoral law extended full citizenship rights to all © The Author(s) 2020 P. Sánchez León, Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5_8

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members of the academies (of language, history, natural sciences, moral and political sciences), as well as “Lawyers, Doctors, Surgeons, Pharmacists, and Road, Mining, and Mountain Engineers. Architects, Industrial Engineers and Agronomists, and Veterinarians” regardless of the amount of taxes they paid, provided that they were not “in the service of the State” and had been in practice for at least one year; and the same applied to professors and teachers at every level of the education system.1 It was undoubtedly an important extension of the demographic base of limited liberalism, but no less significant is the qualitative change it implied in the social categories of citizenship, since what it did was in practice to recognize the so-called capacities, and moreover as collectives. In short, it was the fulfilment of longstanding demands to complement fiscal property with education as a condition of full citizenship. Its undeclared aim was actually to give renewed legitimacy to representative government by broadening the electoral base, so that the political elite, by virtue of being deemed economically and morally independent, could continue to be considered a legitimate aristocracy without bringing into question the limits of the system. However, the measure was not preceded by any significant debate in the public sphere on the social or cultural changes that would justify such a reform, which was introduced by a royal decree. In fact, by unilaterally approving eligibility criteria that had been denied for thirty years, the legislation actually diminished the status of taxable property among the referents of citizenship, while depriving the state of its status as their exclusive supplier. Albeit in a generic way, the reform undoubtedly sought to undermine the growing capacity of democrats and republicans to compete for the political representation of the middle classes, until then split in two 1  The right was also granted to “Painters and Sculptors” but in this case only if they had obtained a “first or second class prize at national or international exhibitions.” The law also recognized political rights without fiscal qualifications to friars, priests, senior military officers, notaries, and scribes, in a singular amalgam of socio-professional categories whose moral independence was at least questionable; see Gaceta de Madrid 212 (31-07-1865): 1. On the other hand, in addition to instituting the electoral census and tightening the restrictions on who could vote, placing the entire electoral procedure under the supervision of the judiciary, the law reduced to 20 escudos the annual tax threshold for the rest of the citizenry to exercise the right to vote, and it eliminated all economic conditions for being eligible as a deputy. The electoral legislation in force until then, introduced in 1846, required real estate in the amount of 12,000 reales or the payment of a direct contribution of 1000 reales per year, and to be a voter 400 reales per year, 200 reales in the case of the liberal professions; see Electoral law (1846), Art. 4, 14, and 16: 6 and 10 respectively.  An overview of electoral legislation and its implementation in Isabelline Liberalism, see Zurita-Aldeguer (2010).

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between full citizens and those largely excluded from the right to vote. More particularly it was intended to mitigate the so-called retreat of the progresistas, that is, the latter’s refusal to present candidates for election in protest of the corruption that, in their view, made possible the moderate majorities with the support of the unionists.2 The progressives had already adopted this stance in the 1840s before the internal split provoked by the democrats, leaving the electoral arena open to their conservative rivals; but this time the strategic move was much more damaging to the legitimacy of representative government, threatening to deprive the parliamentary majority of an opposition to parley and bargain with. But beyond its practical effect, the context made the retreat acquire an enormous symbolic value, although paradoxically not so much redounding to the advantage of the progressive party that adopted it: in fact, while this policy provoked internal debates among the latter, the main beneficiaries of the strategic reorientation were the democrats and republicans. They in turn had been proposing a boycott of the elections since the end of the previous decade as part of a broader strategy that allowed them to overcome the setback of 1854, when the limitations of their leadership over many of the mobilized and disenfranchised citizens were revealed. In the new circumstances, the progressives’ retreat was celebrated among republicans and democrats because it seemed to bring approval to their own strategy, allowing them to get closer to progressive stances while for the first time escaping their subordinate position and also offering a valuable opportunity to take the initiative in disseminating their wider agenda in the public sphere.3 The key to the understanding between the two political formations was the congruity of their positions on the moral significance and social scope of corruption. As both republicans and progressives expected, when the reform of the electoral law was imposed, far from lessening the discredit of the parliamentary system, it rather modified the signification of  corruption, extending its meaning beyond the strictly political sphere. The emerging coalition of opponents from inside and outside parliament strove 2  On the process that led to this decision by the leadership of the progressive party, arising from the conviction that coalitions with the Liberal Union did not guarantee the necessary impetus for reforms because of the variable attitude and changing loyalty of this party, see Chato Gonzalo (2011); on the political landscape that emerged as a result, in comparative perspective with that of Portugal, see Chato Gonzalo (2014). 3  In an article published in that context by republican leader Emilio Castelar, he defined the retreat as “an act by which we not only protest against electoral corruption, but also protest in favor of the sovereignty of the people”; see Castelar (1880) [1865]: 238.

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to denaturalize the replacement aristocracy projected by the electoral legislation: they successfully presented it as condemned in advance to being hijacked by what they deemed a fully-fledged oligarchy whose corrupt practices, as Emilio Castelar put it, were already a kind of gangrene that affected the entire “social body.”4 In short, the expected “moral influence” of the political class was re-signified as an illicit manipulation of the state’s resources, which, by interfering in electoral procedures, had turned the exchange of favours into a systemic practice.5 By contrast, claiming primacy in rejecting that entire order of things, radical political leaders were presenting themselves as a replacement for the established political class as a whole. The year 1865 also saw the appearance of the first volume of La España contemporánea by the republican ideologist Fernando Garrido, a French-­ language edition of which he had published in exile three years earlier and that contained a survey of recent history since 1808 dedicated to upending commonplace ideas about Spanish culture and politics apparently widespread among Europeans. In the introduction of the book, rejecting the notion that “Humanity” was “an immense machine moved by fate” and trusting in “the spontaneous action of men” in shaping their own destiny, Garrido proclaimed that present-day Spain was “the daughter of the revolution of the nineteenth century” and “of the radical changes operated in the ideas and aspirations of the public spirit” in the direction of progress.6 The book was an exhaustive study of the economy, administration, culture, and public opinion over the preceding decade, based on which Garrido offered a comprehensive political agenda. This tendency to go over to the discursive offensive was marked among the most ambitious republicans calling for alternatives in the sphere of workers’ associative self-organization and territorial and administrative decentralization; moreover, it was supplemented by a renewed emphasis on the Crown as the key to the entire network of corruption of public and private interests. Thus, just a few weeks after the new electoral law came 4  For the same reason, it was urgent to withdraw from “everything that is being devoured by the cancer of immense corruption”; see Ibid.: 213 and 214, respectively. 5  On this liberal notion of “moral influence” in this context, and its evolution in those years, see Sierra (2010); its insertion into the broader context of the origins of Liberalism in Britain, in Pocock (2011) [1976]. 6  More broadly, what he defended was “human action, individual or collective,” duly “illuminated by science,” such as “the great lever that moves the world” and “the motor force” that was driving progress; see Garrido (1865), I: 5, 9, 10 and 11 respectively.

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into force, republican leader Emilio Castelar published in his newly created newspaper La Democracia two articles in which he directly attacked the Crown for making a profit from the sale of property to the state, the private ownership of which was at least questionable. The government’s response to this challenge from the opposition outside parliament was to resort to repression. Taking advantage of an article in the Education Act of 1857 which allowed—by means of a simple “governmental record”— the removal of teachers who instilled “harmful doctrines in their disciples,” opened a case against him.7 The government action intruded in a particularly sensitive area for the most educated sectors of public opinion because it affected the very foundation of a self-defined liberal order—academic freedom. Moreover, the message it was sending was at least compromising, because the use of the current educational norms to punish what could at most be taken for an abuse of the freedom of expression forced the government to portray as a demagogic manipulator of the uneducated masses someone who was hired as a reputable university professor. In other words, in taking the discourse back to the context of twenty years before, the government was qualifying Castelar’s public, both inside and outside the academe, as an inept plebe. The media and social reaction was not long in coming. In fact, what the government did not anticipate is that the measure, coupled with the dismissal of the rector of the Central University for refusing to depose one of its numerary professor, would lead to what may be considered the first autonomous student mobilization in the history of Spain, which, moreover, ended in a bloodbath in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, where ten years earlier the similar repressive forces of repression had crushed the popular mobilization against another conservative cabinet supporting corruption practices of the royal family and slipping also into tyrannical modes.8 7  The case was to be opened “with a hearing of the person concerned and consultation of the Royal Council of Public Instruction” and could also be used to terminate teachers deemed unworthy of the profession “because of their moral conduct”; see Article 170 of the legislation in the “Ley Moyano de Instrucción Pública de 1857,” https://es.wikisource.org. The articles were titled “¿De quién es el Patrimonio Real?” [Who owns the Royal Patrimony?] and “El rasgo” [The trait], respectively. 8  Planned for 10 April 1865, the “Night of San Daniel” as it was later denominated, or “Night of the slaughterhouse,” was originally supposed to involve a long nocturnal “serenade” in front of the building of the Ministry of the Interior, but since the state of siege had been decreed, the combination of troops and civil guard sent to disperse this gathering of students, workers, and democratic and republican leaders opened fire on groups of demonstrators, resulting in a dozen deaths and several injuries, as well as many detainees. The

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In sum, the government started the year 1865 by taking the initiative with a reform intended to regenerate political life, but ended it on the defensive, opening new spaces for public criticism and social mobilization that affected not so much political but even civil rights. It is true that this had relatively few immediate consequences, but the year 1865 duly became the object of an entire critical-satirical literature that took advantage of the contrast with the recent past to denounce the rise of corruption as a social phenomenon, and to predict an imminent political crisis. Indeed, the first issue of the satirical magazine El Cascabel [The rattle] had appeared as early as 1863—reviving a minor but hugely popular genre—in which, following a traditional calendar of feasts and meteorological prognostications, was included a humorous review of the year and forecasts for the one to come, in this case 1864.9 More interesting yet, a new popular theatrical genre then emerged that mixed lyrics and music in a sort of zarzuela (popular operetta) with political content, epitomized by the work entitled 1864 and 1865 that centred on a scathing comparison of the two years.10 Finally, at the beginning of the following year, its author José María Gutiérrez de Alba premiered Revista de un muerto. Juicio del protest can be considered fully independent in the sense that it did not function as an added ingredient within another political protest; paradoxically, however, it was not directed against the academic hierarchy but in favour of it; see an analysis and interpretation in González Calleja (2009). 9  The one of 1863 included verses such as the following: “Does not the minister suck?/ doesn’t the magnate suck?/ doesn’t the peasant suck? /doesn’t the villain suck?/ Whether silver, or honor,/ or gravy, or blood,/ are the people not sucked [dry]/ by a hundred thousand characters?” Apart from this, every month of the 1864 calendar gave the same forecast: “The newspapers announce that there is a crisis of government.” It also included some “five commandments for staying healthy and living well,” the second of which mandated “obedience to the Laws and keeping one’s distance from politics”; see Almanaque (1863): 5–6, 69, and 85 respectively. The genre of the prognosticating almanac goes back to the public sphere of the mid-eighteenth century, when it had gained enormous popularity on the eve of the Esquilache Riots; see Medina (2009), pp. 57–82. 10  The piece called itself “comical-lyrical-fantastical play” and dealt with the events of the year that ended, made up of political allusions and social satire. At the end of the work there was a “Virgin of Democracy” with this caption: “I am the virgin of hope,/ I give man peace and prosperity;/ I am the port of salvation;/ I acclaim the rights of man;/ I worship and love justice./ Mine is the world! There is no remission!”; this female character appeared with the protagonist of the play, the year 1865, but the entourage of 1864 prevented them from gathering together; see Gutiérrez de Alba (1865): 31. Its author drew inspiration from French models and the Cervantine tradition in his exploration of this genre; see Rubio Jiménez (1994); on Gutiérrez de Alba, see Campos Díaz (2015).

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año 1865 [Review of a deceased one. Judgement of the year 1865] whose tone of final judgment gave the impression of a regime at the point of exhaustion. Although this work was the subject of censorship, precisely because of this it glimpses the growing difficulties faced by institutions in arresting the drift in the Isabelline sphere of public opinion, which on its part increasingly blurred the divide between high and low culture and enabled an unusual synergy between audiences of diverse social and cultural backgrounds quickly evolving towards politicization and impudence. To this end, equally or even more decisive was the proliferation of a type of public space, the so-called Café-musical, featuring these experimental shows that combined customary settings with an inordinate social and political critique.11 Thus, if the government’s aim was to attract the world of culture to the cause of limited representative government, it was trying to do so just as artists seemed to be placing a critical distance between themselves and the prevailing institutional order as a whole. Moreover, this was true not only of the purveyors of popular culture, but this increasingly critical vein was also evident in works directed at the educated public. In a context hitherto dominated by the trope of corruption, the government’s loss of direction had led to the revival of an older theme, dormant during the previous decade: that of tyranny. Fernando Garrido, who as early as 1860 had published a work on the subject based on anecdotes about European monarchs returned to it in 1867, but this time more comprehensively, publishing the first of several volumes of a Historia de los crímenes del despotismo [History of the crimes of despotism], written under the pseudonym Alfonso Torres de Castilla to avoid reprisals. Through the stories it brought together, ranging from classical Antiquity to the French Revolution, he showed that despotism was an active tendency in all historical societies, turning “into beasts those who exercise it

11  In fact, the rise of this type of establishment led to authorities towards the end of 1867 banning “lyrico-dramatic performances,” with the argument that only “discrete pieces of music” could be performed but not mixed ones, which fell into the category of “zarzuelas.” Only after the establishment of democracy in the coming years they would be called “Cafésteatro.” Similarly, from January 1867, works “written in the dialect of some provinces” were banned throughout the country since they were considered to contribute “to fostering the spirit of autonomy,” destroying “the most effective means of generalizing the use of the national language”; see Lalama (1867): 113 and 111, respectively. An overview of theatrical censorship, in Rubio Jiménez (1984).

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and into machines those who suffer it.”12 However, his narrative emphasized that despotism had been declining in strength throughout history, because its “horror” produced a reaction in the form of “the love of freedom”; in conclusion, under “the representative and parliamentary system” that was spreading in Europe and the post-colonial American states, “political despotism could not exist today, [for] it would be an anachronism.”13 Nevertheless, Garrido took a position equidistant from both pessimistic and optimistic fatalism, emphasizing as the main lesson of history the crucial importance of periodically administering the vaccine of freedom, justifying thus why he directed the work primarily “to the new generations.”14 Garrido had previously linked the monarchy with despotism; however, by bringing both concepts together in a longterm historical narrative and doing so in a context in turn infused with the discourse of corruption, he facilitated the discursive convergence of all the counter-concepts that in the repertoire of the mixed constitution had made up the vision of a depraved and unbalanced government, pronouncing it unsustainable. From the longer term perspective dating back to 1766, it was evident that after a century of important changes Liberalism had succeeded in instituting what the privileged nobility of the Old Regime had most lacked: an apparatus of representation with which not only dominate the state, and thus public policy, but by means of which to reproduce the entire system. What was still far from being realized, however, was that the movers and the passive beneficiaries of that entire framework should be perceived as a legitimate aristocracy in the conventional sense of the Western political tradition. Seen this way, the vista that opened up in 1865, although in the short term it did not result in a government crisis and, precisely for that reason, had incubated a crisis of representation of 12  See Garrido (1867): I, 8. The work would be published again in 1871 under the title of Historia de la tiranía. He had previously published another one titled with irony Lindezas del despotismo [Witty aspects of despotism] (1860). 13  See Garrido (1867): I, 9 and 17. 14  He urged them not to forget “the sufferings, the pains, the martyrdom of those who sacrificed themselves to conquer” for them “the goods they enjoy,” especially in countries like Spain that had needed “long and bloody struggles” to ensure “their independence and freedoms against theocratic and political despotism.” For this purpose, the work proposed a whole deontological and epistemological code, because according to its author, the problem was not that the crimes of despotism were unknown, but that “historians, bribed, sold out to oppression, have presented them to us as virtues or glorious feats”; see Ibid.: 10; in contrast, he presented his as an “unbiased and conscientiously written work.”

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Isabelline Liberalism that affected not only the institutions, but the very  concepts and categories themselves which had enabled these and made them appear legitimate. There were other marked differences between the contexts of 1766–1774 and 1865–1868. Faced with what was already insinuated as an oligarchic tyranny that threatened the freedom and moral integrity of the entire population, education and culture now attained a new meaning by being understood, not as mere referents of citizenship or of a civil right on its own, but as guarantors of order against systemic drift towards anarchy. This interesting perspective was expressed, albeit using negative tropes, by a university professor during an official ceremony in 1867: in addition to the usual claim that a lack of education implied living “completely segregated from the rest of humanity,” he now stressed that the lack of culture inspired in the uneducated citizen “a certain ferocious indifference towards those who are placed over him.”15 The prospect of a social antagonism  emanating from differences in education was one that, besides threatening to be equally or more conflictive than one unleashed by economic inequalities, was also profoundly unjust and symptomatic of a flaw that was not attributable to natural trends but to instituted negligence. By this point in time, however, the capacity of people for self-government was taken for granted, for, although lacking education, they were seen to possess more than sufficient moral qualifications, to the extent that discourses began to proliferate that took the semantic inversion of aristocracy and plebe to the extreme of placing the ethic of the vulgo over that of the rest of the citizenry.16

15  And he continued: “Observe the profound rancour that these crude souls almost always harbour against the señores [lords], as they call them, and you will see that behind this feeling is partly hatred for what they have, and partly for what they know,” so that “both confused impulses engender in them the wildest prejudice against those lucky ones who insult them with their superiority”; see Nieto (1867): 8 and 9 respectively. 16  As a revealing example, the writer Carlos Frontaura ended his book of snapshots of customs in the form of small illustrative tales with one entitled “El vulgo” which, rather than merely dignifying it, presented its members as a moral model: those “men of the vulgo” who “never see their name printed” were characterized as enviable and ideal subjects “rather than [those who owned] sumptuous palaces, magnificent trains, and expensive dresses, and titles and decorations,” next to all of which was “the joy, carefreeness, freedom, quiet poverty in which the vulgo lives”; see Frontaura (1868): 301 and 302, respectively. Frontaura, director of El Cascabel, thus contributed to an emerging hybrid genre that transcended the boundaries of conventional costumbrismo to enter into social critique; see Rubio Cremades (2000).

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Above all, these moral standards were considered to provide with meaning to a national community whose epicentre was a sphere of public opinion that stabilized and reproduced the referents of citizenship independently from the state, consolidating rootedness as a sufficient condition for demanding the active participation of adult males in political deliberation. Moreover, to channel this there now existed an increasingly legitimized procedure, universal suffrage, which had the virtue of offering in a single institution a new space for participation alongside a socially extended traditional form of representation. In this way, the radical constitutional transformation it entailed could be relativized, presenting it as framed by a much more diffuse but less political concept: that of regeneration, applicable to an organic imaginary with a long tradition regarding an order appropriate for a Catholic culture such as the Spanish one markedly continued to be.17 In sum, democracy, in its capacity to mobilize civic energies, could now easily be invoked as a regenerator of an order that, in its drift towards degradation, threatened to drag the nation down with it. On the other hand, this organic democracy echoed a deep-rooted egalitarian discourse that invoked the constitutional imaginary of Cádiz. Undoubtedly, the context was not the same as in 1812, so that the illustrative image of this equalization may be sought in the conventional culture promoted by several decades of Liberalism. Thus, in his assessment of nineteenth century Spain, Fernando Garrido established an emblematic analogy between democracy, called upon to open “the doors of elections to all citizens,” and theatre: in his vision, universal suffrage would marginalize “the comedy of intrigue and the back room” in favour of “the great spectacles of the public square” where “the great emotions” and “the energetic and sublime passions of the masses” would be represented; and he predicted that in this looming age theatrical architecture would be transformed, with the seated courtyard being expanded, and “the box, the symbol of privilege and selfish isolation of the privileged classes” to be “replaced by the immense gallery in which every citizen will have his seat.”18 17  On the resorting to a discourse of regeneration in this context, in comparative perspective with France, see Zurita-Aldeguer (2019).  On this concept running through Spanish modernity, driven by the Catholic philosophical current of Central European origin known as “Krausism,” see Sánchez León (2011); on the emergence of Krausism in Spain in those years, inspired by the works of Austrian moralist philosopher Karl Kraus, see Capellán de Miguel (2007). 18  See Garrido (1867), II, p. 980.

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The metaphor was an allusion to an aesthetic programme long espoused by the radical liberals of the Isabelline period, alongside an even older imaginary related to the makeup of a communitarian democracy suited to the times and to national idiosyncrasies. But unlike the option chosen by the Constitution of Cádiz, the old corporate structure could be duly bypassed, since now universal suffrage functioned as the selection mechanism for an elective aristocracy that, in addition to being partially outside the state apparatus and legitimized by independent referents adjudicated by the community, also possessed a sufficient sociological foundation in these middle classes newly empowered by means of the capacities recognized by the electoral law of 1865. Now, as part of the expression of their hegemony and in order to be able to assume the role of natural representatives, in the discourse the liberal professions paradoxically had to appear diluted in an all-encompassing “people” that, once the plebe had been absorbed in it, dignified mainly other groups, such as unemployed youth, students, and artisans threatened by unemployment and industrial production.19 Needless to say, this was the case insofar as participation was at the forefront of all critical discourses; but these were in turn soon overdetermined by a rhetoric of mobilization from outside the system emanating from radical political agendas. In this regard, the progressives playing a crucial role in the conspiracy being hatched could seek inspiration in an inherited repertory in which the military and civil components were both key to ensuring the success of a popular uprising.20 Moreover, the latter eventually opted for the familiar form of urban juntas that, once the bounds of the system were overrun, ensured that the whole process would be designated as a Revolution, thus reviving the terminology associated with 1808, only now to define a struggle for freedoms not against a 19  This redefinition of the liberal professions, and the middle classes in general as absorbed by the category of people, has been noted in scholarly studies, albeit to try to present the revolutionaries of 1868 as manipulating the discourse in order to obscure the protagonism of the elites in the social and political mobilizations that put an end to the Isabelline regime; see De la Fuente (2000). In fact, it is rather this type of approach that distorts documented evidence by presenting as fake or madeup the discourse of those middle classes self-portraying themselves as people, imposing presentist categories such as middle class on the textual evidence when it comes to giving an account of their identity. 20  In fact, the progressives opted for insurrection faced with the impasse of the moderado governments, with General Juan Prim eventually assuming leadership of the conspiracy; on this individual, see Fradera (2000).

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foreign invader but to expel the then revered Bourbon monarchy, effected by taking advantage of Queen Isabel’s summer departure abroad.21 For its part, the Revolution of 1868 would be called “Gloriosa” because, compared with the one in 1854, it was carried out with the minimal use of violence, a characteristic that on the other hand brought it closer to the aetiology of the Esquilache Riots. However, the contrast of 1868 with 1766, 1808, and 1854 was especially stark with regard to candidates for constituent subjects. With the monarchy and aristocracy replaced by their counter-conceptual versions of despotism and oligarchy, and with democracy absorbing many of their attributes, the revolutionaries of 1868 were able not only to redefine the people as sovereign and establish democracy as an independent form of government, but also to aspire to recalibrate the relations between participation and representation by universalizing the former through the vote. However, the main imbalance in the constitutional setting they came to devise right after would be generated at the higher level, that of order, since such an inclusive imaginary of democracy, moreover founded on an organic conception of the community, made universal suffrage appear as both a conclusive and at the same time an exclusive formula of participation that delegitimized any other form of claims-making.22 Given these preconceptions, the six-year democratic interlude of 1868–1874 would run into major problems when it came to managing the emerging conflicts of an order of representation and participation as novel as it was precarious. In any case, it should be stressed that the language of the mixed constitution continued to accompany much of the discourse developed in that context, and even more so those of the eventual disarticulation of the democratic experiment. Indeed, the history of this conceptual grammar cannot be said to have ended after the so-called Bourbon Restoration of 1875; nor indeed the dichotomy between people and plebe as a fundamental aspect of modern Spanish politics. Indeed, by 1876, in the decree temporarily reinstating the legislation of 1865 until a new, more restrictive electoral law was passed, “direct and 21  These comparisons are nor from today but were rather made in that context, showing that the weight of such an indomitable memory was decisive in making it possible to interpret the constituent process that ensued as the resumption of an impulse that had its origin in 1808; see Sánchez León (2008). 22  A similar problem occurred in France in 1848 as a result of another revolution which also brought with it the first experience of universal suffrage; see Rosanvallon and Costopoulos (1995).

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egalitarian” universal suffrage was once again openly labelled as a “revolutionary formula that puts property and intelligence in the hands of impassioned or ignorant masses.”23 Moreover, it was not only the plebe that made a comeback—although increasingly under distinctly social designations, such as the working class, day labourers, and so on—but so did the monarchy, as well as the constitutional framework for a new elective aristocracy with claims to legitimacy. Yet even more marked was the return of corruption, which the new regime instituted as indispensable to its functioning. Thus, when universal suffrage was reintroduced in 1891, Spain’s representative government at the turn of the twentieth century was not a democracy worthy of the name, and could easily be denigrated as an oligarchy, and eventually—two decades later—as a tyranny. Democracy would have to wait for the articulation of a discourse that could once again re-establish relations between mobilization, representation, and participation by reintegrating the plebeian working class into a fully sovereign citizen people. But as the saying goes, that is another story.

Works Cited Almanaque (1863). Almanaque cómico-profético de El Cascabel. Año 1  – 1864, Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel Minuesa [available at www.bne.es]. Campos Díaz, José M. (2015). José María Gutiérrez de Alba (1822–1897): biografía de un escritor viajero, Sevilla: Diputación de Sevilla. Capellán de Miguel, Gonzalo (2007). “Liberalismo armónico. La teoría política del primer krausismo español (1860–1868)”, Historia y Política 17: 89–120 [available at https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/Hyp/article/view/44566]. Castelar, Emilio (1880) [1856]. “Manifestaciones progresistas”. In Recuerdos y esperanzas, Madrid: Librerías de A. de San Martín, II: 211–17 [available at www.bne.es]. Chato Gonzalo, Ignacio (2011). “El fracaso del proyecto regenerador de la Unión Liberal (1860–1863): el fin de las expectativas de cambio”, Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 33: 141–61 [available at https://revistas.ucm.es/ index.php/CHCO/article/view/36669]. ——— (2014). “Conciliación o revolución: los caminos enfrentados del liberalismo peninsular (Portugal y España, 1863–1866)”, Arbor 190: a111. doi: https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2014.766n2003 [available at http://arbor. revistas.csic.es/index.php/arbor/article/view/1913/2155].

 See “Real Decreto” (1847–1878) [1876]: 689.

23

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De la Fuente, Gregorio (2000). Los revolucionarios de 1868: elites y poder en la España liberal, Madrid: Marcial Pons. Fradera, Josep M. (2000). “Juan Prim y Prats (1814–1870). Prim conspirador o la pedagogía del sable”. In Isabel Burdiel and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (eds.), Liberales, agitadores y conspiradores. Biografías heterodoxas del siglo XIX, Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 239–66. Frontaura, Carlos (1868). Caricaturas y retratos, Madrid: n.p. [available at www.bne.es]. Garrido, Fernando (1865). La España contemporánea, sus progresos morales y materiales en el siglo XIX, Barcelona: Establecimiento tipográfico editorial de Salvador Manero [available at www.googlebooks.es]. ——— (1867). Historia de los crímenes del despotismo, Barcelona: Establecimiento tipográfico editorial de Salvador Manero [available at www.bne.es]. González Calleja, Eduardo (2009). Rebelión en las aulas: movilización y protesta estudiantil en la España contemporánea, 1865–2008, Madrid: Alianza. Gutiérrez de Alba, José M. (1865). 1864 y 1865, Madrid: Imprenta de D. Anselmo Santa Coloma [available at www.bne.es]. Lalama, Vicente de (1867). Índice general por orden alfabético de cuantas obras dramáticas y líricas han sido aprobadas por la Junta de Censura y Censores de Oficio para todos los teatros del Reino y Ultramar, comprendiendo los años de 1850 a 1866, Pinto: Imprenta de G. Alhambra [available at http://bibliotecadigital. jcyl.es/es/consulta/registro.cmd?id=18867]. Ley electoral (1846). Ley electoral para el nombramiento de diputados a Cortes, Madrid: Imprenta Nacional [available at http://www.ub.edu/ciudadania/hipertexto/evolucion/textos/electoral/1846.htm]. Medina, Alberto (2009). Espejo de sombras: sujeto y multitud en la España del siglo XVIII, Madrid: Marcial Pons. Nieto, Emilio (1867). “Discurso leído en la Universidad Central en el acto solemne de recibir la investidura de Doctor en la Facultad de Derecho”, Madrid: Imprenta de Rojas y cia. [available at www.bne.es]. Pocock, John G.  A. (2011) [1976]. “The Classical Theory of Deference”, The American Historical Review 81/3: 516–23 [available at https://www.jstor. org/stable/1852422?seq=1]. Real Decreto (1876). “Real Decreto autorizando al Ministro de la Gobernacion para presentar a las Córtes el adjunto proyecto de ley, restableciendo la electoral de Diputados a Córtes de 18 de Julio de 1865, y creando una Comision que estudie y proponga otra ley definitiva sobre dicha materia”. In Colección Legislativa de España (1847–1878), Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, CXVI: 689–93. Rosanvallon, Pierre and Costopoulos, Philip J. (1995). “History of the Word ‘Democracy’ in France”, Journal of Democracy 6/4: 140–54 [available at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/16713].

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Rubio Cremades, Enrique (2000). “Afinidades entre el género cuento y el cuadro de costumbres: Carlos Frontaura”. In El Cuento español en el siglo XIX: autores raros y olvidados. Lleida: Universidad, 89–101. Rubio Jiménez, Jesús (1984). “La censura teatral en la época moderada: 1840–1868. Ensayo de aproximación”, Segismundo 39–40: 193–231. ——— (1994). “José María Gutiérrez de Alba y los inicios de la revista política en el teatro”, Crítica Hispánica XVI/1: pp. 119–40. Sánchez León, Pablo (2008). “La “guerra civil” de 1808. El 2 de Mayo en la cultura liberal española”. In Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos (ed.), La Guerra de la Independencia en la cultura española, Madrid: Siglo XXI, 79–101. ——— (2011). “Decadencia y regeneración. La temporalidad en los conceptos fundamentales de la modernidad española”. In Javier Fernández Sebastián and Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel (eds.), Conceptos políticos, tiempo e historia. Nuevos enfoques en historia conceptual, Santander: Universidad de Cantabria/McGraw-­ Hill, 271–300. Sierra (2010). “Las influencias legítimas (y las corruptoras)”. In María Sierra, María A. Peña y Rafael Zurita, Elegidos y elegibles. La representación parlamentaria en la cultura del liberalismo, Madrid: Marcial Pons, 411–50. Sierra, María “Las influencias legítimas (y las corruptoras)”. In María Sierra, María A. Peña y Rafael Zurita, Elegidos y elegibles. La representación parlamentaria en la cultura del liberalismo, Madrid: Marcial Pons, 411–50. Zurita-Aldeguer, Rafael (2010). “El proceso electoral”. In María Sierra, María A. Peña y Rafael Zurita, Elegidos y elegibles. La representación parlamentaria en la cultura del liberalismo, Madrid: Marcial Pons, 189–300. ——— (2019). “Universal Male Suffrage and the Political Regeneration in Spain and France (1868–1871)”, Historia y Política 42: 209–39 [available at http:// www.cepc.gob.es/publicaciones/revistas/revistaselectronicas?IDR=9& IDN=1423&IDA=38822].

CHAPTER 9

Conclusions: Studying Modern Citizenship as Historical Condition

Beyond Conventional Narratives: Chronology, Continuity, and Change It is a commonplace that all history is a history of the present. What is usually omitted is that this statement entails a very particular sense of the present, which may be variously experienced and measured by quite different yardsticks, often even conflicting ones. What is offered here is a history of the present in that it shares an extended consciousness of a crisis that at the very least affects the form of representation in twenty-first century democracies. Such a stance is not conducive to a narrative of the past that is indulgent with the present. What is usually offered is the opposite: a history shaped by the hegemonic conventions with which the present tells its own story and which adopts by contrast a critical perspective towards the past it studies and sets out to account. Thus, a crucial way of distinguishing between stories about the past is by taking note of the relationship they maintain with the present, whether critical or not—for only in the former case may the knowledge of the past contribute to maintaining a critical distance from the present and its conventions. In turn, this kind of attitude favours perspectives that, by keeping a critical tension with the present, may gain an insight into the past normally absent from extant or conventional narratives. The history told in this study may be seen in some ways as conventional but doubtless also very different to what can be found in the textbooks © The Author(s) 2020 P. Sánchez León, Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52596-5_9

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and academic studies on the period. Above all, it distinguishes itself by focusing on a dimension that is generally taken for granted: the first experience of modern citizenship, which is dated to the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century in a great part of the Western world, in the European metropolises as well as their emancipating American colonies. To be clear, it is not that many studies do not address this central phenomenon of modernity, but they have been doing so from an epistemological framework and following a narrative pattern that does not foreground citizenship itself, but rather as subsumed within the general framework of society and its inner economic and social differences on one side, and on the other, as part of the constitutional architecture and among the various political and cultural institutions. This approach has made possible important findings and contributions, allowing research to shed light on the development of capitalist class-based society and the rise of the modern national state. But this has also come at a cost. To begin with, it has tended to break down the study of the citizenship condition into a series of separate niches, and usually to reduce it to the description of rights and duties; however, the condition of citizenship comes with a whole array of capacities among which is participation and its linkages with deliberation, as well as certain values, starting with political virtue and its tension with particular interest, the study of which concerns very different disciplines. In sum, in the condition of citizenship the anthropological and the sociological intertwine with the juridical and the political, but also with the moral and the cultural, so that its study demands a much more holistic perspective. Moreover, all these aspects of the citizen condition have not only been addressed separately, but also usually from the perspective of modernization. Accordingly, such epistemological paradigm itself had to enter a crisis for this whole scheme to start to break apart, bringing into question the teleological assumptions that underlie the Grand Narratives of modernity, but also bringing back into focus essential dimensions of modern history  that had been relegated to the background, such as civic political participation in relation to representation. As this book has shown, these two dimensions of the citizen condition should not continue to be addressed separately, as they are logically and historically interdependent, and only a joint approach can embrace their complex and changing relations over time. In effect, political participation does not follow a linear historical trajectory, but neither is it easy to insert into a narrative of modernization because—as demonstrated in this book—the rise of Liberalism

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consecrated modern citizenship but at the cost of over-inflating the legitimacy of representation, marginalizing and even delegitimizing a whole series of forms and mechanisms of participation typical of the Old Regime. More generally, the growing emphasis on political participation disrupts the framework that modern historiography has been projecting on the construction of citizenship, in which representation is accounted for simply as a transfer, evolution, or rearrangement of traditional forms into modern ones. In fact, a history of citizenship genuinely interested in understanding the issue of participation must jettison the conventional dichotomy traditional/modern. This is because, while participation characteristic of the Old Regime was not founded on citizenship, the representative government established in its aftermath, which offered scarce or non-existent avenues for participation, does not meet the standards of modern citizenship. In reality, as this study has shown, the ways in which political participation could be defended and practiced under Liberalism was at least partly rooted in the traditions of the Old Regime, as duly re-­ signified in contexts of crisis and political and constitutional change. Moreover, as I have also shown, the introduction of participation in the narrow and limited scheme instituted by representative government under Liberalism often had to be done through collective mobilizations that necessarily overflowed the system from outside. In sum, the main proof that a history of the citizenship condition worthy of the name demands an all-embracing focus is the need to include in its study the whole issue of the boundaries between order and disorder in the passage to modernity and its sequels. All these questions have an interest beyond the specific case of Spain between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of nineteenth century. The overarching aim of this study is to help overcome the increasingly unbearable Northern European-centric academic bias, as a result of which the great topics of modernity have been studied by analysing processes that occurred in those countries considered as more advanced or pioneering. These privileged cases tend to be France, England, or the United States, while others, seen to be lagging behind, are left in the background—and what is more, the tendency is to study these by measuring them against the former. To begin with, this study has chosen a case that goes beyond the singular and the national, since it deals with what was at the outset a whole constellation of continental and overseas territories that made up a vast transatlantic empire dominating the lives of millions of inhabitants, and that would fragment into more than a dozen national

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states; moreover, it has adopted a comparative perspective to show the analogies but above all the differences between its trajectory and those of other European countries. On the other hand, the period chosen is one of great changes but preceding the establishment of democracy, with the aim of enabling critical comparisons with the current dynamics, and contributing to a historicization of political modernity that does not take for granted that the present is a constant improvement over the past. Although deeply committed to respecting the specificity of the case and particular historical contexts, the questions raised by this study are of general, universal, and global relevance. Besides, the Spanish case has the added interest of demanding critical distance towards a version of the Grand Narrative of modernization that has become particularly sophisticated. The fact that Spain has been characterized as a frustrated, belated, or incomplete example of modernization has encouraged historiographic approaches that by necessity had to be complex, since they had to derive these idiosyncratic qualifications from the model, on the one hand, while properly integrating them into accounts coherent with empirical evidence, on the other. In any case, not even the most accomplished approaches to the modern history of Spain related to the matrix of modernization have managed to avoid producing an account that is ultimately centred around the contrast with or the negation of a model.1 An overall problem shared by these kinds of interpretations is that they tend to condemn historical subjects for diverging from the expected standards in the crucibles in which they found themselves; and more specifically from the perspective of this book, they distort the image of the first modern citizens of Spanish history, by presenting them as incapable of carrying through the political modernization and stability they were supposedly committed to. The alternative approach has been to deny such failure, frustration, or delay, presenting the Spanish case as essentially comparable to its European counterparts.2 This interpretive line faces its own major problem in that, by reducing the specificities of the case to minor differences, it produces accounts that diminish the importance of features that may in fact have 1  Just to invoke representative examples: from the standpoint of Marxian social history, the metanarrative is that of a failed or incomplete social revolution, while from the perspective of a Kantian political sociology the leitmotif is that of a “passive revolution”; for the former, see Fontana (2007); on the latter, see Villacañas Berlanga (2014): 387–441. 2  A recent example for the English-speaking readers in Álvarez Junco and Shubert (2016).

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been more decisive later in time or the source of more significant differences that do not fit this narrative scheme. In any case, both ways of observing the passage to modernity in Spain have more in common than may appear at first glance, starting from the fact that both tend to undervalue the importance of the long first half of the nineteenth century in favour of its last decades and the first third of twentieth century.3 In effect, in the Spanish scholarly production of the last half-century a clear dividing line has been established demarcating the modern period in a before and after the so-called monarchic Restoration of 1875, with the latter considered to be a period of stability that on the one hand consolidated the achievements of Liberalism from the first half of the century, and on the other side was the cradle of the modern labour movement and attendant social tensions but also of supposedly even more profound modernizing impulse, to be intensified from the reestablishment of democracy in 1931. In this sense, Spanish historiography after Franco’s regime reveals itself as rather pursuian the legacy of Liberalism, which had already constructed its own history from the vantage point of the second half of nineteenth century, centred around the struggle of supposedly modernizing social, political, and cultural urban elites against entrenched powers rooted in the Old Regime, and their capacity for resistance and reaction. This narrative of modern Spanish history bisected by the year 1875 has updated a retrospective approach at the expense of another, more reasonably prospective such as the one adopted in this study. In turn, this arbitrary approach has encouraged many specialists to regard the first part of the century with a sense of condescension and disdain, a paradoxical stance for a history of citizenship given that, from the perspective adopted in this study, the period following the 1875 Restoration appears as one of backlash rather than progress, starting with the fact of having instituted corruption as an indispensable ingredient for the reproduction of the entire institutional order based on representative government.4 What may explain the preference among post-Franco historians for over-emphasizing this period is the influence of nearly half a century of the suppression of civic political life on their conception of what amounts to a satisfactory regime of liberties; be

3  There have been some exchanges, though scarce, on the first half of the nineteenth century; see an overview that assumes the normalization approach in Ginger (2010). 4  For an example cited here not for being emblematic but rather because it is quite recent and still representative, see Martorell (2018).

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it as it may, their approach has hitherto constrained the possibilities for a history of citizenship in modern Spain worthy of the name. In contrast with the metanarrative elaborated by several generations of specialists and intellectuals, the chapters that make up this book have tried to underline that the crossroads of Spanish nineteenth century were certainly framed by the defence of liberties against the continuation or even the backlashes of reactionary forces; but equally or even more so the crises that marked the transition from the Old Regime to Liberalism were repeatedly overflowed by collective mobilizations with a popular base and of a radical hue. Any study on Spanish modernization that does not take into account this dimension of historical experience is doomed to reproduce stereotypes inserted in a long-established narrative deeply biased by ideological assumptions that demands critical distance and deconstruction. In this sense, moreover, what is valid for Spain is also true of many of the historical narratives of the different postcolonial national states emerging in America following the dismemberment of the vast transatlantic empire of the Spanish Monarchy. However, the alternative is not to simply rebalance the narrative framework of Hispanic modernity by placing greater emphasis or elevating the status of the period prior to the Restoration or the War of Independence. To begin with, the historiographies that choose as their period of study the second half of the eighteenth or the first half of the nineteenth century assume chronological criteria that are no less self-limiting and inhibiting. It is not possible to understand the historical development of the condition of modern Spanish citizenship by starting from 1808 and beginning with the struggle for the first political Constitution of the Monarchy, just as it is not possible to account for the demise of the Old Regime by ending with the death of the last self-declared absolutist king in 1832 or with the declarations of independence of the former American colonies. In this sense, beyond labelling it simplistic to reduce modern history to an account of changes and continuities, this study actively brings into question the conventional divide between the periods normally known as early modern and modern. And in so doing, it shines a light on events that have hitherto been assigned a subsidiary role when not appearing as degraded, promoting instead an alternative chronology in which the relevant milestones are events such as the Esquilache Riots of 1766 or the July Revolution of 1854.

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The Relevance of Language in a Genuine Interdisciplinary Approach Yet, the key is not in the chronology presented here but rather in the framework of knowledge which gives it meaning, together with the historical phenomena inscribed in it. For if modern citizenship cannot be properly understood without reference to processes occurring before 1808–1812—or 1789–1793 in the case of France, or 1776–1787 in that of the British colonies in North America—that is because, even if the first definition of citizen rights took place in these particular contexts, the language of citizenship had entered discourse prior to this, under the Old Regime, and already then had showed capacity for supplementing the available semantics, albeit not without creating tension in discourse, and with time allowing for deeper processes of subjective identification. This alone justifies the attention given in this study to language and discourse; but this is even more important for another, simpler though scarcely noted reason, namely, that speaking, in the broad sense of the term—which includes at least the performative level and that of reading and writing—is the most widespread, habitual, and generalized activity shared by humans, well beyond other forms of collective action either for political ends or not, and without which numerous other exceptional or daily-life actions would be unfeasible, aside from being impossible to communicate. In that sense, the focus on language in this study—with all the limitations imposed by the textual record from the chosen period—entails an entire epistemological approach to the knowledge of social reality. No doubt, the words spoken, read, or written do not exhaust social reality, yet it is through the use of language that social subjects give meaning to the world, to our actions and those of others. From this perspective, attention to language and the construction of meaning allows us at least to distinguish between those processes that historical subjects are conscious of and feel capable of interpreting in the form of discourse, from those they are not. Having said that, although the focus is on language, the aim here is not to present its study as an alternative to other historiographical practices and approaches, but it is certainly seen as the basis for the construction of a new paradigm around which to build knowledge about the past. The agenda for such venture is to a large extent yet to be developed—this study being intended as just a first building block. Instead, this study merely outlines a new means of understanding of the modern citizenship condition. In this regard, the hypothesis takes as its

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starting point the argument that the study of citizenship needs to take into consideration at least three significant levels or dimensions: mobilization, representation, and participation. Obviously, in order to further develop any hypothesis one must divulge a series of analytical tools and methods of research that make up the intellectual baggage of the researcher, whether she or he is an academic or not. No one can seriously expect that even the most detailed consultation of archival documents, the uncovering on a new trove of evidence, or the most careful reading of the available historiography will settle an issue that is to be solved firstly at the level of critical theoretical reflection. Thus, the topic that has been addressed here paradigmatically illustrates the accumulated shortcomings and disorientations that have conditioned Spanish historiography since long before the start of the new millennium. In effect, while the hegemonic paradigm among historians was the so-­ called social history, at least a minimum dialogue was established with the social sciences, though usually rather myopic and utilitarian from both sides; yet this situation has not improved with time nor has even this flawed exchange been maintained, further limiting the scope for intellectual inquiry and theoretical reflection. It is true that the crisis of the paradigm of social history has brought about a greater interest in other disciplines invaluable for historical research, such as literary theory, philosophy, or archaeology among others. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that this widening of the fields of perspective and methods has stimulated more synergic relations among specialists. Instead, what followed the decline of social history is a purely rhetorical employment of the most hackneyed and fallacious word in the academic historian’s vocabulary: interdisciplinarity. For as actively promoted by this work, the elaboration of a hypothesis for historical research demands a dedicated knowledge of all the disciplines involved in it, and of its categories, interpretive traditions, and ongoing debates. Instead of this, we usually encounter something quite different: either a predatory incursion by the historian into a given discipline, or, on the contrary, an invasion with aspirations of hegemonic imperialism on the part of any particular discipline over historical research. Obviously the problem is that stepping out of this dynamic requires much more work than scholars in general, and historians in particular, are usually willing to devote to the endeavour. The case of the modern citizenship condition is highly significant in this respect, because its historical study implicates the social and human sciences, in a way that none of them can pretend to be sufficient for

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addressing the issue, nor can this be achieved by simply juxtaposing the knowledge provided by each of them separately. One way of showing this is to focus on the discipline of law. There can be no doubt that the condition of citizenship concerns the law in quite a direct and primordial way, to the extent that the definition of rights and duties, and their juridical forms, constitutes one of the natural areas of the discipline. On the other hand, in the context of the crisis of social history, which had aspired to totalizing visions of the past, the history of law has acquired importance in historiography thanks to the double fact that law offers the possibility of an overarching view of the social order at large, and that it is at the same time a dimension that throughout the Old Regime cuts across all social relations in a way that can be seen as constitutive, which moreover allows for interesting comparisons and contrasts with modernity. However, even with these arguments in mind, the pretension of comprehending a whole social order or society based on juridical parameters alone is a deceptive illusion, or even worse, conducive to narrow-mindedness; and the same can be said of the wish to comprehend from the standpoint of the law the field of anthropology.5 The narrative presented here provides immunity against such unilateral temptations. The initial historical hypothesis or premise developed in this book can be summed up as the idea that in the Spanish Monarchy the shortcomings in collective organization of the privileged nobility as an estate were decisive for the kind of crisis that occurred in the Old Regime. A hypothesis such as this can only be elaborated by incorporating a theoretical tradition derived from sociology, albeit from a line of reflection particularly sensitive to historical perspectives and focused on the inner conflicts among socially dominant groups.6 Turning to the relations 5  The history of law has long aspired to occupy the whole field of the social; see Hespanha (1978) and (2002); for the case of anthropology, see Hespanha (2017) and the more emblematic text of Clavero (1984). 6  In effect, the elaboration of this thesis on the lack of a tradition of collective organization on the part of the nobility draws mainly from the field of historical sociology. The deeper issue at stake is that the relations between social powers, and between them and the institutions, depend in turn on the inner configuration of such powers, both in a structural way and at the level of collective identity and organization. Two sources of inspiration are relevant here: on one side, the classic “debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism,” and on the other, certain critiques of “dependency theory.” On the former, see especially Brenner (1996); the latter is inspired above all in Zeitlin (1984). A theoretical approach to these issues applied to the transition to modernity can be found in Sánchez León (1995); an early application of this sociological thesis in relation to the passage from the Middle Ages to the

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between law and anthropology, the situation is similar, for as the central thesis of this book claims in relation to the estates of the Spanish Monarchy, within the variety of subjects recognized by the law, corporations were a specific type whose markedly oscillating aetiology had in the Spanish case clear anthropological effects due to its manifest political and institutional derivations, especially decisive for the crisis of Enlightened reforms in 1766 and later in the face of the constituent processes of Liberalism.7 In a more general sense, the deeper proposition running through the studies in this book is that social practices produce subjects whose identity is not reducible to the categories established in law, and this is so even if the notion of law is extended to the whole universe of customs that generate norms: that is, they cannot be fully understood either by appealing to multinormativity nor by adopting a plural approach to the range of legal norms. Without rehearsing here the theory that underlies the main thesis of this study, the issue at stake is that there is always a gap between the classifications instituted in law and the collective identities prevailing in society: this is so because subjects also define  through their exchanges meaningful referents about the world, themselves, and the others. In fact, it is precisely that differential that lies behind the struggles for recognition that are the object of study of sociologists and political scientists as manifestations of conflict and collective action, around which in their turn the classificatory systems become or cease to be dominant, provoking either the reproduction of order or its crisis and transformation.8 Accordingly, the initial hypothesis of this work requires the combination of perspectives from all these disciplines, an approach which on the other hand does not question the relevant place that corresponds to legal perspectives in this scheme of knowledge. early modern period in Castile, in Sánchez León (1998), and including an anthropological perspective, in Sánchez León (2002); see also Sánchez León (2007a). The thesis renders obsolete the usual approaches from social history, which have always been unable to take into consideration that, in order to specify the character of political power in any given order, what is decisive are the forms of collective organization displayed by the social groupings. 7  To paraphrase the title of the revisionist work by Bartolomé Clavero (1984), in the Old Regime there could be “as many persons as estates,” but not all of them acquired the personality of a corporation, and this difference, crucial for specifying the capacity for influence of the different subjects of the body politic, cannot be explained merely through the discipline of law, not even if inspired by political anthropology. 8  A key text on this issue is Honneth (1996) [1992]; a more detailed discussion of the categories required for adopting this perspective is presented in Moscoso (1992); as applied generally to Western history, in Sánchez León (2007b).

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Understanding Contexts in Their Fullness and the Limits of Historiographic Subdisciplines The key, however, is ultimately not in the aggregation of perspectives but rather in the elaboration of a hypothesis establishing a relation among them all, in this case for the purpose of studying the citizenship condition over time. And something similar can be said of the treatment of the available empirical evidence. In effect, for properly historicizing the condition of citizenship it is necessary to get a complete view of the implied historical contexts. In the studies gathered here the goal has been to study mobilization, representation, and participation as they featured in the discourse of the period and not as objectivized by the observer. Without pretending to have exhausted the theme, at any rate it should be noted that this has entailed acquiring both a general and quite detailed understanding of the various contexts over a rather long historical period, bisected by the chasm of the crisis of the Old Regime. Another point worth making is that a book devoted in principle to the analysis of the representation of the crowd in discourse on democracy actually devotes a great deal of attention to issues apparently very removed from this question, such as the political representation of the nobility in the Old Regime or the concept of aristocracy in the political philosophy of nineteenth century; or that a study focused on ideological groups representing the radical strand within Liberalism finds it relevant to concern itself so much with the discourse of ideologues belonging to completely divergent political currents. This way of proceeding originates in a declared interest in learning from the language of the period under study in its entirety an approach assumed as relevant for an understanding of the condition of citizenship that distinguishes this book from conventional political history and especially from the history of thought as it is usually practised. To be clear: it is undeniable that the history of political thought occupies a principal space in the development of the perspective here adopted, as much as many of the processes and events here studied are well known to have been important landmarks for political history. However, this study clearly strives to distance itself from the way historians have approached the history of ideas and political usages, normally focusing on some particular stance, ideology, or organization and the individuals and works that nurtured it. Compared to such a partial and biased focus, one of the premises here is that the ideological discourse of a particular political grouping or a specific line of thought cannot be properly understood without studying

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all the others of any importance in the given historical context. Not taking this into consideration reduces studies of political thought, especially on the modern period, to mere exegeses of the ideas and discourses of the authors involved, a practice that is far removed from the understanding that the ideologues and political actors are not only what they declare to be but primarily what their “speech acts” tell about them and constitute them, normally around ideological controversies in public debates that demand to occupy the centre of attention in scholarly studies. In contrast to this, there are many specialists in ideologues and leaders—whether from among the enlightened, doceañistas, conservatives, progressivists, republicans, or reactionaries—who choose to study them out of mere  affinity with or rejection of their ideas. This together with what appears as a rather deficient training in hermeneutics results in a historiographic practice not sufficiently attentive to the distance between the past and the present. Overall, due to the state of the history of thought in post-Franco historiography we do not presently have a reliable map of modern ideologies highlighting not only the differences among them but also their deeper-­ level analogies, as the studies in this book demonstrate, positions very far removed from each other in the ideological spectrum often elaborate discourses drawing from a common set of concepts and meanings; and vice versa, discourses from shared ideological tendencies are sometimes woven by reference to matrices of meaning that may be notably diverging. Above all, only knowledge of discourse in its variety and highlighting its essentially contested physiognomy allows to avoid the mirage that similar ideas imply elaborating an analogous discourse plotted by comparable semantics. In order to overcome this fallacy implicit in the activity of many historians of thought this work has profited from so-called conceptual history. For a start, this emerging field of knowledge has been key for constructing the principal empirical hypothesis that runs through the studies gathered in this book, and which leans on a relational definition of plebe and people as asymmetrical counter-concepts. Beyond this, inputs from conceptual history have made it possible to isolate a phenomenon that departs from the customary set of categories of analysis in the history of thought and political history in the transition to modernity: a political sensibility such as doceañismo, which transcended the various ideological options available in the Liberal public sphere while at the same time being much less formalized than any of these, characterized as it was by a series of common tropes and referents of meaning that drew from the experience of early Liberalism. Beyond the fact that doceañismo was decisive for the

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transmission of a whole collective memory to later contexts, in a more general way ideological sensibilities are a relevant phenomenon that needs to be taken into consideration; however, incorporating them into the analysis implies denying that manifestations of political thought and organization between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century had already reached the degree of formalization typical of democracies from the twentieth century, an implicit assumption in conventional methodology which reveals itself as biased by presentist concerns. Yet all this does not make conceptual history enough of a field or an alternative to the historical knowledge of ideas, not to mention their relations with politics, since it cannot by itself account for the crucial issue of how ideas take root in subjects and in the institutions that promote action and order respectively. On this point an important complementary contribution is offered by the study of ideas around traditions as inserted in discourse. This book has focused on one such tradition, sanctioned as it is by a long and solid trajectory of reflection and research: republicanism. However, republicanism has been addressed  avoiding an essentialist or ontological approach that risks taking traditions as given and self-­referential devices when not as a deus ex machina of intellectual or political events; instead, what has been proposed here is that the republican tradition is better approached and invoked in historical research if understood not as a set of axiomatic proposals but as a series of tropes revolving around the identity of a subject capable of political self-government. Moreover, republicanism needs to be properly inserted in the framework of a political culture such as the Spanish, solidly anchored in tropes of a Catholic cultural tradition that proved to be very resilient and reluctant to incorporate strong notions of moral self-determination and political virtue.9 9  In this sense, it is far from clear that in Spanish academic production the knowledge of the republican tradition is currently in good shape. A recent example, in contrast to the project outlined here, advocates for blurring the singular traits of the different European political cultures of the Early Modern period and outlines a sort of transnational republicanism of questionable likelihood; see Herrero Sánchez (2017); another example of the decontextualized approach to republicanism in eighteenth-century Hispanic culture can be found in Astigarraga (2011). Overall, the historiography on the early modern period demands a better understanding of the differences between traditional vecindad and modern citizenship, and mostly a better understanding of the institutional and cultural conditions of the shift from one to the other. In the case of the historiography on the modern period, the problem is even greater given that republicanism is normally confounded with a particular political ideology, even though much of its intellectual production rarely if ever invoked the

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In a wider sense, traditions are not in themselves enough a category for accounting for the citizenship condition in time, for the crucial question— under which conditions are they established, reproduced, or  decomposed—can only be answered from outside the category; in this sense, as it has been shown here with the case of doceañismo, the key is to adopt an approach sensitive to how emerging historical events, in order to render them meaningful, usually impose the re-elaboration or actualization of discourse, around which traditions are renewed but may also be weakened or even dissolved. It also implies widening the sphere of interests to include other emerging lines of research such as the history of political sentiments and emotions, which have been here addressed in rather cursory manner despite their importance for understanding how social identities are historically constituted.

In Favour of a History Distinguishing the Voice of the Subaltern To sum up, just as in the case of the social sciences, there is no single discipline, field, or tool of historical analysis that can supply by itself a repertoire of categories and methods sufficient for historicizing the modern citizenship condition. Against all these specialized approaches, this book adopts a perspective that, in its committed involvement with different social and human sciences and its aim of studying the languages of entire historical periods, provides for something that is history pure and simple, without a qualifier. Of course this does not mean that the goal has been achieved, less so in a satisfactory manner, but at least it is possible to claim that label, and mainly to defend the approach from some immediate objections. A possible major one is that in reality the approach taken here is but a new version of history “from above”: after all, its main focus is the discourse produced by the intellectual, political, and social elites between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries. To this objection one may respond, first, that history “from above” is not the same as history “of those above”: the studies here presented are woven together by a common empirical hypothesis focused on the collective empowerment of popular majorities excluded from participation and the republican tradition, and, on the other hand, there are republican tropes to be found in the discourse of other ideologies in the public sphere of Liberalism.

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right to representation in the transition from the Old Regime to Liberalism. In this sense, it is not history of those above but of those below. But it is neither a history from above in the more conventional sense in which the epistemological and the methodological are often confused. The so-called postcolonial studies have called attention to the immense ensemble of historical subjects deprived of a voice of their own in the historical narratives of modernity, starting with women and continuing with ethnic minorities and the socially inferior groups. This is undeniable, but it is not less so that the effort required to give voice to the marginalized is much more compromising than specialists who adhere to the postcolonial approach are usually willing to acknowledge. To begin with, giving a voice to those who do not feature in historical narratives implies knowledge of the language available in a given period to a degree of depth and refinement that would enable one to distinguish within the discourse the elocutions that may be deemed distinctive of the subaltern groups. Any study that fails to do this is susceptible to the imposture by which the one that is really speaking is precisely the power that has marginalized the subaltern and deprived him or her of a voice. But beyond this there is another no less relevant problem, that of whether it is possible for the subaltern to speak with a different language to that available in a given historical context, shaped by hegemonic powers, and the matrices of which the subaltern cannot bend to his own will. On the crucial epistemological issue of whether the subaltern can speak, the provisional answer offered here is that in the case of the plebe or the crowd that is hardly possible, because, to begin with, from the perspective of both the Old Regime and Liberalism that category was not given the chance of representing itself, and could only be represented by others and in principle by the order that marginalized and denigrated it. Yet it has also been argued here that eventually the plebe could rely on representatives external to the dominant powers and who, by speaking in its name, contributed to dignify the individuals that made up the category, so that it could be said that they came to allow them to speak; however, in principle what they did was allow them to speak as the people, that is, under the assumption that the members of the plebe identified themselves with the same referents of citizenship as their representatives. Nonetheless, it has also been demonstrated that in situations of crisis and states of exception, both under the Old Regime and Liberalism, there was an undeniable irruption of forms of culture and collective identity that overflowed the established schemes of representation. And it has also been equally pointed

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out that in such emerging contexts, the expression of those without a voice was usually  mediated by the account elaborated  by observer-­ participants that belonged to the cultural elites, not to the popular classes. This does not mean that the individuals classified as member of the plebe did not speak, or did so with a voice that was not theirs; but it certainly means that the historical record prioritizes those whose discourse represents popular cultural forms from outside, translating them into the conventional vocabulary of the period. To lose sight of this and to take for granted that the texts allow us to isolate voices and identities of the subaltern is falling prey of another, even more perverse form of imposture: in this case, the one who speaks is the researcher who interprets the textual or documentary register as if it were really expressive of a marginalized voice. Faced with this risk, in the chapter of this book devoted to the issue I have opted to stop the analysis at that point and to leave unanswered the crucial question posed on the extent to which the modern citizenship condition draws upon popular or plebeian cultural traditions that are alien to it, and whose matrices of meaning escape any easy understanding from the cultural parameters of modernity, but that are neither simply vestiges of the Old Regime. Yet this self-imposed limitation should not prevent future approaches, for which in any case one should be equipped with a more thorough theory of representation and more sophisticated historical hermeneutics. By contrast, this book does openly take sides in favour of an approach that gives priority to the study of order over that of conflict. This is so because it is assumed that subjects are shaped and partake in a specific, contextual historical ordering which is established beforehand and within which alone they can get their identity recognized, no matter how contrary to the established order it may be. In this sense I am in favour of a history of social movements that takes as its starting point an understanding of order for the proper insertion of conflict in it, and of its possibilities and limits. But this assumption has also to do with a radical commitment to historicizing. No matter whether the researcher, or the discipline, or intellectual or academic current involved conceives of order as the result of the resolution of conflict or not, the fact is that in the long historical period addressed in this history of citizenship the framework of knowledge, not just dominant but virtually exclusive, assumed that in the relation between order and conflict there was a clear hierarchy with the former set over the latter. If this was so in general, it was even more so on the issue of discourse on citizenship, since, as this study has made clear, between the

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Old Regime and Liberalism to think about the citizenship condition was an operation that was always carried out by reference to a conceptual repertory designed to stabilize order as produced by collective self-­ government. In effect, the grammar of the mixed constitution was developed as a conceptual and imaginary repository in the first place because it served the purpose of thinking about an order founded on citizenship with a view in maintaining it in time and avoiding conflict in general, and specially the one that could push self-government towards degeneration into any form of authoritarian government, such as despotism or oligarchy, or what writers of very different ideological persuasions considered as chaos and anarchy.10

Towards a Complete Narrative on the Specificity of Spanish Modernity No doubt there is still a great deal of work to be done on the specific issue of the contribution of the mixed constitution to the forging of modern political culture; here the argument has been made only for its importance as a framework of language for the study of the imaginary of democracy, which I reckon that lies in its capacity to be apprehended by publics that were not necessarily literate. This alone makes it worthwhile to underline once again that language is a perfectly legitimate dimension for addressing the knowledge of history in general, and in particular that of protest and collective action. As argued in the famous opening sentence of Karl Marx’s 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in the mid-nineteenth century context that is the main crucible for the narrative of this book: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”; no less well-­ known, however, is the tail end of this seminal statement: “[yet] they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”11 My view is that among those “circumstances” inherited from the past language stands out, and gives meaning to the rest.

 That was the case at least until the emergence of Marxism. Even Marx himself was trained in that grammatical repository, though he ended up subverting its conventional usage to the point of greatly transcending it in his work; see Sánchez León (2019). 11  See https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm. 10

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To complete a research project based on these premises, the studies gathered here have made inroads into rather unusual terrains in the study of political culture, and at first sight of little relevance for the knowledge of the citizenship condition, such as political economy, historical narratives, or aesthetic theory; by contrast, in other cases it has remained within domains fully habitual for the study of discourse, politics, or collective action. The result is surely uneven and unbalanced. As a disclaimer, the justification is that the purpose was not to close down but rather to open up a thematic and an approach, and that those terrains have been traversed to the extent that they are seen as relevant for testing the hypothesis. In this sense, the central motive behind this study is to gain a better knowledge of the modern condition of citizenship, which is something very different to studying the history of citizenship in any of its aspects. On this point the project consciously detaches itself from so-called cultural studies, a field that in recent years has become as dominant as its contents are vague. Certainly, this scholarly trend has made it possible to create a sense among those who study culture in its innumerable manifestations of being involved in a common enterprise, but this broadening of thematic specialization has come at the cost not just of the impossibility of comprehensive overviews but the lack of a semblance of paradigmatic systematicity. As it happened in its day with social history, this current feature of the scholarly landscape, beyond helping professionals to justify their employment, reflects a headlong forward rush without theoretical or methodological guidance. In a way more specific to the case, this study has aimed to show that the relevance of cultural processes can only be properly gauged by exiting the self-referential field of culture in order to observe them from the standpoint of their political externalities. Beyond this, what is needed is a historiography conscious of the fact that the main challenge is to elaborate a new framework for a complete narrative of Spanish modernity, and it is foreseeable that new scholarly works contributing to this agenda will begin to be valued. For ultimately the supplementary effort that this may involve is something that can be achieved much more easily than in the past by making use of TICs. Nonetheless, the resort to so-called Digital Humanities cannot substitute other efforts for maintaining a tension between theoretical reflection and historical interpretation. In that sense, the agenda outlined here is one that calls for radical specification, not just with respect to other contemporaneous cases but applied to historical contexts, a perspective developed here by drawing from the

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category of re-signification, deployed in order to convey that each present always rethinks the transmitted historical experience, no matter how detached it sees itself from the recent past. What underlies this agenda is a struggle against ontology in the definition of any historical subject or historiographical object, a driving force tempting historians who instead of questioning essentialist assumptions  tend to give them  a prominent place in their accounts. In this study, resistance to such commonplaces has meant having to sacrifice the obligatory focus on the category of “society,” since it is by far the most easy to naturalize, being as it is the fetish category of the whole classical tradition of twentieth-century historiography, and along with it the accompanying lexicon on “social classes” (and those of “gender” and “ethnicity”); in its stead, the procedure has been to start by questioning other naturalizations and leave that more overarching one for later approaches, though offering some insights for future research. In any case, it is choices like this what allow for significant comparisons with the present such that the past is not put at the service of the blinkers with which the former tends to naturalize the latter. This explains the decision to open and close every chapter with a reference to current affairs, and the same applies to these conclusions. A history like this claims to be of interest beyond the academic world without renouncing any of its rigour and consistency. In that sense it is not a history that tells us how we got to where we are today, but rather one that helps clarify which compelling problems of today can be seen and understood in a different light once we are able to re-signify the past and account for it in an unconventional way. A simple but direct summary of this book is that it tells how, from an initial situation of degrading exclusion, the rise in the consciousness of the excluded was a determining factor in the eventual establishment of universal suffrage in Spain. In this sense, the perspective distances itself from the narratives of failure, yet not by means of a purely rhetorical vindication of popular agonism but by showing that the crucibles of nineteenth-century citizenship were if anything as hazardous as the current ones. Of course, the path to universal suffrage was winding and encompassed several generations, which makes it impossible to account for it from a teleological perspective that would place the results of each of the struggles and processes here described  in intentional connection with the subsequent ones. Even so, the approach is much more directly opposed to the increasingly common perspectives that try to normalize Spanish modernity by decree, thus neglecting the required specification any historian worth the name should

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commit to; and not only because the transition to modernity in the territories of the Hispanic monarchy has been singular but also because such narratives conspire against the possibility of reinserting Spain within a history that, apart from being global, should once and for all cease to be Eurocentric. Besides, contrary to the assumptions of this simplistic and late-Western “normalizing” perspective, the citizens of nineteenth-­century Spain were successful in ways that today appear impossible, such as initiating constituent processes which are  nowadays proving incredibly difficult—so that instead of concluding that we have overcome their crucibles, studying them should lead us to reflect upon that which prevents us from succeeding in ours. In this sense, far from proposing a history of citizenship culminating with the present, the issue at the core of this whole study is that perhaps modern citizenship is at a major and challenging crossroads, and may even be in decline, and it is that awareness what explains the need to tell its history as of a condition that we are perhaps currently being deprived of. Yet, even if assuming that citizenship is not a final and unsurpassable condition but a historical and contingent one, this book has made it clear that there is at least one generalization that can be made out of its study, and it is that giving meaning to reality, or rather appropriating it through the use of language is a sine qua non of any citizen struggle; as a matter of fact, giving meaning to reality  is the most essential and political of all forms of collective action, which makes possible and also imposes limits on any success or failure of popular politics. In this sense, social struggles can be distinguished more than it appears at first glance by means of their different uses of words for naming reality. However,  this study has also underlined one important difference between the past and the present on the issue of the struggles of and for citizenship. It consists in that twentieth-­ century democracy has transmitted to the twenty-first century a nearly unsurmountable difficulty faced by the excluded, neglected, and marginalized—the subaltern—in being even recognized as such, subsumed as they are  in  a formal and homogeneous category of citizens instituted by democracy. The plebe, however, exists also in the present, albeit lacking a name that would allow it to become an all-embracing and autonomous subject—certainly excluded but at least discernible—as it was the case with the proletariat in the passage from Liberalism to democracy. Indeed, the plebe can be found today and here in the massive and growing proliferation of citizens who are ceasing to be a part of it, starting with the immigrants who

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are not given naturalization in the countries where they live and to whose economies they contribute; but also among  all the citizens members of nation states providing them with rights but who cannot make proper use of them due to the asymmetries or lack of access to other resources. All these are precarious individuals of the world that the twenty-first century democracy is incapable of recognizing as subaltern; yet it is us who potentially have the key to, through awareness, mobilization, and participation, bring about the end of an order that represents us in a way we are not: plebeians of the globalized world, let us unite under a banner that allows us to speak with our own voice!

Works Cited Álvarez Junco, José and Shubert, Adrián (2016). “Introduction”. In J. Álvarez Junco y A. Shubert (eds.), The History of Modern Spain. Chronologies, Themes, Individuals, London: Bloomsbury, 1–13. Astigarraga, Jesús (2011). Luces y republicanismo: economía y política en las Apuntaciones al Genovesi de Ramón de Salas, Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. Brenner, Robert (1996). The Rises and Declines of Serfdom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, in Michael L.  Bush (ed.), Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, London: Longman, 247–76. Clavero, Bartolomé (1984). Tantas personas como estados: por una antropología política de la historia europea, Madrid: Tecnos. Fontana, Josep (2007). Historia de España. Vol. VI: La época del liberalismo, Madrid: Crítica-Marcial Pons. Ginger, Andrew (2010). “Spanish Modernity Revisited: Revisions of the 19th Century”, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 13/2–3: 121–32. Herrero Sánchez, Manuel (2017). “Introducción. Líneas y debates conceptuales en torno al estudio de las repúblicas y el republicanismo en la Europa moderna”. In M. Herrero Sánchez (ed.), Repúblicas y republicanismo en la Europa moderna (siglos XVI–XVIII), Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 17–89. Hespanha, Antonio M. (1978). A historia do direito na historia social, Lisbon: Horizonte. ——— (2002). Cultura jurídica europea: síntesis de un milenio, Madrid: Tecnos. ——— (2017). “O direito e a imaginaçao antropológica da cultura europeia do inicio da era moderna”. In Julio A.  Pardos et  al., Historia en fragmentos. Estudios en homenaje a Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 275–92. Honneth, Axel (1996) [1992]. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, London: Polity Press.

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Martorell, Miguel (2018). “Liberalismo en un país con pocos liberales, 1808–1874”, Areas: Revista internacional de ciencias sociales 37: 13–27 [available at https://revistas.um.es/areas/article/view/335471]. Moscoso, Leopoldo (1992). “Lucha de clases: acción colectiva, orden y cambio social”, Zona Abierta 61–62: 81–187. Sánchez León, Pablo (1995). “¿Autonomía estatal o clases fragmentadas? Conceptos, teorías y estrategias de investigación en sociología histórica del cambio social”, Política y Sociedad 18: 149–64 [available at https://revistas. ucm.es/index.php/POSO/article/view/POSO9595130149A]. ——— (1998). Absolutismo y comunidad. Los orígenes sociales de la guerra de los comuneros de Castilla, Madrid: Siglo XXI. ——— (2002). “La constitución histórica del sujeto comunero: orden absolutista y lucha por la incorporación estamental en las ciudades de Castilla, 1350–1520”. In Fernando Martínez Gil (coord.), Actas del Congreso Internacional “En torno a las Comunidades de Castilla”, Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 159–208. ——— (2007a). “Changing Patterns of Urban Conflict in Late Medieval Castile”, Past and Present 195, Suppl. 2: 217–32. ——— (2007b). “El poder de la comunidad”. In Ana Rodríguez (ed.), El lugar del campesino. En torno a la obra de Reyna Pastor, Madrid: Universidad de Valencia-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 331–58. ——— (2019). “Anarquía (capitalista), oligarquía (burguesa), demagogia (proletaria): el primer Marx y la gramática de la constitución mixta”. In Pablo Sánchez León (coord.), Karl Marx y la crítica de la economía política. Contribuciones a una tradición, Arre (Navarre): Pamiela, 61–84. [Hay una versión preliminar de este texto en inglés en academia.edu.]. Villacañas Berlanga, José L. (2014). Historia del poder político en España, Barcelona: RBA. Zeitlin, Maurice (1984). The Civil Wars in Chile, or the Bourgeois Revolutions that Never Were, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Index1

A Abarca de Albolea, Pedro Pablo, see Aranda, Count of Absolutist rule, 106n42, 107 Accounts, 6, 8n15, 10n25, 12, 13, 19, 30, 33n9, 44, 44n47, 47–49, 57, 57n80, 57n81, 58, 60, 65, 65n99, 66n100, 67n102, 67n104, 70n113, 106, 115n62, 142n22, 143, 149n39, 159n65, 162, 173, 174, 174n2, 196n67, 197, 198, 205, 212n3, 214, 214n5, 217, 217n16, 221, 222, 226, 227, 227n44, 232n61, 233, 233n63, 235, 236, 236n72, 239n77, 241n80, 254, 267n36, 305n19, 314, 316, 323, 326, 329 as historical sources, 221 “Adamitism” (adanismo), political, 174 Aesthetics and conservatives, 181, 264, 283 and the debate on the plebe, 181, 265

and the distinction between popular and vulgar, 267 and imagination, 263, 266, 268 and mediation between ideologies, 256, 269 and morality, 287 and progressives, 265 and radicals, 181, 264–266, 305 theorization, 264 theory, 179, 264, 328 See also Art “Afrancesados” (1810s), 60, 60n89, 77n132 African natives, 102 and citizenship, 101 Alcalá Galiano, Antonio, 112, 112n55, 144n27, 146, 259, 260, 270n45, 274, 284 deputy, 112 ideologue and leader (moderado party, 1830s-1850s), 144n27 Alicante, 221n27

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

1

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333

334 

INDEX

Álvarez Junco, José, historian (2000s), 136 Álvaro, Aniceto de, deputy (1837), 260n17 Amador de los Ríos, José, historian, (1845), 198 America colonial, 10, 11 postcolonial, 103, 316 American Civil War, 11n29 Ametller, Victoriano, pamphletist, republican (1850), 276–278 Anacyclosis or anakuklosys politeion, 138 Anarchy, 14n36, 54n71, 139, 142 and anarchist, 147 as disorder, 154, 155, 164 as effect of democracy, 139, 146, 153, 156, 257 1808 as, 62 1812 Constitution as, 76 vs. monarchy, 241 religion, 194 as synonym to demagogy, 14, 139, 146, 153 as threat of self-government, 123 Andalousia, 222 Ankersmit, Frank, 8n15, 226n43 Anthropology citizen, 94, 109, 121, 122, 162, 181 corporate, 46 individualist, 96 Antillón, Isidoro de, ideologue of early Liberalism (1810s), 61n91 Anti-machiavellianism, 53n70 See also Machiavelli, Niccolò Antiquity, 7, 7n13, 13n34, 14n36, 16, 139, 153, 185, 215, 254n6, 266n32, 270n43, 301 Appropriation of meanings and discourse, 19 See also Discourse

Aragon, kingdom and Crown of, 37, 64, 70n112 Aranda, Count of, 37, 37n26, 65 Aranjuez, Mutiny or Riot of (1808), 55, 55n76, 143 Argüelles, Agustín de, ideologue of early and doctrinaire Liberalism (1810s-1830s), 66n101, 69n108, 69n109, 70n113, 71, 102n31, 115n64, 260n16 Aristocracy of birth or blood, 123 as created beyond politics, 149, 256, 258, 259, 286, 287, 302, 321 as dependent on the State, 118 as deprived of its attributes by democracy, 14, 75, 111, 288 and the 1812 Constitution, 257 elective, 106, 117, 118n69, 260, 305, 307 and the high chamber or Senate, 117n69 as individuals versus a class, 286 legitimate, 102, 105, 262, 282, 285–287, 296, 302 as mediator in conflicts, 259 natural, 73, 113n58, 121 in the mixed constitution, 38n32, 39, 70, 100, 257 old or traditional vs. new and elective, 41, 103, 259 of privilege and office-holding, 105, 117n69, 123 and property, 279n74 and representative government, 13, 54n71, 117, 256, 257, 279, 286 struggle for hegemony with participation in liberalism, 15, 256, 259, 287 and universal suffrage, 257, 282, 286, 305

 INDEX 

Aristotle, 185n35 Army, 59, 74, 121n80, 221, 222 free access to, 74 Art canon, 180 and politics, 180 and the quality of citizenship, 180 Artists democratization of, 269 moral commitment of, 180, 263 as opposing government, 301 of progressive outlooks as dominant, 264 as representatives of the people, 180 social role of, 264 Asquerino, Miguel, playwright and aesthetic theoretician (1840s), 264, 265, 265n31, 271, 275 Assemblies citizen, 49, 223 and deliberation, 5, 12, 31, 49, 54, 58, 145, 224 as instances of democracy, 71, 142 neighbour, 3, 40, 58 and “open councils” (concejos abiertos), 34 as platforms for demagogues, 145, 147 Association and democracy, 280–282 as social order, 280 Asymmetrical counter-­ concepts, 17, 322 plebe and people as, 17, 322 Autonomía de los partidos, La , essay, by Antonio Ribot y Fontseré (1856), 238n74 Ayguals de Izco, Wenceslao, playwright and essayist, radical (1840s), 265n29

335

B Barcelona, 192, 221, 238n74 Barcia, Roque, ideologue, republican (1850s), 276 Barricades, 227n46, 228–231, 236n71, 237, 240, 240n79, 244, 246, 283 Bayonne, Constitution of (1809), 62n93 Benavides y Fernández Navarrete, Antonio , law expert and politician (1847), 185n39 Bernot, Eduardo, essayist, republican (1862), 276 Bible, The, 191n53, 197 Biscay, 54n72 Body politic, 10n23, 112n54, 189, 241, 257, 320n7 Bonaparte, José, self-designated king of Spain (1808-1814), 56 Bonaparte, José I, 56, 77n132 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 56, 57, 63 Borrego, Andrés, Liberal ideologue and leader, moderado (1830s), 120n75, 149n38 Bourbon dynasty, 56 Bourgeoisie, 153, 157, 157–158n60, 158n61, 159n64, 288 Bravo Murillo, Juan, President of Cabinet, moderado (1850), 220 Brenner, Robert, 278n68 Burke, Edmund, 141, 141n20 C Caciquismo (local electoral corruption), 174 Cádiz, Constitution, see 1812 Constitution “Café-musical”, public space for comedies (1860s), 301

336 

INDEX

Calderón Collantes, Saturnino, procurador, progresista (1830s), 113n56 Calvo de Rozas, Lorenzo, merchant and ideologue of early Liberalism (1810s), 61n91 Cámara, Sixto, ideologue and leader, democrat (1860s), 219n22, 271n47 Campoamor, Ramón de, poet and essayist, conservative (1861), 263n24, 280 Canga Argüelles, José, ideologue of early Liberalism (1810s), 58n84, 63n95, 66n100, 101n26 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio, ideologue and politician, conservative (1850s), 221n27 Capacity(ies) and the 1837 constitution, 118, 120 for moderados, 204 moral and cultural, 104, 124 for progresistas, 113 and property, 105, 111–113, 111n52, 113n58, 115n64, 116, 117, 121 as referent of citizenship, 101 See also Liberal professions; Middle class(es) Carlist War (1833-40), 106, 107n44, 121–123, 149, 216, 218, 260 Cascabel, El, satirical journal (1863-1865), 300 “Caste” (casta), 254 Castelar, Emilio, ideologue republican (1850s-60s), 273, 274n56, 279, 279n74, 280, 280n75, 280n76, 281n79, 282, 297n3, 298, 299 Castillo de Bobadilla, Jerónimo, jurist (16th century), 35n16 Castro y Serrano, José, journalist (1860s), 274 Catalonia, 30n2, 163n68, 186n40

Catecismo político de los progresistas demócratas, by Victoriano Ametller (1850), 276 Catholicism and constitutionalism, 75, 100, 183 and fatalism, 189, 190 and free will, 189 and individual rights, 100 and juridical culture, 35, 35n20, 41, 42, 63 Catholic monarchy juridical or legal culture, 11 and the Old Regime, 11, 153 and Rome (1848), 153 Católico, El (journal, 1842), 187 Catón politico, by Roque Barcia (1856), 276 Causality, see Fatalism Cebada, square (Madrid), 235 Central University, 299 Chaldeans, 183n30 Champagny, François-Joseph, Marquis of Cadore, French publicist (1850), 192n57 Change and continuity, 6, 12, 30, 32, 57n79, 311–316 Charles III (1759-1788), king of Spain, 33, 37, 38n31, 43, 46, 47, 52, 65, 96 and Esquilache Riots, 33, 38, 39, 42, 48n60, 57, 95, 300n9, 306, 316 Charles IV (1788-1808), king of Spain, 56, 96 Chartism (England), 152, 214n6 Chateaubriand, François-René, 140n15, 141, 141n17, 154 Chico, Francisco (police officer, 1854), 235, 236n71 Christianity, 194, 204n82, 273, 274n56 as overcoming moral corruption, 273 (see also Catholicism; Religion)

 INDEX 

Church, 153 Catholic, 74, 74n122, 275 Cicero, 13n34 Ciompi revolt (1381), 139n11 Circle of Unity, 230 Citizenship and community, 92n2, 94, 100 conception of, 8, 99, 100, 109, 180, 233 as condition of subject (anthropology), 312 criteria for in Enlightenment, 91–125 criteria for in Liberalism, 93 and high culture, 95 and neighborhood, 3, 224n38 popular, 29–78, 124, 227, 231, 232, 277 and popular culture, 277 and vecindad, 224n38 Ciudad Real, 232n61 Civil economy, see Political economy Civil Guard, military-police force, 228, 299n8 Civilization, 102n29, 110n50, 152, 179, 179n17, 200n77, 216, 241, 269n40, 279 Civil society and association, 280, 281 and citizenship, 118, 124, 281 as source of civic recognition autonomous from the state, 280 Clamor Público, El, newspaper, progressive (1849), 197 Class(es) middle (see Middle class(es)) struggle, 157, 157n59, 158n63, 160n65 working, 158n61, 161, 307 Clergy See also Desamortización

337

Colmeiro, Manuel, legal expert (1850), 239n77 Colonial empire, 10, 56 Spanish or Hispanic, 11, 95, 316 “Comedy and Drama” or “Comedy,” 264 and high comedy, 283 and the middle classes, 283 and progressives, 108, 112, 113, 119n73, 122n91, 147n34 political, 264 and political virtues and emotions, 264, 312 social, 264 and social critique, 271, 288, 303n16 as targeting representatives, 265 Commercial society, 44, 44n49, 53n70, 96 Communist Manifesto (1848), 156, 158n61, 158n63, 159n64, 161 limited impact of in 1848, 156 Communitarians, debate, 92n2 Company of Jesus, see Jesuit(s) Comunidades de Castile, 199 Común (Commons) and gilds, 36, 36n22, 41, 50 syndic (síndico) and spokesperson (personero) of, 40, 40n35 as taxpayers in Old Regime, 36 Concejo abierto, assembly type of local government, 34 Concepts conceptual change, 5, 140n14 conceptual innovations, 160 conceptualization, 2, 4, 5, 160, 175 as heritage from the past, 161 and knowledge, 175, 178 and values, 136 Condorcet, Marquis of, 93n3 Consent, theory of, 225

338 

INDEX

Conservatism (and conservatives or moderados) and aesthetics, 181, 264, 266, 268, 283 and progressives, 112n55, 147n34, 150n42, 163, 220, 238, 244 on the defensive, 155 and democracy, 138 as ideology, 108, 112, 138, 138n10, 147n34, 175n4, 181, 268n37, 270, 286 internal fracture of, 216 and the novel, 260n16, 266, 268 parliamentary majorities of, 151, 190 in power, 190, 195 Conspiracy and the military (pronunciamento), 219, 220, 305 and populism, 55n76, 146, 146n31, 234, 244, 305 and social base, 139 Constant, Benjamin, 104n36 Constituent process Biennium (1854-56), 255, 256, 263–274 of 1854, 240, 240n78 of 1812, 12, 19, 62n93, 70, 72 Constitution of 1856, 280n75, 281n79 of 1845, 190n50, 240, 279n74 of 1837, 120, 122, 123n84, 146, 148, 148n35, 148n36, 149n38, 222, 258, 259 of 1812, 12, 67, 73n121, 75, 76n127, 77, 101–103, 102n29, 103n32, 108, 115, 116, 144, 144n27, 147, 215, 257, 281n79 Constitutional crisis, 55–76, 141, 157, 212 Esquilache Riots as, 57

Consulates of merchants, 74, 74n122 “Consulta al País” (1810), 72, 72n117 Contingency, 158, 175, 206 Corporations democracy-in-corporation, 55–76, 257, 281 and estates, 65, 65n99, 320, 320n7 gilds as, 36 and gilds, 12, 37, 41, 57 and the Nation, 75 of the nobility, 37, 37n24, 39, 41, 57, 64, 65, 65n99 and participation, 8, 9, 41, 65 and representation, 8, 17, 41, 65 and time, 47, 64, 65 Corregidor, royal delegate in towns, 34 Corruption and aesthetics, 263–274 and the court, 285n91 as key in relations between representation and participation, 255 and the social body, 272 Cortes (parliament) of Old Regime, 109 of Cadiz (1812), 77n129 summoning of, 10n23 unicameral, 67, 69 Councils, open (concejos abiertos), local assemblies, 34, 34n14 Counter-concept(s), asymmetrical, 17, 52, 58, 160, 257 Counter-revolutionary though, see Reactionary ideology Court Bourbon, 38, 43, 50n64 and corruption, 285, 285n91 Crisis constitutional, 55–76, 141, 157, 212 economic, 136, 253

 INDEX 

and disaffection, 2 political, 5, 11, 19, 20, 56, 59, 91–94, 115, 152, 181, 212, 220, 227, 229n51, 237, 244, 257, 262, 300 in representation, 1, 3n8, 12, 91, 104, 136, 211, 230, 255 Crowd and aristocracy, 257, 261, 321 as asymmetrical counter-concept of people, 17 and the attributes of political representatives, 262 and essentialist vocabulary, 262 as included in the people, 235 (see also Plebe) in Liberalism, 15, 287, 325 and the limits of an ontological or essentialist, 323 (see also Plebe) representation of, 321 as opposed to people, 51, 287 as product of the Enlightenment, 16 and tribunes, 260n18, 261 Culture frontiers between high and low, 46, 269, 301 plebeian, 214, 236n72 (see also Popular culture) popular, 236, 237, 246, 277, 301 as power of historical change, 11 and citizenship, 102, 119n73, 124 Customs and habits, 271, 288, 303n16 critique of, 195 reform of, 45, 45n50 D Decentralization, administrative and territorial, see Federalism Deliberation in assemblies, 5, 12, 31, 48, 49, 54, 58, 142, 145, 147, 224

339

and democracy, 142, 242n83 in juntas, 12, 58 Demagogy (and demagogues) as core discourse of modernity (for reactionary thought), 141 as defined in the dictionary, 147 and democracy, 138, 139, 142, 144, 144n25, 146, 146n32, 148, 150, 156, 162–164 and dictatorship, 154n53, 157 and disorder, 139, 142, 146n32, 156 as lasting political system, 140 and manipulation, 150 as “plebeian tyranny,” 138, 139, 142, 156 and populism, 138, 164 as social order, 159 an synonym to anarchy, 153 Democracia, La, journal (1865), 299 Democracy as absorbing the feature of union from monarchy, 306 in aesthetics, 275 as appropriating the attributes of aristocracy, 288 and association, 280, 282 in-association, 281, 282 crisis of, 6, 30, 246, 253 as defined in non-political terms by conservatives, 151 deliberative, 2, 2n6 and demagogy, 138, 139, 142, 144, 144n25, 146, 146n32, 148, 150, 156, 162–164 democracy-in-corporation, 55–76, 257, 281 democratic imagination, 32 as dimension of a constitution, 38, 41, 63, 71, 71n115, 107, 203 and disorder, 63n95, 142, 143, 154, 164

340 

INDEX

Democracy (cont.) as distinctive from universal suffrage, 138, 164, 244, 304, 306, 307 in the 1812 Constitution, 73n121, 102, 107, 144, 144n27, 147, 257, 281n79 features of (quantity and force), 149, 215 as imaginary, 31, 53, 103, 138, 149, 206, 243, 282, 304–306, 327 as legitimate form of government, 1, 142 in the mixed constitution, 13, 32, 38, 70, 111, 122, 218, 224, 241, 288, 295 in 19th century, 224n38 and ochlocracy, 14n36, 139 as popular government, 144, 144n26, 147, 242 post-Franco, 30, 78, 136, 253 as “pure” form of government, 53, 139 transition to, 3, 245, 254n2 Democratic as constitutional dimension, 150 and the distinction between demagogy and democracy, 162, 163 and the end of the opposition between demagogue and tribune, 155 faction, 262 and its Manifiesto (1849), 214 as party, 204n82, 214, 218, 223, 246 Party (USA), 214n6 Spain as democratic country by history, 284 and universal suffrage, 137, 164, 244, 255, 280, 304 “Democratic monarchy,” 73, 107, 147, 215, 257

Democrats and republicans, 20, 49, 150n43, 177, 198, 217, 217n16, 218, 223, 232, 239n76, 240–242, 244, 268, 268n37, 271, 274n56, 280, 282n81, 296, 297 as faction, 156, 262 as hegemonized by progressives, 244 limitations in leadership of, 215, 230 in opposition, 137, 297 as party, 204n82, 214, 214n6, 218, 219n22, 220, 223, 246 and popular mobilization, 243 and progressives, 147n34, 150, 150n42, 156, 177, 198, 214, 219n22, 229, 239, 244, 268n37, 276 and republicans, 20, 49, 152, 177, 198 and unity, 16, 214–220, 223, 232, 242n83, 244 and universal suffrage, 137, 138, 161, 164, 218, 244, 255, 257, 282, 306 Desamortización (sales of monastic lands, (1836), 146n31 Despotism, 39, 39n34, 63, 63n95, 69, 123, 140n15, 148, 179, 262, 276, 301, 302, 302n12, 302n14, 306, 327 Asiatic, 179n18 (see also Tyranny) Determinism, see Fatalism Día de revolución, Un, drama by Fernando Garrido (1854), 271n47 Dialectics, Hegelian, 158 Díaz, Nicomedes Pastor, ideologue and policitian, moderado (1840s), 122n81

 INDEX 

Diccionario Nacional or gran diccionario (1853), 178 Dictatorship in Donoso Cortés’s “Speech,” 154n53 in Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, 156 and plebeian tyranny, 157n59 of the proletariat, 158 and revolution, 158 “Speech on” by Donoso Cortés (1849), 154n53 Discourse democratic, 216, 224, 257–263 on mobilization, 13, 305, 305n19, 307, 321 on participation, 13, 19, 71, 305, 321 reactionary, 77 on representation, 13, 34, 49, 71, 255, 307, 321 republican, 38n30, 112, 113, 154, 241, 277, 278, 282 as shaped by dichotomies, 6 traditionalist, 41, 46 on unity, 220, 223 Disorder and order, 3, 7, 14, 15, 19, 20, 51, 56, 140, 143, 146, 147, 157, 161, 244, 313 as revolution, 149, 154, 180 “Discurso sobre la economía civil y la instrucción pública” by Jovellanos (1797), 99 “Discurso sobre las formas de gobierno”, by Agustín Ibáñez de la Rentería (1790s), 53 Division of powers, 14n35 Doceañismo, 20, 78, 109n48, 112, 112n55, 113, 115n64, 121, 149, 218, 225, 232, 240n79, 242–244, 260n16, 272n50, 281, 284, 285n91, 322

341

in evolution, 118–123 and progresistas or progressives, 216 as political sensibility, 216, 322 Doceañista(s), see Doceañismo Doctrine(s), 46, 108, 113n58, 122n81, 151n46, 177, 178, 178n15, 183n31, 184, 185n35, 186, 188, 190, 191, 197n70, 201, 219, 261n19, 299 political, 108 Domestic servants, 101 Domínguez, Ramón Joaquín, author (1853), 178n14 Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino, theatre play by Duke of Rivas (1835), 181 Donoso Cortés, Juan (Marquis of Valdegamas), 147n34, 153, 154, 154n51, 154n52, 154n53, 154n54, 157–160, 157n59, 157n60, 158n61, 158n62, 159n64, 159n65, 160n66, 162, 177, 188–195, 191n54, 194n62, 198, 202, 203, 258, 258n10 on aristocracy, 258 comparison with Marx, 156, 158n61, 158n62 and conservatives or moderados, 153 and fatalism, 189, 195, 198 and free will, 160n66, 189 and progress, 147n34, 177, 191, 194 on plebe, 161, 162 “Speech on Dictatorship” by (1849), 154n53, 161 E Early modern period, 7n13, 8n18, 9n21, 10, 11, 16, 34n14, 34n15, 36, 37n24, 55n75, 64, 139, 140n14, 200n76, 284, 320n6, 323n9

342 

INDEX

“Eco de la Revolución, El”, pamphlet by Francisco Pi i Margall (1854), 204, 240 Eco del Comercio, journal, democrat (1845), 218n18 Education Act of 1857, 275, 299 as basic right, 277 as centre of moral philosophy and political economy, 99 and civil conception of citizenship, 101, 303 consensus on its moral, 91–125 consensus on its moral value, 46n53 as criterion for voting rights, 19 and the Enlightenment, 19, 91–125 and freedom of press, 101 and instruction, 101, 276n63 of the lower classes, 274, 275 and the middle classes, 105 as referent for citizenship, 101 relation with property, 19, 20, 93, 296 and representative government, 117, 276 and universal suffrage, 276 Egalitarianism, 202 1854 Revolution, 204, 211–247, 256, 271n47, 276, 283, 316 1848, 135–164 as cradle of reactionary thought, 141 discursive and ideological effects of, 260 as gateway to plebeian tyranny and anarchy, 76, 139, 153–156 mobilization and participation in, 161, 243n85 Revolution, 135–164 in Spain, 151–156, 159–163, 188–190, 193, 197, 260, 261, 274

Eighteenth century, 5, 10, 11, 13, 14n36, 16n38, 17n39, 18, 19, 32, 33, 36n22, 38n32, 46n54, 53n70, 56, 58, 94, 95n8, 97n15, 98n17, 99n21, 140, 215, 323n9 1875 Restoration, 138n8, 315 1868 Revolution, 306 1864 and 1865, satirical comedy (1865), 300 1837 Constitution and citizenship criteria, 122 and electoral legislation, 258 debates for, 120, 181, 259 1832 Electoral reform (England), 105 1812 Constitution as extending in space, 103 as extending in time, 103 and the mixed constitution, 144n27 and participation, 71, 108 and representation, 71, 108 Eiras Roel, Antonio, historian (1960s-2000s), 245n86 El delincuente honrado, theatre play by Jovellanos (1777), 100n23 Elections direct, 117, 258n12 general or national, 122, 240 indirect system of, 102, 258n10 municipal or local, 122, 135 Electoral legislation commission for (1837), 107 of 1865, 298 of 1812, 110, 117, 240 Electors, 9n22, 40n36, 73, 110 “Elogio de la plebe española”, journal article (1812) Emotions and aesthetics, 58n83 and historical narrative, 283n84 See also Political crisis, emotions Engels, Friedrich, see Marx, Karl

 INDEX 

England, 257 as inspiration for Spanish liberals, 106 English Channel, 141 Enlightenment and education, 91–125 late, 93, 118 and public sphere, 11 reforms, 32, 143, 320 Ensayo histórico-crítico sobre la antigua legislación de Castilla y León, by Francisco Martínez Marina (1808), 67n102 Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo by Juan Donoso Cortés (1851), 202 Enthusiasm, 63n95, 140, 141n16, 145, 151n46, 174, 187, 195, 199, 213, 213n4, 228, 263, 264, 264n25, 267 Escosura, Patricio de, writer and politician, moderado to unionista (1850s-1860s), 261, 285 España contemporánea, La, by Fernando Garrido (1865), 298 Espartero, Baldomero , as Regent (1840-1843), 123, 150, 231, 237, 238n74, 240, 260, 262, 264 Espronceda, José de, poet and playwright, progressive (1834), 264n25 Esquilache, Marquis of, 34n12, 44n47, 46, 143 Esquilache Riots (1766) accounts of, 44n47 and the Atlantic wave of revolts, 33 consequences of, 44 and the constitution, 42 in historiography, 33 and the nobility, 39, 57 new phase in, 48

343

and plebe, 42, 48n60 in the provinces and overseas colonies, 52, 56, 57 and pasquinades, 48n60 Estates (in Old Regime) and nobility, 39, 319 and representation, 51, 64 (see also Nobility) Third, 16, 39n33, 51n66, 95n6 Estatuto Real, see Royal Estatute (Estatuto Real, 1834–1836) Europe Central (1848), 152 post-Napoleonic, 103 Exaltado faction, 108 Exception, state of, 33, 56, 61n90, 63 See also Riot(s); Revolution Exile, of Spanish Liberals (1814), 103 in 1823, 103, 103n33 Exploiters/exploited dichotomy, 286, 288 Expression, freedom of, see Freedom F Factions, political, 150, 182n28 Fatalism, 178, 182, 186, 186n39, 193 as concept, 175, 176, 186, 189, 195, 202, 205 definition, 175–177 and determinism, 178, 186 as doctrine (school), 178, 178n15, 184, 197n70, 201 in epistemology, 175, 177, 178, 196, 197, 201, 204 and the history of philosophy, 183, 185n35 in Juan Donoso Cortés, 189 and phrenology, 186, 186n40 and politics, 177, 180–183 and popular protagonism in History, 198

344 

INDEX

Fatalism (cont.) and predestination, 183n31 and the social question, 188n46 in Spain, 176, 179, 195, 196, 205 Federalism, 67n103, 298 Ferdinand VII (1808-1832), king of Spain, 56, 76, 77n130, 103, 106, 107, 109, 120, 144n28, 145, 145n30, 257 Fernández Baeza, Pascual, deputy (1837) Ferrer del Río, Antonio, historian (1850s), 199–201, 199n75, 200n77, 273 15-M and corruption, 174 and politics, 136, 174 image of the past in, 174 and participation, 31 and populism, 136 and representation, 136 Florence, 9n22, 139, 139n13 Florentine Histories by Machiavelli (16th century), 139n11 Flórez Estrada, Álvaro, 70n114, 101n26, 109, 114n60, 114n61, 145n28 Representación by (1820), 109, 144n28 Fórmula del progreso, la by Emilio Castelar (1858), 279 Forner, Juan Pablo, Enlightenment thinker (1790s), 54n74 France, 11, 11n28, 12n33, 17n39, 33n11, 44n49, 55, 62n94, 72n117, 77n132, 95n8, 97n15, 101n27, 104, 105, 136n4, 140–142, 141n20, 144, 152, 184, 198n73, 214n6, 243n85, 257, 259n13, 274n56, 306n22, 313, 317 as inspiration for Spanish liberals, 106

Freedom, 72, 72n117, 122, 145n29, 299 academic, 299 and despotism, 302n14 of expression, 72n117, 122, 145n29, 299 and necessity, 205 and press, 72n117, 101, 101n26, 221n29 of thought, 99 Free Trade in Grains Act of 1765, 44 Free will, 160n66, 176, 178, 178n14, 179, 179n18, 181, 183, 189, 190, 193, 193n60 See also Fatalism French Revolution and demagogues, 63, 144n25 See also Jacobin(s) Frontaura, Carlos, writer (1860s), 303n16 G Gándara, Miguel Antonio de la, Jesuit (1766), 45n51 García López, Francisco, deputy (1854), 262 Garrido, Fernando, ideologue and leader, democrat-republican (1850s–1860s), 240–242, 241n79, 271n47, 279, 281n78, 298, 301, 302, 304 Genovesi, Antonio, Neapolitican intellectual (1750s), 96n11 Gilds, 12, 35–37, 37n25, 37n27, 41, 50, 51n65, 57, 98 and corporations, 12, 36, 37, 41, 57 Globalization, 1, 1n1, 2, 17n39, 254 and democracy, 1, 1n1 Godoy, Manuel de, strongman at the Court (1808), 55, 55n76, 143

 INDEX 

Gómez de la Mata, Agustín, author of chronicle, signing Un Hijo del Pueblo (1854), 232n61 González Bravo, Luis, deputy, 191 González de Llamas, Pedro, deputy (1810s), 68n107 Grand Narrative(s), 312, 314 Gregorio, Leopoldo di, see Esquilache, Marquis of Gutiérrez de Alba, José María, 300 H Habsburg dynasty, 200n77 Hegel, Friedrich, see Dialectics, Hegelian Hegemony, 20, 69, 93, 121, 123, 152, 176, 182–188, 203, 204, 243, 267, 305 in discourse, 206, 232 Hybridization, semantic, 204 Hijo del Pueblo, Un, 226, 227, 227n44, 227n45, 229–237, 230n53, 230n54, 231n56, 232n61, 234n68, 236n72 See also Gómez de la Mata, Agustín Hispanic monarchy, 330 empire, 316 Histoire de la Révolution française by Adolphe Thiers (1840s), 185 Historia de los crímenes del despotismo, by Fernando Garrido (1865), 301 Historia general de España, by Modesto Lafuente (1850), 200 Historians, 4, 7, 14n35, 33n9, 136, 175, 185, 185n36, 192n57, 197n70, 199, 199n75, 201, 203, 220n25, 245, 286, 302n14, 315, 318, 321, 322, 329 as pedagogues, 201 Historiography and the concept of progress, 200 in the 1840s, 200

345

and historians, 4, 199 and the nation, 69n108, 200 and popular protagonism, 43 and progressive and radical ideology, 323n9 renewal of in 1850s, 200 History as approach retrospectively or prospectively, 7, 315 and fatalism, 176, 182, 198, 199 and historical culture, 173–206, 205n84 and historical narratives, 4, 20, 33, 55n76, 68n105, 175, 187, 195–203, 302, 316, 325, 328 as magistra vitae, 200 of philosophy, 183, 185n35 and progress, 174, 182, 200, 206, 241, 261 and providence, 183, 200, 201 public debates on, 322 and the public sphere, 11, 174n2, 175, 187, 203 Hobbes, 185n35 Holland, Lord, 64 Hybridization, semantic, 204 I Ibáñez de la Rentería, José Agustín, enlightened publicist (1780s), 53, 54, 73n120 Iconology, treatise by Cesare Ripa (16th century), 242n83 Identity, 8n16, 9n20, 17, 20, 43n46, 51, 52, 61n89, 67, 91, 93, 100, 105n40, 118, 150, 155, 173, 211–247, 232n61, 257, 280, 282, 283, 305n19, 319n6, 320, 323, 325, 326 communal dimension of, 92 See also Self-identification

346 

INDEX

Imagery (social), 15 Imagination, 9–15, 9n20, 11n29, 29–78, 144n27, 153, 181, 198n72, 215, 236, 263, 264, 266, 268, 281 Independence of colonial America, 316 American, 316 war of (see War of Independence (1808–1814)) Individual rights, 67n104, 100, 218n17, 282, 283 as subject, 7 Individualism, 98, 184, 190, 192 Inequality, 9, 30, 38n30, 104, 112, 113, 115n63, 188, 253, 254, 261, 264, 273, 278, 303 and “association,” 104 Informe de Ley Agraria (Report on the Agrarian Law by Jovellanos (1795), 96, 98 Intellectuals as mass manipulators, 141 and public opinion, 136 Interest, 1, 1n3, 7, 8, 11, 30, 39n34, 60, 72n119, 76n128, 92, 94–104, 102n31, 110n50, 111–113, 113n58, 116, 117, 119, 119n74, 121n79, 138, 149n39, 160, 163n67, 173, 189, 204n83, 206, 212, 213, 221, 225, 225n41, 231, 245, 254, 255, 263, 271n47, 276, 282–284, 286, 298, 312–314, 318, 321, 324, 329 private, 45, 92, 98, 104, 255, 256, 272, 286 Isabella II, queen of Spain (1833-68), 20, 93, 108, 145, 150n41, 152, 228, 229n51, 240, 244, 266n32, 283, 285n90, 295

Islam, 179, 179n17, 183n31, 195, 199n74 Italy, 136n4, 152, 153, 155 See also Rome; Vatican Estates J Jacobin(s) period, 140n14 and Terror, 109 Jaime el Barbudo, theatre play by Sixto Cámara (1853), 271n47 Jesuit(s), 43n45, 45n51, 50n64 Jornadas de Julio, Las, chronicle by Un Hijo del Pueblo (1854), 226, 227n44 José I Bonaparte, see Bonaparte, José I Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de, 62n92, 64, 65n98, 66n100, 70n112, 96–101, 96n9, 97n14, 97n15, 99n20, 100n23, 101n25, 111, 117 and civil citizenship, 100 as continuing previous enlightened authors, 96, 98 and education, 100 on gilds, 98 and the Junta Central (1810s), 62n92 and Lord Holland, 64 and the mixed constitution, 100 on the nobility, 98n18 and opinion, 70n112, 97, 97n13, 109 on women, 101n27 July Monarchy, 105, 184, 197, 214n6 Junta Central (1808), 59–62, 62n92, 64n97, 66n100 conflict with the Regency, 62n93, 63n95 “Junta Chica”, social gathering (1810s), 61n91

 INDEX 

Junta de Abastos (Provisioning board) (1766), 47 Junta del Sur (1854), 229, 229n51 Junta de Salvación, Armamento y Defensa (1854), 229, 229n51 Junta(s), 103n32, 145n28, 220, 223n36 and democrats and republicans, 223 and doceañismo, 180, 223 of 1808, 56, 57, 144n27 of 1843, 123 of 1839, 122 of 1820, 145n28 and the military, 115, 222 Jury, popular and deliberation, 147 and gilds, 36, 36n22, 41, 50 and the nobility, 36, 39, 43, 47, 59n86, 68, 284 and order, 20, 29–78, 107n44, 123n83, 143, 144, 146, 146n31, 147, 149, 163, 175, 181, 215, 269, 301 and representation, 7, 10, 20, 32, 34, 36n22, 40, 40n36, 50, 78, 104, 124, 143, 146, 147, 149, 176, 212, 215, 223, 226, 227, 232, 269, 325 and sovereignty, 10, 11, 53, 61, 78, 103, 109, 141n16, 144, 217, 218, 224, 242 Juste milieu formula, 103n34 Justice, popular, 42n42, 54, 59, 74, 143, 175n5, 195n64, 233, 233n63, 234, 234n65, 237, 300n10 K Krausism, philosophical school (1860s), 184

347

L Lafuente, Modesto , historian, progressive (1850), 200, 201 L’Ami de la Religion, French journal (1850), 192, 192n57 Language degradation of, 14, 267n36 and historical phenomena, 4, 317 limits of language for giving meaning to events, 42, 330 as source of categories for understanding and explaining social phenomena, 6 Larra, Mariano José de, writer, journalist and ideologue (1830s), 181, 181n23 Latina, La, quartier of Madrid, 229 Lavapiés, quartier of Madrid, 229 “La Vicalvarada,” 243 See also Revolution, of 1854 Lazzerati, see Masaniello (leader of Naples revolt 1642) Leadership and conspiracy, 139, 143, 244, 305n20 and demagogy, 139, 147, 150, 162 and democracy, 137, 139, 150, 245 limits for representation by, 226 and mobilization, 20, 55n76, 136, 226 vs. political party leaders, 150 and Revolution, 76, 135–164, 227 of riots, 60n88, 143 and unity, 150, 229, 230, 244 Legitimacy, 5–7, 10, 12, 14, 19, 32, 33, 35, 45n50, 50, 53, 56, 57, 58n84, 59, 59n85, 77, 97n13, 109, 115, 119, 124, 143, 146, 150n42, 159, 212, 217, 224, 225, 229, 234, 242, 245, 256, 262, 265, 296, 297, 307, 313 in the 1854 Revolution, 225

348 

INDEX

Leroux, Pierre, saint-simonian ideologue, 184, 184n34 Levantamiento de las Comunidades de Castilla, El, by Antonio Ferrer del Río (1850), 199 Liberal elites, 152, 156 fears by (1848), 152, 156 Liberalism and Catholicism, 100, 202 and citizenship, 15, 20, 91–125, 146, 233, 281, 296, 313, 325, 327 crisis of, 12, 153, 196, 226, 313, 320, 325 “doctrinnaire” or doctrinal, 103, 104n36, 148n37 early, 19, 20, 62n92, 67, 68n105, 74n122, 76, 94–103, 187, 322 in France, 104 as gateway to disorder and anarchy, 154, 202 as social order, 104n35, 151, 154, 257 Liberal professions, see Middle class(es) Liberals and communitarians (debate), 20, 92n2, 122n82, 123, 305 early or first generation of Spanish, 107, 264 radical, 68, 149, 156, 160, 162, 196, 198, 215, 218, 219, 232, 240, 245, 246, 264, 274 as settling scores with the 1812 Constitution, 144 See also Moderados and Progresistas Liberal Triennium (1820-23), 78, 144 as better labelled Doceañista Triennium, 78 Liberal Union (Unión Liberal), political party, 229n51, 238, 261, 297n2

Lindezas del despotism, by Fernando Garrido (1860), 302n12 Lista, Alberto, ideologue and theoretician, conservative (1830s), 180, 199n75 Literacy and literate public, 327 Local government, 35n16, 54n72, 73n120, 148 López, Joaquín María, deputy, ideologue and leader, progressive (1830s), 111n51, 148n37 Lorca, locality in Murcia, 221n27 Louis Philippe I of Orléans, king of France, 105 Louis XVI, king of France, 97n14, 141, 141n20 Luther, 185n35 M Mably, 185n35 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 53n70, 139, 139n11, 139n13, 175n6 and anti-Machiavellianism, 53n70 Madrid (Spain), 33–37, 33n11, 36n21, 37n25, 37n28, 39n33, 43, 44n47, 45, 47, 48n58, 48n59, 50, 52, 58n83, 59, 145n30, 192, 220–222, 221n26, 226–237, 244, 246, 299 Maistre, Joseph de, 140n16, 154 “Manifiesto of the Persians” (1814), 76 Manifiesto Progresista Democrático (1849), 155, 214 Manual de derecho constitucional, by Antonio Alcalá Galiano (1843), 259 “Manzanares, Manifesto of” (1854), 221, 227n44 Marat, Jean-Paul, 180

 INDEX 

Maria Cristina, Isabella II’s mother, 106, 109, 115, 123, 145, 149, 181, 228, 233n63 and corruption, 228 in the 1854 Revolution, 233 Regency (1833-40), 106, 115, 123, 145, 149, 150, 181 Market reforms and degradation of customs, 266 in Esquilache Riots, 95 Martínez de la Rosa, Francisco, deputy, ideologue and leader, moderado (1830s-1850s), 112, 119n73, 275, 275n61 Martínez Marina, Francisco, ideologue of early Liberalism (1810s), 67n102, 68n105, 74n124 Martos, Cristino, political ideologue and leader, progresista-demócrata (1854), 220, 220n24, 227n44 Marx, Karl, 156–160, 157n59, 157n60, 158n61, 160n65, 160n66, 162, 327 and the Communist Manifesto (1848), 156, 158n61, 158n63, 159n64, 161 and plebe, 160–162 Masaniello (leader of Naples revolt 1642), 139n12 Mayors of the Quartiers (Alcaldes de Barrio), 40n37 Mazdaism, 179n17 Mazzini, Giuseppe, Roman radical leader (1848), 154 Meaning, fields of appropriation of, 19 changes in, 7, 15, 41 Memoirs d’Outre-Tombe, see Chateaubriand, François-René Mendal, a.K.a (Cano, Francisco Chico’s doorman, 1854), 235

349

Mendizábal, Juan Álvarez (president of cabinet, 1835), 106n43, 107n44 Middle Ages, 7, 7n13, 34, 198, 319n6 Middle class(es) and doctrinaire liberals, 283 and education, 19 and habits, 97 as natural representative of the people, 119, 283 as part of the people, 285 and property, 19 in trichotomous images of society, 286 Mignet, François-Auguste (French historian, 1840s), 185 Military and 1854 Revolution, 220, 221, 226, 232, 243, 244 and juntas, 56, 57, 57n80, 115 and mobilization, 48, 115 and repression, 60 Militia, urban and popular, 60n87 Militia National, 117n67, 121, 121n80, 122, 148, 149, 231, 239 Mill, John Stuart, 163n67 Millar, John, 97n15 Ministry, 285n91 of Interior, 299n8 Mixed constitution or government as adopted by all political illignments in Spanish liberalism, 155, 239 as conceptual grammar or repository, 62n94, 143, 148, 215, 306 as constitutional balance, 70n112 and the 1810 summoning of Cortes, 63, 66, 66n100 in Esquilache Riots, 39 as grammar for political discourse, 15, 16, 39, 65, 70, 77, 111, 148, 239, 241, 242

350 

INDEX

Mixed constitution or government (cont.) as hegemonic in discourse, 61, 282 as ideal, 13, 13n34, 14, 257 as imagination for lasting order, 9n20 and representative government, 15, 18 as social imagery, 15 as trans historical conceptual repertoire, 13, 149 as vocabulary of modern political imagination, 113, 286–288 See also Monarchy; Aristocracy; Democracy Mobilization in 1854, 236 in 1848, 161 in Esquilache Riots, 57 as fostering participation, 95 as foundation of order, 139, 151 as instituting the distinction between order and disorder, 3, 7, 19 and the military, 48, 146 as preeminent to representation, 225 pro-absolutist, 106n42, 107 reactionary and fanatic, 145, 179, 260 re-classified as participation, 18 and representation, 3, 5, 13, 15, 17–19, 32, 53 as studied jointly with representation and participation, 7 as surving the 1812 Constitution, 103 as transgressing the established order, 19 and unity, 243 Moderado party (conservative) decade (1844-54), 183 internal split of reactionary faction (1948-49), 297 and Liberal Union, 238, 261

members, 189 and the unity among liberals, 231 Moderados and Progresistas, 108 Moderation as applied to monarchy, 69, 70 as feature of aristocracy, 38 as political value, 143n23, 219, 283n86 Modernity as identified with diversification and specialization, 5 and moderns, 154, 326 Modernization and customs and habits, 195 narrative of, 245n87, 312, 314 Monarchy vs. anarchy, 241 and biological cycles, 193 Bourbon, 19, 32, 33, 46n54, 95, 96, 306 and democracy, 13, 14, 54n71, 69, 69n110, 70, 70n113, 70n114, 75, 103, 107, 203, 239n77, 241, 257 as democratic, 63, 73, 73n121, 107, 215, 239, 257 to be democratized, 260 as divide-line between order and disorder, 14 as element of the mixed constitution, 104 as expressing unity and coordination, 14 Habsburg, 63n95 July (France), 105, 184, 197, 214n6 and king’s two bodies, 193, 193n58 in the mixed constitution, 70, 107, 149, 239, 241, 242, 288 and moderation, 63, 69, 70 vs. national sovereignty, 241 and progress, 241, 242 and religion, 137

 INDEX 

Montalembert, Count of, French ideologue (1848), 190 Montesquieu, 13, 14n35, 38, 215 Moral economy, 43, 43n46, 234n68, 236n72 Morals independence, 296n1 of the people, 228 and politics, 46n53, 98, 257, 296 and virtue, 64, 96, 121n80 Mostenses, square (Madrid), 235 Moyano Law, see Education, Act of 1857 Municipalities, see Local government Muslim religion, see Islam Mutiny, see Riot(s) N Naples (Italy), 34n12, 37n25, 139n12 Napoleonic period post-, 109 Narrative(s) Grand, 312, 314 moulds, 30, 48, 49 Narváez, Ramón María, military and politician, conservative (1840s), 152, 152n48 Nation as corporation of corporations, 75 and liberal historiography, 200 and ‘nationist’ thought, 43 and people, 69n108 and religion, 45, 69n109 Naturalization, 39n33, 266n32, 329 Natural law, 12, 160n66, 276 Navas, Conde de las, deputy (procurador) (1836), 108n45 Necker, Jacques, French ministry of finance (1770s), 97n14 Neighbourhood, see Vecindad

351

Newton, 185n35 New World, 11, 36 “Night of San Daniel” o of “the slaughterhouse”, see Students protest (1865) Nineteenth century, 5, 10, 11, 13, 17, 18, 32, 33n9, 41n39, 105n40, 106, 108n44, 118n70, 124, 137, 138, 143, 144n26, 145n29, 150n40, 154n53, 158n62, 162–164, 175, 177, 178, 179n18, 186n42, 188n46, 198n73, 199n74, 200n76, 205n83, 206, 212, 213, 213n4, 245, 254, 255, 259n15, 266n33, 275n60, 281n79, 282n83, 284, 286, 287, 298, 304, 312, 313, 315, 315n3, 316, 321, 323, 324, 329, 330 Nobility and aristocracy, 39, 41, 65, 68, 279n74, 321 as citizens, 73 and collective representation, 64 and constitution, 39, 41, 43, 65, 66, 70n112, 77n130, 279n74 as corporation, 37, 37n25, 37n28, 57, 65 discourse by, 67 in 1808, 57, 65, 76 and the Esquilache Riots, 39 as estate, 37n24, 39, 65, 77n130, 98, 100, 319, 320 as lacking a tradition of corporations, 36 and natural aristocracy), 73 as social and political power, 320n6 and private interest, 98 and property, 65, 279 and virtue, 41n39, 276 See also Privilege(d)

352 

INDEX

Nocedal, Cándido, 266–268, 266n33, 267n35, 267n36, 271n46, 272 conservative (1850s), 266, 268 ideologue, 266–268 politician and literary critique, 266 Novel and conservatives, 266, 268 genre of, 267 See also Aesthetics O Ochlocracy, see Anarchy O’Donnell, Leopoldo (military and politician, unionista (1854), 220–222, 223n36, 240 Office(s) designation by lot, 74n124 election of, 54, 72 oath and responsibility of, 75n125 patrimonalisation of, 40, 54 Old Regime anthropological imagination of, 9 crisis of, 11, 12, 18, 31, 32, 33n11, 138, 319, 321 endurance of, 7, 142 participation in, 8n18, 11, 19, 313 traditional Cortes of, 109 Old Testament, see Bible, The Oligarchy as counter-concept of aristocracy, 255, 285, 306 dichotomy with people, 286–288 and tyranny, 66, 303, 307 Oliveros, Antonio, deputy (1812), 71n115 Olózaga, Salustiano, deputy, progressive (1837), 108n45, 117n67 1º [Primero] de Septiembre, El (journal, 1843), 217n12

Opinion as distinctive from “public opinion,” 97n13 and interest, 97 and plebe, 269 and popular customs and culture, 94 and “the public,” 2, 30, 62n92, 97n13, 97n14, 109n47, 111, 120, 146, 148, 149n39, 161, 174, 189, 212, 212n1, 222, 227, 231, 234, 234n66, 254, 259, 263n24, 298, 299, 301, 304 and women, 97, 97n15 Opinion, freedom of, 187 Optimism, 174, 175n4, 181, 188 Ordax Avecilla, José, leader and representative, democrat (1849), 155 Order and disorder, 3, 7, 14, 15, 19, 20, 51, 56, 140, 143, 146, 147, 157, 161, 244, 313 social, 5, 9n20, 11, 36, 98, 104n35, 119, 139, 142, 151, 154, 159, 162, 189, 257, 263, 280, 286, 319 transgression of established frontiers of, 56 trichotomous and dichotomous images of, 286 Orense, José María de, deputy, democrat (1856), 262 Original sin, 191n53 See also Fatalism; Religion Ortiz y Galve, José Joaquín, deputy from Panamá (1812), 73n120 P Pacheco, Joaquín Francisco, ideologue and representative, conservative (1830s–1840s), 150n42, 151, 151n45

 INDEX 

Paris, 141n17, 202 Parliamentary debates in 1835, 107 in 1837, 107 Parliament(s) and Cortes, 10n23 Participation (political) as approached historically, 321 changes and continuities in, 32 in 1854, 244 and the 1812 Constitution, 71, 108, 121 in Esquilache Riots, 42 experiences in 1848, 162 experimentation in, 30n2 and juntas, 12, 106, 149 labeled as “informal,” 18 limits to, 145 in local institutions, 32 in Old Regime, 8, 8n18, 11, 12, 161, 313, 325 popular, 147, 156, 161, 213, 223, 243n85, 246 relations with representation, 42, 71, 102, 286 and rootedness, 121, 122, 304 struggle for popular, 124 and unity, 16, 212, 214 Partido progresista democrático (1849), 219n22 See also Democratic, faction; Democratic, as party Parties, political critique of, 225 in democracy as opposed to liberalism, 216 and disunity, 216 and popular representation, 124 See also Factions, political Pater familias, 9n20 Path dependency, 189n49 Patria, 38n30, 60, 72n119, 230

353

Patriotic societies, 145 People all-embracing definition of, 160 as constituent power, 55 constitutional dimension of, 150, 161 as corpus representans, 66 as dignified, 60, 150, 204, 305 and education, 275, 276 and equality, 76n128 and historical fatalism, 182 inclusion of plebe into, 271 as inclusive, 20, 31, 213, 226 as integrated through culture, 214 and its morals, 51, 228, 233, 276 and its representatives, 48, 73, 119, 150, 180 and juntas, 57, 58n84, 223n36 and medieval Cortes, 67n102 and the Nation, 68, 69n108 and oligarchy as dichotomy, 286–288 as overcoming political parties, 222 and peoples (pueblos) in plural, 67 and plebe, 19, 60, 257–263, 295 vs. plebe, 18 and political unity, 240 and popular self-­ organization, 54n74 and representation, 17, 18, 111n51, 223, 226, 236 struggle for its meaning, 160 as synomous with plebe, 58 Pérez de Castro, Evaristo, deputy (1811), 144n25 Pérez Ledesma, Manuel, historian (1990s), 286–288, 287n94 Pessimism, 175n4, 193–196, 206 Peter the Cruel, Castilian king, 198 Phrenology, 186, 186n40, 186n41 and religion, 186

354 

INDEX

Pidal, Marquis of conservative to reactionary (1848), 153 ideologue, 153 Pi i Margall, Francisco (ideologue and politician, republican (1850s)), 204, 204n83, 205, 240, 240n79 Pius IX, Pope, 152, 153 Pizarro, Luis, Count of Las Navas, deputy (1837), 108n45 Plebe as absorbed into the people, 305 in the American colonies, 76 as asymmetrical counter-concept of people, 322 and biopolitical management, 52 and civil citizenship, 100 as destituent power, 55 as excluded from the political body, 52 as included in and interchangeable with the people, 69 indigenous identities in America, 52 modern conception of, 140 in 19th century, 17, 18, 138, 162, 214, 287 and people, 19, 60, 257–263, 295 and representation, 161, 271 as separated from people, 233 and violence, 233 Plebeian culture and civil citizenship, 100 as enduring in 19th century, 143 as independent from high culture and referring to carnival, 236 Plebeian tyranny and democracy, 138, 153 and dictatorship, 157, 157n59, 158 as distinctive from tyranny of the majority, 163n67 as final stage of revolution, 140 See also Demagogy (and demagogues)

Plena potestas, 8n18, 10n23 Podemos, political party, see Unidas Podemos, political party Poetry and exalted liberals from the first generation, 264 and poets, 264n25 popular vs. cultured, 269 popular vs. vulgar, 269 romantic, 108n45 satirical, 46 See also Aesthetics; Art Political crisis coalition, 212 Political economy, 45n51, 52n67, 54n73, 96n11, 99, 101n25, 114, 114n60, 160n66, 328 Political science, 6, 14, 92n2, 103, 103n34, 111, 296 as orthodoxy, 111 Politics, 6, 8n15, 11, 11n26, 12n33, 30, 38, 38n30, 43, 67, 68, 74n122, 92, 123, 123n83, 135, 136, 138, 143n23, 151, 155, 157, 162–164, 175, 176, 180, 183, 190n51, 197n70, 199n75, 203, 204, 205n83, 213, 216, 225n40, 242, 254, 256, 260, 264n27, 265, 270, 285n90, 287, 298, 300n9, 306, 323, 328, 330 and art, 283 Polybius, 13n34, 142n22 Popular culture and citizenship, 277 and plebeian culture, 237, 277 and politics, 236, 237, 246, 277, 301 Populism, 137, 137n6 as analytical category, 137, 137n7 and comedy, 265

 INDEX 

and 19th-century demagogy, 138, 164 as rhetoric, 137 in 21st century, 164 Portillo, José María, historian (2000s), 57n82, 59n85, 62n93, 67n102, 68n105, 68n106, 69n108 Pragmática of 1774 against riots, 60n87, 60n89 Pragmatics, 19, 176n10, 177 Press (media) law, 220 Prestige, 119, 123 Prim, Juan, General, progressive (1860s), 305n20 Príncipe, Miguel Agustín, playwright (1845), 217, 217n13 Principles, 8, 11, 31, 35, 36, 46, 50, 61, 63, 65n98, 66, 69, 71, 103, 104, 108, 111, 115n63, 123n84, 144n27, 149n39, 152, 160n65, 180–182, 184, 185n35, 192, 194, 197, 218n18, 223, 223n34, 225, 225n41, 239, 241, 263, 265, 275n61, 276n62, 279, 282, 282n82, 321, 325 vs. interests, 225 Privilege(d) and aristocracy, 117n69, 123 classes, 112, 112n54, 143, 304 and property, 65, 278, 279 Progresista(s) or Progressive ascendance on Regent Espartero, 149n39, 238n74 Biennium (1854-56), 212n3, 239, 240n78 and conservatives, 112n55, 147n34, 163, 219, 220, 239, 275, 297 internal split by Democrats (1848), 297 and Liberal Union, 297n2

355

and moderates, 265, 269, 297 in opposition, 219 party, 108, 111n51, 113, 120n75, 123n83, 147, 147n34, 148, 149n38, 155, 177, 182n28, 195, 197, 199, 204n82, 214, 216–220, 219n20, 220n24, 220n25, 232, 232n61, 239, 243, 259, 267, 267n36, 275, 297, 297n2 and press, 191, 194 Progress idea of, 174, 177, 206 political vs. social, 201 Proletariat, 157, 157–158n60, 158, 158n63, 160n66, 288, 330 Pronunciamiento, see Junta(s) Pronunciamiento(s), military, 103n32, 145n28 Property and capacity, 111–113, 113n58, 116, 121 as citizenship criteria, 92, 93 and culture, 93, 101, 102, 117 and education, 233 and electors and eligible, 104 fiscal or taxed, 19, 20, 115, 117, 118, 123, 296 politically constituted forms of, 278, 278n68 and progresistas, 113, 120n75 as referent for political rights, 93, 274 relation with education, 111n52, 296 and republicanism, 93n3, 99, 277 and the State, 94 Protagonism, popular and fatalism, 198, 204 and theodicy, 198 Proverbios ejemplares, by Ventura Ruiz Aguilera (1860), 273

356 

INDEX

Providence, 157, 177, 183, 185–190, 187n43, 188n46, 191n52, 193, 194n60, 198, 200, 201, 204, 205, 279n73 See also Future Public opinion as bridge between representatives and average citizens, 146 cleavage with liberal institutions, 222 as distinctive from “opinion,” 97n13, 97n14 as external guarantee of representative government, 231 as identified with popular citizenship, 227 and political crisis, 173–174 and representatives government, 161, 212 Public sphere in the Bourbon Monarchy, 46n54 and contention, 203 Enlightened, 95 and high and low culture, 46, 301 and history, 175, 203, 322 “plebeian,” 46n54 as representative of ideological sensibilities, 203 under liberalism, 20, 183, 187, 206, 281n77, 324n9 Pueblo y el Trono, El, essay by Fernando Garrido (1854), 241 Puerta del Sol (Madrid), 299 Q “Quién ha hecho la Santa Revolución de España,” article (1812), 57n81 Quintana, Manuel José, poet and ideologue (1800s-1830s), 61n91, 113, 113n58, 114, 146n32, 272n50

Quirinal Palace, see Rome, Ancient Quod omnes tangit formula, 8n18 R Radicals and aesthetics, 264, 265, 305 and doceañistas, 20 democrats and republicans as, 150, 177, 198, 217, 232 and drama, 264, 272n48 liberal, 198, 218, 240, 241, 245, 246, 274, 305 and the novel, 52 Reacción y la revolución, La by Francisco Pi i Margall (1854), 204 Reactionary ideology on demagogy, 140 and 1848, 162, 163 interpretation of the 1848 Revolution from, 140 on leadership, 163 and Liberalism, 154, 163, 316 Real Academia, see Royal Academy of Language Real Cuerpo Colegiado de Caballeros Hijosdalgo de la Nobleza de Madrid, 37n28 See also Nobility, Representation Recreo Literario, journal (1838), 196n67 Reform(s) and constitutional reflection, 54n73 of customs, 45n50 1832 Bill (England), 105 Enlightened, 32, 143, 320 Regalism, 43 Regency and drift towards despotism, 66 of General Espartero (1840-43), 123, 150, 260, 262, 264

 INDEX 

and Junta Central, 61, 62n93, 63n95 and legitimacy, 115 of María Cristina (1833-40), 106, 123, 145, 149, 181 in War of Independence, 123, 149, 260 Regeneration, 95, 191n52, 193, 221n27, 304 and democracy, 284 Regimiento, system of local government, 34, 35n16, 35n18, 37n25 Religion Catholic, 35, 41, 42, 53n70, 62, 65–67, 72n117, 75, 99, 152, 153, 183, 187–190, 194, 200, 204, 216, 239, 304, 323 and freedom, 157 and Liberalism, 216 and morals, 194 Muslim, 179, 183n31, 195, 199n74 and pantheism, 179n17 and philosophy, 270 Renaissance, 11, 11n26, 13, 13n34, 16, 16n38, 38, 48, 137, 139, 270n43 humanism, 38, 48, 140 See also Republicanism Representation as approached historically, 176 and conservatives, 148n35 and corporate anthropology, 122, 280 crisis in, 3n8 and the 1837 Constitution, 124 and the 1812 Constitution, 108, 124 in Esquilache Riots, 39 and estates, 50, 64 as exclusive channel of popular demands, 143 as hegemonic, 254n2, 262

357

initiatives in the field of, 37 limits of, 211–214, 226, 236 modern vs. traditional, 7 and participation, 1–12, 9n19, 15, 19, 31, 32, 34, 41, 49, 53, 56, 58, 65n99, 71, 75, 76, 78, 91, 92, 94, 104, 108, 122, 124, 161, 176, 211–247, 255, 287, 288, 306, 307, 318, 321 and referents of citizenship, 325 relations with participation, 3, 10–12, 17–19, 32, 71, 104, 136, 255, 287, 288, 306 as shaped by changes and continuities, 32 struggle for the meaning of, 124 and unity, 16, 75, 213, 214, 221, 232, 247 Representative government and education, 117, 276 as popular government, 148n35 and the popular/unpopular dichotomy, 149 and sovereignty, 71, 93, 218 See also Liberalism Representatives artists as, 180 and corporations, 16, 50 and corruption, 20 and the crowd, 124 discursive vs. political, 226 and education, 276 in the 1812 Constitution, 73n121 as legitimate, 20, 146, 150 and the nobility, 36, 37, 76n128 and parties, 9n20, 150, 214, 225, 232 and the people, 73, 76n128, 161, 180, 214, 232, 262, 270, 283 of the people, 48, 73, 76n128, 119, 150, 180, 270, 283 two meanings of, 226 and virtue, 73, 75, 276

358 

INDEX

Repression, 52, 60, 152, 152n48, 157, 157n59, 162, 228, 235, 257, 271, 299 Republicanism and Esquilache Riots, 38 French tradition of, 225, 230n54 as tradition, 323 Republicans and aristocracy, 276–280, 282n80, 283 and communitarians (debate), 92n2 and democracy, 274n56 and democrats, 20, 150n43, 177, 198, 217, 218, 223, 232, 239n76, 240, 242, 268, 268n37, 274n56, 280, 297 as distinguishing themselves from demagogues, 150n43 and doceañismo, 270 and the unity of all liberals, 223 Republic(s) democratic and federal, 242 as form of government, 152n49 Re-signification, 143, 329 partial, 143 Resistance, right of, 55n75 Restoration absolutist (1814), 144 in France (1815), 142 of 1875, 315 Revista de un muerto, Juicio del año 1865, satirical comedy, 300–301 See also Gutiérrez de Alba, José María Revolts and rumour, 98 See also Riot(s) Revolution in the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, 156 and dictatorship, 156, 158 of 1854, 211–247, 256, 271n47, 276, 283, 316 in Europe, 260

and exclusion, 76 French, 11n28, 17n39, 33n11, 55, 61, 63, 76, 103, 140, 140n14, 144n25, 180, 185, 185n36, 225, 230n54, 259, 285, 301 as gateway to plebeian tyranny and anarchy, 135–164 its absence in Spain, 151–156, 162 of the last quarter of 18th century, 11, 19 mobilization and participation in, 151 and moderados, 195 and participation, 162, 213 and providence, 157, 205 as processes, 140n14, 159n64, 230, 231, 240, 243, 244 in reactionary thought, 141, 158 in the Speech on Dictatorship by Donoso Cortés, 154n53, 161 as term, 136 as unfolding of modernity, 154 in the United States, 62n94 “Revolving doors,” 254n5 Rich/poor dichotomy, 286, 288 Right(s) civil, 101, 104, 286, 300, 303 individual, 67n104, 100, 218n17, 282, 283 of kings (divine), 16, 31, 66, 93 political, 18, 91–93, 104, 105, 108, 117–119, 121n79, 146, 160, 176, 258, 274, 287, 296n1 to resistance, 55n75 Riot(s), 33n11, 43n45, 46n53, 49n61, 50n64, 55, 55n76, 143 against the clergy (1835) of Aranjuez, 55n76 as illegitimate, 146 as legitimate barometers of discontent, 145 1774 Pragmática against, 60n87 See also Esquilache Riots (1766) Ripa, Cesare, 242n83

 INDEX 

Rivas, Duke of, playwright (1830s), 181, 181n23 Rivero, Nicolás María, ideologue and leader, democrat (1850), 219n22 Robespierre, Maximilien, 180 Rodríguez de Campomanes, Pedro, attorney of the Royal Council and Enlightened reformist (1760s-1780s), 34, 34n13, 45, 53n70, 95 and the Esquilache Riots, 95 Rodríguez Rubí, Tomás, playwright and literary critique, radical (1850s), 272, 272n49, 272n50 Romanticism, 180, 272 See also Art; Artists Rome, 152 ancient, 150n41 Rome, Ancient, 154n53 Rootedness (arraigo) and communal referents, 277 and education, 277 and property or taxed wealth, 120n75, 121 as referent of citizenship, 277 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 8n15, 105n39, 226n43, 306n22 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 97n15, 185n35 Royal Academy of Language dictionary of, 144n26, 147 of History, 185n39 Royal Council, 33, 35, 35n18, 36, 43n44, 61, 62n92 attorneys of, 47 Royal Council of Public Instruction, 299n7 Royal Estatute (Estatuto Real, 1834–1836), 108n44, 258 Royal House, 239 See also Court Ruiz Aguilera, Ventura (playwright and poet (1860s)), 273, 273n54

359

S Sagra, Ramón de la, academician and political economy expert (1840), 261n20 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 104n35 and saint-simonians, 104n34 Salamanca, Marquis of (1850s), 228, 233 San Miguel, Evaristo, (military and politician, doceañista-progresista (1830s-1850s), 229, 259, 259n15 Sartorius, Luis, 220, 221, 221n29, 227 count of San Luis, 220 moderado (1850), 227 President of cabinet, 221 Scali, Giorgio, 139n11 See also Ciompi Revolt (1381) Schicksaldramen, 181n23 Science and religión, 178, 186 social, 6, 8n15, 49n62, 194n60, 205, 318, 324 Self-government, 7, 13, 31, 53, 54n74, 60, 78, 144, 152, 152n49, 153, 215, 218n17, 223, 255, 303, 323, 327 and citizenship, 13 Self-identification, 217 Semanario Patriótico, journal (1810s), 61 Semantic change, 51, 140n14, 146n32, 159, 242, 287 reversal, 285 Senate, 117–118n69, 239, 259, 259n15 “Servile” or reactionaries (1810s), 60, 61n89, 264n27 1789, 11n28, 17n39, 55, 72n117, 104–106, 140, 140n15, 159

360 

INDEX

1766, 19, 32, 33, 33n11, 36, 38, 39n34, 41, 42n43, 43, 45, 49–53, 55–57, 55n76, 59–62, 65, 71, 72, 73n120, 76, 96, 143, 224n38, 302, 306, 316 “78 Regime,” 174, 212 See also Transition to democracy, in Spain Seville, 61, 221–226, 228, 232 Sforza, Tommasso, 139n11 See also Ciompi Revolt (1381) Shortages, 39n34 Siglo, El, journal, radical (1849), 204n82, 264n25 Social critique, see Customs and habits Socialism, 156, 162, 184, 184n34, 202 and French political culture, 184n34 Social, the inequality, 253, 254n2, 261, 264 question, 188n46, 192n56, 261 sciences, 6, 8n15, 49n62, 194n60, 205, 318 as semantic field, 2, 13, 15, 41 Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País (Economic societies of friends of the country), 95 Society, 5, 6, 15–17, 43, 44, 53n70, 70n112, 74n122, 96, 98, 100n23, 101n25, 104–106, 110n50, 115n63, 117, 118, 123n84, 124, 141, 142, 145, 146, 151n46, 157n59, 160–162, 160n66, 179n18, 180, 182, 187, 190, 192–194, 195n64, 201, 201n79, 205n85, 214, 230n53, 233, 233n62, 241, 245, 257–261, 258n10, 263, 272–274, 278, 280–284, 281n77, 286, 287, 287n94, 301, 312, 319, 320, 329 as conceptual field, 15 and constitutions, 6, 43

Sociological imagination, 68, 281 Sofronia, drama by José Zorrilla, 108n45 Southern Europe, 16 Sovereignty deposit of, 56 national, 74n124, 223n34, 241 popular, 10, 11, 54, 61, 78, 93, 103, 109, 141n16, 217, 218, 224, 242, 258 as representation, 53 Spain, 1n2, 3, 3n9, 8n15, 8n17, 17–20, 29, 30, 30n1, 38n31, 39, 41n39, 44, 54n72, 57n81, 65n99, 70n112, 73n120, 75n126, 77, 78n133, 91, 93, 95n8, 96n11, 98n17, 101n27, 103, 103n32, 103n33, 104, 104n36, 106, 109, 110, 118n70, 123, 135, 136, 144, 144n27, 149n39, 151–156, 151n44, 162, 174, 175, 182, 182n26, 186, 186n40, 187n43, 190, 192, 193, 196, 200, 200n77, 203, 205, 211, 212, 212n3, 214–216, 217n13, 233, 236, 244–246, 245n87, 253, 254n3, 255, 257, 259, 260, 261n20, 265n31, 275n60, 279, 279n72, 281, 284, 298, 299, 302n14, 304, 307, 313–316, 329, 330 under the Bourbons, 17, 44 “Speech on Dictatorship” by (1849) comparison with Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manfiesto (1848), 161 Status, 4, 5, 8, 8n15, 9, 13, 15, 31, 36, 37, 37n24, 41, 51, 61, 65n99, 73, 74n122, 75, 93, 94, 99n19, 103, 105, 110, 119–121, 122n82, 123, 141, 146, 147, 160, 164, 173, 175, 177, 180,

 INDEX 

181n23, 186n40, 197, 203, 212, 238n75, 259, 262, 265, 266, 273, 285n90, 296, 316 Stoicism, 183n30 Students protest (1865), 299n8 Subjects as citizenship, 11, 100 as individuals, 7, 44, 75 in Old Regime, 19 Suffrage corruption, 307 direct, 110n50, 114, 115n63 indirect, 110, 112, 121n79, 224n38 limited, 15, 162, 253–288 passive, 110 universal, 1, 5, 18, 19, 137, 138, 146n32, 147, 152, 161, 164, 212, 217–219, 218n17, 239, 241n79, 244, 255, 257, 258n10, 262, 263n24, 276, 280, 282, 286, 304–307, 306n22, 329 T Taxpayers and citizenship, 114 as the Común, 36 and gilds, 36 “largest” and voting rights, 12, 109, 110, 115, 115n63 Taylor, Charles, 14, 15n37 Teleology, 162, 217n16 Temporality, see Time Teoría de las Cortes, by Francisco Martínez Marina (1813), 68n105 Terror (in French Revolution), 63, 109, 140n14, 180, 188, 234, 234n65 Theatre, 264n27, 265, 265n30, 271–273, 271n47, 272n49, 276n62, 304

361

censorship of, 264, 271n46, 301n11 as metaphor of democracy public protection of, 272 See also Drama Theodicy, 190, 197, 198 and popular protagonism in History, 198 Theology, 175n7, 179, 184, 185 and fatalism, 175, 179, 184 science, 186, 190, 198 Thiers, Adolphe, French historian and politician (1830s-1840s), 185, 185n36, 197, 199n75 Tiberius, Roman emperor, 140n15 Time, 159, 175, 192, 193, 202, 280n76 conceptions of, 9n19, 180, 187, 200 and fatalism, 175–177, 175n4, 175n6, 182–184, 183n31, 185n35, 186, 188–192, 193n58, 193n60, 195–202 and future, 174, 175, 181, 187, 188, 189n49, 193, 195, 199, 202, 206 liberal consensus on, 200, 202 and Providence, 177, 183, 185–190, 187n43, 188n46, 191n52, 193, 194n60, 198, 200, 201, 204, 205 status of and citizenship, 173–177, 180 Time and fatalism, 177–182 Times, The, English newspaper (1850), 194 Tirios y Troyanos, theatre play by Miguel Agustín Príncipe (1845), 217n13 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 163n67 Toreno, Count of (José María Queipo de Llano), 106n43, 124n85

362 

INDEX

Torres de Castilla, Alfonso, alias, see Garrido, Fernando, ideologue and leader, democrat-republican (1850s–1860s) Tracy, Destutt de, 62n94 Tragedy, see Drama Transition to democracy, 3, 245, 254n2 in Spain, 3 Tribunes of the plebs or crowd in the Esquilache Riots, 48n60 as stigmatized, 124 and the tribunes in Ancient Rome as newspapers of the period, 150n41 Triennium with Espartero as Regent (1840-43) or Progressist, 183n29 liberal or doceañista (1820-23), 78, 144 20th century, 1, 136, 138, 138n8, 140n14, 160, 163n67, 164, 174, 178n15, 185n36, 245, 315, 323, 329, 330 Tyranny and crises in representation, 255 and oligarchy, 14, 14n36 traditional concept of, 159 and tyrannicide, 46 U Unbalance, constitutional and the mixed government, 284 Unidas Podemos, political party, 136 United States of America, 11, 11n29, 62n94, 136n4, 214n6, 313 Unity and democracy, 16, 75, 214–220, 241, 242n83

in 1854, 220, 244 as feature of monarchy, 60n110 and mobilization, 243 on the opposition, 213 and participation, 16, 75, 212–214, 221, 232, 243 political, 216, 240 and representation, 75, 212–214, 221, 232, 242n83, 243, 247 Universal suffrage as banner for the unity of all liberals, 219 of 1891, 307 of 1869, 282n83 V Vacatio regis, or absence of the monarch, 56, 63, 63n95, 66 Valdegamas, Marquis of, see Donoso Cortés, Juan (Marquis of Valdegamas) Valencia, 221 Valera, Juan, ideologue, political and literary critique, conservative (1860s), 268–272, 268n37, 268n38, 269n40, 270n43, 270n45, 274, 280, 280n76, 283, 283n86, 284 Valladolid, 221 Vatican Estates, see Italy; Rome Vecino(s) (Vecindad), 3, 40, 40n37, 58, 224n38, 229 and citizenship, 224n38, 323n9 and participation, 40 and representation, 40, 40n36 Vicálvaro, village of, 221 Virtue, 33, 38n30, 38n32, 41n39, 64, 73, 74n124, 75, 92, 93, 95n8, 96, 99, 104, 116–119,

 INDEX 

121n80, 125, 179, 183n30, 243, 255–257, 260, 264, 267n34, 273, 276, 279n74, 280, 282, 284, 296, 302n14, 304, 312, 323 Voluntarism, 158n62 Voting, 2, 5, 8, 8n17, 12, 18–20, 74n124, 102, 109–111, 113, 114, 115n64, 116, 146, 162, 224, 258n10, 295 Vulgar and aristocracy, 286, 288 as criterion for distinguishing between good and bad taste, 268 as plebeian, 267, 269 See also Crowd

363

W War of Independence (1808–1814), 72n117, 76, 143, 143n24, 316 Wealth as criterion for voting rights, 111 taxed, 91–125 Women, and citizenship as deprived of political rights, 101 and opinión and interest, 97 Z Zamora, 221n27 Zaragoza, 220, 221 university of, 220n25 Zarzuela (popular operetta) (1860s), 300 Zorrilla, José, 108n45