BURDIEL Myths of Failure and Success

Myths of Failure, Myths of Success: New Perspectives on NineteenthCentury Spanish
Liberalism
Author(s): Isabel Burdiel
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 4 (December 1998), pp. 892-912
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/235170
Accessed: 02-04-2017 13:13 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
The Journal of Modern History
This content downloaded from 129.11.21.2 on Sun, 02 Apr 2017 13:13:29 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Myths of Failure, Myths of Success: New Perspectives on
Nineteenth-Century Spanish Liberalism*
Isabel Burdiel
University of Valencia
Between 1808 and 1843, the long process of dissolution and crisis of the Span-
ish Absolutist Monarchy opened up many possibilities for reaction or reform.
Ultimately, however, it led to the establishment of a liberal parliamentary re-
gime, which, while politically restrictive and socially oligarchical, was also of
a very different nature from that of the absolutist government of the previous
centuries. The clergy and the nobility were stripped of their status as privileged
classes; tithes were abolished; the church and municipalities had their proper-
ties disentailed; and seigneurial rights were eliminated. At the same time,
guilds were wiped out and freedom of industry and trade were proclaimed.
These are the facts. However, William Faulkner might have been right when
he said that facts have nothing to do with truth. Contemporaries termed what
had happened the Spanish Revolution. But what kind of revolution was it?
Did it involve real changes in the countrys social and economic structure? Did
it mean a substantial transfer of power in those spheres? In short, was it an
authentic revolution, a bourgeois revolution?
I
For many years, the answer to that question (coming both from Spanish and
Hispanist historiography) has been no. Relative economic backwardness, po-
litical instability, and the difficulties the Spanish liberal state experienced in
creating a popular sense of national identity have been put down to the nonex-
istenceor at least the limitationsof an authentic liberal and bourgeois rev-
olution. That was an interpretation imported from the political rhetoric of
nineteenth-century radical liberalism and canonized by the Regenerationist

Movement of 1898. As Joaqun Costa put it in 1901, in his extremely influential
* An earlier version of this article was discussed at the History Research Seminar, Uni-
versity of East Anglia, in November 1996. I want to thank the seminar director, Edward
Acton, and all who attended for their very useful comments. I have a special debt to Colin
Davis and to James Casey for their generous reading of the draft version. Research was
sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, DGICYT PB-93-0358-
C02-01.
[The Journal of Modern History 70 (December 1998): 892912]
q 1998 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/98/7004-0004$02.00
All rights reserved.
New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Spanish Liberalism 893

Oligarqua y Caciquismo (Oligarchy and caciquism), those two traditional
evils of modern Spain resulted from the survival of feudal structures in the
countryside and the predominance of the old aristocracy, and their values, over
a weak bourgeoisie incapable of carrying through its own revolution. Agrarian
reform and democracy, then, were seen as the two unfulfilled objectives of the
Spanish revolution of the nineteenth century.1

Eighty years later, in 1985, the historian Jose Alvarez Junco could still criti-
cize the political manipulation of a scientifically badly defined concept (the
concept of bourgeois revolution) whose utilization in the Spanish case is a
clear example of applying the inapplicable. What happened after 1808 had
nothing to do with a bourgeois revolution because all the political and juridical
transformations that took place produced an oligarchic and nondemocratic so-
ciety. In any case, he said, the slowness of the changes initiated in 1808 indi-
cated that the process could not be considered finished until almost our own
time, with the industrialization of the 1960s and the political transition to
democracy in the late seventies. The Spanish revolution, therefore, must have
been either the longest in history or one that never happened.2
The similarities between these analyses of the political failure of the Spanish
bourgeoisie and the notions of the Italian rivoluzione mancata or the German
Sonderweg have been highlighted on numerous occasions. In all three cases,
the French Revolutionary model was obviously used as a benchmark, leading
to an implicit, negative teleology that influenced any study attempting to ex-
plain the experiences of Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, or
Francoism in Spain. The debate was revived in Spain, significantly, during the
later years of Francoism and the transition to democracy.3
Three related outcomes of that debate are worth mentioning here. First, the
heated discussion of the seventies and eighties encouraged a profound reas-
sessment of the hermeneutic value of the very concept of bourgeois revolu-
tion, which, despite its application to a supposedly atypical case, connected
Spanish historiography with the general European debate on nineteenth-
century revolutions. This suggested that a strong revision of the normative
1
The political implications of such an interpretation were all too manifest in Spain in
the strategy of republicans, socialists, and communists during the Second Republic, the
Civil War, and, even later, under Francos regime. The most recent and brilliant discussion

on the so-called Spanish anomaly is Santos Julia, Anomala, dolor y fracaso de Espana,
Claves 66 (1996): 1022.
2
J.Alvarez Junco, A vueltas con la revolucion burguesa, Zona abierta 3637 (1985):
98, 1023.
3
P. Ruiz, Un balance global. Del Antiguo al Nuevo Regimen: Caracter de una trans-

formacion, in Antiguo Regimen y liberalismo. Homenaje a Miguel Artola: Visiones
generales, ed. A. M. Bernal et al. (Madrid, 1994), pp. 15991; and I. Castells, La rivo-
luzione liberale spagnola nel recente dibattito storiografico, Studi storici 1 (1995):
12761.
894 Burdiel
ideas associated with the French model was necessary in the Spanish case and
led to the acknowledgment (as Adrian Shubert has pointed out) that, when all
the cases studied are peculiar, peculiarity itself becomes common ground. For
an increasing number of active historians, it seems rather futile now to go on
speaking of a failed bourgeois revolution, if we take that term to mean a
transfer of power from the feudal classes to the bourgeoisie or, in broader
terms, a radical transition from feudal to capitalist economic relations. Not
only in Spain but all over Europe as well, the concept of bourgeois revolution
that was once shared by both liberal and Marxist historiography has ceased to
serve a useful function.4
Second, in the last twenty years of research, the old unified, grand narrative
of classical Spanish historiography has been undermined by important empiri-
cal research on diverse local and regional situations that are closer to the deeply
fragmented historical reality of the first half of the nineteenth century. For the
first time we can stand on firm empirical ground when testing the validity of
classic global interpretations.5
Third, there has been a profound revision of the myth of failure as a leit-
motiv of Spanish history and historiography. Historians now seriously ques-
tion the image of social, economic, and political stagnation associated with
nineteenth-century Spainan image that (in the earlier seventies) could go so
far as to represent Spain in 1900 as comparable with pre-1789 France.6
Derived from this last perspective, a new orthodoxy is emerging, which,
oddly enough, bears a strong but obscure family resemblance to the old one.
In fact, the recent shift of interest toward long-term analysis, and the swing of
the pendulum from the myth of failure to the myth of success, threatens once
more to blur what still needs to be explained: the so-called Spanish Revolution.
For historians in this camp, that revolution begins to appear, if not nonexis-
4
A. Shubert, A Social History of Modern Spain (London, 1990), p. 2. In the dialogue
between Spanish and European historiography, D. Blackbourn and G. Eley (The Peculi-
arities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century
German History [Oxford, 1984]), W. M. Reid (Money and Liberty in Modern Europe:
A Critique of Historical Understanding [Cambridge, 1987]), C. Mooers (The Making of
Bourgeois Europe [London, 1991]), and G. Comninel (Rethinking the French Revolution
[London, 1987]) have been important.
5
Brilliantly discussed by J. Millan, Liberale revolution und sozialer Wandel im

Spanien des 19 Jahrhunderts: Ein Literaturuberblick, Neue politische Literatur 40
(1995): 381401.
6
The exploding of this myth is referred to in David Ringroses latest book, which has

been published under the Spanish title of Espana, 17001900: El mito del fracaso (Spain,
17001900: The Myth of Failure) (Madrid, 1996) and the English title of Spain, Europe
and the Spanish Miracle (Cambridge, 1996). The most recent and polemic defense of

the so-called Spanish normality is J. P. Fusi and J. Palafox, Espana, 18081996: El de-

safo de la modernidad (Madrid, 1997).
tent or incomplete, at least irrelevant or unnecessary for previous and subse-

quent social and economic change; an implicit parallel is being drawn here (as
a kind of retrospective wishful thinking) to what happened in Spain during the
peaceful transition from Francos regime to democracy.
In my opinion, however, to underestimate nineteenth-century revolutionary
liberalism and the impact of its juridical-political program eludes rather than
resolves the questionnamely, Why did nineteenth-century liberals, instead
of awaiting the blessed transition, opt for (or perceive themselves as driven
toward) acting according to what they termed revolutionary right in order to
achieve disentailment, abolition of tithes and seigneurial rights, freedom of
trade and expression, legal equality, and representative government?
In order to make that question answerable (or arguable as a fruitful ques-
tion), it seems appropriate to start by saying that the political upheavals that
took place between 1808 and 1843, although relevant to the process of social
and economic change in modern Spain, were not the origins of that develop-
ment, nor did they sanction radical change in the short or medium term. What
was forged between 1808 and 1843 was a new political arrangement of the
relations of power, which had already undergone considerable change during
the eighteenth century. The importance of these earlier changes, together with
the impact that the crisis of 1808 had on them, enables us to understand the
specificity of the Spanish Revolution.
In Spain, as in the rest of Europe, the fact that the relationship between
liberalism and revolution was possible but not essential had historical rather
than logical origins. In fact, rather than speaking of causal and necessary rela-
tions, on many occasions one may have to speak of profound tensions and even
of strong antagonisms. The social groups involved in the so-called Spanish
Revolution never constituted a homogeneous group with common interests and
alternatives. The open ideology of liberalism, combined with its intense local
character, implied a deep social and political heterogeneity. The existence of a
liberal nobility and a liberal clergy, the lower classes faith in a liberal utopia,
and the internal political divisions of middle-class liberalism are adequate
proof of this. For this reason, the Spanish revolution remains suspended as an
archetype incapable of historical explanation if we reduce it to a head-on (and
inevitable) struggle between absolutists and liberals, nobles and bourgeois. It
was not, in any case, a struggle inscribed in the logic of historical development
(either Marxist or liberal) in which the Spanish people were mere puppets. In
other words, there was no predetermined relationship between liberalism and
revolution, nor was either conceived as the only possible response to the prob-
lems and expectations of Spanish society at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.
In this essay I will argue that eventually the relationship between liberalism
and revolution was fully established as a result of both external and internal
896 Burdiel
challenges whose origins and dynamics should be analyzed rather than dimin-
ished or taken for granted in one way or another. My intention here is to chal-
lenge two widely accepted interpretations regarding the significance and char-
acter of the Spanish Revolution. The first and more general of these, which I
have already mentioned, is endorsed mainly by those historians who draw on
the theory of modernization. It contains the implicit assumption that the revo-
lution was not really necessary. It did not inaugurate anything that was not
there before, and it contributed very little to already well-established tenden-
cies toward change in the economic and social structure. The works of David

Ringrose and Jesus Cruz are the most recent examples of this standpoint. The
second and more specific interpretation has been best defined by one of the
most influential Spanish Marxist historians, Josep Fontana. Fontana asserts
that the revolution was very limited from the beginning because it consisted
of a compromise between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, with the Crown
as arbiter.7
As I will try to demonstrate, both interpretations are equally flawed in min-
imizing the historical importance, and vigor, of revolutionary liberalism. I will
argue thatunlike what happened in Britain or Germany, for exampleSpan-
ish liberalism was forced into open revolution to ensure that those already
well-established tendencies toward change in the economic and social struc-
ture would not be swallowed up by the equally well-established resistance to
change of political absolutism. A reformist solution from abovewith the
Crown as arbiterwould have been a rather good solution for the majority
of Spanish liberals. That possibility was prevented by the extreme weakness
and financial impotence of the Bourbon monarchy, which was incapable of
forging the necessary social and political consensus through the efficient con-
duct of business, both at home and abroad. I will also suggest that the Crowns
failure to offer a reformist solution should be analyzed in the broader perspec-
tive of an ideological climate that increasingly conceived solutions, threats,
and expectations in liberal terms; in that environment, the old Absolutist Mon-
archy could not present itself as a viable arbitrator.
In the following pages I will present an analytical summary of recent re-
search on the historical configuration of that liberal scenario for political dis-
cussion between 1808 and 1833. In the third and more substantial part of this
essay, I will focus on the decisive political struggles of the 1830s, which consti-
tute the crucial testing ground for my argument. I will conclude by proposing,
7
Ringrose, Spain, Europe; J. Cruz, Gentlemen, Bourgeois, and Revolutionaries: Polit-
ical Change and Cultural Persistence among Spanish Dominant Groups, 17501850

(Cambridge, 1996); J. Fontana, Cambio economico y actitudes polticas en la Espana del

siglo XIX (Barcelona, 1973), and La crisis del Antiguo Regimen, 18081833, 3d ed. (Bar-
celona, 1988).
from a European viewpoint, a revision of some of the traditional arguments

about the failure, limitations, or futility of the Spanish Revolution in the nine-
teenth century.
II
As Ringrose (among others) has consistently argued, Spain in 1808 was not an
immobile feudal society aroused to foreign ways of liberal thinking by the
invasion of the Napoleonic troops. Interest in private property and in a free
market economy was already a working reality during the eighteenth century.
This prospect appealed to wide sectors of the business world as well as to
agrarian property owners, regardless of their level of privilege. Free markets
in land and commodities were seen as the solution to problems of productivity
and food supply. . . . [and] these ideas circulated in official circles well before
the end of the century, reflecting a combination of mercantilist, physiocratic,
and liberal doctrine. 8
In the same way, the relative failure of the Enlightened reformism of
Carlos III (175988) helped to bring out the political implications of economic
reform and economic change. It is true that there is no necessary correlation
between economic and political liberalism. Nevertheless, the assumptions of
economic liberalism could not but have political effects on the search for ex-
planations and political responses to the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy
when faced with Napoleon. The debate concerning the possible relationship
(and possible interactions) between economic progress and political reform
was, in fact, the decisive debate of the late eighteenth century.9
By then, Hobbes and Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau, Turgot and Adam
Smith formed part of Spanish reformist political culture, which also included
the national traditions of natural law, Jansenism (in a very particular Hispanic
form, which laid emphasis on regalism and state control of the church), and
scholastic and historicist criticism of absolutism. These national traditions pro-
vided the language for discussion of such writers through insistence on the
traditional individualism of the freeborn Castilian and, even more, on the

supposed traditional freedom of Aragon. The contrary view (deriving from the
defenders of absolutism), stating that Spanish liberalism was an entirely new
and foreign product, is just a politically motivated myth that recent research
8
Ringrose, Spain, Europe, p. 170.
9
Politics was inherent in the concept of culture in the Enlightenment and was not con-
ceivedas it was lateras different from the social or the economic. C. Lipp,
Politische Kultur oder das Politische und das Gesellschaftliche in der Kultur, in Kultur-

geschichte heute, ed. W. Hardtwig and H.-U. Wehler (Gottingen, 1996), pp. 78110. See

also A. M. Hespanha, Lespace politique dans lAncien Regime, Boletin da Facultade
de Dreito de Coimbra 19 (1983): 1983.
898 Burdiel
has already modified. Early Spanish liberalism was no more (and no less) than
the result of a process of communication and competition between old and
new languages (national and foreign materials) that were ready to hand
and that served to legitimize criticism of Bourbon absolutism from very diverse
sociopolitical positions. By 1808 these languages of nonconformity had al-
ready carved out a public sphere, which obviously was very restricted; but it
undoubtedly existed, and it affected the thinking not only of the middle classes
but also, to a considerable extent, of an important sector of the nobility and
even some of the clergy.10
The turn of the century was a period of war, economic distress, and social
unrest. Ten years of (lost) wars against the French Convention (179395) and
against England (17961802) made evident the weakness of the Spanish mon-
archy, which was incapable even of guaranteeing the defense of its own terri-
tory, including the colonies. In 1794, the experience of the French occupation
of the northern part of the country demonstrated that self-defense was the only
way of stopping a foreign invasiona lesson that was certainly in the minds
of the population when the Napoleonic troops entered the peninsula in March
1808.
During those years of war, resistance against obligatory military levies, food
riots, and rural revolts against the payment of rents and seigneurial dues com-
bined with the discomfort of all sectors tied to external trade, which was badly
affected by the instability of colonial shipping. This situation increased the
endemic financial difficulties of a monarchy that was accustomed to alleviate
them through imperial income. When the ministers of Carlos IV (17881808)
tried to face the problemby selling some church lands in 1798 and revising
the system of fiscal immunities of the nobility and the clergythey transferred
the general sense of precariousness and uncertainty to those privileged groups
that considered themselves especially entitled to determine the Crowns room
for political maneuver.11
10
A. Elorza, La ideologa liberal en la ilustracion espanola (Madrid, 1970); and, more

recently, P. Fernandez Albadalejo, Fragmentos de monarqua (Madrid, 1992); A. Albe-

rola and E. La Parra, eds., La ilustracion espanola (Alicante, 1986). See also J. Marichal,

El secreto de Espana: Ensayos de historia intelectual y poltica (Madrid, 1995). An old

but interesting article is L. Rodrguez Aranda, La recepcion e influjo de la filosofa de

Locke en Espana, Revista de filosofa 76 (1954): 11529. See also J. M. Portillo, La

historia del primer constitucionalismo espanol: Proyecto de investigacion, Quaderni Fi-

orentini 24 (1995): 30373; and J. Varela Suanzes-Carpegna, La constitucion de Cadiz y

el liberalismo espanol del siglo XIX, Revista de las Cortes generales 10 (1987): 27109.
11
J.-R. Aymes, La Guerra de Espana contra la Revolucion Francesa (17931795)

(Alicante, 1991), and J.-R. Aymes, ed., Espana y la Revolucion Francesa (Barcelona,

1989), include local studies, especially for Catalonia, Aragon, and the Basque Country.
See also L. Roura, Guerra Gran a la ratlla de Franca: Catalunya dins la guerra contra la

Revolucio Francesa, 17931795 (Barcelona, 1993).
The result was that, in March 1808, when Napoleons troops began to enter
the country, a court conspiration buttressed by popular support had already
forced the dismissal of the chief minister, Manuel de Godoy (17671851), and
the abdication of Carlos IV in favor of his son, the future Fernando VII (1814
33). The last act of the collapse of the Spanish monarchy was played in Bay-
onne, on the French-Spanish border, when both Carlos IV and Fernando VII
were forced to abdicate in favor of Napoleons brother, Joseph Bonaparte.12
Read in this context, the War of Independence (180814) was both a na-
tional reaction against foreign invasion and a social and political response to
`
the diverse frustrations and aspirations of that critical fin de siecle. In fact,
the declaration of wardisregarding the explicit instructions of the Bourbon
administrationwas in itself a revolutionary action. It was the assertion of the
sovereignty of the people over the absolutism of the monarchs. Both the Span-
ish nation and Spanish liberalism were born from that act of rebellion. Napo-

leonas the liberal priest Martnez Marina liked to sayhad done Spain a
great favour by breaking the ties that bound the nation to its Prince, thus
permitting its effective regeneration. The nation, he said, does not dissolve
or lose its political existence but rather begins its recovery through the bod-
ies and perfect communities that antedated absolutism.13
The movement against the French was extremely heterogeneous, and there
is no doubt about the decisive role played in its organization and ideology by

the Catholic Church and by the traditional hierarchies of the ancien regime.
Nevertheless, the creation of the so-called Juntas, groups of local personalities
who took over authority at the local and regional levels, favored a strong revi-
sion of the bases of sovereignty. The result was the call of the General Cortes
of the Kingdomthe Spanish version of the French Estates Generalwhich
was preceded by a general consultation of the country on the necessary re-
forms.

The Cortes, which gathered in Cadiz in 1810 while the French occupied
almost the entire country, proclaimed in its inaugural session that sovereignty
resided in them. That was simultaneously a declaration of principles and a
political appropriation of what was really happening. From that sui generis
12
From 1796 on, the Spanish diplomacy designed by Manuel Godoy went back to col-
laboration with France against England and its allies. The Treaty of Fontainebleu
(October 1807) granted the Napoleonic troops the right to passage to Portugal. After the
abdication of the Spanish kings, the Statute of Bayonne promised a number of reforms
that attracted a select number of old Spanish enlightened reformers to the French cause.
They became known as the afrancesados. M. Artola, Los Afrancesados (Madrid, 1953).
13
F. Martnez Marina, Teora de las Cortes (18121816), 3 vols., ed. J. M. Prendes (re-

print, Madrid, 1979); P. Fernandez Albadalejo, Observaciones polticas: Algunas

consideraciones sobre el lenguaje poltico de Francisco Martnez Marina, Estat, Dret i
societat al segle XVIII (Barcelona, 1996): 691714.
900 Burdiel
Parliament, a group of deputiescalled for the first time liberalesmanaged

to pass a massive legislative attack on the social, economic, and political organ-

ization of the ancien regime. The Constitution of 1812 created a constitutional
monarchy that derived its legitimacy from the sovereignty of the people,
strictly limited the powers of the Crown, and established civil rights (including
fiscal equality), personal liberty, and the separation of powers. The Cortes also
decreed, among other measures, the abolition of seigneurial jurisdiction, the
elimination of the entail, and freedom of trade and industry.14

The degree of social representativity of the liberales of Cadiz has been a
classical locus of discussion. It is obvious that the nation as a whole was not
liberal. But what was the nation at that time? The true social weight of liberal-
ism, and of absolutism, should be measured where the most immediate social
and political conflicts between them took place, that is, at the local and regional
levels. In this respect, one should take into account the intense local at-
temptsled mostly by merchants and liberal property ownersto displace
the old local oligarchies from the Juntas, to force the convocation of the Cor-
tes, and to defend its doings against the increasing hostility of a royalist
movement.
Even more, those analyses that overemphasize the unrepresentative nature

of the liberalism of Cadiz ignore the fact that many of the measures passed
there responded to the results of the consultation of 1809. The language in
which that consultation was answered was not, in many cases, a liberal lan-

guage. Nevertheless, when the liberals of Cadiz articulated those answers in a
liberal discourse, something changed drastically. That change in the language
of discontent was the crucial legacy of the liberal generation of 1812. From
this point of view, it is not so much a question of the degree of social represen-

tativity of the Cadiz liberals (although this is also relevant) as it is a question
of analyzing how and why that first liberalism was able to develop (as it did)
into the language of reference for the political struggles of the next thirty years.
For it is clear that, from 1812 onward, not only pure absolutism but also the
so-called Enlightened despotism were increasingly driven to take part in an
ideological struggle whose language, and rules, had changed, forcing the com-
batants to speak liberal. That is, it forced every other political discourse to
define its position in relation to the liberal agenda, even when trying to con-
demn liberalism or pretending to forget its very existence.15
14
M. Artola, ed., Las Cortes de Cadiz, Ayer, no. 1 (Madrid, 1991).
15
X. Arbos, La idea de nacio en el primer constitucionalisme espanyol (Barcelona,

1986). For the General Consultation of 1809, see M. Artola, Los orgenes de la Espana

contemporanea, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1959). An interesting discussion on the process of com-
munication, and mutual modification, of absolutist, reformist, and liberal discourses is C.

Garca Monerris, Las reflexiones sociales de Jose Canga Arguelles: Del universalismo

absolutista al liberalismo radical, Revista de estudios polticos 94 (Madrid, 1996):
20328.
That is what Fernando VII did not quite realize when, in 1814, after the

defeat of the French, he overturned the Constitution of Cadiz and all its works
as if such things had never happened. 16 That was an impossible desire, and
one betrayed by the monarchy itself when it refused to restore the nobilitys
legal jurisdiction and, instead, began to urge royal officials to take back (in
favor of the Crown) all rights and dues associated with seigneurial jurisdic-
tion. This was a desperate (and unsuccessful) attempt to gather resources for a
monarchy broken by the independence movements in the American colonies
and, at the same time, unable to finance an effort to recover them. In this con-
text of widespread economic crisis, with state finances in a ruinous, chaotic
condition, the vocabulary of liberal legislation became the language of choice
to justify traditional resistance to the payment of seigneurial dues, while the
nobles openly expressed their dismay at finding themselves caught between
the rebellion of their vassals and the despotic Turkish domination of the
king.17 It was in these conditions, after more than six years of foiled conspira-
cies, that a military rising by some of the troops about to embark for America,
led by Comandante Riego, succeeded in making contact with a series of city
insurrections; their combined forces obliged Fernando VII to accept the Con-
stitution of 1812.
The so-called Trienio Liberal (182023) was somewhat more than a

thwarted liberal experiment. It was really the test laboratory for the Cadiz leg-
islation. The sale of the property of the regular clergy and the abolition of
entails and feudal estates attracted broad sectors of the local middle classes to
liberalism, and capitalist strategies interested a sector of the nobility. Moreover,
patriotic societies (political debating clubs) and the National Militia became
schools for appropriationand re-creationof the liberal language for a
whole world bound up with petty trade and craft production. The political radi-
calization resulting from this milieu actually became one of the great problems
of the time. The boundaries of national sovereignty and, broadly speaking, the
liberal public sphere henceforth constituted the center of the political debate,
and the liberals split into moderados (moderates) and exaltados (extremists).
The former supported revision of the Constitution of 1812 in a restrictive sense
that would permit integration of the Crown into the government and the

achievement of some kind of pact with the sectors of the ancien regime most
ready and willing to change. The exaltados, however, decried limitations on
freedom of expression and political association, defended the integrity of the
16
Decreto real, the so-called Manifesto de los Persas, was published in Gazeta extraor-
dinaria de Madrid (May 12, 1814).
17
Representacion de la nobleza (1820); P. Ruiz, Senoro, propiedad agraria y bur-

guesa en la revolucion liberal espanola, in O liberalismo na Peninsula Iberica na

primeira metade do secolo XIX (Lisbon, 1982), pp. 37113. See also Fontana, La crisis

del Antiguo Regimen; and M. C. Romeo, Entre el orden y la Revolucion: La formacion

de la burguesa liberal en la crisis de la monarqua absoluta (Alicante, 1993).
902 Burdiel
Constitution, supported a radical interpretation of the decree abolishing feudal

estates, and tried to entrench themselves in the National Militia.
The liberal split favored the absolutists, who also capitalized on the discon-
tent of a significant sector of the peasantry (especially in Valencia, Catalonia,
the Basque Country, and Navarra) at the increase in the burden of taxation and
the policy of land reform. Nevertheless, the numerous royalist parties needed
the decisive help of the troops of the Holy Alliancethe 100,000 Sons of
Saint-Louisto restore the absolute monarchy in 1823. One year later, in
1824, with the definitive victory of the American rebels in Ayacucho, the vast
Spanish empire was reduced to its island possessions. While the European
powers were beginning to build their great nineteenth-century empires, Spain
was losing its own.18
This was the beginning of the second absolutist restoration (182333),
which brought with it the outline of a reformist absolutist plan that failed spec-
tacularly becauseunlike, for example, what took place in Prussiathe
Spanish monarchy lacked sufficient strength, financial resources, and political
credibility, as well as a real desire for reform and an ability to reach an
agreement to impose it. At any rate, beyond the repressive policy of the regime
and the survival of what Irene Castells has called the insurrectional utopia of
liberalism, those ten years were characterized by a reformulation of the pro-
grams and strategies of the (already) different sectors of both liberalism and
absolutism. The Crown demanded the return of disentailed property but did
not restore the Inquisition, and it attempted a reform of trade and state finances
that recalled certain liberal proposals. It was a shilly-shallying, faltering policy,
and its immediate effect was to distance a considerable sector of ultra-
absolutists from the king and thus to heighten the crisis of legitimacy of a
monarchy reduced, as Fernando VII himself said, to beating the white (abso-
lutist) donkey and the black (liberal) donkey. 19
III
The final years of the reign of Fernando VII and the opening years of the civil
war, which, on his death, set liberals against absolutists, offer an absolutely
18
A. Gil Novales, El Trienio Liberal (Madrid, 1980); and M. C. Romeo, Liberalismo

y Revolucion en Espana: A proposito del Trienio Liberal, Bulletin dhistoire contempo-
raine de lEspagne 15 (Bourdeaux, 1992): 7188. Among the most influential economic
studies on the repercussions of the end of the Spanish Empire is L. Prados de la Escosura,

De imperio a nacion: Crecimiento y atraso economico en Espana (17801830) (Ma-
drid, 1988).
19
J. Fontana, Hacienda y estado en la crisis final del Antiguo Regimen (18231833)

(Madrid, 1973), p. 19; and I. Castells, La utopa insurreccional del liberalismo (Barce-
lona, 1989).
crucial testing ground for my argument about the decisive shift in favor of
revolution that Spanish liberalism had to make, even if that shift was undesired
and feared by a strong majority of its supporters.
While the absolutists once again managed to raise part of the Catalan peas-
antry in the so-called War of the Malcontents (1827), nonpayment of tithes and
seigneurial dues became widespread in much of the country, and there was a
series of liberal conspiracies that tried hard (and unsuccessfully) to bring back
the Constitution of 1812. At the same time, though, something less spectacular
than these overt struggles was happening. Different sectors of the nobility, the
middle classes, the state bureaucracy, and the army had begun to contemplate
the idea of a political pact between reformist absolutism and moderate liberal-
ism. Those seeking progress within the absolute monarchy had already tasted
the bitter opposition of the ultraroyalists, blocking any consistent movement
toward reform. Meanwhile, the moderate liberals had seen that violent insur-
rection was incapable of prevailing decisively over absolutism, and they were
beginning to understand the dangers that could accompany the participation of
the people in political change.
A petition addressed to Fernando VII in 1831 from Paris reads: There have
been and are means of shaping the happiness of the nation and finally having
a stable constitution which ensures for all time the physical well-being, rights
and properties of the citizens who form society, without the pitfalls of revolu-

tion. The author was Don Vicente Bertran de Lis, a prosperous trader, a distin-
guished proponent of radical liberalism during previous constitutional periods,
a great purchaser of disentailed property, and, by that time, moneylender to a
ruined monarchy. In 1819, a famous conspiracy against absolutism in which
he himself had participated resulted in the execution or exile of various mem-
bers of his own family.20
However, 1831 was an excellent opportunity for trying to change course.
Until then, any possibility of reform had been blocked by the ultraroyalism of
Don Carlos, heir to the throne of his brother, who had no offspring. The po-
litical scenario was substantially altered by the birth of Princess Isabel and

the proclamation of the so-called Pragmatica Sancion (Pragmatic Sanction),
which allowed female succession. This law, passed during the pregnancy of
the queen, revoked the House of Bourbons Salic Law, which had been brought
to Spain in 1701 and was foreign to traditional Spanish practice. When Don
Carloss supporters proved unable to have the law repealed through conspiracy
at the royal court and therefore opted for open, violent action, the time of mod-
erate liberalism seemed to have come.
On Fernandos death, in September 1833, and during the years of the so-
20
M. Bertran de Lis, Representacion al Ministerio Espanol por Don Manuel Bertran
de Lis (Paris, 1833), p. 4.
904 Burdiel
called Carlist War (183340), it was evident to all that the struggle between

the regent Mara Cristina (on behalf of her daughter) and Prince Don Carlos
involved more for the future of the country than a dynastic conflict. Carlist
intransigence at first served the cause of moderate liberalism by forcing the
Crown to make concessions. The result was the granting by the queen regent
of the so-called Estatuto Real (Royal Statute), inspired by the Charter conceded
by Louis XVIII to the French. The goals of the new regime could be summa-
rized as (1) gaining liberal support against Carlism, (2) avoiding the political
radicalization of previous constitutional periods, and (3) as a result, opening
up a path for the political and social integration of the less radical and more
wealthy members of the middle classes into the new regime, while maintaining
aristocratic hegemony.21
Going back to my general question about the relationship between liberal-
ism and revolution, it is worth examining the words of the first prime minister

of the Estatuto regime, Francisco Martnez de la Rosa, who was a landowner,
a successful writer, and an old liberal of 1812 and 1820 who had already suf-
fered exile in France and in England. His famous book, The Spirit of the Cen-
tury (182351), was a reflection on the French revolutionary cycle, including
(significantly) the Restoration regime, which, in his opinion, reached a crisis
when, unfortunately, the work of Louis XVIII was threatened and the people
had to rebel. For him, the French experience had demonstrated that revolu-
tions occur because the institutions are not in agreement with the prevailing
interests of a society. Echoes of Francois Guizots thinking are evident here;
revolution is only inevitable when the abuses sustained by reason of tradition
present a type of resistance that cannot be overcome in any other way or when
it is the only means of avoiding something worse still. The political idea of lib-

eralism, Martnez de la Rosa said, was not (and never had been) revolution but
slow yet uninterrupted progress. Revolutions, he argued, are never necessary
in the same way that natural phenomena are . . . ; reforms, however, are often nec-
essary. The best way of ensuring that the former are impossible is to understand
the necessity of the latter and willingly make the sacrifices required. 22
As the German historian Dieter Langewiesche has argued, until the middle
of the century revolution belonged to the pattern of action of the middle
classes, but not to that of the liberals. European liberals become revolutionar-
ies against their will. They saw revolution as the worst of all reform possibili-
ties, and if the revolutionary process proved unavoidable they sought to end it
as quickly as possible by legalizing it. Alterations should not come by revolu-
21
I. Burdiel, La poltica de los notables: Moderados y avanzados durante el regimen
del Estatuto Real (Valencia, 1987).
22
F. Martnez de la Rosa, El espritu del siglo (Madrid, 182351), pp. 19195.
tionary right, but as a result of constitutional change defined by parlia-

ment. 23
This was clearly the opinion of the majority of Spanish liberals in the 1830s.
At the same time, Fontana is right when he speaks of a class fear among
property owners of all types (including nonliberal ones) with regard to the
strong popular component of Carlismthat vague but operative hatred of the
rich that royalist bands and volunteers represented. For a considerable number
of the countrys elites, whether formally bourgeois or not, Carlism involved
the risk of a more dangerous (or perhaps less controlled) social disorder than
liberalism, especially if liberalism could moderate its ideas and act in defense
of property and peaceful political change.24
According to the Marquis of Miraflores, a leading moderate absolutist, this
explains the fact that the rights of succession of Isabel II were defended by
the flower of Spanish nobility . . . [men like himself ], the majority of the rich
property owners, all the merchants, numerous enlightened individuals, most of
the army, and, in short, every man of any value in the social order. 25 From the

point of view of a moderate liberal like Martnez de la Rosa, It was important
to unite defenders of the cause of Isabel II by calling for the support of the
classes who, by their birthright, their education, or their wealth, exercise most
influence on the nation and not the proletarian mob who are favorably inclined
toward D. Carlos. And for those who were not very politically minded, such

as Cscar i Oriola, a rather modest Valencian landowner, the issues were seen
like this: If they removed the fiefs and seigneurial rights from my lands, ev-
erything would be fine with me. Carlism was as dangerous to these three
speakers as liberal radicalism was.26
So far, Fontana is right: political reform from above, with the Crown as
arbiter, might be the appropriate means to avoid both dangers and combine
order with freedom. However, things could not be so simple or so peaceful.
The key question, of course, was whether the Crown wished to perform the
role of the avant-garde of change and compromise, and the Crown did not. The
23
D. Langewiesche, Liberalismus und Burgertum in Europa, in vol. 3 of Burgertum

in 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europaschen Vergleich, ed. J. Kocka (Munich,
1988), pp. 36094.
24
This hatred of the rich was subordinated to a great extent, as Jesus Millan et al. have
demonstrated, to the interests of certain local oligarchies, whose model of economic de-
velopment could be at variance not only with liberal reforms but also with the interests

of the high nobility eager to secure property rights over their lands. J. Millan et al., eds.,
Carlisme i moviments absolutistes (Vic, 1990).
25
Memoria de la situacion poltica de Espana a la epoca de octubre de 1833 dirigida

a S. M. la Reyna governadora por el marques de Miraflores, conde de Florida-Blanca,

cited in Fontana, La crisis del Antiguo Regimen (n. 7 above), p. 215.
26
Martnez de la Rosa; and Jose Cscar i Oriola, cited in Burdiel, La poltica, p. 102.
906 Burdiel
queen regent refused to act on any of the rather moderate parliamentary peti-
tions; and in towns and villages it was evident that the authorities treated the
Carlists with tolerance while, in contrast, any liberal demonstration was imme-
diately repressed. A moderate liberal Valencian newspaper summarized the sit-
uation as follows: If, God forbid, an inexplicable blindness, or a long series
of errors, should lead us to the terrible dilemma of having to choose between
revolution and despotism, we have suffered too much from the errors of the
latter to reject the former. 27
It is worth having a closer look at the expression God forbid. The experi-
ence of previous constitutional periods had already shown how dangerous it
was to foster popular participation in the development of the liberal program
of reform. Nevertheless, the attitude of the Crown (and the extension of Carl-
ism) was forcing people to face up to that undesirable choice between revolu-
tion and despotism.
During the summer of 1835, government authority was questioned in practi-
cally every important city in the country. Local committees elected by the
people and composed mainly of middle-class liberalsthe so-called Juntas
began to act firmly and autonomously against civil Carlism, which still pre-
vailed among municipal and provincial employees. They also favored the re-
cruitment of radical liberals to increase the power of the local militia, which
supported their request for a change in direction by the Madrid government that
would ensure victory over Carlism and the opening of a clear path to reform. In
return, the Juntas could present themselves as the means of preventing wider
outbreaks of violence by the more radical liberals, which were now threatening
to erupt. In 1835 and during much of 1836, the evidence points to a situation
of multiple sovereignty, as defined by Charles Tilly: a revolutionary situation
that might or might not have led to open revolution.28
During those months, the Juntas tolerated such violent acts as the killing of
well-known supporters of Carlism at the local level or the burning of convents
as a way of bringing about the confiscation and sale of church lands (desamor-

tizacion) by action from below. What they could not tolerate (but could not
prevent, either) was the burning of the Bonaplata factory in Barcelona by a new
type of liberal proletarian mob, which they feared as much as the royalist one

referred to by Martnez de la Rosa. Despite everything, a majority of liberals
was trying hard to avoid the dangerous transition from a revolutionary situation
to open revolution. They thought that they had won their case when the regent
27
El Turia (August 3, 1835).
28
C. Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York, 1978). There is a lengthy dis-
`
cussion in I. Burdiel, Dret, comproms i violencia en la revolucio burgesa: La revolucio
del 1836, Recerques 22 (Barcelona, 1990): 6381.

agreed to the calling to power of Juan Alvarez de Mendizabal, a merchant and
financier with a spotless liberal pedigree and very close ties to British finance

capital. Mendizabal presented a package of reforms that included a revision of
the statute and a widening of the franchise, the exclusion of Don Carlos from
the line of succession, the purging of absolutist employees from the state appa-
ratus, and, finally, the restoration of the laws of disentailment, abolition of sei-

gneurial rights, desamortizacion, and so on. Those were the necessary reforms
that, according to the liberals, would make revolution unnecessary. Without
these basic preconditions it was not possibleat least from the liberal middle-
class point of viewto contemplate pacts, or the bringing together of old and
new elites in the much-admired English fashion.29
Contrary to the opinions of present-day theorists of modernization, when

Mendizabal was removed from office by the regent (after she had refused to
approve his minimum program), Spanish liberals seemed convinced that revo-
lution had become unavoidable. The wish of a particular school of historical
thought (although understandable in terms of historians own preferences) to
discount the importance of violent political action can lead us to underestimate
the significance of particular moments of conflict for historical change. The
direction of historical evolution that scholars see so clearly and inevitably laid
out did not look like that to the Spanish liberals of 1836. However inevitable
the pattern of reform may seem to us in hindsight, people of the time were very
concerned about the real possibility that reform could be resisted and brought
to a halt. Documents from the British Foreign Office fully confirm the credibil-
ity of the rumors that were gaining ground concerning a French intervention,
which would be the third in less than twenty-five years.30
It would be useful to have more detailed research available on the role of
Spain as a piece on the international chessboard of the 1830s and its influence
on internal politicsa subject that has generally been neglected by Spanish
historiography of the liberal revolution. This lack of detailed research has pre-
vented an accurate evaluation of the reality or fictionto my mind, more real-
ity than fictionbehind the rumors concerning the growing agreement be-
tween the regent and the French government that they should do a deal with
Carlism. This pact would secure a regime able to reinforce the Western Euro-
pean Alliance and, at the same time, able to keep the revolutionary peril at a
29
Both progressive and moderate liberalism shared in this respect a strong common
will to abandon, as early as possible, the tactic of taking to the streets and to return to

the respectability of parliamentary politics. For Barcelona, the best study is A. M. Garca

Rovira, La revolucio liberal a Espanya i les classes populars (Vic, 1989).
30
Partly available in Prime Ministers Papers Series: Palmerston, vol. 1, Private Corre-
spondence with Sir George Villiers (afterwards Fourth Earl of Clarendon) as Minister to
Spain, 18331837 (London: Her Majestys Stationery Office, 1985).
908 Burdiel
distance from French frontiers.31 None of this was at all acceptable from the
liberal point of view. Even a French consul could see that: one such official

reported from Valencia that the dismissal of Mendizabal has complicated the
situation alarmingly, causing the most violent and perceptible indignation
among a multitude of influential men who had remained calm up until then. 32
The revolts throughout the country in 1836 achieved their objective when a
mutiny of the royal guard forced the regent to accept the Constitution of 1812.

The request for a reward by Sergeant Gomezthe leader of the mutineers

met with the following reply from Mendizabal, back in power after the 1836
uprisings: There is nothing I can do for a revolutionary. 33 This sort of politi-
cal version of the story of Judas and the thirty pieces of silver should not con-
ceal the importance of what had happened. I shall take it as the point of depar-
ture for my concluding remarks.
IV
The political outcome of the liberal revolution of the 1830s was a constitu-
tional monarchy based on the political exclusion of the majority of the popula-
tion. The resulting liberal parliamentary system was profoundly antidemo-
cratic, antipopular, and oligarchic. Despite being formally a centralist system,
the new national state reformulated but did not destroy the old political, social,
and cultural characteristics of local and regional milieus. These are all undeni-
able facts. However, the consequences drawn from them and the evaluation of
their causes need to be revised. First, as I hope I have demonstrated, the col-
lapse of the regime of the Royal Statute put an end to any chance of reform
from above. Control, from then on, was no longer in the hands of moderate
absolutism but in those of liberalism. When the relationship between the two
was reversed, the liberal revolution became a fact. It was not the result of a
pact between the nobility and the bourgeoisie with the Crown as arbiter. The
Crown never acted as such; it was obliged to accept a situation that it had not
mastermindedone, in fact, that it had opposed repeatedly.
31
The notorious influence of British interests, through their ambassador, on the pro-

gressive government of Mendizabal was something the French did not approve of,
especially when they found out that the British were negotiating an exclusive bilateral
trade agreement just when revolutionary sentiment was at its peak. I. Burdiel, Relaci-

ones internacionales y revolucion liberal: Notas sobre las relaciones Hispano-Britanicas

durante la revolucion de 1835, Hispania 45 (Madrid, 1985): 619633.
32 `
The French Consul quoted in Ministere des Relations Exterieures, Affaires Etran-
gers: Correspondance politique consulaire. Espagne, vol. 11 (JanuaryNovember,
1936), fols. 21112, 42123.
33
A. Gomez, Los sucesos de La Granja en 1836: Apuntes para la historia (Madrid,
1864), p. 39.
Second, the central position of the local setting as a place for developing
liberal ideas and interests was a reality in Europe throughout the nineteenth
century. The primary setting for sociopolitical life was not so much the nation
as the local/regional milieu. As James Sheehan pointed out some years ago,
although liberalism was global in scope, it was intensely local in character. In
the case of Spain, more work needs to be done to evaluate the effectiveness of
local networks of relationships in gradually shaping Spanish liberalism as a
national reality. The tension between nation and region should not be evaluated
in a rigid, ahistorical way that implies mutual exclusivity in terms of political
identity. In Spain, as in France, Portugal, and Italy, such tensions did not neces-
sarily imply a questioning of the nation-state. Spanish history shares with these
other European realities an intense contradiction between an emphasis on the
nation as a community that the liberals helped to create, on the one hand, and
an emphasis on the networks of local power, on the other. As has been pointed
out by, among others, Marco Meriggi and Piero Schiera, city, bourgeoisie,
liberalism and nation coexisted during the long nineteenth century as chocks
maintaining an unstable equilibrium, elements constituting an unresolved
tension. 34
Third, the liberal rupture was not a popular revolution and, without a doubt,
the aim of the liberals was not a transition from absolutism to democracy. The
change had been brought about with the people, but not for the people. The
continual overlapping of the liberal utopia and the political project of democ-
racy is a historical fact. Nevertheless, making the two identical is an error of
historical perspective. As in the rest of Europe, democracy and liberalism were
not necessarily compatible systems; in fact, they were antagonistic throughout
the nineteenth century. Indeed, the main political problem of liberalism had
always been to control the revolutionary energy generated by the struggle
against the old regime. In Spain, it took almost ten years to reduce the forces
of democracy unleashed from 1835 to 1836. Once the democratic supporters
of the Constitution of 1812 had served to break the hegemony of absolutist
reformism in the transition to the new liberal regime, that document was aban-
doned in favor of a much more moderate text, the Constitution of 1837. From
then on, national sovereignty was understood to be embodied in Crown and
34
J. J. Sheehan, Some Reflections on Liberalism in Comparative Perspective, in

Deutschland und der Westen, Vortrage und diskussionsbeitrage des Sympossions zu Eh-

ren von Gordon Craig, ed. H. Kohler (Berlin, 1984), pp. 4458; M. Meriggi and P.
`
Schiera, eds., Dalla citta alla nazione: Borghesia ottocentesche in Italia e in Germania
(Bologna, 1994). I follow here the discussion introduced by I. Burdiel and M. C. Romeo
in Old and New Liberalism: The Making of the Bourgeois Revolution, 18081844,
Journal of Iberian Studies (London, 1998); and I. Burdiel, The Origins and Peculiarities
of Spanish Liberalism, 18081843, in Spanish History since 1808, ed. J. Alvarez Junco
and A. Shubert (London and New York, 1998).
910 Burdiel
parliament, suffrage was drastically restricted, and both the moderados and the
progresistas tried hard to enact revolutionary socioeconomic legislation while
stopping revolution as the ideological climate for political discussion. The
Constitution of 1845 only consolidated the oligarchical postrevolutionary pact
on the basis of respectable liberalism and of upper-middle-class interests. I
wish to emphasize the historical quality of the prefix post- and to recall that,
as in the rest of Europe, classical liberalism meant, above all, representative
politics without democracy.35
Finally, the conventional wisdom according to which the old privileged aris-
tocracy managed to survive politically and to consolidate its rights to private
land as a result of liberal legislation has already been strongly modified by
recent research. In fact, the old nobility only retained its lands in those areas
where it had already consolidated property rights throughout the eighteenth
century, regardless of its situation of privilege. This was the case in the classic
latifundia areas of Extremadura, part of Andalusia, and CastillaLa Mancha.
In other placesas diverse as Madrid, Catalonia, Valencia, and Valladolid
the nobility suffered an important reduction in its assets and incomes in the
medium term. We now have enough evidence to argue that many of the old
Grandee families (Osuna, Medina Sidonia, Altamira, etc.) ended the century
with their estates reduced to less than one-third of what they owned before
the revolution.
By that time, the wealthiest people in the country were of bourgeois ori-
ginexactly the opposite of the situation in the 1830s. The aristocrats that
managed to preserve their fortunes (and there were not as many as we had
previously thought) did so by adapting their social and economic strategies to
the new situation of the free market and private property; that is, by moderniz-
ing within the framework of the changes introduced by the liberal revolution.
Their earlier rights were not simply transferred to bourgeois-type rights, as
Ringrose implies. Rather, the liberal revolution forged a new kind of relation-
ship between old and new wealth, forcing the adaptation of the former to the
model of economic activity of the latter. It was this (and not the untouched
survival of the nobilitys economic power) that allowed the famous merger of
old and new elites. This situation, significantly, did not really materialize until
the last third of the nineteenth century.
35
As in the title of Michael Bentleys book, Politics without Democracy (18151914)
(London, 1984). The Spanish liberal problem from a European perspective has been

addressed in L. Roura and I. Castells, eds., Revolucion y democracia: El Jacobinismo eu-
ropeo (Madrid, 1995). See also D. Langewiesche, Europa zwischen Restauration und
Revolution, 18151849 (Munich, 1989); J. Kocka, Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-
Century Europe (Oxford, 1993); I. Woloch, ed., Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom
in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, Calif., 1996); and E. Pii, ed., I linguaggi politici
delle rivoluzioni in Europa (Florence, 1992).
As I have been able to demonstrate elsewhere, when that merger took place,
parliament had already been occupied by deputies who came mainly from the
middle classes, leaving the old nobility clearly outside the main centers of po-
litical action. Some of the new politicians were given titles by the Crown, but,
of course, that is something very different than saying that the old nobility
managed to survive politically. One of the striking features of nineteenth-
century Spanish politics is precisely the fact that the old nobility did not sur-
vive. When we compare this situation with the political (and social) survival
of the hereditary aristocracy in England, Germany, and even France, it be-
comes clear that the peculiar quality of the Spanish situation is just the oppo-
site of the way the conventional wisdom would have it.36
In fact, the aspects on which one should reflect are the extraordinarily plebe-
ian nature of the Spanish liberal regime and the political effects of the displace-
ment suffered by the traditional nobility. The strong bourgeois exclusiveness
of Spain in the nineteenth century, isolating the liberal regime socially and
politically from above and from below, constitutes a relatively atypical

case in the European context. I agree fully with Jose Varela Ortega when he
relates the extreme political instability of Spain in the nineteenth century not
with the absence of or limitations affecting the liberal revolution but with its
strongly breakaway nature. In Spain, the liberal state did not emerge gradually

but was formed by the liquidation of the state of the ancien regime. Probably
its weakness and the difficulties of nationalization lay precisely in the radical
nature of a revolutionary process that had hitherto been considered limited
and insufficient.37

No wonder, then, that Alvarez de Bugallal, a member of Canovas del Cas-
tillos government in the 1870s, could confidently say: We have already had
our 89; our complete revolution has already been accomplished . . . , we ac-
complished it in 1812, in 1820, and it has been framed into a definitive consti-
tution since 1833 up to the present day. 38 No wonder, either, that radical liber-
alism, an important sector of the middle and popular classes that had fought in
the 1830s against Carlism and nevertheless had been excluded from the new
political sphere, may have thought that its revolution was still to come.
36
I. Burdiel, Analisis prosopografico y revolucion liberal, 18341854, Revista de es-

tudios polticos 93 (monographic issue on Parlamento y poltica en la Espana

contemporanea [Madrid, 1996]: 12338); D. Higgs, Nobles in Nineteenth Century
France: Practices of Inegalitarianism (Baltimore, 1987); and H.-G. Haupt, Noblesse et

bourgeoisie dans la societe des notables, Histoire sociale de la France: Depuis 1789
`
(Paris, 1993): 10586; Les noblesses europeenes au XIXe siecle (Rome, 1988).
37
J. Varela Ortega, La Espana poltica de fin de siglo, Revista de Occidente 102203
(Madrid, 1998): 4377.
38
Alvarez de Bugallal (Cortes of 186971) in La oposicion liberal-conservadora en
las Cortes constituyentes de 18691871 (Madrid, 1871).
912 Burdiel
It was these radical liberals who, like their counterparts in the rest of Europe,
clung to the concept of bourgeois revolution (which from their point of view
was yet to come) and the finalist conception of history implicit in it. As in the
rest of Europe, they accepted (and/or converted into a political banner) the idea
that there was no discontinuity between liberalism and democracy and that the
former had to be the logical consequence of the latter. The historical reality
wasas is well knownquite the contrary. But, that, I believe, is another
(sad) story, whose consequences we have all suffered for a long time, not least
for being unable to identify properly its causes and its historical implications.

BURDIEL Myths of Failure and Success

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

BURDIEL Myths of Failure and Success

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Myths of Failure, Myths of Success: New Perspectives on NineteenthCentury Spanish

tent or incomplete, at least irrelevant or unnecessary for previous and subse-

from a European viewpoint, a revision of some of the traditional arguments

Parliament, a group of deputiescalled for the first time liberalesmanaged

Constitution, supported a radical interpretation of the decree abolishing feudal

tionary right, but as a result of constitutional change defined by parlia-

Você também pode gostar