Monarchy and Liberalism in Spain: The Building of the Nation-State, 1780-1931

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Monarchy and Liberalism in Spain The Building of the Nation-State, 1780–1931

Edited by David San Narciso, Margarita Barral-Martínez and Carolina Armenteros

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Introduction Possible monarchies: the political and cultural modernisation of Spanish liberalism David San Narciso Margarita Barral-Martínez Carolina Armenteros An institution central to the political, social, and cultural construction of the modern nation state, European monarchy played a founding role in the birth of liberalism, as well as in liberalism’s development into a mature political current formative of the modern State. The history of Spain, from the downfall of the Old Regime to the nineteenth-century establishment of a modern parliamentary system to the rise of a military dictatorship in the 1920s, offers at once a paradoxical and a particularly illustrative example of this fact. Obliged to compromise with liberalism in order to survive, the Spanish monarchy functioned during most of the nineteenth century as the stabiliser of the liberal enemy that had at once subjugated it and endowed it with legitimacy. Even more, after liberalism imposed itself on the monarchy, the two cooperated closely in establishing the modern nation state. As Spain’s monarchs gave up political power—definitely in theory, only partially in practice—to national sovereignty as embodied by parliament and as expressed in the written constitution, they ironically contributed to forming modern Spanish nationhood through new means of representation. In the end, the interdependence between monarchy and liberalism became so close that—as the twentieth century demonstrated—they were unable to survive without each other. Understandably, Spanish scholars have taken an interest in the monarchy’s role in the rise of liberal statehood, from Isabel Burdiel in her study of Isabel II to Ángeles Lario and Javier Moreno-Luzón in their work on the Spanish Crown’s place in nineteenth and twentieth-century political systems, respectively.1 Jean-Philippe Luis has for his part described the downfall of absolutism at the dawn of the liberal age as well as the coexistence, during the last ten years of Fernando VII’s reign, between the king’s absolutist ideology and the State’s liberal practices.2 By contrast, Anglophone scholarship has neglected the rapport between liberalism and the Spanish monarchy almost completely.3 Filling this lacuna, however, is important. Not only did Spain play a pioneering role in the birth and development of European

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liberalism—a fact frequently forgotten given the country’s reactionary image in enlightened and post-­enlightened works—it was also a modern empire, once world-­encompassing, whose political fate had transcontinental repercussions.4 Monarchy and liberalism’s unlikely alliance in Spain, its development and its outcome likewise exhibit striking and instructive parallels with contemporary Italy and especially Portugal. More usefully in a world where monarchy is a subject largely reduced to tabloid and society magazines, studying the complex role the institution played in the emergence of the modern liberal nation state is crucial for gaining awareness of the ways in which, dangerously or benignly, the monarchical legacy and presence continue to condition the political and cultural practice of modern European democracies. Liberalism’s deep dependence on monarchy during the decades of its emergence and establishment in Spain furthermore raises universal questions regarding the role that ritual and other tools for projecting symbolic fictions and collective imaginaries play in the transformation of government, the balanced practice of politics, and the bloodless transition of power, that supreme virtue of democracy. The liberalism-­monarchy dynamic invites us, in short, to question the boundaries between the political and the cultural, and more specifically to wonder about the extent to which the ceremonial, far from being as purely frivolous and as decorative as it is frequently taken to be, has the potential to function as a stabiliser and destabiliser of the political, especially during critical times that witness the transformation of the State. Most of the essays in this volume were presented at the conference ‘Monarchy and Modernity since 1500’ that was held at the University of Cambridge in January 2019. Together, they provide a systematic overview of the rapport between liberalism and monarchy in Spain, even while constituting a set of original contributions to knowledge that combine the perspectives of established specialists and emerging scholars. The collection covers monarchy’s rapport with the pre-liberal, liberal, and post-liberal nation state from the eve of the French Revolution, when the Old Regime monarchy functioned as the regulator of a ‘natural’ order, to Alfonso XIII’s expulsion from Spain following the failure of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. It also explores monarchical agency vis-à-vis liberalism through two main thematic-analytical axes. The first is a political axis that examines the monarchy’s direct confrontation with, and adaptation to, liberalism as a political force with democratic, constitutional, and parliamentary expressions. The second axis is cultural, and studies the Crown’s self-­reinvention and support of liberalism through various staging strategies that comprised visits, rituals, ceremonies, iconography, religiosity, and familial and military display. To set the stage for this dual analysis, the sections that follow outline the political and, cultural context of Spain’s nineteenth-century monarchy, with particular reference to liberalism and the construction of the modern nation state.

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An intense political struggle: Impositions, resistance, and compromises In 1840, the progressive politician Joaquín María López gave a course in constitutional politics at the Ateneo de Madrid following the custom of these spaces of political education and socialisation. There, before the cream of Spain’s politicians and intellectuals, he affirmed that the monarchy and the nation were engaged in a war ‘fast or slow, muted or declared, softened by moderation, dissimulated by hypocrisy, tempered or suspended by events’, whose end could only lead to ‘[parliamentary] representation disappearing or monarchy ceding and becoming dependent upon [the nation]’.5 Recent experience certainly supported his view. When he pronounced these words, little more than four years had passed since Spanish liberalism had managed to impose itself definitively on a monarchy more than mistrustful of it.6 The attempts at political involution encouraged by the Crown before—and after—1840 entailed maintaining a vigilant attitude to force the institution to maintain itself within liberalism. The process was enormously similar in Europe’s other countries. The French Revolution had altered the royal figure in the whole continent, initiating a complex process to relocate it within the new liberal constitutional framework. In 1815, the French theorist Benjamin Constant identified the five powers contained in a constitutional monarchy.7 Among them, the ‘royal power’ stood out among the others as a neutral and mediating element. Monarchy thus became the keystone of a whole system articulated around the separation of effective functions and control of the other actors. The fundamental difference between absolute and constitutional monarchy, Constant specified, was the establishment of a whole series of precautions that avoided the usurpation of other powers. Fifty years later, Walter Bagehot synthesised this whole current of opinion regarding the role that the monarchical institution and its representatives should have in a liberal and wholly constitutional world. In his reflections, the British writer and journalist established a clear division of power between what he named dignified and efficient parts. Thus, whereas the former were charged with acquiring respect and prestige, in order to ‘excite and preserve the reverence of the population’, the latter had the mission of ‘work and rules’.8 This cleavage rested, therefore, on the clear delimitation between a monarchy that dignified the State and a cabinet that used this reserve of authority and legitimacy in the daily labours of government. It was a theory that depended on the Crown’s neutralisation as a structure of political power in order to seclude it in a symbolic space, and place it above party struggles. What we have gleaned from Bagehot’s analysis should not lead us into error. As an ideal type, his monarchical model still represents an archetype— unreal, but referential even for his contemporaries—of the process of the monarchy’s adaptation to the constitutional system.9 The rise of new constitutional frameworks opened up a path that was difficult to transit based on

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the tense and changing relationship between the Crown and the new sovereign subject, the nation. The process was far from being simple, particularly due to the resistance put up by monarchs deprived of part of their functions and sovereignty. In this way, the struggles for legitimacy between parliaments, governments, and monarchs were in certain cases intense throughout the nineteenth century.10 Re-endowed with meaning and relocated in the system, however, monarchy demonstrated it was not a vestige of the past. As Arno. J. Mayer said, at least until 1914 it constituted the very centre of political and civil societies.11 In such a way, the institution maintained a fundamental role within Europe’s process of liberal reconfiguration. The monarchy of the Spanish Bourbons broadly followed dynamics and problematics that were very similar to those of its European cousins.12 The watershed was marked by the triple crisis—regarding constitutions, independence, and sovereignty—that opened up in 1808 with Spain’s invasion by the Napoleonic troops.13 This fact relied on the substrate of a plural constitutional culture that arose towards the end of the eighteenth century to redirect administrative monarchy. In the name of the common good, the Crown widened its space of action, modified the constitution of the State, and eroded the statutory and territorial particularisms proper to the Old Regime.14 In 1808, the solution depended on a new constitutional pact between the king and the people. But when the monarchy was kidnapped by Napoleon, its sovereignty was absorbed by a people become nation, as a new sovereign subject took shape. Established on the principle of national sovereignty, the Constitution of 1812 founded a radical and essentially new monarchical model.15 It applied a strict separation and hierarchisation of powers, establishing all of the monarch’s functions that made him the head of government and first magistrate of the nation. But to these royal prerogatives were added a great number of restrictions that reflected the fear of the figure of the despot king that had haunted the eighteenth century. Among them stood out the impossibility of blocking, suspending, or dissolving the Cortes or of ceding or renouncing royal authority, as the nation’s dominion was prior to any of the monarchy’s decisions. The Constitution’s practical application was limited. In 1812, Fernando VII was in exile, so it could not be implemented. When the king returned to Spain in 1814 he derogated it, annulled all of the Cortes’ acts and arrested the deputies. But the changes implied by this Constitution marked the monarchy’s destiny, forcing even the institution’s reformulation within the counter-revolutionary cultures that flourished in the context of the Spanish Restoration.16 It was necessary to wait until the liberal revolution of 1820 to put into practice the assembly-centred monarchical model it proposed. The result could not be worse. For three years conflicts succeeded each other among the king, the ministers, and the Cortes as a consequence of the very rigid application of the division of powers. The model showed its inviability for several reasons: it did not establish equality between the executive and legislative powers, it provided for no links between the powers of the

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State, and it developed no mechanisms of mutual control.17 In this way, an openly anti-liberal and counter-revolutionary king used his constitutional prerogatives—like the suspensive veto—to delay many of the laws that emanated from the Cortes and to create government crises. The liberal impulse came to an abrupt end with the Holy Alliance’s armed intervention through the French army, following Fernando VII’s appeals for help to his European cousins. In 1823, liberalism was condemned to exile and to using uprisings to obtain power, although always with unsatisfactory and dramatic results. Fernando VII’s death in 1833 opened up a window of opportunity to consummate the liberal revolution in the context of a bloody civil war.18 The king had left as heir a three-year-old girl, Isabel II, whose mother, María Cristina of Bourbon, exercised the regency. With most counter-­revolutionaries up in arms in support of prince Don Carlos, Fernando VII’s brother, the regent queen had to seek the liberals’ help. María Cristina compromised with a weak, incipient, and uncertain constitutional model already founded in a new political theory. In 1834 she promulgated the Estatuto Real, a sort of endowed charter that proclaimed sovereignty as shared between the monarchy and the Cortes, and that amply reinforced the power of the former vis-à-vis the 1812 model. Over the medium term, this text implied the definitive establishment of liberalism and constitutional monarchy in Spain. However, the Estatuto Real’s framework soon ceased providing a space of minimal encounter. Given the obstacles that the Crown constantly raised to the regime’s liberalisation, a liberal revolt occurred in 1836 that ended the monarchy’s attempts to control the political process from above.19 Liberalism imposed itself definitively on the monarchy, configuring a constitutional regime founded on the theoretical principles of doctrinaire liberalism, and the rejection of the assembly-­ inclusive monarchy that was formulated by the Constitution of 1812. In this way, the two Constitutions that defined the political framework of the liberal State, the progressive one of 1837 and the moderate one of 1845, proclaimed that sovereignty was shared between the monarchy and the nation and increased the Crown’s executive power.20 Both attributed to the monarchy a legislative power portrayed in the capacity to make laws under the formula ‘las Cortes con el Rey’ (the Cortes with the King). To this was added the capacity to initiate law on a par with the Cortes and the ability to summon, close, dissolve, and suspend them. The creation of a shared sovereignty between the Cortes and the Crown— the so-called regime of dual trust—weighted the balance towards the strengthening of royal power, that is, of the executive. This was achieved through three mechanisms: the refusal to sign, the use of the decree of dissolution of the Cortes, or government through Royal Decree.21 It was done in such a way that, as the conservative political writer Jaime Balmes put it, in the case of a conflict between the government and the parliament it was the queen who resolved it ‘either accepting the ministry’s resignation or withdrawing her trust or dissolving the Cortes… The monarch opted, then, between the ministry and the Cortes’.22 This was all done under the

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protection of the prerogatives that the Constitutions themselves attributed to the Crown. These ample powers are understandable only in the context of the struggle between the parliament and the government, and always under the supposition that the political parties would manage to impose themselves on the Crown and instrumentalise all those prerogatives. For that was needed, first, the existence of strong, united, and compact parties that would come to stable agreements regarding parliamentary functioning, something that in general was not achieved then. The Moderate Party—the principal political current during Isabel II’s reign—cancelled the party game and relied exclusively on the throne, in such a way that it found no other way of strengthening itself politically than by strengthening the Crown. The Progressive Party, for its part, exhibited in practice similar behaviours, although it distanced itself in its political principles from its conservative adversaries. As the British ambassador, Lord Howden, wrote in 1856, ‘here the monarchy is conceived as nothing more than a party monarchy; and all the parties and factions defend themselves rather than the Crown and attack or protect it depending on whether they are in power or not’.23 The existence of a dual executive—formed by the Council of Ministers and the queen—with large constitutional powers gave the Crown an ample field of political action. This possibility of intervention was multiplied when the parties were unable to impose themselves on the monarchy’s will. Queen Isabel deployed all her political abilities to encourage the parties’ internal fragmentation and divide them into opposing groups. By this means she freed herself from the political control that these parties should have imposed, thus creating for herself an ever larger sphere of action. This situation generated various attempts at political involution supported by the Crown, which led for instance in 1854 to a liberal revolution where Isabel II’s throne was endangered. This struggle to try to impose oneself over the other political actor configured what Isabel Burdiel has called ‘political entropy’,24 that is, a sort of levelling of power in the attempt to control the other actor that led to the general paralysis of the Isabeline liberal system. The regime ended up completely paralysed and delegitimated due to the existence of political parties that were very fragmented around certain figures and with an attitude of exclusion towards political adversaries, which legitimated the use of uprisings as a tool of political change.25 In this context, the party system in a state of crisis and decomposition transferred to the monarchy a large part of its responsibility, precisely due to the constitutional prerogatives and political practices of which politicians had made use. In this way the monarchs’ decisions, their successes, and especially their errors, acquired particular publicity. The revolution of 1868 ended with the expulsion of Isabel II and the opening up of a large process of political mobilisation and participation that would last until 1874. The revolution was anti-dynastic, against a Bourbon family associated with despotism, but it was not anti-monarchical. The Constitution of 1869 reassumed the principle of national sovereignty and formed a model of parliamentary monarchy where the nation—represented in the Cortes—had

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priority over the Crown.26 With the Constitution approved, a search for a monarch was then conducted among European dynasties that represented fully liberal government, among which the Italian one stood out, following Italy’s recent process of unification. Amadeo of Savoy was the king of Spain that the Cortes elected in 1870. It was the start of a brief and convulsed reign characterised by the disaffection of almost everybody, that after the dismantling of the revolutionary coalition, lacked political defenders.27 In addition, political practice and dynamics ended up denaturing this constructed regime, so that, for instance, elections were fraud—as had happened before and would happen again—in spite of the demands for transparency during the electoral processes that presided over the revolution of 1868 and the constituting process. Without a political or social base, the king decided to abdicate for himself and his descendants in 1873. Thus began the first republican experience in Spanish history, which lasted hardly a year, and was spent in the festering confrontations between republican supporters of a federal and a unitary model. In 1874 another military uprising inaugurated the reign of Isabel’s son, Alfonso XII. Known as the Restoration, this was a period conceived, first, as a response to the excesses of the previous age regarding the political participation and mobilisation of the masses. It was also organised by analysing the errors made during Isabel II’s reign, particularly party exclusivism and the recourse to violence as a tool to access government. In this way, the new Constitution of 1876 gathered up the revolution’s conquests in exchange for accepting the conservative precept of shared vis-à-vis national sovereignty. The king maintained his constitutional prerogatives and his important position in the system as a moderating power. The difference was now in the parties’ framework of understanding, in the will to establish a stable system that could integrate political adversaries and be founded on agreements between parties.28 To attain this, it was necessary to provide for what had not been accomplished during the Isabeline age: the articulation of stable and cohesive parties that could peacefully take turns in power through legal mechanisms. Alfonso XII’s unexpected death in 1885, with a regent queen pregnant with the future king Alfonso XIII, struck fear about the permanence of political achievements since 1874.29 In this situation, the leaders of the two major parties agreed to succeed each other cyclically in power. In this way, a harmonious relationship was established between the government and the opposition that implied agreeing on norms and resolving political conflicts through negotiation. It was a system based on electoral fraud—controlled by the new government and based on an agreement about the number of each party’s seats—where the monarchy maintained a preponderant role as the last instrument of government change. In spite of the political crises that succeeded each other, particularly after the enormous impact of the Spanish-American War and the end of Spain’s overseas empire,30 liberalism maintained a long idyll with the monarchy that had been unknown until then. The Restoration’s system survived María Cristina’s regency and structured, in this way, the first liberal phase of Alfonso XIII’s effective reign

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(1902–1923).31 This was a time when the challenges generated by the First World War led the whole of European liberalism into a deep crisis. The coup d’ état of General Primo de Rivera in 1923, and the support given to him by the king, ended the liberal system along with the constitutional monarchy and parliamentary government it represented.32 It was a system in crisis that had begun its subtle transformation towards a complete parliamentary regime, where governments depended only on Cortes elected through transparent processes.33 The system of dual trust was broken when King Alfonso XIII supported the general, thus sanctioning and legitimating the dictator in the face of civil and parliamentary government. This led him to assume political responsibility for the dictatorship, identifying his figure with the dictator’s. Within his constitutional prerogative, Alfonso XIII named Primo de Rivera ‘sole minister’ with ‘powers to propose [to the king] whatever decrees are convenient’ with the force of law.34 It was a measure that broke the traditional division of powers and endowed the executive power with co-legislative functions that had previously been exercised by the Cortes. This appointment was followed by the dissolution of the Congress and the Senate, by non-compliance with the Constitution of 1876—since the king did not summon new Cortes within the three-month period prescribed in the constitutional text—and by the destitution of the respective presidents after they reminded Alfonso XIII that he had sworn to uphold the Constitution. In this way, during six long years, a dictatorship was established with a clear anti-parliamentary character where constitutional guarantees were suspended, the state administration was purged, and severe censorship was imposed. The authoritarian turn sponsored by the king was principally effected against a parliamentary liberalism that was seen as corrupt and distant from the true national will of which the monarchy and the army now assured they were the faithful interpreters. During these years, the dictatorship attempted to maintain absolute control over public order and to open up a constituting process, naming a corporate assembly that de facto liquidated the parliamentary regime and the Constitution. What is certain is that the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera signified a complete rupture with the whole liberal tradition of the previous century and its possible process of parliamentarisation. Although the king himself justified the authoritarian solution to return to ‘normality’, the solutions to the political crisis implied a change in the essence of the regime and of the monarchy. This problem would form part of the deep crisis that European liberalism experienced after the First World War, and that obliged monarchies to opt between the democratisation—following the British model—or the fascisation—­in attunement with the Italian case—of liberal regimes. In this way, the ‘normalisation’ pursued between 1923 and 1930 was very far from restoring the liberal Constitution of 1876. The dictatorship’s failure to create a new legality with an innovative constitutional project carried the monarchy itself away with it. When Primo de Rivera resigned in 1930, there was no help except to invest in democratisation, assuming the great risks it

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implied.35 But in order to be successful, democratisation needed the participation of republicans and socialists, as well as an agreement between liberal currents.36 These political actors had collaborated to conspire against the dictatorship and to attain power through force of arms, a recourse that had been absent since the pronunciamiento of 1874, but that the coup d’ état of 1923 had again legitimated, breaking the consensus of the Restoration. Mistrust of a king who had prioritised the authoritarian solution and broken his oath put a break on the possible process of parliamentarising the liberal constitutional regime, and led to the monarchy’s end in 1931. Thus ended the combat between the monarchy and liberalism that had raged since 1812. The struggle was, as we have seen, very intense. And in it, in addition to the political and constitutional aspects analysed, a series of cultural elements would be determining that were related to the new representative and symbolic functions that the monarchy had to assume with the liberal revolution.

Bourgeois culture and Catholic morals for a monarchical national identity Symbology and iconography acquired a special value in the conformation of individual and collective identities since the eighteenth century. The ultimate objective was to shape political communities, united by a history in which monarchy occupied a fundamental place. This tendency would be completed in the nineteenth century with the development of nationalist currents that promulgated their own myths, symbols, and monuments. In all of them, the social and cultural dimension of kings, queens, and entire royal families played a protagonic role. The monarchy, a supposed anachronism inherited from the Middle Ages, was able to maintain itself as a principal institution for the construction of the liberal nation state until the beginning of the twentieth century. Before then, though, contemporary political systems had to articulate a non-elected, inherited figure within a liberal system based on juridical equality and representative governments. To face this challenge, the Crown had to renounce its effective power and be able to endow itself with a potent symbolic power that would lead it to acquire a quality of representation, of symbolisation of the new system. This transition was neither easy nor slow. Throughout the nineteenth century and until the First World War, European monarchies had to reinvent themselves, following the expression coined by David Cannadine.37 In this way, they were able to become elements of imbrication between the new liberal order and the forms of power that originated in the Old Regime. They used values like nation, religion, and bourgeois domesticity as cultural tools to relate to the new social and political context and thus legitimate their own power. In this way, sovereigns were able to justify their position in the system through the construction of attitudes and common values, projected majestically from the position of monarchical legitimacy. There were three principal identity features that the monarchy would use to those ends.

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The first was the representation of moral and national unity.38 In this respect, one of the most prominent roles that kings and queens assumed was that of nationalising agent, a role that has recently been a subject of study.39 The reproduction of the new symbolic image that the monarchical institution translated into the modern language of liberalism, was achieved through renewed discourses, symbols, and public appearances. In Spain, the idea of fatherland was mythified throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, such that, since the 1850s, it constituted a sentiment crucial for monarchical legitimation, integrating provincial-regional specificity into the national identity itself. It was then that patriotism became nationalism, in the banal sense of the term, acting already as a principal actor in the political process.40 The historiography on nationalisation processes has been fruitful in the last few decades, showing how the Spanish liberal State also developed an active function and programme for nationalising the masses. To this end, it incorporated the Crown’s public image and used its character as an incarnation of the cultural values of bourgeois society that went hand in hand with liberalism. It was a slow transformation that began with the nineteenth century, was impulsed during the reign of Isabel II in 1833 and accelerated towards the end of her reign, in the 1860s, until it consolidated during the Bourbon Restoration from 1874 onwards. The cultural history of politics offers analytical possibilities from multiple methodological perspectives. These interdisciplinary approaches have contributed significant advances concerning representation, Spanish kings as royal figures, and the image and symbolic functions of the monarchy as an institution. The Crown has been analysed from multiple perspectives: from religion and gender,41 to the iconography in materials of public use—like coins and stamps—to national icons like the flag and the national anthem. In addition, the perspective of cultural analysis conceives of monarchy as an institution that not only assumes social and moral values, but that is even a public spectacle developed in ceremonies, expositions, and royal visits. In this way, through the tools of cultural history, the monarch’s progressive reclusion to the sphere of the symbolical has been studied, adding the Spanish case to other European examples like Britain, the emblem of banal monarchism.42 Throughout the nineteenth century, Spanish monarchs ceased to show themselves before their subjects in order to do so before their citizens; and their form of representation, majesty in a family context, also continued evolving until it became the nation’s incarnation.43 The Spanish iconography and symbology that was displayed in ceremonies, parades, and royal travels was shaped by public ornaments like flags, coats of arms, the national anthem and other melodies, bell ringing, military parades,44 zarzuelas and corridas, with the bulls as the people’s feast par excellence. All this mingled with elements of regional culture like the peasantry’s chants and typical dress. Spanish national identity as sponsored by the Crown45 was transmitted as concentric spheres with the symbols of regional identities—an aspect that is also repeated in other examples like the

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English46 —and with the image of security and progress that liberal reality harboured until the First World War.47 But the genesis of peripheral or substate nationalisms and their conflict with the nation and Spanish patriotism, perhaps due to lack of consideration, converted the national question into a central problem since the reign of Alfonso XIII. The symbolisation of dominant national social values was the second tool the monarchy used to justify its presence in the new political system. Organising and mobilising certain familial metaphors was essential to generating favourable sentiments of adhesion. A family model was created that mediated between the old aristocratic ideal and the new, bourgeois one.48 But this link between familial and political metaphors was not new in the nineteenth century. Its roots were rather in the Old Regime’s absolutist conceptions. From there it would evolve into the liberal perception of a king who was ‘father of his governed ones [sus gobernados]’—with political authority, but filtered by liberal morality.49 The familial monarchical allegory acquired a certain complexity when a woman represented the Crown, as in the case of Queen Isabel II. This influenced gender and national discourses that were readily comparable with those of other contemporary monarchies.50 Royal propaganda used gender stereotypes like the model of domestic wife and angel, of Christian, virtuous, pious, and charitable mother. Queen Isabel II, the only regnant queen in modern Spain, and the kings’ consorts were projected as mothers of the nation. As a male and a family man, the king’s task was to govern and represent the nation.51 It was a hegemonic masculinity that would become regenerating and modern as soon as the twentieth century began.52 That is, the nation, incarnated in the figure of the king or queen, acquired the sexed values and characters of bourgeois society, hybridised with nationalism, that George Mosse has discussed.53 A model was thus reproduced that copied the hegemonic cultural pattern, with roles clearly defined in modern families, just as in the English case.54 During the regency of María Cristina of Bourbon (1833–1840) her maternal image was already emphasised, highlighting her condition as a private mother raising her daughters. Once her daughter and that of Fernando VII, Isabel II, began her effective reign (1843–1868), the familial metaphor was socially projected, especially after the heir’s birth in 1857, when she became mother of the nation as well.55 But the passage of time would demonstrate that this symbolic capital could not maintain itself. The queen was not capable of representing liberal and bourgeois ideals either in her political and institutional activity, or in her private and family behaviour, marked by the scandals of her love life.56 The royal marriages formed by Amadeo of Savoy and Maria Vittoria dal Pozzo (1870–1873), by Alfonso XII and María Cristina of Habsburg (1879–1885) and by Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg (1906–1931) also developed family representations related to middle-class cultural patterns and gender stereotypes. These discourses referred to conjugal and family lifestyle, to maternal models, to the education of heirs, and to the Christian charity

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proper to bourgeois domesticity. These values were represented even as the dynastic component and monarchical legitimacy were maintained. Thereby, as Bagehot said, the monarchy managed to ‘[bring] down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life’.57 Domestic ideals were thus recreated with which Spanish families could identify. The final identity elements that made possible assuming the monarchy’s new symbolic role were the religious ones. In the Old Regime, religion was the principal source of legitimation for the monarchy, as the institution was associated with the defence of Catholic values and Christian morality. Although, when liberalism triumphed, a distinction between the sacred and the profane was established, religion continued playing a fundamental role. It was the sacred link between the people and the new political regime. The defence of the separation of Church and State was not at odds with faith. Thus, the religious theme was a sensitive subject for monarchs, in the face of a public opinion that continually appealed to the Crown’s morality. Spaniards also became citizens of the Catholic nation since the community of believers was identified as the national community.58 As well, national morality would be identified with the image of the kings and their private life, which in turn, connected with Catholic morality and bourgeois responsibility in the interaction between national and gender identity.59 At this crossroads, the encouragement of pious works, munificence, charity, the Marian cult, and the veneration of ‘realms of memory’ by the kings became indispensable elements of the construction of symbolic legitimacy. At the same time, the feasts of the royal family like marriages, births, baptisms, and funerals were authentic state ceremonies. The religious offices of Christianity’s vital cycles signified the veneration of Spanish national vitality. For the same reason, local and regional devotions were very used in royal trips, from Isabel II to Alfonso XIII. Linking the kings to their citizens through devotions they had interiorised as part of their lives was a gesture of great cultural value and emotional weight. But in reality these religious practices, very linked to welfare piety, were also fundamental components of the new religiosity professed by European nineteenth-century royalty.60 From the 1860s the public appearances of Spain’s kings increased to an extraordinary degree, resembling other contemporary monarchies in this regard. To acquire political authority, it was necessary that the monarchy acquire legitimacy through the imbrication of national identity, gender roles, and Catholic morality. The nation and the monarchy appeared as two distinct political entities, and the Crown’s role was to symbolise the union of citizens. Thus, throughout the implantation of liberal parliamentarism, kings and queens had to become symbols of the nation, the supreme incarnations of moral and national identity. Monarchs travelled throughout the kingdom to gain popularity directly; they visited emblematic churches to show their fidelity to religion and national customs; they inaugurated expositions, factories, and railway stations to represent their commitment to progress; and they visited hospitals and charity centres to make note of their philanthropic and

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Introduction 13

charitable spirit. Liberal monarchism insisted on the Crown’s symbolic function as something that could not be renounced. In this way, the Bourbon dynasty came to represent national identity on a solid historical basis, adding to this social representation through Catholic morality and bourgeois domesticity. Thanks to these cultural elements the monarchy managed to legitimate its permanence in the contemporary world, acquiring a meaningful symbolising character. The monarchy had to represent certain national, gender, and religious discourses and hybridise them all. And, precisely because of the intense character of this union, the loss of some of these elements caused the institution’s foundations to stagger, as happened on no few occasions. In this way, to survive the revolution, the monarchy had to assume the new symbolic role that liberalism had theorised for it. *** Part I of this volume is devoted to the Spanish monarchy as a political institution. It opens with Jean-Philippe Luis’ essay on its profound transformations, from its Old Regime identity as a mechanism for maintaining the natural order, to its reactionary episode under Fernando VII, to its unstable and conflict-ridden years as a liberal parliamentary regime during the regencies of his daughter Isabel’s minority. Isabel Burdiel then discusses the succeeding Isabeline period (1843–1868), when the queen’s overt sexual and political activities created serious difficulties for the relationship between the Spanish monarchy and bourgeois liberal parliamentarism. Along with the work of David Cannadine, these difficulties prompt Burdiel to reflect on the suitability of biography as a means of understanding monarchical politics and culture. Isabel’s successor Amadeo I of Savoy, the foreign king rejected by the Spanish people, was likewise uneasy on the throne. His twoyear reign (1871–1873) nonetheless represented Spain’s first exercise in democratic monarchy and would be long remembered in the republican imaginary. Eduardo Higueras Castañeda and Sergio Sánchez Collantes explore this subject. Ángeles Lario next recounts the consolidation and stabilisation of the constitutional monarchical system as, the Bourbons restored, Alfonso XII reigned over the pact between conservatives and progressives and liberal parliamentarism was able to limit the Crown’s role. Javier Moreno-Luzón closes Part I by examining the crisis of liberal parliamentarism at the turn of the twentieth century, the polarised politics that emerged after the First World War, and Alfonso XIII’s final decision to support dictatorship. Part II recounts the new modes of cultural and national representation that the Spanish monarchy adopted once it made a pact with liberalism in 1833. David San Narciso ponders how evolving policies regarding etiquette helped to express, legitimate, and develop the relationship between monarchy and successive liberal governments. Rosa Ana Gutiérrez-Lloret and Alicia MiraAbad for their part examine how the royal family adopted stereotyped values and behaviours, constantly reinventing itself in order—paradoxically—to

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appear stable. The liberal monarchy’s similarly fixed yet ever evolving image in value documents like coins, stamps, and banknotes is the subject of Raquel Sánchez, who reflects on how easily liberalism represented its political project in comparison with the republican tradition. David Martínez Vilches in turn considers how the liberal revolution forced the Crown to re-symbolise its religious image, adapting its religious devotions to the liberal State’s new demands for national identification. The monarchy and the parliament’s competition for symbolic representation is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the State Opening of Parliament Ceremony, studied by Oriol Luján, who considers how, from 1850 to 1923, the ritual helped strengthen the evolving powers of parliament, Crown and citizens. Lastly, Margarita Barral-Martínez analyses how monarchs from Isabel II to Alfonso XIII used travel as a means of establishing political and symbolic relationships with Spain’s regions, helping to construct national identity even while projecting an image of the ‘welfare monarchy’. This volume thus covers originally, and from a dually political and cultural perspective, the Spanish monarchy’s rapport with liberalism from its Old Regime origins to the Second Republic. It is the first study of the subject in English, and the first methodical exploration of it in any language.

Notes 1 Burdiel, 2010; Lario, 1998, 1999, 2007, 2017; Moreno-Luzón, 2003. 2 Luis, 2002; 2017. 3 Morgan C. Hall’s 2003 biography of Alfonso XIII, however, touches upon it, as does Javier Moreno-Luzón, 2017. 4 Luengo and Dalmau, 2018. 5 López, 1987: 65–66. 6 For a general book see Shubert and Álvarez-Junco, 2017. 7 Constant, 1989: 20–35. 8 Bagehot, 2001: 7. 9 Cannadine, 1989; Williams, 1997. 10 Kirsch, 1999; Langewiesche, 2013; Prutsch, 2013; Rosanvallon, 1994; Sellin, 2018. 11 Mayer, 1981. 12 Lario, 1998; Millán and Romeo, 2013. 13 Portillo, 2000: 159–258. 14 García-Monerris, 2011. 15 Artola, 1991; Marcuello, 2015; Sánchez-Mantero, 2003; Varela, 2013. 16 Ibid. 17 La Parra, 2018: 375–474; Marcuello and Pérez-Ledesma, 1996; Varela, 2013: 251–266. 18 Burdiel and Romeo, 1998. 19 Burdiel, 1998. 20 On the Constitution of 1837 see Varela, 1984; Lario, 2017; on the Constitution of 1845 see Marcuello, 2013.

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Introduction 15 21 Marcuello, 1998. 22 Balmes, 1925: 514. 23 National Archives, Foreign Office (NA-FO), 72/897, 07-11-1856. 24 Burdiel, 2010. 25 Vilches, 2019. 26 Bolaños, 1999; Fuente, 2007. 27 Sánchez, 2019; Troncoso and Mas, 1987. 28 Calero, 1987; Dardé, 2001; Lario, 1999. 29 López, 2016. 30 McCoy, Fradera and Jacobson, 2012. 31 Cabrera, 2003; Hall, 2003; Lario, 2019; Moreno-Luzón, 2012. 32 Gómez-Navarro, 1991. 33 Ben-Ami, 1983. 34 Gaceta de Madrid, 16-09-1923. 35 Martorell, 2003. 36 Fuentes, 2016. 37 Cannadine, 1983. 38 As already indicated by Hobsbawm, 1990. 39 Banerjee, Backerra and Sarti, 2017; Barral-Martínez, 2016; Brice, 2010; Guazzaloca, 2009; Ramos, Murilo and Corrêa, 2018; San Narciso, 2019b; Sellin, 2017; Van Osta, 2006. 40 On banal nationalism, see Billig, 1995; Roca, 2018. On imagined communities, Anderson, 1983. 41 In recent years, historiography has demonstrated the potential of integrating gender and religion as modern historical knowledge categories: Blasco, 2018. 42 Billig, 1992; Langland, 1997; Olechnowicz, 2007. 43 Deploige and Deneckere, 2006. 44 Military values, along with religious ones, were another of the elements exploited in Spanish monarchical symbology to recreate national identity through the image of soldier-kings. On military values and the monarchy, see Boyd, 2003; Fernández-Sirvent, 2010; Forsting, 2018. 45 Barral-Martínez, 2015; San Narciso, 2017b. 46 Loughlin, 2013. 47 Langewiesche, 2013. 48 On the Spanish case, see San Narciso, 2019a, and for a general perspective, Fradenburg, 1992; Schulte, 2002; Wienfort, 2016. 49 Brice, 2012. 50 Ward, 2002. 51 Margadant, 1999. 52 Moreno-Seco and Mira-Abad, 2016; Peyrou, 2011. 53 Mosse, 1973. 54 Wienfort, 2016; Weisbrod, 2006. 55 San Narciso, 2017a. 56 Burdiel, 2004; Gutiérrez-Lloret and Mira-Abad, 2014. 57 Bagehot, 2001: 41. 58 Alonso, 2014; Millán and Romeo, 2015. 59 Fernández-Sirvent and Gutiérrez-Lloret, 2014. 60 Prochaska, 1996; Wolf, 2010.

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