The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spain [1 ed.] 0815358245, 9780815358244

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Figures
Tables
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Rethinking the nineteenth century and Spain: Critical configurations
Works cited
1 Caribbean siblings: Sisterly affinities and differences between Cuba and Puerto Rico in the nineteenth century
A new Caribbean
The utopia of a transatlantic kingdom
Slavery and the “specialty of the Antilles”
Modernity at both sides of the Atlantic
Emancipation as modern discourse
The Glorious Revolution and colonial uprisings
The road to autonomy: under Cuba’s shadow
The causes and remedies for evil
Coda
Notes
Works cited
2 Good Spanish, better Basques: Culture, politics, and identity construction in the Basque diaspora of the nineteenth century
Migration and national identity in the Basque Country in the nineteenth century
The construction of a visible community in the diaspora
Organized communities
Towards an (almost) unified diasporic identity: between discourse and symbolism
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
3 The Cors de Clavé: Popular music, republicanism, and social regeneration
From taverns and religious brotherhoods to choral societies
The choral singer: a new model of citizen
Popular music: public entertainments and social identity
A Romantic choral repertoire for the republican project
Coda
Notes
Works cited
4 Health policies and liberal reforms
The demographic and epidemiological background
Coping with infectious diseases: the birth of a health administration
Some final comments
Works cited
5 Equatorial Guinea: Colonization and cultural dislocation (1827–1931)
First period of identity dislocation in the Spanish Guinean territories (1827–1843)
Second period of identity dislocation in the Spanish Guinean territories (1843–1899)
Third period of identity dislocation in the Spanish Guinean territories (1900 to 1931)
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
6 Global Hispanophone cultural production in the nineteenth-century Maghreb and the Ottoman Empire
Sephardic communities
Spanish migration to Algeria
Grammars of Maghrebi/Standard Arabic and Riffian
Spanish renegados and explorers in the Maghreb
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
7 Fortuny and the Spanish-Moroccan War (1859–1860): Battle paintings and orientalist pictorial production
From Rome to Tetouan
Fortuny’s second trip to Morocco
Orientalist works and Fortuny’s final trip to Morocco
The great painting
Works cited
8 The Philippines in the context of the nineteenth-century Spanish Empire
Colonial economy: from the Manila Galleon to free trade
Colonial order: the limits of political reform
Peculiarities in the colonial governance of the Philippines
The road to revolution
The American intervention
Notes
Works cited
9 Nineteenth-century realism and political economy: The plot against the equation
Economic theory and its discontents
Diagnosing the financier’s ailments
Regarding beauty in commodities and consumers
Plotting the end of necessities and the return of luxuries
Coda: realism as luxury
Notes
Works cited
10 Colonial wars, gender, and nation in nineteenth-century Spain: Soldiers’ writings, metropolitan views
To start with: on colonial women in letters home from Spanish soldiers
Colonial wars, metropolitan men, and historiography: indifference and restitution
Racializing and genderizing the nation through colonial war: images and experiences of rebel Cuba in metropolitan Spain, ...
Not only Cuba: colonial women and metropolitan masculinities across four continents
By way of conclusion: beyond 1898
Notes
Works cited
11 Guidebooks, panoramas, and architecture: Competing national constructions in Catalonia and Spain
Shaping the Spanish identity: conflicting visions of Spain amongst foreign and national travellers
National histories and competing national discourses: Modesto Lafuente and Víctor Balaguer
Panoramas, landscapes, and national sites: Covadonga and Montserrat
A privileged observatory to revisit the emergence of modernity
Notes
Works cited
12 Navigating stereotypes and perceptions of Spain
Tropes of oriental Spanishness
Domesticating al-Andalus
Beyond Moors, gypsies, bandits, bullfighters …
Conclusion
Note
Works cited
13 Partial protagonists: Biography, fiction, and the nineteenth-century legacy in Rosa Chacel and Benjamín Jarnés
The new biography in Spain and Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX
Two biographers in search of a subject
Nineteenth-century revolt
The reinterpretation of failure
Limiting possibilities
Notes
Works cited
14 Posterity and periphery in late nineteenth-century Galicia
Winning for eternity: Benito Vicetto and Manuel Murguía
Writing in the dead town: cultural capitality in Emilia Pardo Bazán
Notes
Works cited
15 Urbanization in upheaval: Spanish cities, agents and targets of a slow transformation
Introduction
Historical antecedents
Spanish cities in the wake of the new liberal regime and nascent capitalism (ca.1830–c.1890)
Spanish cities during the second industrialization (c.1890–c.1920)
Conclusions
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works cited
16 Spain and the visual culture of suffering
Introduction
Goya’s Disasters and the objectivity of suffering
Social painting: ordinary life between sensationalism and the new aestheticism
Spanish Catholicism
Notes
Works cited
17 Recreating the homeland abroad: Migrants, settlers, and Iberian identities in the Americas, 1870–1920
Migrants into Spaniards?
The Cuban War of Independence and Iberian migrants
A new impulse for Spanish nationalism in the diaspora
Iberian minority nationalisms, migrants, and Hispano-Americanism
Conclusions
Works cited
18 Ruins of civilization: The classics at the foundation of Iberian nationalisms
Lightness of the classics in Spanish nationalism
Uses of archaeology
Notes
Works cited
19 Y ahora seremos españoles: The uncertainties of Puerto Rican identity in the late Spanish Empire
Españoles americanos
Assimilationism, autonomism, possibilism
Images of hispanorriqueño identity
Americanos españoles
National and political identity
Notes
Works cited
20 The legacies of Atlantic slavery in nineteenth-century Spain
The sugar/slave binomial in Cuba
The illegal trade of enslaved Africans in Cuba
Spain’s role in the illegal slave trade
Acknowledgment
Notes
Works cited
21 Women in nineteenth-century paintings: An imaginary album of daily life
Realism and the emancipation of secular genres
Social Realism: women at work, at home, and in the street
Figures and scenes of the bourgeois woman
Notes
Works cited
22 Theatre spaces in Barcelona, 1800–1850
Teatre de Santa Creu and theatrical spaces up to 1835
Theatrical scene and political scene, 1808–1835
Teatre de Santa Creu ~ Teatre dels Gegants, 1820–1821
The free use of the theatre, 1836–1850
The new Capuchin theatre or Teatre Nou, 1843–1848
Conclusions
Acknowledgements
Notes
Works cited
23 Education and citizenship in the construction of the Spanish State: From the Constitution of Cadiz to the creation of ...
The nation-state and the education of the citizenry
State education projects: from the Public Education Committee Report (1813) to the General Curriculum (1845)
Instituting a system: from the Public Education Law (“Moyano Law”) of 1857 to the Ministry of Public Education (1900)
Citizenship, civilization, and language
Notes
Works cited
24 The Yucatan Channel and the limits of “Spain” in the mid-nineteenth century
War in the Yucatan Peninsula
The Atlantic
Zorrilla
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
25 Politics, affect, and the negotiations of gender in Concepción Arenal’s antislavery writings
Women, the public sphere, and spaces of sociability in nineteenth-century Spain
Concepción Arenal: proto-feminist, philanthropist, social reformer
Sensibility and social reform: strategies of negotiation in Arenal’s antislavery writings
Arenal’s antislavery poem: “La esclavitud de los negros”
Arenal’s “Abolición de la esclavitud” and the affirmation of the political subject
Women’s sphere of influence and imagined communities: “A las mujeres”
Utility and justice in Arenal’s antislavery writings of the 1870s
Morality and reason in “Moral blanca y moral negra”
Conclusion: gender, enlightenment, and liberal subjectivity in Arenal
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works cited
26 “Los que no pueden ser otra cosa”: Nineteenth-century state arts administration and Spanish identity
The nineteenth-century expansion of collecting
The creation and control of a national collection and exhibition system
Importation and exportation restrictions
Property laws and disclosure
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
27 The dream of a Federal Republic: United States independence as a model for Rossend Arús i Arderiu’s activism and ...
Introduction
Arús’ fight for an Iberian Federation and freemasonry ideology
US independence as a laboratory for an Iberian Federation: the federal state as model
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
Index

Citation preview

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T H E R O U T L E D G E H I S PA N I C S T U D I E S C O M PA N I O N T O N I N E T E E N T H -​C E N T U RY  S PA I N

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Nineteenth-​ Century Spain brings together an international team of expert contributors in this critical and innovative volume that redefines nineteenth-​century Spain in a multinational, multilingual, and transnational way. This interdisciplinary volume examines questions moving beyond the traditional concept of Spain as a singular, homogenous entity to a new understanding of Spain as an unstable set of multipolar and multilinguistic relations that can be inscribed in different translational ways. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in Hispanic Studies. Elisa Martí-​López is Associate Professor Emerita of Spanish at Northwestern University, USA.

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Routledge Companions to Hispanic and Latin American Studies

Routledge Companions to Hispanic and Latin American Studies are state-​of-​the-​art surveys of the key areas within Hispanic and Latin American Studies, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems, themes, and recent developments in research. Series Editor: Brad Epps, University of Cambridge The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment Edited by Elizabeth Franklin Lewis, Mónica Bolufer Peruga, and Catherine M. Jaffe The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Nineteenth-​Century Spain Edited by Elisa Martí-​López For more information about this series please visit: https://​www.routledge.com/​Routledge-​Companions-​to-​Hispanic-​and-​Latin-​American-​Studies/​ book-​series/​RCHLAS

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THE ROUTLEDGE H I S PA N I C S T U D I E S C O M PA N I O N T O N I N E T E E N T H -​ C E N T U RY S PA I N

Edited by Elisa Martí-​López Series Editor: Brad Epps Spanish List Advisor: Javier Muñoz-​Basols

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First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Elisa Martí-​López; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Elisa Martí-​López to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Martí-López, Elisa, 1960– editor. Title: The Routledge Hispanic studies companion to nineteenth century Spain/edited by Elisa Martí-López. Description: London; New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. | Series: Routledge companions to Hispanic and Latin American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020012358 (print) | LCCN 2020012359 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815358244 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351122900 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Spain–History–19th century. Classification: LCC DP203 .R68 2020 (print) | LCC DP203 (ebook) | DDC 946/.07–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012358 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012359 ISBN: 978-​0-​8153-​5824-​4  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​351-​12290-​0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK Visit the eResources: www.routledge.com/​9780815358244

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CONTENTS

List of figures  List of tables  Notes on contributors  Acknowledgements 

viii x xi xvii

Rethinking the nineteenth century and Spain: critical configurations  Elisa Martí-​López 1 Caribbean siblings: sisterly affinities and differences between Cuba and Puerto Rico in the nineteenth century  Silvia Álvarez Curbelo 2 Good Spanish, better Basques: culture, politics, and identity construction in the Basque diaspora of the nineteenth century  Óscar Álvarez Gila

1

4

19

3 The Cors de Clavé: popular music, republicanism, and social regeneration  31 Jaume Ayats and Anna Costal 4 Health policies and liberal reforms  Josep L. Barona

50

5 Equatorial Guinea: colonization and cultural dislocation (1827–​1931)  Justo Bolekia Boleká

63

6 Global Hispanophone cultural production in the nineteenth-​century Maghreb and the Ottoman Empire  Adolfo Campoy-​Cubillo v

75

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Contents

7 Fortuny and the Spanish-​Moroccan War (1859–​1860): battle paintings and orientalist pictorial production  Jordi Àngel Carbonell Pallarés

91

8 The Philippines in the context of the nineteenth-​century Spanish Empire  María Dolores Elizalde

106

9 Nineteenth-​century realism and political economy: the plot against the equation  Luis Fernández Cifuentes

122

10 Colonial wars, gender, and nation in nineteenth-​century Spain: soldiers’ writings, metropolitan views  Albert Garcia-​Balañà

136

11 Guidebooks, panoramas, and architecture: competing national constructions in Catalonia and Spain  Josep-​Maria Garcia-​Fuentes

150

12 Navigating stereotypes and perceptions of Spain  Claudia Hopkins 13 Partial protagonists: biography, fiction, and the nineteenth-​century legacy in Rosa Chacel and Benjamín Jarnés  Geraldine Lawless 14 Posterity and periphery in late nineteenth-​century Galicia  Helena Miguélez-​Carballeira 15 Urbanization in upheaval: Spanish cities, agents and targets of a slow transformation  Jesús Mirás Araujo 16 Spain and the visual culture of suffering  Javier Moscoso 17 Recreating the homeland abroad: migrants, settlers, and Iberian identities in the Americas, 1870–​1920  Xosé M. Núñez Seixas

168

189 205

218 235

250

18 Ruins of civilization: the classics at the foundation of Iberian nationalisms  263 Joan Ramon Resina

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Contents

19 Y ahora seremos españoles: the uncertainties of Puerto Rican identity in the late Spanish Empire  Wadda C. Ríos-​Font 20 The legacies of Atlantic slavery in nineteenth-​century Spain  Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla

278 295

21 Women in nineteenth-​century paintings: an imaginary album of daily life  307 Teresa-​M.  Sala 22 Theatre spaces in Barcelona, 1800–​1850  Gabriel Sansano 23 Education and citizenship in the construction of the Spanish State: from the Constitution of Cadiz to the creation of the Ministry of Public Education (1812–​1900)  Mario Santana and Antonio Pérez García

325

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24 The Yucatan Channel and the limits of “Spain” in the mid-​nineteenth century  Lisa Surwillo

355

25 Politics, affect, and the negotiations of gender in Concepción Arenal’s antislavery writings  Akiko Tsuchiya

369

26 “Los que no pueden ser otra cosa”: nineteenth-​century state arts administration and Spanish identity  Óscar E. Vázquez

385

27 The dream of a Federal Republic: United States independence as a model for Rossend Arús i Arderiu’s activism and freemason ideology  Aurélie Vialette

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Index 

413

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viii

FIGURES

1.1 Ex-​voto painting of the Siege of San Juan by the British. José Campeche, c.1797  6 1.2 The school of teacher Rafael Cordero. Francisco Oller, 1891  12 1.3 First autonomic cabinet of Puerto Rico. February 12, 1898  15 1.4 The 44th New York Volunteers in Porto Rico  16 3.1 Men singing in the tavern, Maria Ferrés Puig, c.1910–​1920  33 3.2 Euterpe Choral Society, 1860  37 3.3 Concert of the Clavé Choruses in the Camps Elisis of Barcelona, 1864  38 3.4 Musicians of Els Tranquils Orchestra from Ripoll, 1883  41 3.5 Tenor part for Josep Anselm Clavé’s Catalan adaptation of La Marsellesa, 1871  44 3.6 Monument to Josep Anselm Clavé on Passeig de Sant Joan in Barcelona  46 7.1 La Odalisca, Marià Fortuny Marsal, 1861. Oil on cardboard, 56.9 × 81 cm  94 7.2 Familia marroquí, Marià Fortuny Marsal, c.1861. Etching on paper. 35.5 × 24 cm  95 7.3 La guardia de la Qasba de Tetuán, Marià Fortuny Marsal, c.1861. Etching on paper. 21 × 16.5 cm  96 7.4 Playa Africana, Marià Fortuny Marsal, 1867. Watercolour on paper, 31.5 × 61 cm  98 7.5 Fantasía árabe, Marià Fortuny Marsal. Photo engraving on paper  99 7.6 La batalla de Tetuán, Marià Fortuny Marsal, 1865. Oil on canvas, 300 × 972 cm  103 11.1 Postcard of Covadonga’s landscape and the Gothic temple built next to the historical shrine during the nineteenth century, c.1900  156 11.2 Postcard of Montserrat’s landscape including the Catholic shrine built during the nineteenth century upon the former ruins following Balaguer’s political and cultural project on the Catalan and Spanish monasteries, c.1900  158 viii

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Figures

11.3 Postcard of the late nineteenth-​century Pelagius’ statue placed in Covadonga in close relation to its landscape  162 11.4 Postcard of the Madonna of Montserrat dressed up in her royal clothes, c.1890  163 11.5 Postcard of the Catholic monument designed by Antoni Gaudí for the mountain of Montserrat, c.1900  164 12.1 The Evil Eye. John Phillip, 1859. Oil on canvas, 44.7 × 35 cm  171 12.2 El Jaleo. John Singer Sargent, 1882. Oil on canvas, 232 × 348 cm  172 12.3 “L’Andalousie au temps des maures—Les Arènes” (Andalusia in the time of the Moors - the arena). Photograph from Baschet 1900  173 12.4 Diagram of ceiling of the “Hall of the Two Sisters.” Owen Jones/Jules Goury, 1842  176 12.5 Entrada del coro en la clausura del monasterio de las Huelgas de Burgos (Entrance from the choir into the cloister of the monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos). By Bachelier and Adam after Genaro Pérez Villaamil. Lithograph 37 x 50.5 cm (size of sheet), from España artística y monumental, vol. 1 (Paris: Hauser, 1842)  180 12.6 Yglesia de San Antonio Abad, en Bilbao (Church of San Anton in Bilbao). By Bichebois and Bayot after Genaro Pérez Villaamil. Lithograph 38 x 54 cm (size of sheet), from España artística y monumental, vol. 3 (Paris: Hauser, 1850)  181 12.7 Canal de Isabel II. Puente-acueducto de la Sima (Canal of Isabella II. Bridge-aqueduct of la Sima). Photograph by Charles Clifford, c. 1855  183 12.8 Inauguración del ferrocarril de Langreo por la Reina Gobernadora. Entrada del tren en Gijón. Genaro Pérez Villaamil, 1852. Oil on canvas, 109 × 140 cm  184 15.1 Crude birth rates and crude death rates in Spain (‰), 1860–​1920  224 16.1 Desastres de la Guerra. Francisco de Goya, 1810–​15. Plate 27: “Caridad”  238 16.2 Desastres de la Guerra. Francisco de Goya, 1810–​15. Plate 26: “No se puede mirar”  239 16.3 ¡Otra Margarita! (Another Marguerite!). Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, 1892. Oil on canvas (130.2 × 200 cm)  242 16.4 “¡Y todavía dicen que el pescado es caro!” Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, 1894. Oil on canvas, 151.5 × 204 cm  243 21.1 La nena obrera. Joan Planella, c.1882–​5. Oil on canvas, 67 × 54.7 cm  310 21.2 Doradoras. Manuel Cusí, c.1891. Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 59 cm  312 21.3 Sin labor. Francisco Maura, 1890. Oil on canvas, 250 × 170 cm  313 21.4 La bestia humana. Antonio Fillol, 1897. Oil on canvas, 190 × 280 cm  314 21.5 Sífilis. Ramon Casas, 1900. Poster, 80 × 34.3 cm  316 21.6 Abans del bany. Ramon Casas, 1894. Oil on canvas, 12.5 × 60 cm  319 21.7 Clorosis. Sebastià Junyent, c.1899. Oil on canvas, 99.5 × 77.5 cm  320 21.8 Autoretrat. Lluïsa Vidal, c.1899. Oil on canvas, 36 × 27 cm  322 22.1 Planta general de un teatro … proyecto presentado por el arquitecto Josep Oriol Mestres Esplugas, 1842  333 24.1 Indiera. Mariano Guzmán, 1860  357 24.2 Mapa de la isla de Cuba. José María de la Torre, 1850  363 ix

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TABLES

2.1 Population of Basque territories, 1900–​1936  4.1 Average life expectancy in Spanish urban and rural areas, 1900–​1930  4.2 Infant and child mortality in Spain: trends and urban–​rural differences, 1860–​1930  5.1 Cocoa produced on Fernando Poo, 1889–​1913  5.2 Pidgin English in the Bubi language  15.1 Participation of the urban population in Spain according to several criteria (in percentages), 1860–​1910  15.2 Annual average growth rates of the urban and rural population, 1860–​1920  15.3 Crude birth rates, crude death rates, and infant mortality: urban and rural Spain, 1860–​1920  15.4 Migratory balances and percentage of urban population by region, 1860–​1930  15.5 Provincial capitals with the highest annual growth rates, 1860–​1900  15.6 Growth of GDP and GDP per capita, 1850–​1935 (average yearly logarithmic rates)  15.7 Main destinations of internal migration in Spain, 1877 and 1930  15.8 Main migration basins in Spain around 1930  15.9 Total immigrants received by all the Spanish provincial capitals, 1900–​1930 

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20 51 51 67 69 220 221 224 225 226 227 228 228 230

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CONTRIBUTORS

Silvia Álvarez Curbelo is a cultural historian and retired Professor from the University of Puerto Rico, School of Communication. She is the author of Del nacionalismo al populismo (1993); Ilusión de Francia:  Arquitectura y afrancesamiento en Puerto Rico (1997); Hispanofilia: Arquitectura y vida en Puerto Rico (1998); Un país del porvenir: el afán de modernidad en Puerto Rico (2001); De vuelta a la ciudad: San Juan de Puerto Rico 1997–​2001 (2011), and Tiempos Binarios: La Guerra Fría desde Puerto Rico y el Caribe (2017). She is a member of the Puerto Rican Academy of History and is Associate Historian with the Archivo-​Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín. She is currently working on a book about American progressivism and US colonies in the 1930s. Óscar Álvarez Gila is Professor of History of America at the University of the Basque Country, Spain (UPV/​EHU). His research interests deal with the study of European emigration, especially from the Basque region in Spain and France to the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of “From the Records of My Deepest Memory …” Personal Sources and the Study of European Migration, 18th–​20th Centuries (2016) and Antes de la ikurriña. Banderas, símbolos e identidad vasca en América (1880–​1935) (2019), among other books. Jaume Ayats is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a violinist. Since 2012 he has served as the Director of the Museu de la Música de Barcelona. His main field of research is polyphonic chants in the Latin Mediterranean countries. His publications include Córrer la sardana: balls, joves i conflictes (2006), Cantar a la fàbrica, cantar al coro (2008), Les chants traditionnels des Pays Catalans (2008), and Els Segadors. De cançó eròtica a himne nacional (2011). Josep L. Barona is Professor of History of Science at the Universitat de València (Spain). He was a Salvador de Madariaga Research Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence), and Visiting Professor at the Trinity College Oxford, Wellcome Unit University of Oxford, the University of Bergen (Norway) and the University of Kumamoto (Japan). He is currently directing the research group Health in Society (www.sanhisoc.es). His research focuses on the social and political dimensions of health, hunger, and nutrition during the interwar period, and

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Contributors

the exile of scientists and doctors after the Spanish Civil War. His recent publications include The Rockefeller Foundation, International Diplomacy and Public Health (2015) and Health Policies in Interwar Europe. A Transnational Perspective (2019). Justo Bolekia Boleká is Professor in the Department of French Philology at the University of Salamanca. He received the Outstanding Doctorate Award from the University of Salamanca. He is a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Ghana and Maroua (Cameroon), and has written books on linguistics and the lexicography of Bubi, a language spoken in Equatorial Guinea. His publications include Lingüística bantú a través del bubi (2008), Diccionario Español/​Bubi y Bubi/​Español (2009), and “El auge y el declive de las culturas del África Occidental (o Atlántica)” (2014). Adolfo Campoy-​Cubillo is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Oakland University. His research interests include Global Hispanophone cultural production of the Maghreb, Diaspora Studies, and Women’s Studies. His publications include articles on the topic of Global Hispanophone cultural production; Memories of the Maghreb:  Transnational Identities in Spanish Cultural Production (Palgrave, 2012); an interdisciplinary special issue on the Western Sahara (co-​ edited with Jill Robbins, 2015); and a special issue on the Global Hispanophone (co-​edited with Benita Sampedro, 2019). He is also co-​editor of a critical translation of José Díaz Fernández’s El Blocao (2015). Jordi Àngel Carbonell Pallarés is Professor of Art History at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in Tarragona. He was curator at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (1992–​1994) and has curated numerous exhibitions in museums and cultural institutions. He is director of the URV research group “From colonialism to the global world.” He has published several books and articles on Spanish painters, including Visiones de Al Maghrib. Pintores catalanes decimonónicos (2001); Orientalisme. Al-​Maghrib i els pintors del segle XIX (2004); Un artista maleït Francesc Gimeno (2006); De la trinchera al atelier. La Batalla de Tetuán de Fortuny (2013); Josep Tapiró, el pintor de Tánger (2014); and Southern tracks. Morocco and Iberian Orientalism (2015). Anna Costal is a musicologist and musician. She teaches at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya and is a member of the “Musical Creation and Performance” research group at the same institution. Her main research fields include popular music in the nineteenth century, Catalan music heritage, and chants of oral tradition in Catalonia and Corsica. She is the author of “Polyphonies, Bodies and Rhetoric of Senses: Latin Chants in Corsica and the Pyrenees” (2011); “From Cuba with Love:  Rhythms and Revolutions in Nineteenth-​Century Spanish Popular Music” (2013); and Això no és una biografia de Pep Ventura. L’Empordà romàntic, revolucionari i espectacular (2018). María Dolores Elizalde is Scientific Researcher at the Institute of History, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), in Madrid, Spain. Her most recent publications include Filipinas, siglo XIX: Coexistencia e interacción entre comunidades en el imperio español (co-​edited with Xavier Huetz de Lemps, 2017); Gobernar colonias, administrar almas. Poder colonial y órdenes religiosas en la renovación de los imperios ibéricos (1808–​1930) (co-​edited with Xavier Huetz de Lemps and Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, 2018); and Redes imperiales:  intercambios, interacciones y representación política en Nueva España, las Antillas y Filipinas, siglos XVIII Y XIX (co-​edited with Carmen Yuste, 2018). xii

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Luis Fernández Cifuentes is Robert S.  and Ilse Friend Professor Emeritus of Spanish at Harvard University. He taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. He is the author of more than eighty articles on topics ranging from autobiography to travel literature. His publications include Teoría y mercado de la novela (1982); La norma y la diferencia (1986); Cartografías del desasosiego (2003); and critical editions of Zorrilla (Don Juan Tenorio, 2012), Palacio Valdés (Los majos de Cádiz, 1998), and Max Aub (La calle de Valverde y Las buenas intenciones, 2001). He has edited several books of collective articles, including Spain beyond Spain (with Brad Epps, 2005) and Estudios sobre la poesía de Lorca (2005). He is currently engaged in a project on the cultural history of the year 1955 in Spain. Albert Garcia-​Balañà is Associate Professor of Modern History in the Department of Humanities at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. His research focuses on industrial work and popular politics in Catalonia, and the social and political links in Spain between metropole and colony in the nineteenth century. His publications include La fabricació de la fàbrica. Treball i política a la Catalunya cotonera, 1784–​1874 (2004); “Patriotismos trasatlánticos. Raza y nación en el impacto de la ‘Guerra de África’ en el Caribe español de 1860” (2017); and “Racializing the nation in nineteenth-​century Spain (1820–​65): a transatlantic approach” (2018). His current research focuses on metropolitan experiences of the Spanish colonial wars before 1898. Josep-​Maria Garcia-​Fuentes is an architect and Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University. He is also a Fellow at the London School of Economics, in the Catalan Observatory (UK), and Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Milano (Italy). His publications include “A nation of monasteries: the legacy of Víctor Balaguer in the Spanish conception of national monuments” (2013); “Guidebooks, postcards, and panoramas:  the building of Montserrat through modern mass media” (2016); “Architecture, politics and ideology in the construction of modern Montserrat” (2019); and “Deconstructing Gaudí: entangled relations between satire and architectural criticism” (2019). Claudia Hopkins is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications on nineteenth-​century Spain and Anglo-​Spanish relations include Orientalism and Spain (co-​edited with A. McSweeney, 2017) and Pascual de Gayangos: A Nineteenth-​Century Spanish Arabist (co-​edited with C. Álvarez Millán, 2008). In 2009, she helped curate the exhibition The Discovery of Spain: British Artists and Collectors: Goya to Picasso (National Gallery of Scotland). Her monograph Spanish Orientalism:  Art and Identity 1833–​1956 is forthcoming (Bloomsbury). Geraldine Lawless is Senior Lecturer in Spanish in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University, Belfast. She is the author of Modernity’s Metonyms:  Figuring Time in Nineteenth-​Century Spain (2011) and Spain in the Nineteenth Century: New Essays on Experiences of Culture and Society (co-​edited with Prof. Andrew Ginger, 2018). She has also published on the representation of future time in nineteenth-​century Spain, early Spanish science fiction, and on nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century literature by authors including Rosalía de Castro, Silverio Lanza, and Rosa Chacel. Elisa Martí-​López is Associate Professor Emerita of Spanish at Northwestern University. She is the author of several articles and a book (Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Novel in Nineteenth-​Century Spain, 2002)  on the processes of cultural production and xiii

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consumption in the mid-​nineteenth century. As part of her project “The Urban Spaces of Death: Cemeteries as Narratives of the Modern City 1780–​1918,” she has published “It’s all about location: the space of death in Barcelona, 1819–​1972” (2012); “Memory and the city in Barcelona’s cemeteries” (2017); and “Death and the crisis of representation in Narcís Oller’s La febre d’or (and Pérez Galdós’s La de Bringas)” (2017). Helena Miguélez-​Carballeira is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Bangor University and Director of the Centre for Galician Studies in Wales. She is the author of Galicia, a Sentimental Nation: Gender, Culture and Politics, which received the 2015 Award for Best Essay in Galician by the Association of Writers in Galician. She is the editor of A Companion to Galician Culture (2014) and has written extensively on post-​1850 Iberian cultures and Translation Studies. She is currently editing the volume Postcolonial Spain: Coloniality, Violence, Independence, which will be published by University of Wales Press. Jesús Mirás Araujo is Lecturer of Economic History in the Department of Economics and Business at the University of A Coruña, Spain. He is the author of numerous articles on urban history and business history, including “The conquest of urban mobility:  the Spanish case, 1843–​2012” (with A. Martínez-​López, 2015) and “Historic urbanization process in Spain (1746–​2013):  from the fall of the American empire to the real estate bubble” (with J.  M. Cardesín, 2017). He is the co-​editor (with Mercedes Fernández-​Paradas and Isabel Bartolomé) of Globalización, nacionalización y liberalización de la industria del gas en la Europa latina, siglos XIX-​ XXI (2017). Javier Moscoso is Research Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and, until recently, research fellow at the MPIWG in Berlin. He has been a visiting professor and research scholar at universities including Harvard University, l’Université Paris-​Sorbonne, and the University of Chicago. He is the author of numerous articles on the cultural history of the human body and the history and philosophy of experience. His book Historia cultural del dolor (2011) was translated into English in 2012, and the French edition received the Libr’à nous Prize in 2016. His latest book is Promesas incumplidas. Una historia política de las pasiones (2017). His current book project analyses the global history of the swing and the cultural meaning of balancing. Xosé M.  Núñez Seixas is Professor of Modern History at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He taught at the Ludwig-​Maximilians University of Munich (2012–​17). He has published widely on the comparative history of nationalist movements and identities, overseas migration, and the cultural history of war. His most recent books include Camarada invierno. Experiencia y memoria de la División Azul, 1941–​1945 (2016; in German, 2016); Metaphors of Spain. Representations of Spanish National Identity in the Twentieth Century (co-​edited with J. Moreno, 2017); Regionalism and Modern Europe. Identity Construction and Movements 1890 to the Present Day (co-​edited with E. Storm, 2018); and Patriotas transnacionales. Ensayos sobre nacionalismos y transferencias culturales en la Europa del siglo XX (2019). Antonio Pérez García is a secondary school history teacher and teaches History in the Department of Education at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Universidad de La Laguna and completed his PhD at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, with a dissertation on “La Historia de España en el Bachillerato: los referentes del currículo en el desarrollo de la asignatura.” xiv

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Joan Ramon Resina is Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. He was chief editor of Diacritics (1998–​2004). He is the editor of eleven volumes and the author of 160 critical essays in refereed journals and collective volumes. His single-​authored books include El cadáver en la cocina: La novela policiaca en la cultura del desencanto (1997); El postnacionalisme en el mapa global (2005); Barcelona’s Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (2008); Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos: Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural (2009); Catalunya al món. Com es lidera la projecció exterior d’una nació sense estat? (2011); Josep Pla: The World Seen in the Form of Articles (2017); and The Ghost in the Constitution: Memory and Denial in Spanish Society (2017). Wadda C. Ríos-​Font is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College (Columbia University). She specializes in Spanish literature and culture from 1800 to the present, as well as on issues of Spanish nationalism(s) during the last century of the Empire—​specifically involving Spain, Puerto Rico, and Catalonia. She is the author of Rewriting Melodrama: The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater (1997) and The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain (2004), in addition to multiple articles in refereed journals and edited volumes. In 2009, she was awarded a John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for research on the early development of Puerto Rican national culture. Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and foreign corresponding member of the Cuban Academy of History. He is coeditor of the books Negreros y esclavos:  Barcelona y la esclavitud atlántica (ss. XVI-​XIX) (Barcelona, 2017) and Cádiz y el tráfico de esclavos: de la legalidad a la clandestinidad (Madrid, 2018). Teresa-​M. Sala is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the Universitat de Barcelona. Her research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century cultural studies, with a special focus on artistic expressions in Barcelona. She is director of the Modernisme-​ Noucentisme and Contemporary Design research group GRACMON-​UB, and has curated numerous exhibits in museums and other cultural institutions, including Barcelona 1900 (Van Gogh Museum, 2007–​8) and Azul, el color del Modernismo (Caixaforum, 2019–​20). She is the author of Àlbum. Imatges de la família en l’art, coauthored with Xavier Roigé (2004); La vida cotidiana en la Barcelona de 1900 (2005); La Casa Busquets. Una història del moble i la decoració del Modernisme al Déco a Barcelona (2006); Barcelona 1900 (2007); El Modernismo (2008); Pensar i interpretar l’oci. Passatemps, entreteniments, aficions i addiccions a la Barcelona del 1900 (2012), and Las casas de la vida, coauthored with Daniel Cid (2012). Gabriel Sansano is Full Professor of Catalan Studies at the University of Alacant. His area of specialization includes contemporary and comparative drama. He is the author of two monographs, La Festa d’Elx (2016) and Silenci, oblit i preservació de la memòria democràtica (2018), and is the editor of a special issue on eighteenth-​century Catalan literature and culture (2012). He is currently working on a collective book titled Tres segles de teatre barceloní (El Principal a través dels anys). Mario Santana is Associate Professor of Spanish and Deputy Dean of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he is also the faculty coordinator for the programs in Basque and Catalan Studies. His most recent publications include essays on the media and memory in Catalan television, the institutionalization of Iberian Studies in the United States, translation xv

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and Iberian interliterary relations, and the fiction of Jaume Cabré, among them “Screening history:  television, memory, and the nostalgia of national community” (2015); “Translation and literatures in Spain, 2003–​2012” (2015); “La memorialització de la Història en la ficció contemporània” (2017); and “Iberian Studies: the transatlantic dimension” (2019). Lisa Surwillo is Associate Professor of Iberian and Latin American Culture at Stanford University. She is the author of The Stages of Property (2007), a study of copyright in nineteenth-​ century Spanish theater; and Monsters by Trade (2014), an analysis of slave traders in the literary and cultural Spanish traditions. She has published on the questions of Spanish colonialism, race, slavery, law and literature and gender in numerous articles. Akiko Tsuchiya is Professor of Hispanic Studies and an Affiliate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her areas of specialization include nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Spanish literature and culture, and gender studies. She is the author of a monograph on Galdós, and her most recent books include Marginal Subjects: Gender and Deviance in Fin-​de-​siècle Spain (2011) and a co-​edited anthology, Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World (2016). Her co-​edited book, Unsettling Colonialism: Gender and Race in the Global Nineteenth-​century Hispanic World, was published in 2019. She is currently working on a new book, titled Spanish Women of Letters in the Nineteenth-​Century Antislavery Movement: Transnational Networks and Exchanges. Óscar E. Vázquez is Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign with appointments in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He specializes in modern Spanish and Latin American visual cultures. His publications include Inventing the Art Collection. Patrons, Markets and the State in Nineteenth-​Century Spain (2001); “Introduction: recalcitrant modernities—​Spain, cultural difference and the location of modernism” (with L. Elena Delgado and Jordana Mendelson (2007); “Charging the line:  nineteenth-​century Spanish painting between history and orientalism” (2015); and The End, Again. Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain (2017). Aurélie Vialette is Associate Professor at Stony Brook University. Her first book, Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses (2018), won the North American Catalan Society Prize for Outstanding Work in the Field of Catalan Studies. Her publications include “A woman’s political answer to the cuestión social in nineteenth-​century Spain” (2015) and “Disposable bodies:  the problem about penitentiary colonization” (2017). She has a forthcoming edited volume titled Dissonances of Modernity: Music, Text, and Performance in Modern Spain (2020) and is currently working on a new book on Peninsular Crime, Colonial Punishment:  The Carceral Archipelago and the Failed Rebirth of the Spanish Empire.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank the individuals and institutions who have granted us permission to use the images contained in the book. I am grateful to Linda Grabner, who has translated a number of chapters. I  am also endebted to Traci Schick for her help with the editing of the manuscript, superb attention to detail, and general know-​how. Finally, I thank Rosie McEwan and Samantha Vale Noya, our editors at Routledge, for their guidance and support throughout the development of this project, and the production team including Jane Robson and Roopa Vineetha.

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RETHINKING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND SPAIN Critical configurations Elisa Martí-​López Scholarly interest in nineteenth-​century Spain has embraced a wide variety of texts, subjects, and issues, and yet it has been often heavily dependent on a positivist epistemology—​the cataloguing and critical description of the material studied—​and the epistemological preeminence given to the nation-​state with its identification with one language organizing most of the work on the period. This identification is particularly prominent and conspicuous in studies with a wide temporal scope. Most overviews on the nineteenth century in Spain not only take for granted the inclusions and exclusions imposed by the nation-​state, but also provide the metanarrative that legitimizes it. The correlation between language and nation at the core of critical practices studying history, literatures, and cultures in the nineteenth century is not exclusive to the scholarship on Spain. However, since Spain is the subject of this volume, it is the identification of Spain with the interests of its Royal Court and, later on, with those of Madrid as the capital of the nation-​ state, and that of the Spanish language (its literature and culture) with Spain to the exclusion of other historical, linguistic, and cultural productions as well as other national, non-​national, or transnational contexts, that most deserves our critical attention since it is at the core of the study of nineteenth-​century Spain from its inception and often still in its current practices. Titles of publications (like this one), the organization of tables of contents, and/​or editors’ introductions often take for granted and legitimize “Spain” as an unproblematized national frame of discussion even when the volumes include studies that put forward other national frames (or none at all), or directly engage in their deconstruction. Moreover, these contributions dealing with realities or imaginaries other than those of the Spanish nation-​state tend to appear as extra material, something added to the core content of the book—​“Spain”—​their relation to it, when not assumed as “regional” or “peripheral,” left ambiguous, unexplained, undetermined. It would seem that the restoration of democracy in Spain with its recognition of both Spain’s other nationalities and the revision of its imperial past—​even if uncertain and uncomfortable—​ and, most especially, the impact of new critical thinking (post-​structuralism, reader/​reception theory, post-​Marxist, post-​colonialism, and gender/​sexuality/​queer studies) on the hierarchical values exacted by the nineteenth-​century patriarchal and colonial nation-​state, have not fully destabilized the positivist and nationalistic approach that often frames the scholarship in this 1

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field. Regardless of the critical efforts to rethink it, the fact remains that the paradigm of the nation-​state often functions as a naturalized and encompassing critical framework for many studies on the nineteenth century to the exclusion of other possible political borders and cultural boundaries, their efforts often undermined by an insufficient knowledge of non-​Spanish languages, literatures, and cultures. The strength and merits of the new critical focus on Iberia and/​ or the transatlantic world—​the issues, influences, intersections, crossings brought forth in a context of national fragmentation—​are transforming for good our fields of study.The appearance of Iberian Studies and Transatlantic Studies as new critical frames to rethink modern Spain beyond traditional linguistic and national constraints, as well as the breadth of new issues and approaches brought forth by new critical theories—​gender and sexuality, race and imperialism, migrations and exile, space (urban planning, landscape, gardens) and its practices, everyday life, popular and mass culture, medical and hygienist discourses, material culture (fashion, furniture, ornaments), the law and criminality, visual and printed cultures, transatlantic voyages and travel books, and a long etcetera—​have been redefining (often radically) the field since the 1990s. However, the difficulties and contradictions arising from the critical paradigms of Iberian Studies or Transatlantic Studies when it comes to making explicit what it means to consider Iberia or the transatlantic world as either multinational or transnational contexts, or to question the preeminence of Spanish in both these new critical areas of study, exemplify the exciting challenges faced by new approaches to the study of nineteenth-​century Spain. The use of the terms “Iberian,” “Hispanic,” or “transatlantic” could—​and on occasion does—​serve to hide the preeminence of the history of Spain as nation-​state as well as the literary and cultural production in Spanish, or to ignore the ambiguity and indetermination that sustain these notions as if they were self-​ explanatory and sufficient. The question of what do “Spain,” “Hispanic,” “Iberian,” and “transatlantic” mean—​with the current and peculiar set of inclusions and exclusions observed in scholarly practices—​is often left unanswered. Sebastiaan Faber’s comments on “the uncertain promise of Transatlantic Studies”—​ is it a “neo-​Hispanism,” a renovated Pan-​Hispanism? (2016, 26)—​point clearly to the challenges ahead not only for transatlantic scholars but for Iberianists as well (Fernández-​Cifuentes and Epps 2005; Resina 2009, 2013). The Modern Language Association’s decision to link Iberian Studies to Spanish in its new forum format is a case in point. For the MLA, Iberian Studies is a neo-​Hispanism: its “natural” cultural center is that of the Spanish language and culture, and its national context that of Spain as nation-​state. Another compelling case is the “silencio” of “la mayoría de los profesionales del pasado” in Spain in the face of the renewed Spanish imperialism of the bestselling 2016 book Imperiofobia by María Elvira Roca Barea. (Neo-​)Hispanism undermines the national de-​centering brought forth by Transatlantic and Iberian Studies. Its hegemony prevails, more often than not, quietly since it has “el apoyo decidido de un Estado arrinconado por el desafío catalán y de unos medios, públicos y privados que abandonaron toda responsabilidad periodística de contraste, verificación y pluralidad” (Martínez 2019). The title of the current volume, The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-​Century Spain, can be read as a confirmation of the traditional Hispanist paradigm that has dominated the field for so long. It does indeed frame the studies included in it and favours a totalizing understanding of Spain as nation-​state. And yet, the chapters of the volume contribute in their own way to the critical self-​awareness at the volume’s center, to the open acknowledgment of the crisis of the Hispanist paradigm: “its lost explanatory potential as scholarly practice,” the critical awareness that “what it renders invisible now outmatches what it deserves to make visible and comprehensible” (Faber 2016, 26). The volume does not take for granted “Spain,” but rather presents the competing political and cultural strategies for subject and national formation emerging 2

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from diverse locations during the 1800s. Unfortunately, and for obvious and diverse reasons, The Companion is not—​and could not be—​a comprehensive book including all subjects and issues currently being studied, as well as all scholars whose work is essential to understanding the shifts transforming our fields, but it presents different, singular, perhaps contradictory insights and visions on Spain and the nineteenth century as sites of political, cultural, and critical contention. It foremost locates and marks difference and plurality when studying Spain: Spain as an unstable set of multipolar and multilinguistic relations that can be inscribed in many different transnational ways. The volume avoids the assignation of a priori hegemony or centrality to any particular location of nation-​building and cultural production, or critical discourse. Thus, the arrangement of the Table of Contents is simply that of the alphabetical order of the authors’ last names. No a priori classification such as chronology, periodization, category, national territory, linguistic area, etc., organizes and shapes the contents of the book. It does not seek to assert and legitimize any particular critical approaches on—​new epistemological “truths” about—​the nineteenth century and Spain, or construct a new grand narrative, but rather to show the ways in which our field of cultural production both creates knowledge and (re)produces and embodies ideology(ies). The volume’s critical stance is that, to study the nineteenth century and Spain, students and scholars should always be aware of—​and question—​the ideology their critical practices (re)produce and embody, and be knowledgeable about—​and engage with—​the complex political processes of nation(s)-​building and the linguistic and cultural diversity that constituted what we call Spain in the 1800s. I ask myself to no avail what would be the right title for the volume I envisioned, but whose definitive form is indebted to the generosity and professionalism of its contributors: each chapter of the book showing the strength of current research to destabilize established notions, to open new critical insights, and to identify new debates. Perhaps the quandary is not only mine or an indication of the difficulties and contradictions arising from the new critical approaches to “Spain.” Perhaps it is the confirmation of the historical failure of democratic Spain to accept the right to self-​determination and to imagine itself as a multinational state, and its inability and unwillingness to redefine its political and cultural relations with Spain’s old colonies in terms other than those of past hegemony and dominance.

Works cited Fernández-​Cifuentes, Luis, and Brad Epps, eds. 2005. Spain beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Faber, Sebastiaan. 2016. “Hispanism,Transatlantic Studies, and the Problem of Cultural History.” In Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World, edited by Akiko Tsuchiya and William G. Acree, 17–​33. Nashville, TN:Vanderbilt University Press. Martínez, Miguel. 2019.“La larga resaca posimperial.” Estudios de política exterior 192 (noviembre/​diciembre). https://​www.politicaexterior.com/​articulos/​politica-​exterior/​la-​larga-​resaca-​posimperial/​ Resina, Joan Ramon. 2009. Del hispanismo a los estudios ibéricos: una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. —​—​—​, ed. 2013. Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Roca Barea, María Elvira. 2016. Imperiofobia y la leyenda negra. Madrid: Siruela.

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1 CARIBBEAN SIBLINGS Sisterly affinities and differences between Cuba and Puerto Rico in the nineteenth century Silvia Álvarez Curbelo

To Diana and Consuelo, mis hermanas The islands that witnessed the momentous transatlantic encounter during the latter years of the fifteenth century were the founding lands of a vast empire “donde nunca se pone el sol” [where the sun never sets], according to King Philip II. Cuba and Puerto Rico would also be the last two possessions of that empire as a new imperial supremacy emerged during the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This essay browses the genome simultaneously similar and differentiated of the two Caribbean island-​sisters, described by Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió with the metaphor “de un pájaro las dos alas” [the two wings of the same bird].1 In 1887, the colonial government in Puerto Rico executed a cruel repression campaign against liberals and separatists, journalists and intellectuals as well as laborers. Venezuela, the United States, and Cuba received many exiles from the island in the following years. Among them, the grand dame of Puerto Rican letters: Lola Rodríguez de Tió. In Havana, where she lived until her death in 1924, she wrote Mi libro de Cuba (1893), a collection of poems that yearns for an independent destiny for both islands. The book engendered one of the most endearing tropes in Caribbean geo-​cultural imaginings:  Cuba y Puerto Rico son de un pájaro las dos alas. Reciben flores y balas en el mismo corazón … [Cuba and Puerto Rico are the two wings of the same bird.They receive flowers and bullets in the same heart …] Framed by nineteenth-​century Romantic nationalism, the utopian horizon of una patria sola [a single fatherland] described by Rodríguez de Tió still constitutes the dominant representation of Cuba and Puerto Rico’s relationship. This essay draws on Rodríguez de Tió’s Pan-​Antillean poetic imaginary to revisit both islands during the nineteenth century. By performing a comparative view of the core structures of slavery, colonialism, and modernity, this essay proposes that the poet’s metaphor elides profound and decisive divergences between Cuba and Puerto Rico. Along with sisterly affinities born from colonial victimization and resistance, there is also a dense landscape of differences that deserves to be assessed in order to understand not only the nineteenth century but also our own times. This essay also constitutes a way of narrating the history of imperial Spain’s last century from the prism of its overseas boundaries marked by complex urgings of freedom and identity, and by imperial acts of detachment and dispossession that lasted four centuries. 4

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A new Caribbean The nineteenth century started in Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1791 when the Haitian Revolution set—​in an ironic turn—​the basis for a new Caribbean century structured around sugar produced by slaves.Yet it could be said that it was during the British capture of Havana for ten months in 1762 that the significant driving forces of the nineteenth century were constituted for the two Hispanic Antillean islands (Knight 1977; Keuthe 1998). However, even though the conditions of possibility appear to be the same, the conditions of appropriation displayed by both colonies are clearly distinct. This is the story I want to address in this essay. When the Spanish monarch Charles III commissioned Inspector General Alejandro O’Reilly to visit Cuba and Puerto Rico after the British left Havana (1763), the King and his ministers had two objectives in mind—​strengthening the empire’s defensive perimeter and the State’s revenues (Parcero Torre 1998; Kuethe and Andrien 2014). The Creole elite in Cuba negotiated with O’Reilly the cost of keeping Creole military units in exchange for concessions in exporting sugar. The bottom line was that the colony would only be cost-​effective with the promotion of the prized product and the slave trade (Moreno Fraginals 1995). In Puerto Rico, the O’Reilly visit resulted in the modernization of the fortified outpost of San Juan (Morales Carrión 1995). Military investments promoted urban works in the capital and improved the preparedness of the local militia. The renovation was put to the test in 1797, when the British attempted to take San Juan (Alonso and Flores 1997). For thirteen days in April the city was bombarded; in the end, the British ended the siege. José Campeche—​a mulatto artist—​painted an ex-​voto (Dávila 1971) in appreciation for the bravery of Creole soldiers and common-​folk. The defeat of the British forces strengthened a sense of regional identity and set the course for Puerto Rico—​sometimes separate from and sometimes convergent with that of Cuba in its relationship with Spain (Figure 1.1). Unlike Cuba, Puerto Rico failed then to boost sugar production with slave labor, lacking institutional, financial, and agrarian-​culture structures and know-​how. It was not until 1815, when Ferdinand VII granted the Cédula de Gracias [Writ of Graces] that fostered white immigration, that Puerto Rico’s export sugar economy took off with the protection of the slave-​ trade by the colonial authorities (Rosario Rivera 1995). By that time, the events at French Saint-​Domingue had sparked a tectonic change in the Caribbean.

The utopia of a transatlantic kingdom Those were times of turbulence, but also of opportunity. A Caribbean Sea of different shades of blue, as narrated by novelist Alejo Carpentier in his 1962 epic novel El siglo de las luces, would unfold like an intricate canvas of dreams of freedom and violence, of new liberties and guillotines, all emerging from the same source—​the French Revolution. For Ada Ferrer (2016), the Haitian revolutionary process (1791–​1804) is a watershed moment that guides the destinies of the entire region, and even more. The rebellion, as pointed out by this historian, “forced the question of slavery on the French Revolution and on the world” (Ferrer 2016, 2). The critical contradiction between the universal principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity and the continuance of colonial slavery in Saint-​Domingue brought about a new Caribbean. Amidst the war of independence against the Napoleonic armies that invaded the Spanish peninsula in 1808, the main colonial power in the New World underwent a major political transformation. The invasion triggered rebellions for independence throughout its continental empire (Lynch 1986). 5

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Figure 1.1  Ex-​voto painting of the Siege of San Juan by the British. José Campeche, c.1797. Source: Archbishopric of San Juan Collection. Public domain.

France’s occupation of Spain reverberated in the struggle for the control of Santo Domingo. This was the first great public moment for Navy Lieutenant Ramón Power y Giralt—​Puerto Rican born—​sent hastily to the neighboring island to expel the French (Fernández Pascua 2012). While defeating French forces in SantoDomingo, Power was chosen by the five Puerto Rican cabildos as their delegate before the Junta Suprema Central y Gubernativa de España y las Américas, convened in the absence of the Spanish monarch. For the first time in 300 years, it was decreed that Puerto Rico and the rest of the colonies were no longer colonias o factorías [colonies or factories] but una parte esencial del reino [an essential part of the monarchy] (as quoted in Caro de Delgado 1969). In his essay on the sequence of utopias and disenchantments in the early nineteenth century, Rafael Rojas describes an Americanist republicanism that motivated a generation of transatlantic travelers and exiles, such as Power, connected by an enlightened moral and political rhetoric and a sense of differentiated identity (Rojas 2009). It was from this Americanist vocation that Ramón Power declared in 1811 that, “Los derechos del hombre, sí sus más preciados derechos son siempre los mismos y nunca puede perderlos sea cual fuera el lugar en que la naturaleza le hizo nacer—​estos derechos sagrados son imprescriptibles”2 (as quoted in Caro de Delgado 1969, 149–​150). As the voice of the Puerto Rican cabildos, he enumerated the asymmetries that had plagued the relationship between Puerto Rico and the Crown. The Spanish Cortes granted most of his requests, including the establishment of a Diputación Provincial [Provincial Council] and the separation of the Intendencia [Treasury] from the Capitanía General [military governorship] (González Vales 1978). 6

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A few months later, on the feast day of St Joseph in 1812, the Spanish Parliament assembled in Cádiz ratified a liberal Constitution, popularly known as “La Pepa.” 3 The document marked the rebirth of Spain as a transatlantic constitutional kingdom. Although short-​lived, the 1812 Constitution became an inextinguishable moral and political icon for Puerto Rican liberals. It stood for colonial representation, the enjoyment of rights and modernity. But an analysis of the constitutionalist sessions in Spain reveals, according to historian Moreno Fraginals, that the Cuban delegation opted to sacrifice the nation to the plantation (1995, 161). On the already thorny subject of the slave-​trade, the Cuban diputados voted in favor of its continuance. The events in Spain were rather interpreted in tune with the Cuban strategy to occupy an economic void left behind by the fall of Saint-​Domingue, which had already become Haiti. Fusi and Palafox (1997) describe the 1812 Constitution as “un espejismo revolucionario” [a revolutionary mirage]. For Miguel Artola (1973, 40), the Spanish revolutionary bourgeoisie, prematurely stepping into the political arena: El régimen liberal se negó a ver en la insurrección colonial una realidad distinta de sus propias luchas contra el absolutismo y pensó que el reestablecimiento de la Constitución y la reunión de las Cortes con la participiación de diputados americanos, sería suficiente para poner fin al conflicto. 4 It was not. With minimal agreements with the indigenous and slave populations, pro-​ independence forces began to gain ground in the colonies. The restoration of Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne in 1814 assigned to Cuba and Puerto Rico a contentious role against the rebellion. Yet, a bankrupt Spain, and in political fragmentation, was unable to recover its possessions. In 1825 the fate of the empire was sealed (Lynch 1986). In the Caribbean, Santo Domingo had proclaimed its independence in 1821 but was occupied a year later by Haiti. Only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained of the old empire.

Slavery and the “specialty of the Antilles” Fear creates powerful consensus. Corey Robin (2009) proposes that fear tends to perpetuate class-​based privileges and power. Franklin Knight (1970) examines the process by which Cuba was transformed from a society with slaves to a slave society during the first decades of the nineteenth century. In many ways—​especially in the period from 1825 to 1860—​Puerto Rico also showed structures and behaviors of a slave society (Bergad 2017). In both islands, fear played a relevant—​albeit different—​role. During most of the nineteenth century, an overwhelming terror of “the Haitian blood bath” spread throughout the region, referring to the events that led to the birth of an independent Haiti. The instructions from the Puerto Rican cabildos to representative Power are haunted by the terrors of an impending social disorder. Grotesque images of murder and rape, of “an island turned upside down,” favored the alternative of white settlers’ immigration to avoid a racial imbalance which an uncontrolled incorporation of slaves would bring about. But the economic interests of Cuban landowners would not be curtailed by fear. As Ada Ferrer summarizes, the motto for Cuban sugar planters during the first decades of the nineteenth century may well could have been, “to emulate Saint Domingue, but to contain Haiti” (2016, 38). A decade after the loss of its continental colonies, Spain rearticulated its imperial governance. Racial fear and anxieties and a logic of capitalist extraction by peninsular interests headed the process. In 1837 the Cortes made a decision that would define the fates of Cuba and Puerto Rico. It was established that the “provincias ultramarinas serían gobernadas por leyes 7

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especiales” [overseas colonies shall be governed by special laws] (as quoted by Fradera 1999, 71), without any details and no pretensions to equality unlike in Cádiz. These special laws, which alienated the overseas dominions from constitutional scope, were never defined. Furthermore, they became the conceptual mask for applying an old Habsburg mechanism:  the facultades omnímodas or all-​embracing power in the hands of the capitanes generales as a rule for governing the surviving colonies. As Josep Fradera points out, there would be no space for the institucionalización de poderes locales [institutionalization of local powers] (1999, 93). Moreover, the expelling of duly-​elected Cuban and Puerto Rican representatives from the Cortes in 1837 was intrinsically paradoxical:  “el desarrollo del Estado liberal en España … ha facilitado la emergencia del mando supremo como institución por encima de las demás y la única capaz de autonomía política en el espacio colonial”5 (Fradera 1999, 118). This is what Fradera calls in a later book a regime of dobles constituciones [constitutional doubles] (Fradera 2015, xv), in which rules of specialty served to “canalize a conservative reconstruction of empires” and to separate the “espacio de la nación” [the sphere of the nation] from the “espacio del imperio” [the sphere of the empire] (xxiv). The redefinition of the empire required, in the case of Cuba, the ousting of the Creole sugar lords from their privileged position. Captain General Miguel Tacón y Rosique waged an undermining campaign in 1834–​1838 against the economic dominance enjoyed by the Cuban planters since the last decades of the eighteenth century. In Puerto Rico, there was a nuanced spin in the application of the omnímodas by Governor Miguel de la Torre. During his long command in Puerto Rico (1824–​1837)—​recorded in the memoirs of his secretary Pedro Tomás de Córdova—​de la Torre maintained a fierce vigilance on elements suspected of defying order and sponsoring any secessionist plan (Altagracia 2013). But, unlike Tacón’s strategy in Cuba, de la Torre preferred to ingratiate himself with the emerging sugar landowner class. He protected the slave-​trade, improved roads, and guaranteed order in the agricultural areas, in exchange for a system of subsidies that would finance the colonial administration. Secretary Córdova would proclaim that an “Octavian peace” had descended upon Puerto Rico. The people, however, preferred to describe de la Torre’s tenure as the gobierno de las tres B [government of the three B’s]—​baile, botella y baraja [dancing, drinking and card playing]—​a colonial version of the Roman bread and circuses. Miguel de la Torre’s successors maintained this combination of strict discipline and cooperation with the hacendados. However, as sugar production began to show structural weaknesses—​ mostly due to British persecution of the slave-​trade—​additional coercive measures were adopted such as laws against vagrancy, “black codes” of rigorous punishment against insubordinate slaves, and eventually a compulsory labor system called the Régimen de Jornaleros. Colonial fates and fortunes were linked to a policy of despotism, paranoia, and Spanish privilege which prevented even the extension of the snippets of Spanish slow-​paced modernization to Puerto Rico.

Modernity at both sides of the Atlantic With the death of Ferdinand VII in 1833, Spain began a complex process of nation-​building, in which structures from the Old Regime cohabited with the modernizing project of a fragile bourgeoisie (Palafox and Fusi 1997, 66). Until 1876, the Army served as national arbiter, with the military coup as a mechanism for controlled change (Carr 1980, 2). The Spanish governments worked from a concept of shared sovereignty between the Crown and the Courts, with limited democratic rights and full support for economic laissez-​faire, benefiting the new bourgeoisie and a rebranded nobility. 8

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Technologically backward, Spain’s industrialization was limited to Basque country mining and Catalonian textile centers. It depended on European absentee capital, with low levels of reinvestment and generating few forward economic linkages. For Gabriel Tortella, nineteenth-​ century Spain was “un país agrícola y analfabeto en un continente industrial y rico” [an agricultural and illiterate country on a rich and industrial continent] (as quoted by Eslava and Rojano 1997, 91). Nicolás Sánchez de Albornoz (1988) characterizes Spain as a dual nation. Some cities were “islands of modernity” within a crushingly rural immensity and even Madrid and Barcelona had to wait until the 1860s projects of Castro and Cerdá, respectively, for urban renovation (de Terán 1999). How did the surviving colonies handle the middle decades of the century? How did they handle Spain’s lagging behind the modern achievements exhibited by other European societies and the United States? Mis memorias ([1927] 1968), a book by Alejandro Tapia, the founding figure of Puerto Rican historiography, identifies the key elements for understanding the intermediate decades of nineteenth-​century Puerto Rico. Tapia would have preferred to have been born in a country with less disadvantages than Puerto Rico:  “menos murallones … mejores caminos y más escuelas, más luces y menos faroles” [less military walls … more roads and more schools; more lights and less lamp posts] (15). The Danish island of Saint Thomas was for Puerto Ricans “nuestro Liverpool and nuestro París” [our Liverpool and our Paris] (17–​18). On this diminutive island, the arrival of a ship was announced by bells (64). In 1839 they led Tapia to the San Juan pier, where the boxes that brought ice to the island for the first time were being unloaded. The ephemeral ice that the child had in his hands on that afternoon was the “magical” way in which progress arrived in a society isolated from modern circuits. It was different in Havana, which exhibited a culture of novelties of modern profile. Even though Havana and San Juan were both walled cities, the topography of the Cuban capital allowed for urban development on both sides of the fortified perimeter before the demolition of the walls was finally decreed in 1863: “la ciudad cerrada y amurallada se transformó … en 1820 entre los seis distritos urbanos mayores de América”6 (Venegas Fornías 2000, 58). None of this was possible in San Juan, boxed in an islet with access to the main island only on one side. It was not until 1897 that, with popular fanfare, part of the walls was demolished, in time for the centennial celebration of the victory over the British and the granting of autonomy by Spain earlier that year (González Vales 2005, 13–​42). Many icons of modernity came to Cuba before Puerto Rico. For example, the train, the fourth railway in the world to be inaugurated, in 1837. The printing press arrived there almost one century before Puerto Rico, and the University of Havana was founded in 1728. The requests for a university in Puerto Rico were constant throughout the century, and so were the rejections by colonial authorities. Juan de la Pezuela, a member of the distinguished Fine Arts Academy of San Fernando, who was assigned to our island as capitán general in 1849, would argue that “mucha instrucción había perdido a América” [too much education had cost us the Americas] (as quoted by Cruz Monclova 1979, vol. 1, 287). Newspapers provoked official distrust. As governor Rafael Arístegui pointed out:  “No tendré nada que decir a la prensa, si respeta lo que se debe. Muchos artículos de agricultura y un poeta que divierta al público”7 (as quoted by Tapia 1968, 88). During the liberal period from 1820 to 1823 opinion newspapers emerged. One of them included a poem titled Las Coplas del Gíbaro, in which the anonymous author adopted the speech of peasants as a satirical way of criticizing absolutism. For Francisco Scarano (1996), the trope of the Puerto Rican as a jíbaro [peasant] was linked from then on to a Creole elite that thus “masked” its defiance of colonial power. Unlike Cuba (Williams 1994; Ramos 1996), the initial Puerto Rican literary production 9

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did not address the symbolic and complex speech of slaves and freed men until well into the century. The literary representation of identity was bestowed upon the pale jíbaros from the mountainside. Manuel Alonso wrote a set of rural vignettes titled El Gíbaro, criticizing the colonial educational system (González 1976, 104). As was the case in the rest of Latin America, the foundational literature of Puerto Rico was Romantic, in which the family home, the homeland, and the tropical landscape are intertwined through sentimental semantics (Sommer 1991). Later, Neoclassical and Positivist styles would dominate literary production and journalism, although Romanticism and Costumbrismo literature still remained strong. Romanticism was linked to narratives of nationalist freedom; Costumbrismo to a vindication of autochthony that was in tune with emergent liberal projects, seeking an autonomous regime as exemplified by Canada. Costumbrismo’s down-​ to-​ earth tropes were drawn mostly from peasant and emerging urban popular cultures. Romanticism rested on mythical and rhetorical imaginaries, much more akin to letrado [educated elite] circles. However, the frontier between the two discourses was porous as both referred to a distinct cultural and increasingly political “imagined community”: Puerto Rico. A persistent longing to be integrated into the modern world comprised a chronicle of desire in Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century. When the International Exposition was celebrated in Paris in 1867, Román Baldorioty de Castro, who would become a leading figure of autonomism two decades later, was sent to the French capital to report on the technological developments. After touring the pavilions filled with modern wonders, Baldorioty complained about Puerto Rico’s humble exhibition of tobacco leaves and medicinal alcohols. For him, the industrial order and its values of free labor and spirit of association were what Puerto Rico needed. There was no doubt for Baldorioty that slavery was the factor that explained the island’s lack of progress (Baldorioty 1868, 236). If modernity was to become the guideline for public life, it was necessary once and for all to part with the element that denied its possibility.

Emancipation as modern discourse The international campaign against the slave-​trade maintained at the height of 1860 a siege on the slave economies in the hemisphere—​the Southern United States, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil. For many owners in Puerto Rico, slaves became more valuable as a trade commodity than as labor. Cuba became a good market for Puerto Rican slaves (Franco 1980). It must be pointed out that by 1860 slavery in Cuba made up 31.6%, compared to 7.1% in Puerto Rico (Hernández Ruigómez 1998). Facing serious infrastructure problems and difficulties in obtaining credit for the technological transformation of the sugar haciendas into centrales, Puerto Rico was at a disadvantage in competing worldwide. Already by the 1850s, coffee haciendas on the mountainous interior—​who did not depend on slave labor—​proposed an alternative model of export agriculture. For historian Fernando Picó, la hora de la montaña [the economic dominance of the mountain region] had arrived (1986, 192). In my book Un país del porvenir: el afán de modernidad en Puerto Rico (2001), I analyze the abolitionist movement as the first discursive formation of modernity in Puerto Rico. Towards the end of 1864, Puerto Rican-​born Julio Vizcarrondo was one of the founders of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in Madrid. The decisive debate on colonial slavery began. A  year later, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the Spanish Overseas Minister, summoned the colonies to a Junta de Información [Information and Inquiry Commission for the Colonies]. Elected commissioners from Cuba and Puerto Rico met in Madrid between 1866 and 1867.The Union victory in the 10

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US Civil War (April 1865) had put into question Spain’s colonial project and its geopolitical standing (Martínez Fernández 1994, 186). Miguel Artola views the shadow cast by the United States as the spark for convening the Junta (1973, 319). Spain decreed the definite closure of the slave-​trade in 1866, despite the resistance of Cuban planters and peninsular groups who dominated trade, credit, and most of the Cuban sugar industry in those days. The liberal commissioners of Puerto Rico defended a modern model of civilization that required the immediate cease of slavery. Unlike Europe, where multiple social matters were in question (the rise of the proletariat, for example), in the Antilles, the social problem centered around the single institution of slavery (Junta de Información 1867, 206–​253). For the Cuban delegation, the contagion produced by a premature Puerto Rican abolition would spread unbridled passions in both colonies (58). The Junta sessions did not achieve any significant imperial concession, but its failure was one of the triggers for the Guerra de los diez años in Cuba and the aborted rebellion in Puerto Rico, the Grito de Lares.

The Glorious Revolution and colonial uprisings The Glorious Revolution in Spain forced the abdication of Queen Isabella II in 1868. Claims arising from emerging social groups, such as urban workers and middle-​class professionals, for changes that would bring Spain close to European modern standards found an echoing voice within the progressive ranks in the army. The democratic achievements of La Gloriosa were significant. However, its limitations were also decisive. In my judgment, two of them were key: the inability to reach a consensus on a new configuration of the State and the revolution’s incapacity to provide a clear and fair answer to the colonial problem (Artola 1973, 374–​375). The “democratic” revolution of 1868 once again appealed to more representation and the extension of civic and political rights as the solution for avoiding a colonial crisis that soon would spin out of control. Tensions between Creole owners and the colonial administration in Cuba that favored the peninsulares intensified with low sugar prices and lack of coastal trade or cabotaje with Spain. The geographical divide in Cuba between the west, comprising large slave-​ based haciendas owned by Hispanic-​Cuban capital, and the east, a region of Creole owners who depended less on slaves, became intolerable. The Grito de Yara uprising exploded in 1868 at a hacienda in eastern Cuba, whose Creole owner, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, freed his slaves as his first act of war. Céspedes also came up with the metaphor tierra quemada [blazing soil] in the name of freedom for the Cuban nation (McGillivray 2009, 13). Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, the regime of José Laureano Sanz was able to crush in less than four days the uprising that erupted in the mountain town of Lares. There was no significant sugar production in the region, nor did the hindrance of slavery play an important role. Most of the coffee-​hacienda owners were Creole (although some of the leaders were from Venezuela) and the rebellion was fought mainly because of economic grievances: high taxes, the domination of credit by the peninsulares, and, in general, the Spanish protectionist obstacles to Puerto Rican coffee (Bergad in Scarano 1985, 185). Regarding Lares, Puerto Rican historiography tends to focus on the pro-​independence ideology of the uprising and the revolutionary inspiration of exiled Ramón Emeterio Betances, an abolitionist and separatist Puerto Rican physician (Jiménez de Wagenheim 1984; Ojeda 2001; Estrade 2017). A mythical character, part of a network of Antillean revolutionaries with connections in the United States, Europe, and Latin America through freemasonry (Arroyo 2013, 70–​102), Betances maintained, until his death in 1898, a crusade against Spanish colonialism and the threat represented by the United States presence in the Caribbean region. However, the actual experience of the rebellion was mainly of economic interests in conflict. 11

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Reduced to a small area, there was no significant support from sugar cane regions nor from urban nuclei. Repression was severe. From then on, separatism was not able to go beyond projects pursued by dedicated patriots exiled in Cuba and New York. From 1870, when the first Puerto Rican political parties were legally organized, the political arena was divided between liberals and conservative loyalists. The refusal of Creole liberal groups to participate in the Lares uprising reveals the strategy which this group maintained until the colonial takeover by the United States in 1898. It consisted of obtaining reforms from the metropolis and discouraging any option that would cancel Spanish sovereignty. Neither separatism nor annexation—​which had been and were plausible alternatives in Cuba—​gained significant support in Puerto Rico. For the conservadores, defending Spanish sovereignty in the island was the primary objective of their political activity (Bothwell 1979, 91). Of course, loyalism was the fetish that legitimated the economic privileges enjoyed by the peninsulares and their Creole associates. After the start of the Ten Years’ War, the specter of insurgent Cuba was used by this group as a deterrent for reformist measures in Puerto Rico. It was not until five years later that the recently proclaimed first Spanish Republic (1873–​ 1874) decreed the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico and some of the reformist promises of the Glorious Revolution were extended to the island. For Rafael María de Labra—​a Cuban-​ born representative of Puerto Rico on more than one occasion, although he never stepped on the island—​there were no more energetic and substantial reforms during the entire century than the ones approved for Puerto Rico in 1873 (Labra 1880, v). Liberal Creoles envisioned a peaceful future, in which the “free population of color” would serve as a facilitator during the transition from slavery to freedom. Former slaves would be integrated into free society within an orderly scheme of “soft hierarchies” (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2  The school of teacher Rafael Cordero. Francisco Oller, 1891. Source: Athenaeum of Puerto Rico Collection. Public domain.

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In the end, the transition to abolition did not cause any social disorder, and most owners ended up accepting the fact, whether for moral and political reasons or because of economic self-​preservation (Díaz Soler 1953).

The road to autonomy: under Cuba’s shadow In the case of insurgent Cuba, nationality and race remained a contentious subject. Fears regarding “the color of the revolution” were represented by Antonio Maceo, the mulatto leader of the rebellion (Ferrer 1999, 52) but there were also differences within the insurgent field itself regarding the capacity of slaves and free colored to become citizens. After the Paz del Zanjón in 1878 which put an end to the conflict, Ada Ferrer states that, for white insurgents and colored populations alike, the war had definitively sealed the link between the end of slavery and the fight against the colonial order (Ferrer 1999, 68). It was clear for José Martí, who conceived of abolition as a necessary moral action to assert Cuban national identity, yet for black and mixed-​ race insurgents there were many questions regarding a nation that could emerge from the racial divide. During the years that followed, Cuban exiles, who mostly operated from New  York and Florida, became stronger as colonial authorities delayed the end of slavery and insisted on policies of order and privilege for the peninsulares. The cause for Cuban independence gained visibility through a network of newspapers that featured articles from insurgent authors, in particular those of José Martí. After the collapse of the First Spanish Republic, monarchy returned to Spain under Alfonso XII and his éminence grise, conservative prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo. In 1876 the Restoration regime was inaugurated (Martínez Cuadrado 1973). Cánovas’ genius revolved around his fulfilled promise of stability through a balance mechanism—​the monarchy would guarantee the centralist and Catholic tradition, the Courts would be in charge of controlled reform, and the colonies would remain the source of extraction and the international card that would allow Spain to keep its rank as an imperial power. Stability as an end in itself required several operational mechanisms—​alternation between the two main parties, patronage and limited suffrage, protectionism, a free yet controlled public opinion, an urban populace distracted by bulls and zarzuelas [Spanish operettas], an illiterate rural population that obeyed landowners and priests, and peaceful colonies. The Conservative and the Liberal-​Fusionist parties and their leaders—​Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, respectively—​ruled alternately until 1897, when Cánovas’ assassination left Sagasta dealing with the end of the Spanish empire in America and in Asia. Two mechanisms of the regime were key in prompting the final crisis that plunged Cuba into a second war of independence in 1895:  protectionism that affected colonial trade and the unabashed intervention in local election processes in order to favor peninsular interests. The shifting of Puerto Rican liberalism from 1885 towards autonomy had to do precisely with the limitations to local governance and to colonial trade. Liberalism that had insisted until then on assimilation with the metropolis lost supporters as the successful export regions of south and west Puerto Rico—​the cities of Ponce and Mayagüez—​resented the credit monopoly in the hands of peninsular traders and the tariff instability that impaired trade with the United States and even with Spain itself. Unlike San Juan, both cities had high levels of cosmopolitanism, and were open to innovation mostly due to a greater integration with international trade. It was here in the southwest half-​moon of the island where a strong anti-​Spanish sentiment emerged.

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In 1887, Ponce was the host city to an island-​wide meeting that adopted an autonomist platform for the Liberal Party.The most radical version of autonomy—​modelled after Canada—​ represented by Baldorioty de Castro was defeated by a moderate option supported from Madrid by Rafael María de Labra. The winning formula was closer to the Cuban autonomist model—​ with an emphasis on identity in civil and political rights with Spain, administrative yet not political decentralization, and expressing the convenience of a union between liberals of both islands to garner the realization of common ideals (Bothwell 1979, 180). But even this watered-​down version of autonomy was too much for the colonial authorities. The new capitán general, Romualdo Palacio, ordered a fierce repression that gave the year 1887 the nickname of El año terrible [The Terrible Year] (Pedreira 1937). Baldorioty de Castro was imprisoned along with fifteen other autonomist supporters and transferred to the dungeons of El Morro castle, to await execution. The island lived its darkest hour until a young autonomist who had been able to secretly board a ship heading for the peninsula denounced the repressive campaign. The Overseas Minister, Víctor Balaguer, sent a telegram to Governor Palacio, removing him immediately. The poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió went into exile two years after Palacio’s repression when the political atmosphere became unbearable, once again.

The causes and remedies for evil For Benedict Anderson (1989), newspapers constitute a key cultural artifact in the rise of modern nations. The newspaper series appearing in the Ponce newspaper La Democracia in 1891, titled “Las causas y los remedios del mal” [Evil: its causes and remedies], became a road map designed by its editor, Luis Muñoz Rivera, to attain autonomy for Puerto Rico. Where is my country? he asks himself. The feminized bodies of popular classes, marred by anemia, gambling, alcohol, and indolence cannot constitute a nation. Who will do this, then? The young generation is of feeble mind and body. Muñoz Rivera questions if their idleness may be due to the recent past of slavery which prevents them from holding their heads high as free citizens. Among the rich, the lack of virility is a product of fear and egotism. Some have even enjoyed the country’s slow and desperate agony. Finally, Muñoz Rivera sets his eyes on the political class.They are stricken—​Muñoz Rivera says—​with sentimentalism, “obedecen antes al sentimiento que al cálculo; los domina una impresión ponderosa … El platonismo a nada conduce en nuestra época”8 (Muñoz Rivera 1925, 33–​34). Neither war as a means for change nor independence as an alternative of freedom were possible in Puerto Rico. Cuba, with abundant resources and land, could afford to pursue independence. Puerto Rican idiosyncrasies prevented such dreams. If autonomism in Cuba had to deal with criticism by independence supporters and by conservatives—​who in some cases preferred being annexed to the United States to an independent Cuba—​in Puerto Rico, autonomy garnered immediate consensus. Muñoz Rivera held, from his deeply-​rooted pragmatism, a critical card—​the younger sister was not at war, but if autonomy was not granted, separatism and annexation by the United States may become more attractive alternatives for a country that was fed up with arbitrary governments and backwardness. In November 1897, Spain, weakened by Cuban insurgence and a losing tariff war with the United States, approved autonomy charters for its two Antilles. It was late for both Cuba and Puerto Rico (Figure 1.3).

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Figure 1.3  First autonomic cabinet of Puerto Rico. February 12, 1898. Source: Puerto Rico General Archives Collection. Public domain.

Coda Aboard the USS Yale, General Nelson A. Miles cabled his superior officers in Washington on July 22, 1898: “I am anxious to proceed against the island of Puerto Rico.” A veteran of the wars against Native Americans, Miles longed for an Army victory in the Hispanic American War. Until that moment, the laurels had been won by the Navy during the Cuban and Philippine campaigns. On July 25, about 3,000 men led by Miles landed on the south of Puerto Rico. Guánica Bay offered the ideal water depth for landing, but what Miles really wanted was to reach nearby Ponce—​the Crown jewel. He assured the expedition’s Navy commander that “in that southern coast, the inhabitants fiercely oppose Spain and … would surely help the operation.” Indeed, the surrender of Ponce was negotiated with the consular corps and members of Ponce’s wealthy families. As in many moments during its nineteenth-​century history, Ponce bet on the winner. This would be the place in which Miles would issue his famous proclamation of July 28, 1898, stating that “sporting the standard of Freedom,” the United States committed to ensure the prosperity and enjoyment of the fruits of justice and humanity owed to Puerto Ricans (Figure 1.4). Completely ignoring the autonomous status in force enjoyed by Puerto Rico, the transfer of sovereignty was signed in December 1898 in Paris. The colonial condition is still ongoing. In Cuba, U.S. tutelage over the young republic lasted until 1934. For the two Caribbean sisters, sugar would once again be the greedy goddess that would lead their fates during the new twentieth century, with—​once again—​unequal endings.

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Figure 1.4  The 44th New York Volunteers in Porto Rico. Source: In Our islands and their People as seen with camera and pencil, edited by José de Oliveras (St. Louis, ND: Thompson Publishing Co., 1899). Public domain.

Notes 1 I am deeply indebted to Laird W. Bergad’s seminal work “¿Dos alas del mismo pájaro? Notas sobre la historia socioeconómica comparativa de Cuba y Puerto Rico.” Also, gracias to Dr. Alejandro Álvarez Nieves for the translation of the first draft of this essay. 2 “The rights of man, yes, his most precious rights, are always one and the same, and he may never lose them regardless of the place in which he is born—​these sacred rights are unalienable …” 3 In Spanish, “Pepe” is a common nickname for Joseph, hence the name “Pepa,” as constitution is a female word in Spanish (T.N.) 4 “The liberal regime refused to see colonial insurrection as a different situation from their own fight against absolutism and thought that reestablishing the Constitution and assembling the Courts with the participation of delegates from the Americas would be enough to put an end to the conflict.” 5 “the development of a liberal State in Spain … had facilitated the emergence of supreme command as an institution above all others …” 6 “The enclosed and walled city was transformed … by 1820 as one of the six major urban districts in America …” 7 “I will not have anything to say to the press, if it respects what it should. Many articles on agriculture and one poet to entertain the public.” 8 “they obey sentiment before calculation; they are dominated by a powerful impression … Platonism leads nowhere in our time.”

Works cited Alonso, María Mercedes, and Milagros Flores. 1997. The Eighteenth Century Caribbean and the British Attack on Puerto Rico in 1797: With Chronicles. San Juan, Puerto Rico: National Park Service/​Department of Interior. Altagracia, Carlos D. 2013. La utopía del territorio perfectamente gobernado: miedo y poder en la época de Miguel de La Torre, Puerto Rico, 1822–​1837. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejón.

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Caribbean siblings Álvarez Curbelo, Silvia. 2001. Un país del porvenir. El afán de modernidad en Puerto Rico (siglo XIX). San Juan: Ediciones Callejón. Anderson, Benedict. 1989. Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Arroyo, Jossiana. 2013. Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Artola, Miguel. 1973. La burguesía revolucionaria (1808–​1874). Madrid: Alianza Universitaria. Baldorioty de Castro, Román. 1868. Exposición Universal de París. Memoria presentada a la Comisión Provincial de Puerto-​Rico. Puerto Rico: Imprenta de Acosta. Bergad, Laird W. 1998. “¿Dos alas del mismo pájaro? Notas sobre la historia socioeconómica comparativa de Cuba y Puerto Rico.” Historia y Sociedad 1: 143–​153. —​—​—​. 2017. “Slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1804 to Abolition.” In The Cambridge World History of Slavery, edited by David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and David Richardson, 98–​128. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bothwell, Reece. 1979. Cien años de lucha política. 3 vols. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto  Rico. Caro de Delgado, Aida. 1969. Ramón Power y Giralt:  Diputado puertorriqueño a las Cortes Generales y Extraordinarias de España (1810–​1812). Madrid: Ediciones Pareja. Carpentier, Alejo. 1962. El siglo de las luces. México: Cía. General de Ediciones. Carr, Raymond. 1980. Modern Spain 1875–​1980. London: Oxford University Press. Centro de Investigaciones Históricas. 1978. El proceso abolicionista de Puerto Rico: Documentos para su estudio. 2 vols. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Cruz Monclova, Lidio. 1979. Historia de Puerto Rico (Siglo XIX). 3 vols. San Juan: Editorial Universitaria de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Dávila, Arturo. 1971. José Campeche 1751–​1809. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. de Terán Moyano, Fernando. 1999. Historia del urbanismo en España III. Siglos XIX y XX. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. Díaz Soler, Luis. 1953. Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Eslava Galán, Juan, and Diego Rojano Ortega. 1997. La España del 98: el fin de una era. Madrid: Editorial Edaf. Estrade, Paul. 2017. En torno a Betances, hechos e ideas. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejón. Fernández Pascua, Delfina. 2012. Ramón Power y Giralt y las Cortes de Cádiz. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Mapfre Puerto Rico. Ferrer, Ada. 1999. Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–​ 1898. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. —​—​—​. 2016. Freedom’s Mirror:  Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Fradera, Josep M. 1999. Gobernar colonias. Barcelona: Península. —​—​—​. 2015. La nación imperial (1750–​1918). 2 vols. Barcelona: Edhasa. Franco, José Luciano. 1980. Comercio clandestino de esclavos. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Fusi,Juan Pablo,and Jordi Palafox.1997.España: (1808–​1996): el desafío de la modernidad.Madrid: Espasa-​Calpe. González, José Luis. 1976. Literatura y sociedad en Puerto Rico:  de los cronistas a la Generación del 98. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. González Vales, Luis. 1978. Alejandro Ramírez y su tiempo: Ensayos de historia económica e institucional. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Editorial Universitaria de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. —​—​—​. 2005. “El derribo de las murallas y el ensanche de San Juan. Apuntes sobre un expediente.” In San Juan, la ciudad que rebasó sus murallas, edited by Luis González Vales et al., 13–​42. San Juan, Puerto Rico: National Park Service/​Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia. Hernández Ruigómez, Almudena. 1998. “La abolición de la esclavitud en Puerto Rico: introducción al estudio de las mentalidades anti-​esclavistas.” Revista Quinto Centenario 14: 27–​42. Humlebaek, Carsten. 2015. Spain: Inventing the Nation. London: Bloomsbury. Jiménez de Wagenheim, Olga. 1984. El Grito de Lares:  sus causas y sus hombres. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán. Keuthe, Allan. 1998. “La fidelidad cubana durante la edad e las revoluciones.” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 55(1): 209–​220. Kuethe, Allan J. and Kenneth J. Andrien. 2014. The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century. War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713-​1796. New York: Cambridge University Press. Knight, Franklin W. 1970. Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Silvia Álvarez Curbelo —​—​—​. 1977. “Origins of Wealth and the Sugar Revolution in Cuba, 1750–​1850.” Hispanic American Historical Review 57(2): 231–​252. Labra, Rafael María de. 1880. Los diputados antillanos en las Cortes española, 1872–​1873. Madrid: Imprenta de Aurelio J. Alaria. Lynch, John. 1986. The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–​1825. London: W.W. Norton. Martínez Cuadrado, Miguel. 1973. La burguesía conservadora (1874–​1931). Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Martínez Fernández, Luis. 1994. Torn between Empires: Economy, Society and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean. 1840–​1878. Athens, GA: Georgia University Press. McGillivray, Gilliam. 2009. Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Foundation in Cuba, 1868–​ 1959. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morales Carrión, Arturo. 1995. Puerto Rico y la lucha por la hegemonía en el Caribe:colonialismo y contrabando, siglos XVI-​XVIII. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. 1995. Cuba/​España, España/​Cuba. Historia Común. Barcelona: Crítica. Muñoz Rivera, Luis. 1925. Campañas políticas. 2 vols. Madrid: Editorial Puerto Rico. Ojeda Reyes, Félix. 2001. El desterrado de París. Biografía del Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827–​1898). San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Puerto. Pagán, Bolívar. 1959. Historia de los partidos políticos puertorriqueños, 1898–​1956. 2 vols. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Librería Campos. Parcero Torre, Cecilia María. 1998. La pérdida de La Habana y las reformas borbónicas en Cuba (1760–​1773). Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Educación y Cultura. Pedreira, Antonio S. 1937. El año terrible del 87. Sus antecedentes y sus consecuencias. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Biblioteca de Autores Puertorriqueños. Picó, Fernando. 1986. Historia general de Puerto Rico. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán. Ponce de León, Néstor. 1867. Información sobre reformas en Cuba y Puerto Rico. 2 vols. Nueva York: Imprenta de Hallet y Brien. Ramos, Julio. 1996. Paradojas de la letra. Quito, Ecuador: ExCultura. Robin, Corey. 2009. El miedo: historia de una idea política. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Rodríguez de Tió, Lola. 1893. “A Cuba.” In Mi Libro de Cuba: Poesías, 3–​6. Habana: Imprenta La Moderna. Rojas, Rafael. 2009. Las repúblicas de aire. Utopía y desencanto en la Revolución de Hispanoamérica. Madrid: Taurus. Rosario Rivera, Raquel. 1995. La Real Cédula de Gracias de 1815 y sus primeros efectos en Puerto Rico. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Sánchez Albornoz, Nicolás. 1988. España hace un siglo: una economía dual. Barcelona: Ediciones Península. Scarano, Francisco. 1985. Inmigración y clases sociales en el Puerto Rico del siglo XIX. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán. —​—​—​. 1996. “The Jíbaro masquerade and the subaltern politics of creole identity formation in Puerto Rico, 1745–​1823.” American Historical Review 101(5): 1398–​1431. Sommer, Doris. 1991. Foundational Fictions.The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro. [1927] 1968. Mis memorias. Puerto Rico como lo encontré y como lo dejo. Barcelona: Editorial Rumbos. Venegas Fornías, Carlos. 2000. “La Habana, puerto colonial: reflexiones sobre su historia urbana.” In La Habana, Puerto Colonial. Siglos XVIII-​XIX, edited by Agustín Guimerá, Agustín y Fernando Monge, 57–​69. Madrid: Fundación Portuaria. Williams, Lorna V. 1994. The Representations of Slavery in Cuban Fiction. Columbia, MI:  University of Missouri Press.

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2 GOOD SPANISH, BETTER BASQUES Culture, politics, and identity construction in the Basque diaspora of the nineteenth century Óscar Álvarez Gila

Migration and national identity in the Basque Country in the nineteenth century One of the consequences of overseas mass migratory movements from the Basque territories in the second half of the nineteenth century was the creation of several Basque diasporic communities1 in countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, and, to a lesser extent, the United States, Mexico, and Chile, most of which endure until today (Álvarez Gila 2013). The presence of Basque immigrants in the Americas dates back to the earliest moments of the conquest and colonization of the continent, especially in the territories that had become imperial possessions of Castile (later, Spain) and France. During the entire colonial period, Basques had the right to participate like other Spanish or French subjects in the governing and exploitation of the lands, resources, and peoples of the newly acquired overseas territories. Stories of successful local indianuak (returnees) that came back to their homeland enriched after their American experiences could be found in almost any Basque village or town. Nonetheless, it was not until after the independence of most of the American continent by the second decade of the nineteenth century that Basque overseas migration started to escalate to numbers never seen before. As García-​Sanz Marcotegui and Arizcun state: From the last decade of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, Navarra, and all of the Basque Country in general, passed through a series of negative circumstances that inhibited its population growth compared with that of Spain as a whole. … The causes of this slow growth were quite diverse, although interrelated. Bad harvests and wars, and the aftermath of both, such as epidemics, at times of multiple illness; inadequate sanitation, emigration; etc. were the principal factors. [Nonetheless] emigration provides the only logical explanation of this pronounced population stability. (1989, 235–​236)

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Óscar Álvarez Gila Table 2.1  Population of Basque territories, 1900–​1936

Years

Spanish Basque Country

French Basque Country

Total

1900/​1901 1930/​1936

911,267 1,237,593

174,351 207,179

1,084,618 1,444,772

Source: Author’s own elaboration based on Urkidi Elorrieta and Asenjo (2008).

Douglass and Bilbao (1975) roughly calculated that from 1840 to 1950 between 200,000 to 250,000 Basques may have left their homeland for a destination abroad, mainly in the Americas—​an estimate that is still accepted today. To a certain extent, the roots of the contemporary Basque diasporic community lie almost solely in the consequences of this emigration. These figures include emigration abroad from all the Basque territories, either in Spain or in France. In order to have an accurate picture of the meaning of these amounts, it is interesting to compare them with the actual population of the Basque territories during the period (see Table 2.1). The Basque Country is a region located in the southwestern corner of Europe, along the coast of the Gulf of Biscay in the Atlantic Ocean, distributed on both sides of the Pyrenean mountains. The lack of any historical precedent of a unified political community for the whole Basque Country through a recognizable statehood has resulted in present-​day difficulties in defining its limits, even for the Basques themselves (Larrañaga Elorza 1996, 478–​479).The most commonly agreed definition focuses on cultural aspects, including the territories where the Basque language (the only remnant of a pre-​Indo-​European tongue in Europe) has persisted until now: in fact, the traditional Basque name to refer to the country, Euskal Herria or “Land of Basque Speakers,” is centered on linguistic identity. Politically and administratively, the Basque lands have been divided into several different kingdoms in a historical process that has led to the present-​day division between a northern, French-​ruled and a southern, Spanish-​ruled Basque region, after the two crowns fixed their border along the Pyrenees in 1659. This chapter will be focused on the Spanish-​ruled Basque Country. Unlike in France, Basque territories in Spain were able to maintain most of their self-​ governing capacities during the nineteenth century. In fact, even when a process of political centralization was implemented by the liberal Spanish government during this century, they were able to retain most of those capacities. They even retained the most important of them, their fiscal autonomy, after the kingdom of Navarre was turned into a Spanish province (1840), and the so-​called Provincias Vascongadas (i.e. Biscay, Araba, and Gipuzkoa) lost their fueros (customary laws of home rule) after their defeat in the last Carlist Civil War (1876). Even though the construction of a Spanish national identity preceded its Basque counterpart and was stronger during the nineteenth century, the pertinence of the notion of “double patriotism” has been argued for the case of the Basque provinces (Aizpuru and Portillo 2015, 68–​74; Rubio Pobes 1999, 406–​407). The most prominent feature of this notion is that it was based on the coexistence of two complementary identities that were not competing with each other: the reaffirmation of a particular Basque identity (based on the persistence of home-​rule and promoted by local oligarchies) was not in collision with the acceptance of a wider, generally Spanish national identity (Molina and Oiarzabal 2009, 701). Only with the emergence by the end of the century of a new political movement, Sabino Arana’s Basque nationalism—​which challenged the Spanishness of Basque people—​would the previous status quo radically change (Mees 2003, 9–​12). 20

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Massive migratory movements during the nineteenth century actually played a critical role in the process that led to the emergence of a visible and stronger Basque identity as well as the subsequent appearance of Basque political nationalism. The relevance of the social, economic, and cultural changes that were derived from the accelerated industrialization of the Basque Country, especially during the second half of the century, have been extensively researched. The presence of iron mines in the surroundings of Bilbao attracted local and foreign capital, which began the exploitation of iron ore for export, and after gave rise to a local ironworks industry. Both economic activities demanded rising numbers of workers, who immigrated to the area mainly from non-​Basque regions of Spain (Montero García 1995, 50–​53). It is not by chance that the founders and first organized groups of modern Basque nationalism were centered in the city of Bilbao itself, as the first ideological formulations of the newly minted Basque Nationalist Party (1893) highlighted a quite xenophobic reaction against immigration and its resulting outcome: a demographic shift that could threaten to turn Basques and Basque culture into a marginal constituent in their own country, “in grave danger of being denatured politically and exploited economically …, as well as diluted demographically” (Douglass 2002, 95). However, less attention has been paid to how the new overseas Basque immigrant communities also managed to create their own parallel paths towards the creation of a particular and recognizable identity in the societies they had settled in, whose echoes still persist today (Totoricaguena 2004, 10). A detailed analysis of this side of the debate must consequently be taken into account to have a more complete picture of the process (Álvarez Gila 2011, 45).

The construction of a visible community in the diaspora Modern migration from the Basque Country to the Americas started very early in comparison to other Southern European regions. After the breakup of the previous model of internal migration within the Spanish empire due to the processes of independence of most of today’s Latin American countries, it took a few decades to resume the migratory movement again until the final years of the 1830s. This new migration, however, was constructed under new bases. Inter-​ Atlantic migratory movements had now developed into an international issue; the growing transformations in shipping technologies lowered the prices of transoceanic traffic; therefore, this allowed a wider segment of the population to enroll in the ranks of emigrants (Douglass 1989). Even though the authorities of Spain always tried to direct its emigrants towards the last remaining colonial territories in Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines, the attractiveness of other emerging destinations, especially the River Plate countries, soon prevailed. Cuba, for instance, was just the third most important point of arrival for Basque immigrants. Their presence in other destinations was always less in numbers, like Chile, Mexico, or the United States (Azcona Pastor 2003, 145–​150). Like any other ethnic community developed within the framework of international migrations, the emergence of Basque-​American communities depended both on “physical” and “symbolic” bases. The existence of a group of people that shared the same origin, cultural and linguistic features aside, it is nonetheless even more relevant to give this group a combination of internal/​external identifications: a sense of self-​identity reinforced by (and also reinforcing) an external, coherent image accepted by the society they lived within. In this regard, Basques were not unknown as an ethnic group in the Latin American countries they settled in. Totoricaguena states that “Basque ethnicity maintenance is visible in the historical record since the 1400s in the New World exploration and colonization processes” (2004, 79). As subjects of the former Spanish empire, Basques had been continuously present in their societies; and some of them—​or their descendants—​had actually taken part on both sides of the war during the 21

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processes of independence. Before this new wave of modern emigration started, there was some kind of social stereotypical construct about who Basques were. Because of this, even at the very early stages of these new flows of Basque newcomers, they soon became a recognizable group, different from migrants of other ethnic or national origins. However, there were also other reasons that help to explain their recognition. First of all, Basques’ ethnic background played a key role in their everyday life, as was the case with any other immigrants who arrived in multicultural, multinational societies. Socially, immigrants were informally addressed, taking into account their ethnic identity, thus deriving into the emergence of a group of “social nicknames” for each of the most visible immigrant groups. This is how, for instance in Argentina, the widespread use of national stereotypes was commonplace by the middle of the nineteenth century:  the tano (Italian), the gallego (Spanish), the gringo (Western European), the turco (Eastern Mediterranean), or the vasco (Basque) (Illesca 2002). It is noteworthy that while other Spaniards were referred to with the general nickname of gallegos (a regional appellation, derived from the fact that the bulk of Spanish immigrants in the country came from Galicia), only Basques managed to get recognition through their own, separate stereotype, to a certain extent different from the main Spanish (but also French) identity. Sooner or later, similar processes also happened in other countries with appreciable Basque immigration. Even in the United States—​which can be considered the last American country where this process can be found—​Basques were able to construct their own space in the context of the so-​called “hyphenated America” by the middle of the twentieth century (Douglass and Bilbao 1975, 478). Although Basques had settled into the newly independent countries of the Americas for quite some time, it is striking that they did not implement their own web of immigrant associations until a very late stage, during the last quarter of the century. Prior to this moment, most Basque immigrants did not seem to have any problems in joining Spanish or French associations, depending on which side of the Pyrenees they had come from. For instance, some of the most prominent members of the Basque community in Buenos Aires, including those who would become “ethnic leaders” within the Basque group, started their careers as members of the Spanish or French mutual-​aid societies that had been created since the middle of the century in the capital city of Argentina (Azcona Pastor 2003, 289). As Irianni states, these associations were a tool in the hands of an ethnic elite whose aim was both to help their fellow countrymen and to get social recognition and political prominence in substitution for direct participation in politics, as they were cast aside because of their foreignness (2010, 988). Among others, this was the case for Ciriaco Morea, a Navarrese-​born immigrant who became a member of the advisory boards of the Sociedad Española de Socorros Mutuos (Spanish Society of Mutual Aid) and the Hospital Español (Spanish Hospital) (Fundación Juan de Garay 2000, 730). Irianni suggests some of the reasons that could explain this delay in the creation of ethnic associations for the Basques. First of all, it may have been a simple matter of numbers: associations are easier to create in places with large (immigrant) populations. It is therefore not by chance that during the nineteenth century the only Basque institutions implemented in the diaspora were located in populous cities, such as Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Havana, or Santiago (Irianni 2011). Secondly, the majority of immigrants never joined such associations, especially those that did not offer any practical services such as mutual aid or leisure and socialization (Azcona Pastor 2011, 128). Finally, it was also a question of identity: most Basques did not confront the idea of being labeled or labeling themselves as plain Spanish (or, in the other case, French) subjects. This does not mean that Basques were not by then in the process of (re) defining a particular identity in the context of their new host societies. In fact, institutionalization of any ethnic community (understood as the creation of a web of associations with both 22

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Good Spanish, better Basques

legal and social recognition) is no more than the last stage of a previous, largely undercover process of informal organization that finally emerges in a more visible form, at least in the eyes of historians who have to rely on the available documentation—​something legal bodies are more prone to offer. In the case of Basques, there were at least four elements that helped and therefore give some clues for the comprehension of the process of a gradual definition of their identity as a specific, distinct one. First, there are the consequences of “chain migration,” the system that introduced most Basques to immigration. Basques, like any other ethnic or national group, presented very specific patterns of settlement and a high tendency to specialize in a particular economic activity. This does not mean, of course, that all Basques who arrived at their new destination country had to be engaged in that activity, but on the contrary, seen from outside the Basque community, it became socially apparent for contemporary witnesses that some businesses, jobs, or economic areas were a kind of Basque monopoly (Irianni 1997, 402–​403). In the case of Argentina and Uruguay, for instance, it was sheep herding and working in meat-​curing plants (saladeros) during the first three to four decades of the nineteenth century, soon changing into milk production and dairy businesses (Douglass and Totoricaguena 1999). José Antonio Wilde, an Argentine author, wrote in 1908 about Basques:  “Empezaron a venir los vascos, decíamos; magnífica emigración, compuesta, en su mayor parte, de hombres atléticos, honrados y laboriosos, dedicándose entonces casi todos ellos a trabajos de saladero. Más tarde, fueron más variadas sus ocupaciones, haciéndose labradores, lecheros”2 (1908, 45). In fact, from the second half of the nineteenth century and even today, the image of the milkman in these two countries is closely linked to the cultural and iconic features attributed to Basques. This image applied to all Basques we should add, because both French and Spanish Basques shared this inclination towards the same job specializations. From shopkeepers in Cuba, to tanners and shoemakers in Chile, sheep herders in the United States and sugar cane cutters in Australia, similar patterns are found among Basque immigrants in other countries. Secondly, contemporary witnesses and present-​day historical researchers agree on the existence and significance of informal spaces for gathering, socialization, work, and leisure where Basques tended to concentrate. Among these spaces there are two that stand out: the Basque hotels or fondas and the courts for playing pelota, a traditional Basque sport. The role of Basque hotels has been thoroughly analyzed in the cases of Argentina and the United States (Echeverria 1999; Irianni 1998, 491–​544). As Echeverria states, these hotels became “the central and crucial gathering place for groups of European and American Basques over the nineteenth century [that] clearly served as a critical social and ethnic institution,” offering the immigrants services like a “job agency, extended family and assistance league” (61). Moreover, Irianni admits that the persistence of some of these hotels, especially in rural areas, became a hurdle for the formation of more formal Basque clubs. With regard to pelota courts or frontones, there is still no in-​depth research on the topic, even though some preliminary views by contemporary witnesses seem to underline their relevance for more than the mere practice of sport (Cruset 2015, 108–​109). Thirdly, lacking the active presence of a state to protect them, immigrants had to rely on other external institutions to get some kind of support. Religion provided spiritual comfort, protection, and organizational resources from one of the few internationally based institutions of the moment. As Catholics, Basques were soon subject to the attention of the authorities of the Church, not only in their places of arrival, but also in the homeland they had departed from. By the end of the decade of the 1830s, the first mentions of Catholic chaplains acting in Argentina and Uruguay to minister on behalf of Basque immigrants appear. At the beginning, they were priests that had immigrated on their own from the Basque Country, appointed by the local bishops to parishes with large Basque populations: José Letamendi, for instance, obtained 23

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permission from the bishop of Montevideo in 1840 to minister sacraments titulo linguæ to men and women that could not express themselves but in Basque language; Dominique Sarrote was given the chaplaincy of a church in Montevideo that soon became popularly known as “the church of Basques” (Álvarez Gila 1997, 702–​704).The growing need for clergy in this community prompted the bishop of Buenos Aires in 1850 to ask his counterpart in Bayonne (French Basque Country) to arrange for a formal system to regularly send priests to take care of Basque Catholics in Argentina. The contract was finally signed in 1855; and thus, from the next year onward, a stable presence of the so-​called “Fathers of Bétharram” or “Basque Fathers” was set up in the major cities of Argentina and Uruguay. These priests opened new “Basque churches” combined with itinerant religious missions to preach and offer church services among Basques in rural areas. These activities were carried out during the entire nineteenth century, with the progressive incorporation of churchmen of new religious orders during the last two decades (Álvarez Gila 1997, 710–​711). There is no doubt that the persistence of the Catholic Church’s activities for Basque immigrants contributed in a great extent to the formation of a collective sense of group identity during the period before formal associations. Finally, the image from outside the group also played an important role in the diasporic process of the construction of Basque identity. To be known is the first step in recognition. Basques started to become visible as an easily identifiable group within the social spaces they settled. From journalism to jokes, from the accounts of foreign visitors to popular literature, a particular, clearly outlined image of the Basque (the vasco in Latin America, the Bosco or Basco in late nineteenth-​century United States) emerged. For instance, most European visitors that left their written descriptions of the River Plate countries during this century invariably spoke of Basques as a separate and often unified group with people from both Basque regions in Spain and France, usually echoing the stereotypes learned from their informants (Irianni 2009, 132). In 1843, a British tourist that visited Uruguay wrote that Basques “bring and retain their own customs and have created their own world. They have their own leisure places,” even though—​he considered this worthy of explanation—​“their region of origin is located in both countries,” Spain and France. Twenty-​three years later, another British visitor, Pastor Murray, declared to have noticed “thousands of men of all ages from the Basque provinces” in Montevideo (Azcona Pastor 2003, 245). Basque characters also appeared in Argentinian and Uruguayan literary works: pivotal authors like José Hernández (Martín Fierro, 1872) or Miguel Cané (Juvenilia, 1884) included descriptions of Basque immigrants in their books when drawing the social landscape of Argentina throughout the century (Iriart 2009, 97, 100–​101). But high literature was not the only space for the Basques: popular theater—​the so-​called sainete—​soon became the most important tool for fixing and spreading a crystallized stereotype (Villanueva 2000, 11–​12) which would be reinforced in the following century thanks to new mass media such as cinema or television. At the same time, Basques themselves also started self-​defining themselves as such, instead of as another national category. A good example can be found in the first census of the State of Buenos Aires in 1855:  more than a minority responded as “Basques,” or more specifically as “Basque-​Spanish” or “Basque-​French,” when asked about their nationality. This process, however, did not only happen in the River Plate countries:  in general, we can assert that a similar evolution also took place in all the American countries Basques immigrated to in sizeable numbers. In all these cases, the stereotypes that were developed included elements such as language, job specialization, and other cultural and racial specificities. As late as 1940, for instance, a tourist guide for the state of Oregon in the United States presented a portrayal of Basque immigrants that could have been easily shared by an Argentinean one a hundred years before: Basques 24

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are thrifty and energetic and have become prosperous. In manners they are courteous and pleasant, but reticent. They have to a great degree maintained the cultural habits of their native country. Besides English, most of them speak Spanish and their native tongue of Escuara. Their appearance is marked by clear olive complexions, dark eyes, fine teeth and red lips. (Federal Writers Project 1940, 77) A good example of the intermingling mixture of all these previous factors and its evolution can be found in the case of Barracas al Sud, a small town close to the city of Buenos Aires. In 1858, a committee of non-​Basque residents addressed a complaint against the local Catholic parish priest, Manuel Eráusquin, because he preached during the dominical masses only in Basque.The answer of the priest to justify his behavior was that a majority of the local population—​and therefore of parishioners—​was Basque (Álvarez Gila 1997, 708). Barracas al Sud had at that moment one of the highest concentrations of Basque population in Argentina, due to the fact that the town was the seat of many saladero factories, a job market in which early Basques specialized in Argentina, as mentioned above (Iriani 1997). However, Basques in Barracas al Sud did not create their own association, Euskal Echea de Quilmes, until the beginning of the decade of 1910.

Organized communities Basques in other cities of the Americas did not take as long as in Barracas al Sud to organize communities. By the end of the 1870s they were already operating several Basque associations in diverse cities of Argentina, Uruguay, and Cuba, and soon others would also be opened in Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. There is still no agreed explanation of the deep reasons for such a boom in the creation of these kinds of institutions, taking place in areas so far apart from each other. On the one hand, some researchers have highlighted that behind the flourishing of the new Basque centers—​as they started to be known—​there was a generational shift: a new team of younger ethnic leaders was taking over the representation of the Basque immigrant community (Ezkerro 2003, 26–​27). But there were surely other reasons. As Molina and Oiarzabal state, “the nineteenth-​century Basque diaspora associations were not far removed from Basque and Spanish politics” (2009, 709). In fact, the very first of these modern associations were born on the edge of the defeat of the Carlist army and the subsequent suppression of Basque home rule. Among them was the birth of the oldest Basque club of Argentina, Laurac Bat (later Laurak Bat), that “was established in Buenos Aires as a political organization celebrating annual protests against the loss of Basque political autonomy” (Ezkerro 2003, 28–​29). Although Laurak Bat cannot be defined as a “political organization,” it is true that the shock originated by the abrupt end of Basque home rule played a pivotal role in the emergence of a new set of associations among Basques in the diaspora that gave prominence to their ethnic identity over their political identification as Spanish. Nonetheless, this did not mean a rejection of their Spanishness: in fact, the names selected to label this first wave of Basque diasporic associations show no contradiction between the two identities. Both the Laurak Bat (“The Four Are One”) of Montevideo (1876) and Buenos Aires (1877), as well as the Asociación Vasco-​Navarra de Beneficencia (“Basque-​Navarrese Charitable Association”) of Havana (1878) referred to the four Basque territories in Spain, thus understanding their Basque identity within the wider Spanish one as a mere regional variety. Similar names were adopted by Basques in Bahía Blanca, Argentina (Laurak Bat, in 1899), and in Valparaíso, Chile (in this case Irurak Bat [“The Three Are One”] in 1902), referring only to the Provincias Vascongadas, hence also confined to a regional Basque-​Spanish space and identity (Araya Ariztía 2006, 125–​127).3 25

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The late nineteenth-​century “fever” for associationism among Basques of the diaspora in the Americas did not confine itself to Basque centers understood as places of socialization. From these first organized groups of Basque immigrants, a wider range of initiatives were soon proposed: Basque schools for the children of immigrants to provide them with an education that would both assure their successful insertion in local societies but at the same time try to maintain their cultural features and Basque identity. Even though the first proposals dated back to the decade of the 1880s in Montevideo, the accomplishment of this dream did not start until 1895, when the Euskal Echea charitable institution was created in Buenos Aires. Euskal Echea also promoted the creation of a retirement home for poor elderly Basques. By 1905, both actions were already implemented (Irianni and Álvarez Gila 2003, 118–​120). Other proposals for mutual aid and charity activities were implemented within already created Basque centers: the Laurak Bat of Montevideo, for instance, managed for more than a decade the so-​called Caja de Reempatrio, to help poor Basques return to the homeland (Irigoyen Artetxe 1999, 159–​160). Even the Laurak Bat of Buenos Aires included a similar purpose among its objectives, the Caja Protectora del Inmigrante, but with much less continuity (Ezkerro 2003, 49). According to the press, some leaders of the Basque community in Argentina even proposed the creation of a bank to serve Basque immigrants, but it only lasted for a few years. Ethnic press must be outlined among all these endeavors that served to give unity and reinforce a sense of identity in the Basque diaspora. Like the rest of the associations cited above, specific journals for the use of Basque communities did not appear until the last two decades of the century. In fact, the first initiatives were closely linked to the newly formed Basque centers themselves. By 1880, three journals with the same title (Laurak Bat) were regularly published in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Havana on behalf of the local Basque centers. However, some independent journalists started directing their own private initiatives with no bonds linking them with any Basque association (Zelaia 2018, 7). Among them, La Vasconia of Buenos Aires deserves special mention: founded in 1893, it was the longest standing journal of the Basque diaspora ever, appearing three times a month until it disappeared in 1943. The success of this private enterprise, along with other similar endeavors in other cities and countries, is indicative of how Basque diasporic communities had, by that moment, already reached a state of maturity and could offer a critical mass of readers (Zelaia 2018, 7–​8). In fact, a total number of 122 journals are registered to have been created by and for Basques abroad between 1878 and 1978.4

Towards an (almost) unified diasporic identity: between discourse and symbolism The implementation of a developed system of institutions and mass media among diasporic Basques has a twofold relevance. In fact, it opens a window into the cultural and ideological debates that were structuring the limits of those Basque communities both internally and externally, as well as their identity as it was being defined. Unlike the preceding period, access to written documents from associations and the press allows us to pass from mere guessing to actual textual analysis, deepening analysis into the discourses that were being produced and rapidly evolving from within Basque communities. Among the topics that were introduced in these debates by the ethnic elites—​not only the directing bodies of the newly created associations, but also and more importantly, the economic and cultural elites born at the interior of the same communities—​cultural and political identity soon became one of the most vibrant ones. During the last two decades of the century, diasporic Basques got introduced into a discussion 26

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on what being Basque should mean, focusing on two aspects: the role of the Basque language and the disputes over the unification of Spanish and French Basques under the same institutional umbrella. Basques, as it has been said before, had traditionally self-​defined themselves as a specific group by way of language. In spite of the growing implementation in Spain and France of measures for erasing local languages and merging regional identities into a sole national one, most Basques that migrated overseas during the nineteenth century came from rural areas in which the persistence of the Basque language and traditional society was still strong. Language, therefore, became one of the key elements in all discourse (Álvarez Gila 2015). Unlike the evolution of the first Basque political nationalism that was emerging at the same time, among diasporic Basques it was language or culture, and not race, that was used to determine the right to belong to the Basque community, or even nation. When Regino Galdos in 1887 promoted the creation of one of the first Basque centers not located in a big city, the Euskaldunak Bat (“Basques Are One”) of San José de Mayo, Uruguay, the new society adopted a very revealing motto: “Gorde gure itzkuntza zar, erria beziñ zarra dan euskera” [Preserve our old language, the Euskara that is as old as our country] (Álvarez Gila 2011, 51–​52). Other cultural leaders among Basques in Uruguay, Chile, or Cuba expressed similar assertions. By 1898, for instance, the director of Eskual-​Herria. Journal des basque-​français du Rio de la Plata, published in Buenos Aires, affirmed that: “Eskuarak ditu egundainotik berezi eskualdunak bertze yendetarik halako gisaz, nun Franciako eta Espainiako eskualdunen egon lekhuak egiten baitu nacione berezi bat bezala munduan, deitzen dugu Eskual-​Herria”5 (Mehats 2005, 291). Putting the key definition of Basqueness in language instead of other elements had an unexpected consequence: to challenge the paradigm of “double patriotism” as it had been developed throughout the century, especially in the Spanish side of the Basque Country. In the Americas, Basques were living together and communicating with each other, sharing a common language and cultural tradition, although they belonged to—​and unquestioningly accepted—​two politically different national identities. By the middle of the 1880s, voices within all the Basque centers existing so far in the Americas—​all of them promoted by Spanish-​Basques—​started questioning the pertinence of granting membership rights to French-​Basques. Reactions were different in different countries. In Cuba, where the French-​Basque colony was very small, they were accepted quite soon. In Argentina and Uruguay, where both Basque communities were quite similar in size, answers took a diverging path. In Uruguay the debate led to a process of total integration, that started by changing the name of the Basque center of Montevideo in 1886 to Euskaldun Guziak Bat (“All the Basques Are One”) to make it more evident that in the future it would admit Basque immigrants from the four Spanish provinces, as well as from the French department of Basses Pyrenées (Irigoyen Artetxe 1999). In Argentina, on the contrary, it evolved into a “separated friends” situation, in which French-​Basques first created their own associations, like the Centre Basque-​Français of Buenos Aires (1895), to start collaborating with their Spanish-​Basque counterparts in common interests linked to culture, sport, and celebration (Álvarez Gila 2011, 55). The creation and use of ethnic symbology also give us some clues to understand the stages of this process. By the beginning of the 1880s, Basques still had no common symbol to depict their identity as other nations or nations-​to-​be had developed by then in Europe. In fact, when Sabino Arana proposed a flag for the Basque Country in 1893, known as the ikurriña, it came to be accepted even by those that did not revendicate the sovereignty that it also represented. Nonetheless, today we know that Basques in the diaspora were already using their own versions of a unified symbol (a flag and a coat of arms), long before it was designed in the Basque Country itself. First mentions of this earliest Basque flag started in 1881, when it was raised 27

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and incorporated into the everyday representation of Basqueness by associations and the press. The first version was organized under the symbology of the number “four,” thus primarily representing the Spanish side of the country.That is why, although this flag continued to be used until the first decade of the twentieth century, other alternative proposals were also competing with it, like the flag used by Euskaldun Guziak Bat of Montevideo, which combined the flags of Spain and France with a green line in between to represent the Basque lands, or the symbology designed in 1895 by Florencio de Basaldua in Argentina, in this case constructed around the number seven—​a way to bring together the four Basque provinces of Spain with the three French-​Basque territories (Álvarez Gila 2019).

Conclusion By the end of the century, the landscape of Basque communities abroad presented a vibrant present. A  myriad of associations, journals, and other collective initiatives were giving birth to a mature diasporic identity, based on—​but a bit different from—​the cultural and political discourses that were being created at the same time in the Basque Country itself. Based on cultural affinity, owning its own symbolic representation, and integrating Basques from both sides of the Franco-​Spanish border, this diasporic identity led to a new, diasporically developed form of Basque nationalism previous to the one created in the mainland: “¿Decimos jamás que somos españoles ó franceses?” asked Basaldua rhetorically in 1894; “Respondemos, soy Basko y … nada más. Y llegará un día en que … la Nación euskelduna, libre, feliz é independiente, vuelva á reconstituirse”6 (Álvarez Gila 2019, 36). As this brief overview of Basque associationism concludes, the still relatively unknown history of diasporic Basques challenges the dominant discourses on the evolution of Basque nationalism opening other avenues of research into both ethnic identity and political nationalism.

Notes 1 The use of the term “diaspora” to refer to the sum of Basque communities abroad has been sometimes disputed, although it is commonly used today (Totoricaguena 2004, xiv–​xvi). 2 “They started to arrive, we said; quite a magnificent immigration, mainly composed of athletic, honest, hardworking males. Most of them came to work in meat-​curing factories. Afterwards, they changed to other occupations, such as peasants or milkmen.” 3 In fact, Irurak Bat was primarily an association created around a pelota court where Basques met with each other. It could therefore be considered a good example of the transition from the pre-​associationism period as described above. 4 All these journals and newspapers have been digitalized and put online thanks to the “Urazandi Digital” project. The complete collection is available at http://​urazandi.euskaletxeak.net/​default.html 5 “The Basque language has always differentiated Basques from other peoples: therefore, the places where Basques live in France and Spain are like any other nation of the world, that we call the Basque Country.” 6 “Do we ever say that we are Spanish or French? We answer, I am Basque, … nothing else. And a time will come … when the Basque nation, free, happy, and independent, will be reconstructed again.”

Works cited Aizpuru, Mikel, and José M. Portillo. 2015. “Provincia, nación y patria: el tratamiento de las identidades en la historiografía vasca.” Huarte de San Juan. Geografía e Historia 22: 67–​89. Álvarez Gila, Óscar. 1997. El aporte europeo a la Iglesia en el Río de la Plata: la presencia religiosa vasca (1835–​ 1965), PhD dissertation.Vitoria-​Gasteiz, University of the Basque Country.

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Good Spanish, better Basques —​—​—​. 2010. “¿Vascos o euskaldunak? Una aproximación al papel del euskara en la conformación de las colectividades vascas de América, siglo XIX.” Sancho el Sabio. Revista de cultura e investigación vasca 32: 71–​84. —​—​—​. 2011. “Desde el ‘solar patrio’ a la ‘nación naciente’: cultura, identidad y política en los centros vascos de América (1880–​1900).” Historia Social 70: 43–​61. —​—​—​. 2013. “Changes on the perception of ethnic identity after the end of mass migration.The Basques in the United States.” Amnis. Revue de Civilisation Contemporaine Europes/​Amériques 12 (online). https:// journals.openedition.org/amnis/1977 (accessed May 25, 2020) —​—​—​. 2015. “The not so forgotten language:  discourses on the Basque language and identity in the diaspora, last quarter of 19th century.” Chap. 6 in Droits culturels et démocratisation. Cultural Rights and Democratisation, edited by Iñigo Urrutia, Jean-​Pierre Massias, and Xabier Irujo, 77–​94. Clermont-​ Ferrand: Institut Universitaire Varenne. —​—​—​. 2019. Antes de la ikurriña. Banderas, símbolos e identidad vasca en América (1880–​1935). Madrid: Sílex. Araya Ariztía, Rubila. 2006. Arrojos, dichas y notalgias: Vascos en el Valparaíso del siglo XX.Vitoria-​Gasteiz: Eusko Jaurlaritza. Azcona Pastor, José Manuel. 2003. Possible Paradises: Basque Emigration to Latin America. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. —​—​—​. 2011. El ámbito historiográfico y metodológico de la emigración vasca y navarra hacia América. Vitoria-​ Gasteiz: Eusko Jaurlaritza. Cruset, María Eugenia. 2015. Nacionalismo y diásporas. Los casos vasco e irlandés en Argentina (1862–​1922). La Plata: Laburu. Douglass, William A. 1989. “Factors in the formation of the New-​ World Basque emigrant diaspora.” Chap.  11 in Essays in Basque Social Anthropology and History, edited by A. Douglass, 251–​268. Reno: University of Nevada Press. —​—​—​. 2002. “Sabino’s sin: racism and the founding of Basque nationalism.” Chap. 6 in Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism, edited by Daniele Conversi, 95–​ 112. London: Routledge. Douglass, William A., and Jon Bilbao. 1975. Amerikanuak: Basques in the New World. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. Douglass, William A., and Gloria Pilar Totoricaguena. 1999. “Identidades complementarias. La sociabilidad y la identidad vascas en la Argentina entre el pasado y el presente”. Chap. 8 in La inmigración española en Argentina, edited by Alejandro E. Fernández and José C. Moya, 257–​271. Buenos Aires: Biblos. Echeverria, Jeronima. 1999. Home Away from Home.A History of Basque Boardinghouses. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. Ezkerro, Mikel. 2003. Historia del Laurak Bat de Buenos Aires.Vitoria-​Gasteiz: Eusko Jaurlaritza. Federal Writers Project. 1940. Oregon.The End of the Trail. Portland, OR: Binfords & Mort. Fundación Juan de Garay. 2000. Los Vascos en la Argentina. Familias y protagonismo. Buenos Aires: FVAJ. García-​Sanz Marcotegui, Angel, and Alejandro Arizcun. 1989. “An estimate of Navarrese migration in the second half of the nineteenth century (1879–​1883).” Chap. 10 in Essays in Basque Social Anthropology and History, edited by William A. Douglass, 235–​250. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. Illesca, Raúl. 2002. “Ser ‘gringo’ en Buenos Aires (1890–​1914).” Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire. Les Cahiers ALHIM 4 (online). https://journals.openedition.org/alhim/512 (accessed May 25, 2020). Irianni, Marcelino. 1997. “Trabajadores vascos en el recuerdo popular rioplatense.” Revista de Indias 210: 399–​419. —​—​—​. 1998. Inmigración vasca a la Argentina, 1840–​1920, PhD dissertation. Tandil: UNICEN. —​—​—​. 2009. “Inmigrantes vascos en la memoria y la literatura argentinas, 1850–​1910.” Sancho el Sabio. Revista de cultura e investigación vasca 31: 117–​138. —​—​—​. 2010. “Pastores y rebaños dispersos. Inmigrantes vascos en Argentina en vísperas del Centenario.” In Congreso Internacional 1810–​2020:  200 años de Iberoamérica, edited by Eduardo Rey Tristán, 973–​ 1001. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. —​ —​ —​ . 2011. “¿Instituciones vascas o vascos en instituciones? Argentina (1850/​ 1920).” Euskonews&Media 572. Irianni, Marcelino, and Óscar Álvarez Gila. 2003. Euskal Echea: la génesis de un sueño (1899–​1950).Vitoria-​ Gasteiz: Eusko Jaurlaritza. Iriart,Viviana. 2009. “Los vascos en la literatura argentina, 1810–​1955.” Revista Internacional de los Estudios Vascos 53(1): 83–​151.

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Óscar Álvarez Gila Irigoyen Artetxe, Alberto Marcelo. 1999. Laurak Bat de Montevideo. Primera Euskal Etxea del Mundo. Vitoria-​ Gasteiz: Eusko Jaurlaritza. Larrañaga Elorza, Koldo. 1996. “W.  von Humboldt y el proceso de definición de Euskal Herria como sujeto del discurso historiográfico.” Revista Internacional de los Estudios Vascos 41(2): 477–​510. Mehats, Claude. 2005. Organisation et aspects de l’émigration des basques de France en Amérique: 1832–​1976. Vitoria-​Gasteiz: Eusko Jaurlaritza. Mees, Ludger. 2003. “How it began:  the evolution of Basque nationalism until the Civil War (1876–​ 1939).” In Nationalism,Violence and Democracy: The Basque Clash of Identities, 9–​20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Molina, Fernando, and Pedro Oiarzabal. 2009. “Basque-​Atlantic shores: ethnicity, the nation-​state and the diaspora in Europa and America (1808–​98).” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32(4): 698–​715. Montero García, Manuel. 1995. La California del hierro:  las minas y la modernización económica y social de Vizcaya. Bilbao: Beitia. Rubio Pobes, Coro. 1999. “La construcción de la identidad vasca (siglo XIX).” Historia Contemporánea 18: 405–​416. Totoricaguena, Gloria Pilar. 2004. Identity, Culture, and Politics in the Basque Diaspora. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. Urkidi Elorrieta, Pello, and Iban Asenjo. 2008. “Euskal Herriko biztanleriaren bilakaera 1900–​2001 eta bere egituran emandako aldaketarik nabarmenenak.” Lurralde 31: 233–​276. Villanueva, Graciela. 2000. “La imagen del inmigrante en la literatura argentina entre 1880 y 1910.” Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire. Les Cahiers ALHIM 1 (online). https://journals.openedition.org/ alhim/90 (accessed May 25, 2020). Wilde, José Antonio. 1908. Buenos Aires desde setenta años atrás. Buenos Aires:  Imp. y Estereotipia de La Nación. Zelaia, Kepa. 2018. Ameriketako diasporako euskal prentsari buruzko azterketa: 1877–​1977. Master’s dissertation. Leioa, University of the Basque Country.

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3 THE CORS DE CLAVÉ Popular music, republicanism, and social regeneration Jaume Ayats and Anna Costal Translated by Linda Grabner, University of Pennsylvania

French utopian socialism was introduced in Catalonia and Spain by reading translations done by the first generation of republican intellectuals, led by figures such as the politician Abdó Terrades (1812–​1856), the industrial engineer Narcís Monturiol (1819–​1885), and the musician Josep Anselm Clavé (1824–​1874), all three of whom were associated with Freemasonry or members of Masonic organizations. Starting in the 1840s, this group of young republicans believed in the possibility of introducing utopian models of social organization founded on brotherhood and the common good. However, the regenerative ideas of the first wave of republicanism did not at all agree with a Spain that had only just shaken off the shackles of the Ancien Régime and was dominated by a moderate liberalism. Republicanism was spurred by implacable repression and censorship. Clavé was jailed and exiled on several occasions between 1843 and 1867; Monturiol—​the main instigator of Cabetian ideology in Spain, and translator, already in 1848, of Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie—​had to shut down the periodical El Padre de Familia in April 1850, accused of being “subversive and seditious”; and Terrades died in exile in Medina-​Sidonia, Cádiz, in 1856. In the face of the impossibility of achieving revolutionary change, republicanism opted instead for gradual social transformation. Clavé had discovered two things in prison: the uselessness of popular revolt, which always clashed traumatically with the weapons of power, and the social power of group singing and of music to build social group awareness. His first republican impulse soon gave way to other tactics, and he decided to go in another direction, but with more profound effects: changing the individual to change society. Josep Anselm Clavé was the leading character in this mission, and he implemented it through music. Inspired by Étienne Cabet and Saint-​Simon, he saw in music the ideal instrument of political action and of the social regeneration he yearned for. Saint-​Simon had emphasized the power of musical action to arouse in workers feelings of group loyalty and an appreciation for the value of teamwork (Locke 1986, 235). In this context, in 1821 the workers at the Saint-​Ouen factories, north of Paris, sang the Premier Chant des Industriels with music by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle—​author of La Marseillaise—​and verses written by Saint-​Simon himself: “Honneur à nous, enfants de l’industrie! /​Honneur à nous heureux travaux! /​Dans tous les arts, vainqueurs de nos rivaux, /​Soyons l’espoir, l’orgueil de la patrie”1 (Saint-​Simon 1821, 214). 31

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With the goal of “difundir el arte creando asociaciones” [spreading art by creating associations] (Eco de Euterpe, May 15, 1864), Clavé developed musical models of workers’ associations similar to those formed in Victorian Great Britain and the July Monarchy of France. In Great Britain, music education for children and factory workers stimulated the creation of new pedagogical systems like Sarah Ann Glover’s “Tonic Sol-​fa” (Pearsall 1973, 111). In France, where there were musical bands and orphéons [choral societies] promoted by the government itself, Guillaume Louis Boquillon-​Wilhelm published a Manuel musical a l’usage des collèges, des institutions, des écoles et des cours de chant with the goal of introducing singing into every public elementary school to make up a “véritable chant national” [true national song] (1840). These musical workers’ associations began to weave an unprecedented social and cultural network that organized the free time of the working classes with the goal of rejuvenating workers debased by misery—​removing them from the influence of taverns, games of chance, and alcoholism—​ and integrating them into the new industrial order, thus reducing the possibility of public disturbances and labor disputes. In the 1850s and the first half of the 1860s, from Barcelona, Clavé managed—​dodging sanctions, between periods of exile and boycotts, and with no public financing whatsoever—​to create a network of choral societies that he himself coordinated through a federation known as Cors de Clavé [Clavé’s Choral Societies]. This organization, despite numerous difficulties over the last 160-​plus years, is still in existence today. By 1864, there were already eighty-​five societies registered in different Catalan towns, and others were founded in Vinaròs, Sevilla, Madrid, Matanzas, Cienfuegos, and Havana (Soriano Fuertes 1865, 93–​94; Casanovas 2000, 125). The honorary members and patrons of these societies were politicians and professionals of the federal republican demesne who believed, like their British and French counterparts, in the education of the masses as a guarantee of peaceful coexistence and social progress. At the same time, Clavé’s project piqued the interest of the wider intellectual community and of certain sectors of the industrial complex that understood this philanthropy as a means to seduce the workers into entering structures of sociality to block the possible emergence of social conflicts and upward mobility …, as a tool to organize communities to be used according to the philanthropists’ views of how the industrial cities should be structured socially, economically, and culturally. (Vialette 2018, 4) Nevertheless, as we shall see, the issue is complex: the choral movement is simultaneously a strategy on the part of certain entrepreneurs and reformist politicians to train workers to be efficiently integrated into the new industrial production system and proud of their contribution to it, and an ideal of secular republicans with an egalitarian bent that contributed significantly to the dignification of the worker and the formation of their political awareness.

From taverns and religious brotherhoods to choral societies The first question to be posed is how these choral societies could succeed to the point of occupying a leading position in civic and ideological activities for at least seventy years. Or, more specifically, how did they manage to convince young laborers en masse to suddenly begin singing in harmony? And the answer is in their recent past, since these men already had a deeply rooted tradition of choral singing. Clavé’s proposal for a new culture aimed at the working classes was supported by two prior experiences of male sociability reformulated according to republican

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The Cors de Clavé

Figure 3.1  Men singing in the tavern, Maria Ferrés Puig, c.1910–​1920. Source: Documentary Collection Maria Freser © Museu Enric Monjo.Vilassar de Dalt.

values: on one hand, by some of the elements and values of the taverns, and on the other, and more significantly, by the old religious brotherhoods. These new choral fraternities disguised their republicanism under the legally protected mantle of a strategic apoliticism. The Catalan working classes already participated actively in group singing at celebrations and in their free time (Figure 3.1). The most widely practiced male group singing was in the taverns, singing in simple three-​part harmonies (Roca 1837), and at Carnival and Easter celebrations. Clavé’s experience as a young guitarist in taverns—​there were more than 500 in Barcelona in those days!—​is at the heart of his regenerative ideal for the lives of industrial workers. The son of a family of tradesmen with a certain amount of musical education, in times of economic hardship, he played the guitar—​a humble, worn guitar that can be seen in the Barcelona Museum of Music—​in these public establishments to support himself. In the taverns, he hated obscene songs—​many of which were probably in the Catalan language—​and lewd dances, like the boleros, which, between prostitutes, alcohol, and gambling, contributed to the miserable life of the men. Clavé himself tells of how he developed a project of regeneration that was expressed primarily through music. His project of social choice sought the transformation of each individual, and this transformation also had the goal of dignifying gender relations, at that time expressed as concepts of “morality” or “decency.” Just before alluding to the “sencillas cantilenas á una ó á dos voces” [simple tunes of one or two parts], he himself tells it this way in an article:

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el repugnante espectáculo de inmundos cafetines, guarida de meretrices y tahúres, que con el infame cebo de lascivos cantares sabían atraer á los incautos á un insondable abismo de degradación y de miseria. Entonces me fijé en aquellos cantos, tan en boga entre las gentes del pueblo, é intenté lo que creyóse un imposible … Su reforma … Uno de aquellos propagadores del mal gusto en las canciones populares, un pobre hombre que desde 1817,—​época en que se estableció el canto en los cafetines de Barcelona—​, por no contar con otros medios de subsistencia, se veía condenado á componer y ejecutar indignas coplas y boleros, poderoso incentivo de los brutales instintos de ciertos desgraciados, me confió la inutilidad de sus esfuerzos para substituir con un repertorio digno el altamente ofensivo á la moral y á la decencia.2 (El Metrónomo, January 25, 1863) On the other hand, the religious brotherhoods, together with the groups of men who sang in the church choirs of most small towns, had maintained a continuity of simple harmonic singing, generally with three vocal parts, at least since the sixteenth century (Ayats 2008, 91–​93). And it was precisely these social groups who emigrated from rural, artisan areas to industrial factories and manufacturers.The habit of singing together and of feeling part of a social group that united their voices in the same way that it united their work came from a long tradition—​as also happened in other regions of the Mediterranean with Latin cultures (Ayats et  al. 2010, 2011a, 2011b). Another decisive element of this traditional, popular male sociability that carried over into the Cors de Clavé was the network of mutual aid that it established. The old religious brotherhoods—​in obvious decline by the nineteenth century, and anchored in a traditionalism incited by the Church’s fear of revolution—​were constituted as an egalitarian group, without distinction between members, in which the brothers helped each other in times of illness, death, or economic instability, in addition to having the obligation of helping the poor and needy. In small towns with no large property owners, this meant attenuating social and economic differences, and allowing a certain rebalancing at the lowest social levels. This religious associationism was highly active in Catalonia, in part as a counterbalance to the official institutions of the Church, and in that counterbalancing function, it was associated with the expression of a certain social critique, particularly through songs. The structure of popular sociability and mutual aid among men tied to singing was the fertile field that facilitated the implantation of a project with a modern aesthetic based on group singing and class solidarity. The Church reacted contradictorily to the brotherhoods’ loss of social influence and their substitution by lay versions with a republican bent (Ayats 2008, 92–​96). On one hand, some bishops and priests viewed the new workers’ singing societies positively, as they considered them admirable for their moral principles that aligned with Christianity, and especially for their goal of enlightening the masses, who thus “se apartarán de los vicios y de las pasiones” [will turn away from vices and passions]—​according to the pastoral visit of the bishop from Girona to Llagostera (El Metrónomo, August 9, 1863). But in other, more traditionalist dioceses, such as those of Vic and Tarragona, Claverian action was seen as a direct attack on Catholic life. It led to continual conflicts, especially because of the laicism of the choral groups and their participation at funerals and ritual celebrations where nonreligious singing, dance music, and couples dancing took precedence over religious music. Some priests accused the choral groups of the damaging ideal “of progress” and the priest of l’Espluga de Francolí, in a sermon in his church, called Clavé a “lobo carnicero introducido en el redil de las ovejas para arrastrarlas a la perdición” [a butchering wolf let into the sheep pen to drag them off to their downfall] (El 34

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Metrónomo, August 9, 1863). Apart from these church members’ differing opinions, the fact is that during that time, a struggle was underway for the control of male sociability. The Church, faced with losing control of a social sphere that had traditionally been in its domain, fought, towards the end of the 1870s, to organize new popular societies around the Catholic centers in reaction against the success of secular sociability. This was the case of the associations of St Louis Gonzaga, commonly known as “els Lluïsos.” This perception of ideological struggle between traditionalists and progressives is already seen in different conflicts between choral societies and religious institutions documented particularly in the early 1860s (Ayats 2008, 92–​96). Clavé learned how to draw elements, both social and musical, from previous generations into his new proposal of group singing, which was in tune with the new aesthetics of popular romantic music and the choral movements of other European countries. In some way, it brought about the emergence of a new music with the intention of becoming popular and, at the same time, of decisively participating in the construction of a new social class and its corresponding political space.

The choral singer: a new model of citizen The choral societies had gained legal recognition for their recreational and musical activity, but they offered their members broader services:  in true republican spirit, they established workers’ associations—​which at that time were completely prohibited—​and at the same time they became a “referente social y educativo para el trabajador industrial” [social and educational referent for the industrial worker] (Vialette 2009, 14). In the Cors de Clavé, staunchly secular, mutual aid and education were activities that were intimately tied to musical activity and the construction of a new paradigm of worker who would act as an efficient economic agent and an active political agent in the res publica. The choral societies, then, fully adopted the character of mutual aid from the religious brotherhoods and guilds of old. The Cors offered assistance in situations of illness, old age, widowhood, and death. They also organized means of individual saving and collective payment, as in the case of monetary bailouts that freed young men from military obligations and war. In their establishments, gambling and wine were prohibited, since, they argued, these were the main source of the mistreatment of women and children in the home, and this must be prevented (El Metrónomo, January 30, 1864). Besides participating in a disciplined way in the choral rehearsals, the choral members committed to learning to read and write, and they could also attend a school for adults where they could receive job training. In the case of the Erato Choral Society of Figueres, as in other societies, in addition to music, they learned sketching, grammar, French, or arithmetic. In this sense—​and carefully avoiding religious debate—​the library, center of the republican civitas, was the guiding premise of these societies and a place of social, political, and cultural construction: “the library-​city became the stage for an enactment of democratization and citizenship based on a fiction of the lettered city that could only be constructed through the establishment of a new civil space” (Vialette 2018, 111–​112). And in some towns, rehearsals ended with a reading aloud of the most pertinent newspaper or of the articles compiled in the Libro del Obrero, published in 1862 by intellectuals from Clavé’s circle, like Víctor Balaguer, Ceferí Tresserra, and Mariano Soriano Fuertes. In short, quite “una escuela de dignos ciudadanos” with the goal of “instruir y moralizar á los obreros” [a school of worthy citizens with the goal of instructing and imparting morals to the workers] (El Metrónomo, January 18, 1863) based on the project described by progressive intellectuals and endorsed by enlightened owners who, 35

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from a paternalistic position, imagined a social horizon populated by happy workers like those presented by Gaietà Vidal i Valenciano: Antes agobiados por un trabajo que desempeñabais con repugnancia, buscabais tal vez en placeres torpes y groseros el olvido de un día de malestar: hoy, contentos con vuestra suerte, satisfechos con vuestra posición, habéis buscado en los incomparables goces de la música un pasatiempo, que al par que eleva vuestro espíritu á regiones más puras y desconocidas, comunica a vuestros decaídos miembros fuerza y vigor para emprender con anhelante afán, el trabajo que debe alumbrar el sol de un nuevo día.3 (El Metrónomo, November 22, 1863) The new worker should be an educated man who would aspire both to professional advancement within the factory or artisan’s workshop—​through his technical specialization or organizational and managerial abilities—​and to political participation. He should also be an elegant man who, based on the values and tastes of contemporary bourgeois society, would construct his own identity, up to date and clearly differentiated from the vulgar and morally corrupt. He had to know how to behave, parade proudly through the streets, and share a new interest in nature.This new ethic and aesthetic turned him, for example, against bullfighting, openly rejecting its bloody barbarity. The spectacle of the bullfight, financed at that time by large local governments, was seen by the republican intelligentsia as the antithesis of the sensitive, spiritual, and educational spectacle represented by choral concerts and the opera. They considered it degrading, tied to bestiality, uncouth manners, and the chaotic brawling of the taverns and the common masses. And politically, it was viewed as being related to traditionalisms and to the corrupt monarchy, in contrast to the regenerative projects of the choral societies, such as open-​air concerts at the break of dawn, the ultimate symbol of a new cult to nature. At the same time, orderly parades through the streets also expressed a unique aesthetic for occupying the urban space, in contrast to the uncivilized throngs. As the opponents of the Orfeón Español ironically expressed, these parades seemed like “una solemne procesión menos los cirios … ¡Vaya modo singular de civilizar!” [a solemn procession minus the candles … What an odd way to civilize!] (El Metrónomo, May 17, 1863). The choral singer was the ideal young man, educated and proud of his social role, on whom to base the production of a new society and the republican’s democratic reformist governability. And according to the records that are still kept, young men were far and away the largest majority of the membership of the societies (Figure 3.2). The importance of the singers’ wardrobe or the rigor of their rehearsal schedules indicate an obvious control by the elites over the working class, acting as a framework of behaviors whose goal was to assimilate the lower classes through acculturation—​and especially the young men with technical abilities from the new codes of industrial production and bourgeois values (Garcia 1995). The same procedure was applied to the complementary role attributed to women, such as preparing clothes and embroidering banners, accepting their husbands’ extreme dedication to the societies, attending dances, and enthusiastically participating in parades and street shows—​although in contrast to women’s work, it is enormously surprising that Clavé’s daughter, Àurea Rosa, was able to hold the position of chorus director and leader of a part of the choral movement after her father’s death. However, the federation of choruses was also a tool for the political construction of workers through male sociability through the new paradigms of the time and the sociability of the spectacle that were flourishing in the mid-​nineteenth century. The activity of group singing helped consolidate the drive to build a political project—​with no hope of success until 1868—​that, through the art of music, lasted more than a generation and eluded, as a sort of cultural underground, the laws of the kingdom. 36

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Figure 3.2  Euterpe Choral Society, 1860. Source: Josep Anselm Clavé Documentary Collection. © Centre de Documentació de l’Orfeó Català.

In this regard, it is important to remember that the Cors’ system of mutual aid included secret cash boxes to support members during strikes and lock-​outs. Likewise, on the tour that Emilio Castelar—​leader of the Partido Demócrata, one of the prime instigators of the Glorious Revolution of 1868, and president of the short-​lived First Republic in 1873—​took through Catalonia in 1863, the network of choral societies represented the majority of the crowds who greeted the politician with songs in every industrial city and town on his route. In this political context, the parade through the streets of Barcelona on the afternoon of 5 June 1864 by 2,000 chorus members from fifty-​seven societies in the great urban park of Els Camps Elisis must have had an enormous vindicating effect (Figure 3.3). Between 1860 and 1864, Clavé had organized four choral festivals in Barcelona. In the festival of 1864, the choruses had a visible presence throughout the working neighborhoods of El Raval and La Ribera. Each group had its banner and its distinctive uniform, and all were composed of tidy, carefully organized young men, and accompanied by ten musical bands. The day culminated with a great concert and a fireworks show. Their intent was to emulate the great choral festivals of France and Belgium, but also to demonstrate to the active agents of Romantic culture that the working classes were political subjects in a society whose restricted suffrage excluded them from political participation. Furthermore, the Cors de Clavé’s festivals in Barcelona also included a choral competition whose trophy—​Pensamiento de Oro—​for first place was financed by a group of republican musicians and intellectuals and by friends of Clavé. This trophy consisted of a pansy made of gold in the form of a pin or brooch that could be shown off on the winning society’s banner. 37

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On the petals of the flower was the inscription “Todo por el arte y para el arte” [Everything because of art and for art] (Costal 2014, 239). The ideas of art and progress together sustained the choral organizations under the triple motto of “Progress,Virtue, and Love,” inspired by the French Revolution. The first-​prize winners of 1864 were the members of the Erato Choral Society of Figueres, one of the most important federal republican territories in the entire Spanish Kingdom, and birthplace of Monturiol and Terrades, both good friends of Clavé. All of the Cors de Clavé’s actions and activities were, therefore, a political display around music—​the most sublime expression of the spirit, from the Romantic point of view—​which served to steal away the art that was the exclusive heritage of the elites, and which proclaimed the necessity for participation by all levels of society in the construction of the liberal ideal of progress.

Figure 3.3  Concert of the Clavé Choruses in the Camps Elisis of Barcelona, 1864. Source: El Museo Universal: periódico de ciencias, literatura, artes, industria y conocimientos útiles 8. 25 (19 June 1864): 4. Biblioteca de Catalunya. Public domain.

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So then, were the Cors de Clavé an associative movement that challenged the status quo of the Spanish monarchical system? Or were they part of a strategy by the business classes to control, organize, and educate workers according to the interests of industry magnates? Or, perhaps, an unstable mix of the two? The choral movement educates and frames workers and develops a social control that is not exempt from paternalism, while also permitting workers an improved standard of living and active social and artistic participation. But it also implies this inspiration of the profoundly transformative—​and for the traditionalist sectors, clearly revolutionary—​ secular republican ideal, with an egalitarian belief in the dignity of the worker. The reflection in 1868 by Élie Reclus, a French anarchist, on the profoundly political character of the social demonstrations of music in Spain during those years reminds us of the complexity of the question: Los orfeones, el drama, la comedia, la ópera, se cuentan entre las más importantes instituciones de la Península. El teatro es aquí el más serio adversario de la Iglesia, y si algún día España se ve libre de la tiranía de los reverendos padres Claret y Cirilio, herederos del Santo Oficio, se deberá sobre todo a los Verdi, a los Meyerbeer y a los Rossini.4 ([1868–​1869] 2007,  57–​58) In July 1867, Clavé was jailed in Madrid. It was the third time the director, composer, and leader of this musical movement suffered imprisonment or deportation. From 1868 until his death in 1874, Clavé essentially abandoned the leadership of the choruses to engage in republican political action.

Popular music: public entertainments and social identity Choral societies are intimately tied to the processes of creation of the new popular music and to new social structures of artistic creation and production, the so-​called society of the spectacle, which transformed the musical panorama of those decades together with the new role attributed to the virtuoso-​artist (Sennett [1974] 2011: 251). Music was recognized throughout the Western world as the main artistic activity. It was with the emergence of the new social group of the working class, and following a strategy of distinguishing classes based on artistic action (Bourdieu 2010) that historically a new category of music was born: popular music. From the start, it was despised by the upper-​class, high-​culture sectors, which denigrated it because it didn’t belong to any of the great imaginaries forged, until then, by Romantic idealism: art as creation by the individual genius or by the collective spirit of the oral tradition. The same adjectives were applied to popular music and to the people who sang it, danced to it, or enjoyed it, like vulgar or light, which highlighted the frivolity of its immediacy, of its style as an element of little or no cultural interest. Popular music thus rounded out the classical taxonomy of the three musical styles as they were classified and studied until well into the twentieth century, and formed the foundations of a united way of understanding musical styles and social classes (Pearsall 1973; Russell 1987; Levine 1988; Weber [1975] 2004, 2008; Gelbart 2007; Scott 2008). In the mid-​nineteenth century, the changes in music, social values, and individual behavior progressed in lockstep. This was particularly noticeable at dances, the new public, secular space of entertainment that allowed young people to display, with unprecedented freedom, their erotic desires, and where the masses could also express their political ideals. Until then, the practice of music in public had been regulated by the institutions of the Ancien Régime. The Church and 39

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the Army controlled religious music and military bands, respectively, and the Town Councils looked after the representation of authority at ceremonies and formal occasions. Dances and other celebrations were governed by the dominant social classes under implicit rules of ostentation, and it was these classes that provided controlled entertainment spaces to the lower classes for the main calendar holidays, like Carnival, Easter, and celebrations of patron saints. The rest of the musical and dancing activities were, simply, ignored as contemptible, whether they were in taverns or at country fairs. The great transformation of public entertainments at midcentury completely changed these old social, economic, and aesthetic codes of music and of celebration. For the first time, the youngest generation of musical artisan families—​those involved in the construction of musical instruments and alternating production on the workshop-​sales floor with musical performance at parties and celebrations—​could devote themselves primarily to being musicians. In many towns and cities, the opening of public theaters for the presentation of the most popular Italian operas offered these artists unprecedented opportunities for stable work outside of either ecclesiastical or military milieux. The performance seasons determined the contracts of orchestra members; an orchestra of only twenty or twenty-​five well-​trained players could perform the works of Vincenzo Bellini, Gioachino Rossini, or even Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Meyerbeer, or Charles Gounod (Costal et al. 2010). From among these musicians of the theater and opera arose the leaders of dance orchestras, who were also virtuoso musicians and composers of fashionable dances—​such as Pep Ventura in Figueres and Josep Jurch in Barcelona, both clarinetists in the opera orchestras of their cities (Costal 2014, 60–​61). The creation of privately managed dance orchestras was possible thanks to new contractual devices: social and political advances allowed for the foundation of social clubs and recreational societies that acted as demanding clients for some musicians, who had to be up to date with the newest trends and were hired according to the law of supply and demand. Musical competition between dance orchestras and the demands of operatic titles in theater orchestras also caused a profound renovation and expansion of musical instruments. The new patented instruments coming from Italy, Germany, France, and Belgium were quickly incorporated into the theater and dance orchestras in Spain. In the latter, the old formation of five musicians, which had made up the majority of the scores for the waltzes and contradanzas of the early nineteenth century, increased to ten or twelve:  to the two clarinets—​or a flute and a clarinet—​two violins, and a bass were added metal wind instruments such as cornets, trombones, saxhorns, flugelhorns, and ophicleides (Figure 3.4). They also had to be up to date on the music that became popular, to incorporate it into their repertoire, together with the new dance rhythms coming out of Europe, such as the schottische and the polka, and the exotic habaneras from Spain’s overseas province. In this context, the relation between opera and dance was so close—​the same musicians, the same instruments—​that their repertoires also moved from the theater to the assemblies of social clubs and plazas, gardens, and public promenades. It was quite common for a society dance to include, during the event, the waltz from Verdi’s La Traviata or Gounod’s rigaudons from Faust, in arrangements specially done for the occasion. The repertoires became homogenized throughout Europe, as did the ways of performing them—​although today we might want to imagine that the original works were very distinct from those ad hoc arrangements. It could be called an unprecedented phenomenon of globalization: from Paris to Havana, from San Francisco to Barcelona, everyone recognized the new popular music. Even those who lived in more rural areas had access to it: the traveling markets of fresh produce, arts and crafts, and small-​scale manufactured goods gave them unrestricted contact with current fashions. 40

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Figure 3.4  Musicians of Els Tranquils Orchestra from Ripoll, 1883. Source: © Arxiu Comarcal del Ripollès.

The habanera, also known by such names as contradanza, danza, or americana, is probably the best example of this profound social transformation in music. Arriving from Cuba around the 1850s, the very rapid acceptance of this new couples dance by local musicians—​some of whom traveled back and forth between the Caribbean island and Spain, like so many young Catalans—​dazzled the younger generation and offended more conservative minds. The sensuality of its slow, measured rhythm and the physical closeness that its movements enabled far and away exceeded the possibilities available to couples up until then, outside of festive contexts and in public spaces, to make physical contact and intimate conversation. This extremely rapid adoption by the local musicians who incorporated the habanera in their repertoires affected social customs and made them instruments of propagation of a new supranational morality that ruptured previous codes. Here is how the author of a chronicle about Carnival dances in Figueres in 1868 expressed it: Tampoco resistí a las habaneras y me declaré partidario en un todo a esas danzas modernas que la indolencia americana ha transportado a nuestra península, a esa languidez que saca fuerzas de flaqueza, porque los que bailan solo necesitan tres cosas:  arrastrar los pies, menear los hombros y desmayarse el uno encima del otro, es sacudir por momentos los lazos que unen á el mundo real para fraternizarse con halagüeñas ilusiones.5 (El Ampurdanés, January 30, 1868) Popular music even crossed a line that seemed uncrossable: religious music. In 1862, the art historian, draftsman, and secretary of the Provincial Commission of Historic and Artistic 41

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Monuments of Barcelona, Josep Puiggarí, gave notice of the practice of performing fashionable dances and Italian opera in Holy Week processions, certain proof that the theater and dance musicians were also members of religious choirs, at least on some occasions: Cada sección … lleva su cantera de música por lo común improvisada ad hoc, y por consiguiente detestable, y perjudicial á los nervios del auditorio, si como a menudo acontece, tres o cuatro de ellas confunden sus ecos, tañendo las unas polkas o americanas, al paso que las otras destrozan el final de La Traviata ó el miserere del Trovador. También este abuso cacofónico es innovación moderna pues antiguamente no se admitían más músicas que la de la capilla, o la llamada del papus reducida a un tambor y dos flautines, enteramente rebujados en vestiduras negras, como unos verdaderos fantasmas, tocando la pasión.6 (El Museo Universal, June 22, 1862) Hence, we can assert that Cabet’s utopia came to pass in some way: “You will hear music and songs everywhere and at all times, at family and public gatherings, in temples and workshops, at theatrical events, and on walks” ([1840] 2003, 43). Popular music became reality in the daily life of towns and cities—​through song, theater, and dance—​while “folk music” remained, on one hand, in the oral traces of an earlier society that was slowly fading away, and on the other, thanks to a new stylized, cultivated formula, became the last recourse of some European elites who preferred to throw themselves into the idealized nostalgia of a rural, old-​f ashioned world.

A Romantic choral repertoire for the republican project It is quite interesting to observe the repertoire of the Cors de Clavé in relation to Italian opera, fashionable dances, and hymns; a music of the Romantic period that, however, and already at that time, was excluded from the canon of classical music and seen with disdain as frivolous, utilitarian, and fruit of the artisan’s craft, as opposed to the aesthetic thinking that E. T. A. Hoffmann and German idealism identified with the genius of Ludwig van Beethoven to reveal to humanity “a mood of vague yearning” ([1814] 1989, 302). The repertoire of the Cors followed the aesthetic preeminence of the opera, especially of the repertoire of the Italian, and later Wagnerian, bel canto.Verdi, Meyerbeer, and Rossini, as Reclus indicated, were undoubtedly the most decisive foundation of this new popular music, and in the compositions of Clavé himself, one can continually feel the belcantista influence in compositions described as chorus, barcarolle, idyll, or pastoral. Another notable influence is Richard Wagner, not the institutionalized Wagner, but the Wagner of the 1849 Dresden Revolution, the man who admired Mikhail Bakunin. It is a highly pertinent cultural fact that the first time an Italianist Barcelona scheduled one of Wagner’s works—​the “Triumphal March” from Tannhäuser, in 1862—​it was performed to the greatest possible effect under the baton of Anselm Clavé: sixty singers from the Euterpe Choral Society, an orchestra of sixty musicians, the women’s choir from the Gran Teatre del Liceu, and sixty musicians from the Regimental Band of the Princess. The occasion warranted it, because within the opera, the “March” represents the entrance of invitees to the singing competition organized by Landgrave Hermann, a patron of the arts. In a simple extrapolation, Clavé imitated the host of Thuringia, whom everyone wants to honor and glorify. The Camps Elisis was changed into a “mansion of peace and splendor”—​according to the text of the musical piece—​and Clavé’s Festivals were legitimized by the reformist revision of Wagner’s concept of singing (Costal 2014, 238–​239). 42

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The other significant source of musical inspiration for the choral societies were the fashionable dances, and especially the rhythms found in the aristocratic and bourgeois salons of Paris, like the schottische, the rigaudon, the galope, the polka, and the redowa, as well as the already consolidated waltz, jota, and contradanza, which became omnipresent in the compositions for choruses, as evidenced in the jota Las galas del Cinca, the schottische El primer amor, and the waltz A orillas del Llobregat, but also the new and exotic habaneras from Cuba. Clavé incorporated the habanera’s rhythm in his compositions, an interesting element if we note the opinion held of this genre on the Caribbean island. In 1868, the Ten Years’ War began in Cuba, and became the first insurrection on the island against the government in Madrid on their path to independence. Since the mid-​nineteenth century, the contradanza had already become an acceptable dance that brought together a great majority of Cubans of different social classes and backgrounds, an emblem of Cubanness. During the war years, the Cubans made that dance a symbol, like the star-​spangled flag or the national anthem La bayamesa. The act of dancing it undoubtedly indicated an anticolonial stance (Galán 1983, 177), as shown by some titles: ¡Viva la libertad!, Los liberales, Se armó la gorda and Gorriones y Bigaritas—​names used to distinguish peninsulars from islanders (Costal 2013, 74). Manuel Saumell, whose father was Catalan but who was considered the great composer of this “national” genre, producing a wide-​ranging catalogue of piano pieces, died in 1870 and only saw the beginning of the revolution, but he left some very clear testimonies, like the contradanza ¡A Somatén!, which coincides revealingly with the title of a Catalan sardana by Pep Ventura (1817–​1874), a friend and collaborator of Clavé in Figueres. The parallelism between habaneras and sardanas becomes even more revealing when we discover the decidedly republican and antimonarchical meaning that Empordà’s danza took on (Costal 2013, 75). The sardanas had become the symbol in dance form of federal republicanism, in contrast to traditionalism, which was represented by the old-​fashioned dance known as the contrapàs. The federal model thus claimed both a uniqueness and a musical diversity equivalent to the diversity of nations that, in their political design, should participate in the construction of a new model of the state, a model that sank together with the First Spanish Republic of 1873–​1874. Hence, it is no coincidence that these revolutionary dances showed parallelisms with other political conflicts of the Romantic period. For example, Johann Strauss Jr., a sympathizer of the ideas of the Liberal Revolution of 1848, composed the Revolutions-​Marsch op.  54 just before participating, with his brother Josef, in the October barricades in Vienna—​against his father’s wishes, a fact that relieved the counter-​revolutionaries, who knew the “evil” that such a popular man as he was would have been able to cause by playing “Rousseau’s ideas on his violin” (Scott 2008, 77). And in the British context, the composer Louis Jullien performed concerts to huge audiences in London with pieces like Siege of Sebastopol Quadrille, referencing the Crimean War (1853–​1856), in which he used rifle shots, cannon shots, and fireworks (Scott 2008, 42). It is quite interesting to observe how the Cors de Clavé managed these different values and meanings through the musical genres they used, in a polysemic musical expression with many nuances and contradictions. But there is no doubt about the trendy modernity of their repertoire and its potent capacity for symbolic evocation and political meaning. This is very well reflected in the only zarzuela—​a uniquely Spanish lyric and dramatic genre inspired by the French opéra comique, which began to replace Italian operas about the mid-​1850s—​with a script and music by Clavé, L’Aplec del Remei, and performed in the Gran Teatre del Liceu in 1858. It is a grand stage production that overtly satirizes the royal family and its government, making singular use of Catalan-​Spanish bilingualism. 43

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The progressive inclusion of the Catalan language in Clavé’s compositions represented a notable change from the diglossic view, according to which the Spanish language was the vehicle of political construction and the only path for the transmission of modernity, culture, and progress. The great majority of singers used Catalan as their daily language, and learned to use Spanish as a language of culture in their singing. Indeed, as Marfany notes, in the nineteenth century, Spanish became the “llengua de les lletres que acompanyen els nous balls de saló, de les cançons d’amor, de les tonades d’actualitat, divulgades a partir dels èxits teatrals, de les andaluseries que són el moll del repertori dels cafès cantants”7 (2008, 198). But the desire to standardize the use of Catalan in the cultural expression of the lower classes was part of the project of cultural and national diversity promoted by federal republicans like Francesc Pi i Margall, a president of the First Republic. Following this idea, in 1871 Clavé crossed the diglossic boundaries that were permitted to the lower classes in translating into Catalan Rouget de Lisle’s La Marseillaise, an anthem that became the musical emblem of the Spanish republicans between 1868 and 1874, despite being prohibited in France and not being declared a national anthem of that country until 1879. In Spain, during the convulsive Sexenio Revolucionario (Six Revolutionary Years), contemporary mechanisms for symbolic action were consolidated through emblematic anthems and songs. The force of a highly meaningful tune transcended the simple communication of a text: it represented the collective acceptance of ideas, a renewal of the commitment acquired. After the uprising of General Juan Bautista Topete in Cádiz, different Spanish translations of the French anthem began to circulate, some anonymous—​“Marchemos pronto a la victoria /​nos llamó ya la Libertad” [Let’s march soon to victory /​Liberty has already called us]—​others by

Figure 3.5  Tenor part for Josep Anselm Clavé’s Catalan adaptation of La Marsellesa, 1871. Source: © Federació de Cors de Clavé.

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known authors, like the one signed by Miguel Ramos Carrión—​“Marchemos, hijos de la patria, /​glorioso día luce ya” [Let us march, sons of the homeland /​a glorious day already dawns] (Gabriel 2007, 275–​276). In Clavé’s adaptation, of three choral stanzas that included solos, some verses were adapted “á los usos de nuestro país” [to the uses of our country], such as the one that begins the first solo piece: “¡Fills de la terra catalana, /​Abans morir que ser esclaus!” [Sons of the Catalan land /​It’s better to die than to be slaves] (Clavé 1897, 200). The people could sing their political reality in their own language, and thus the federal republican message gained unparalleled political force and dimension (Figure 3.5). Initially, the Catalanist cultural action of the Renaixença movement found growing involvement in the work of the choral societies. Clavé, who always wrote the lyrics of his compositions, published the verse for five of his choral pieces—​Les Flors de Maig, Les Nines del Ter, La Nina dels ulls blaus, Lo pom de flors y Cap al tard—​in the volume Los trovadors moderns, an anthological compilation, although anonymous, by Víctor Balaguer in 1859. In the dawning years of Catalanism, the two projects shared a claim of cultural uniqueness, but very soon, some conservative voices of La Renaixença, such as Manuel Milà i Fontanals, reacted against a “people” and a “popular music” that no longer fit with the picturesque image of the peasant farmer singing old, traditional songs, an illusion that was disappearing due to modernity. Even during the “musician-​poet’s” life, the growing popularity of the Cors de Clavé and its acceptance of a national working-​class culture caused traditionalist newspapers like La Renaixensa to harshly criticize Clavé’s choral works. The attacks made from a classist aesthetic were aimed at the simplicity and even the vulgarity of his compositions, making reference to the scant musical training of an author who took advantage of what was most fashionable and to errors in the harmonic construction of the voices, the bulwark of the classical music canon: ¿No podria tornar á reformar tots los choros de cap y de nou, millorant mès la part armónica, posant mes cuydado en los efectes que podrian cábrehi y tráuren lo més partit possible de las quatre veus? Nos pareix que si, y en ferho hi guanyaria éll y nosaltres […] Si Las flors de maig es un choro fluix y descolorit, culpis á la poca experiencia musical de son autor quan lo va fer.8 (La Renaixensa, May 20, 1873) These critical arguments against Clavé were born of a fight that was not entirely musical: they influenced a hot controversy of class struggle and a harsh confrontation between opposing conceptions of nation-​building. Voices such as Milà i Fontanals were reacting to the revolutionary provocation caused by the fact that a third of Clavé’s compositions that were performed by workers were written in Catalan, and among them, several were highly successful. Diglossic control was also a tool of classist segregation. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the conservative elites had imposed a “forced monolingualism” on the lower classes, and had assigned to them ordinary speech patterns to preserve their superiority and cultural power (Marfany 2008, 197–​198). The merit of the choral societies’ leader is that he included Catalan in his compositions, and furthermore, he gave the language cultural and political legitimacy. In his choral compositions, Clavé used the new, fashionable music and dances, combining them with resources from the oral tradition—​such as the perfect agreement of musical rhythm through poetic wording, the use of popular tunes, and the traditional arrangement of voices. This versatility, together with the emotive use of the Catalan language in the working class’s spaces of social and political representation, became the key elements for his popular success. The figure of the leader of choruses of working-​class men became a myth that hid, for many 45

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Jaume Ayats and Anna Costal

Figure 3.6  Monument to Josep Anselm Clavé on Passeig de Sant Joan in Barcelona. Source: Josep Vilaseca and Manuel Fuxà, 1888. Photography by Paola García, CC BY-​SA 3.0.

years and only until the most recent studies of popular music, the complexity of a global project of social regeneration and nation-​building (Figure 3.6).

Coda In the middle decades of the nineteenth century—​coinciding with the great proliferation of theaters, the urbanization of new promenades, and the foundation of social clubs and recreational entities—​the choral singing societies movement, together with fashionable dances, Italian opera, and the zarzuela, was a prime engine for constructing the public image of the worker as a new social actor. Music, songs, and dances were the first layer of social action, as well as the shared experience that left more traces and aesthetic commitment in every individual. Through musical expression and dance—​and thanks to the ambiguity and evanescence 46

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The Cors de Clavé

of these languages—​new social attitudes that involved personal behaviors that were also based on gender, age, class, origins, and religious beliefs were seen and debated. Social morality and public behavior were profoundly transformed thanks to the sociability of singing together and to dancing in couples. The emergence of popular music in that era was not, therefore, a simple festive complement to the transcendent changes occurring in the history of the Spanish Kingdom. Quite the contrary, singing and dancing contributed decisively to revealing political tensions and the options of republican sociability. However, in later decades many of these demonstrations in the public space were “domesticated.”They were resituated or recycled by the possessors of social control by situating them within a folkloric imaginary and aged by the passage of generations—​as happened at the start of the twentieth century with Clavé’s choral societies, the zarzuelas, the sardanas recuperated by conservative Catalanism, and the Cuban habanera, by that time already morphed into the scandalous danzón. Thus, they were highly neutralized with respect to their initial symbolic force and transformative action. Many of the subversive mechanisms that they suggested were thus deactivated, allowing the appearance of a law that popular songs have fulfilled almost to the letter in the last century and a half: every new generation has to inspire its own new popular music, believing it to be the transmitter of a unique force for social transformation.

Notes 1 “Honor to us, children of industry! /​Honor to our happy work! /​In all the arts, victorious over our rivals, /​Let us be the hope, the pride of our country.” 2 “The disgusting spectacle of filthy cafes, the lairs of harlots and gamblers, who, with the infamous bait of lewd songs, knew how to attract the unwary to an unfathomable abyss of degradation and misery. Then I looked closely at those songs, so in vogue among the people of the town, and I tried something that people believed to be impossible … to reform them. … One of those propagators of bad taste in popular songs, a poor man who, since 1817—​when singing was first allowed in the cafés of Barcelona—​, had been driven by lack of other means of subsistence to compose and sing the outrageous coplas and boleros that were a powerful incentive for the brutal instincts of certain wretches, told me of his futile efforts to replace the morally offensive and indecent songs with a dignified repertoire.” 3 “Previously overwhelmed by a job that you performed with disgust, you sought, perhaps in rough or crude pleasures, to forget a difficult day; today, content with your lot, satisfied with your position, you have looked to pass the time in the incomparable enjoyment of music, which at the same time that it elevates your soul to purer, unknown places, gives strength and vigor to your tired members, to begin with eager desire the work that the sun of a new day will bring.” 4 “Choral groups, dramas, comedies, opera all count among the most important institutions of the Peninsula. Theatre here is the most serious adversary of the Church, and if Spain is someday liberated from the tyranny of the Reverend Fathers Claret and Cirilio, heirs of the Holy Office, it will be thanks primarily to the Verdis, the Meyerbeers and the Rossinis.” 5 “Nor could I resist the habaneras and I immediately declared myself a fan of those modern dances that American indolence has brought to our peninsula, of that languor that draws strength from lethargy, because those who dance it only need three things: dragging their feet, shimmying their shoulders, and fainting on top of each other is a way to momentarily shake off the bonds that tie them to the real world, to fraternize with promising illusions.” 6 “Each section … brings its own music, generally improvised and ad hoc—​and therefore detestable, and damaging to the listener’s nerves, if, as often happens, three or four of them confuse their parts, some playing polkas or habaneras, while others destroy the ending of La Traviata or the Miserere of Il trovatore. This cacaphonous abuse is also a modern innovation, since formerly no other music was allowed except for choir music, or the so-​called papus limited to a drum and two piccolos, completely wrapped in black vestments, like true ghosts, playing the Passion of Christ.” 7 “literary language that accompanies new dances at assemblies, love songs, current tunes spread through theatrical hits, the ‘andaluseries’ (Andalusian quirks) that are the essence of the repertoires in cafés cantantes [bars that offered live music].”

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Jaume Ayats and Anna Costal 8 “Couldn’t he go back and redo all the choruses from top to bottom, improving the harmonic parts most, being more careful of the effects that could be included and wringing every possible harmony from the four voices? It seems to us that he could, and in so doing, he would win and so would we … If The Flowers of May is a languid, colorless song, blame the scant musical experience of the author when he wrote it.”

Works cited Ayats, Jaume. 2008. Cantar a la fàbrica, cantar al coro. Els cors obrers a la conca del Ter mitjà. Manlleu: Museu Industrial del Ter, Eumo. Ayats, Jaume, Anna Costal, and Iris Gayete. 2010. Els cantadors del Pallars. Cants religiosos de la tradició oral als Pirineus /​Religious Chants of the Oral Tradition in the Pyrinees. Barcelona: Dalmau Editor. Ayats, Jaume, Anna Costal, Iris Gayete, and Joaquim Rabaseda. 2011a. “Mattutino e Ufficio delle Tenebre a Calvi.” In Tre voci per pensare il mondo. Pratiche polifoniche confraternali in alta Corsica, edited by Ignazio Macchiarella, 68–​88. Udine: Nota. Ayats, Jaume, Anna Costal, Iris Gayete, and Joaquim Rabaseda. 2011b. “Polyphonies, bodies and rhetoric of senses: Latin chants in Corsica and the Pyrenees.” Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales 1 (online). DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.139 (accessed May 26). Boquillon, Guillaume Louis. 1840. Manuel musical a l’usage des collèges, des institutions, des écoles et des cours de chant. París: Perrotin. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2010. El sentido social del gusto. Elementos de una sociología de la cultura. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Cabet, Étienne. [1840, 1848] 1985. Viaje por Icaria, vol. 1, translated by Narcís Monturiol and Francisco J. Orellana. Barcelona: Orbis. —​—​—​. [1840] 2003. Travels in Icaria, translated by Leslie J. Roberts. Siracuse: Siracuse University Press. Casanovas, Joan. 2000. ¡O pan, o plomo! Los trabajadores urbanos y el colonialismo español en Cuba, 1850–​1898. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno. Clavé, Josep Anselm. 1897. Flores de Estío. Poesías de José Anselmo Clavé. Barcelona:  Tipografía de Buenaventura Riera. Costal, Anna. 2013. “From Cuba with love: rhythms and revolutions in Spanish popular music in the 19th Century.” In Made in Spain. Studies in Popular Music, edited by Sílvia Martínez and Héctor Fouce, 67–​77. New York: Routledge. —​—​—​. 2014. Les sardanes de Pep Ventura i la música popular a Catalunya entre la restauració dels Jocs Florals i la Primera República (1859–​1874). PhD dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra. Gabriel, Pere. 2007. El catalanisme i la cultura federal. Història i política del republicanisme popular a Catalunya al segle XIX. Reus: Fundació d’Estudis Socials i Nacionals Josep Recasens i Mercadé, Fundació Campalans i Emprius Club d’Opinió. Galán, Natalio. [1983] 1997. Cuba y sus sones.Valencia: Pre-​Textos. Garcia,Albert. 1995.“Ordre industrial i transformació cultural a la Catalunya de mitjan segle XIX: a propòsit de Josep Anselm Clavé i l’associacionisme coral.” Recerques: història, economia, cultura 33: 103–​134. Gelbart, Matthew. 2007. The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”. Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoffmann, E. T.  A. [1814] 1989. “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music.” In E. T.  A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings:  Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, edited by David Charlton, 96–​102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow/​Lowbrow. The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Locke, Ralph P. 1986. Music, Musicians, and the Saint-​Simonians. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Los trovadors moderns. 1859. Col·lecció de poesías catalanas, compostas per ingenis contemporaneos. Barcelona: Salvador Manero. Marfany, Joan-​Lluís. 2008. Llengua, nació i diglòssia. Barcelona: L’Avenç. Pearsall, Ronald. 1973. Victorian Popular Music. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Reclus, Elías. [1868–​1869] 2007. Impresiones de un viaje por España en tiempos de Revolución. Del 26 octubre 1868 al 10 marzo de 1869. En el advenimiento de la República. Logroño: Pepitas de calabaza. Roca, Joan Baptista. 1837. Gramática Musical. Barcelona: Imprenta de Joaquín Verdaguer.

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The Cors de Clavé Russell, Dave. 1987. Popular Music in England, 1840–​1914:  A Social History. Manchester:  Manchester University Press. Saint-​Simon, Claude-​Henri. 1821. 1re opinión politique des industriels-​1er chant des industriels (Extrait Du Sistème industriel, 2e Partie, pag. 196 et suiv.). Paris: Author. Sennett, Richard. [1974] 2011. El declive del hombre público. Barcelona: Anagrama. Scott, Derek. 2008. Sounds of the Metropolis. The Nineteenth-​Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soriano Fuertes, Mariano. 1865. Memoria sobre las sociedades corales en España, dedicada à la Real Academia Española de Arqueología y geografía del Príncipe Alfonso. Barcelona: Establecimiento tipográfico de D. Narciso Ramirez y Rialp. Vialette, Aurélie Mireille. 2009. Espacios para la cultura obrera en el siglo XIX español:  Literatura, música, representación. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. —​—​—​. 2018. Intellectual Philanthropy.The Seduction of the Masses.West Lafayette, OH: Purdue University  Press. Weber, William. [1975] 2004. Music and the Middle Class. The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna between 1830 and 1848. Aldershot: Ashgate. —​—​—​. 2008. The Great Transformation of Musical Taste. Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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4 HEALTH POLICIES AND LIBERAL REFORMS Josep L. Barona

The demographic and epidemiological background Social development in Western countries during the nineteenth century was severely hampered by the high incidence of infectious disease. A health and demographic transition began in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century when the political authorities implemented a programme of legal reforms focused on improving living and health conditions. The targets were various vulnerable groups. A solid collaboration between social public health reformers and politicians established a reformist programme that made health a political issue. Liberal reformism shaped a broad consensus on the need to improve living standards in rural areas and working-​class neighbourhoods. The collapse of the old regimes in most European countries gave the sanitary and social health care movement a broad international dimension.As an example, it is worth remembering that a Comité de Salubrité was established in France in 1790—​just after the revolution. Similarly, the British sanitary movement and the German mercantilist medizinishe Polizei were the main actors in the reformist policies implemented by liberal governments to combat disease and poor living conditions (Rosen 1993). In Spain, Mateo Seoane, a liberal doctor exiled in Britain, issued his Consideraciones generales de estadística médica (1837), clearly inspired by the ideology of the British sanitary movement. However, most of the liberal reforms failed in Spain and this delayed the implementation of sanitary reformism. The civil registry was not fully implemented until 1871 and the Boletín de Estadística Demográfico-​Sanitaria de la Península e Islas Adyacentes was only available after 1879. During the nineteenth century, most liberal governments experienced a shift from the traditional laissez-​faire doctrine and the state increasingly assumed an important role in social and health matters. A version of a providential state emerged that encouraged public policies, social assistance, and medical care (Pons and Silvestre 2010). As the social and economic advantages derived from public health became evident, the political dimension of health was strengthened (Salort 2008). An emergent providential state evolved gradually in most countries towards the model of a welfare state after World War II (Andresen and Groenlie 2007). Official statistics show that in 1930 some 80% of the Spanish population lived in rural areas. However, the concepts of rural and urban were rather arbitrary given that only provincial capitals were considered urban (Pascua 1934a, 51–​55). Marcelino Pascua, head of the Spanish 50

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Health policies and liberal reforms Table 4.1  Average life expectancy in Spanish urban and rural areas, 1900–​1930

Year

Provincial capitals

Rural areas

Difference

1900 1910 1930

29.52 37.17 47.53

35.48 42.40 50.70

6.46 5.23 3.35

Source: Reher (2001,  107).

Table 4.2  Infant and child mortality in Spain: trends and urban–​rural differences, 1860–​1930

Year

1860 1900 1930

Provincial capital cities (urban areas)

Small towns and rural districts

Under 1

1–​4 years

5–​9 years

Under 1

1–​4 years

5–​9 years

207 225 119

266 245 87

418 415 196

171 201 125

214 200 89

349 361 203

Note: Indicators express probability of death for certain age groups: under 1 year; 1–​4 years, and 5–​9 years per 1,000 survivors. Source: Ramiro Fariñas and Sanz Gimeno (1999, 73–​74).

Health Statistics Service, concluded that the rural population had decreased from 81.2% of the total population in 1920 to 70.5% in 1930. These figures demonstrate the predominantly rural nature of Spain (Pascua 1934a, 2). The collection of demographic and health statistics began in Spain in 1859 with the publication of the Anuario Estadístico de España. The Movimiento Natural de la Población de España followed in 1901. Both sources included birth and mortality rates. At the end of the nineteenth century, several medical journals processed epidemiological records, although not in a standardized format. After several attempts, the first solid contributions to health demography were followed by the creation in 1929 of the Department of Health Statistics within the General Board of Health (Bernabeu-​ Mestre 1992; Rodríguez Ocaña and Bernabeu-​Mestre  1997). In addition, the Spanish demographic and health transition showed regional differences with respect to rhythm and intensity (Dopico 1998). Although these transitional changes occurred later than in northern Europe, Frédéric Le Play was right to consider Spain as one of the stable European societies, especially with regard to rural areas (Bardet and Dupaquier 2001, 489). The health transition in Spain coincided broadly with the Mediterranean model and showed similarities with Italy and Portugal (Bernabeu-​Mestre and Robles 2000). Life expectancy at birth was 29  years in 1860, which was below that of northern Europe. Life expectancy in urban areas was less than in the countryside (Table 4.1). Regional variations and a division between rural and urban were evident for life expectancy (Table 4.1) and infant and child mortality (Table 4.2). The initial disadvantage of urban areas in the demographic and health transition gave way to a progressive improvement and this followed the same pattern as other European countries.

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This is particularly significant for infant mortality rates. Over time, urban areas achieved a relatively advantageous position, especially those areas that were industrialized. Meaningful differences in mortality rates for older children in urban compared with rural areas can be highlighted. Several authors emphasize the role of public hygiene and sanitation measures in cities and urban municipalities. Pascua (1934b) published birth rates, mortinatality, mortality from all causes, infant and child mortality, and mortality from several infectious diseases for 1931 in rural and urban populations. The results revealed a great regional diversity, which forced a discussion of the homogenous vision that national official data offered for Spain. These regional contrasts have been confirmed by more recent demographic research that correlates with cultural and economic factors (Reher 2001). The negative effects of pollution, poor living conditions, and industrialization around cities—​the urban penalty—​were gradually reduced and finally disappeared during the first decades of the twentieth century (Gómez Redondo 1992; Barona 2002). Conversely, mortality after the age of 10 continued to be higher in urban areas, reflecting in part the health risks posed by the urban and social environment. Current historical studies do not show large disparities in child mortality (1 to 4 years) between rural and urban populations at the beginning of the twentieth century. The decrease was quicker in some cities, possibly because of better housing, sanitation, living conditions, and the availability of medical facilities (Ramiro Fariñas and Sanz Gimeno 1999). Spanish medical experts emphasized two main factors in accounting for poor health indicators in rural areas. One was the lack of public health facilities and unhealthy housing (Barona 2004). But they also considered that the high rates of infant mortality derived from unhealthy habits. These conditions included poor breastfeeding, nutritional deficiencies, child abandonment, lack of education, and unhealthy lifestyles. All contributed to the spread of acute infectious diseases, syphilis, and alcoholism (Jordana 1931; Mestre-​Peón 1931; Morote 1931; Barona et al. 2001). To reduce infant and child mortality, doctors and public health experts generally emphasize the importance of an effective fight against unhealthy habits with regard to diet, lack of hygiene, sexual promiscuity, and alcohol consumption (Xalabarder and Presta 1906; Barona 2002, 2004). Some even proposed eugenic solutions for certain cases (for example, prevention of marriages between tuberculosis-​sufferers) and regulations on breastfeeding, wet nursing, and artificial breastfeeding (Martí Ibañez 1937a, 1937b). Medical care and hygiene instruction on breastfeeding and dietary habits required medical and political action (Peset Vidal 1878; Marín Perujo 1886; Torres Fornes 1886; Gilbert i Olivé 1896; Xalabader 1896; Guillén Marco 1898; Barberá 1904; Barrachina 1905; Rodrigo Pertegás 1922; Gallego Ramos 1923; Bartrina and Comín 1930; Perron 1931). The decrease in mortality was not uniform and showed different rhythms and trends in rural and urban areas, in middle-​class districts and working-​class suburbs. Initially, mortality was higher in urban than in rural districts, as a consequence of migrations and the concentration of unhealthy housing, hospitals, and prisons—​in which poverty, infection, and exclusion combined with dreadful results. Environmental pollution and overcrowding worsened the situation in industrial areas, especially during the second half of the nineteenth century. Infant and child mortality was around 245 per 1,000 in the 1860s and 1870s, and life expectancy at birth was less than 30  years (Salort 2008, 46). Childhood epidemics, such as smallpox, measles, diphtheria, and intestinal diseases, increased in the late nineteenth century. Epidemiologists explain this phenomenon as a consequence of the deterioration of the local environment both in private and public spaces. The incorporation of young women into the industrial labour force changed their traditional role as housewives, and disrupted patterns of

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breastfeeding with wet-​nursing and artificial feeding becoming more prevalent. Nutritional problems and an unbalanced diet were described as the source of most health problems among newborns.

Coping with infectious diseases: the birth of a health administration A liberal government proclaimed a Ley de Sanidad [Health Act] in 1855 following similar initiatives in other European countries. Health had become an essential part of social policies under the ideology of the Poor Acts (Swaan 1988). Central, provincial, and local juntas de sanidad [health boards] were established to cope with health emergencies. Unfortunately, these boards mostly lacked qualified experts and did not have sufficient financial support (Salavert and Navarro 1992). The 1855 Health Act emphasized the control of infectious diseases arriving from abroad (mainly by sea). For centuries, health councils in several coastal cities had controlled the risk of epidemics with quarantine strategies. Regardless of their effectiveness, quarantines were reinforced in the eighteenth century (Varela Peris 1998). The 1855 Health Act focused on what was called sanidad exterior [foreign health]. The foreign health service was the first health board composed of technicians and inspectores de sanidad exterior [foreign health officials] (Molero Mesa and Jiménez Lucena 2000). In 1848 a new group of officers—​the subdelegados de salud—​was appointed for the internal health administration, but their duties were mainly focused on defending entry requirements into the health professions. The 1855 Act enabled rural towns to hire health professionals (doctors, surgeons, midwives, and barber-​surgeons) for the care of the local population (Ballester et  al. 2002). However, municipal delivery of this service, reinforced by subsequent legislation, gave rise to conflicts, financial problems, and inequalities (Albarracín Teulón 1974;Valenzuela 1994; Barona 2002; Barona Vilar 2006). Rural doctors and other health professionals, such as pharmacists, midwives, and nurses (paediatric nurses and district nurses) had to wait until the Second Republic in the early 1930s to become state employees (Bernabeu-​Mestre and Gascón 1999). Public health policies were the responsibility of municipalities that, with the exception of some of the larger cities, generally lacked resources. Cities such as Madrid, Barcelona,Valencia, or Bilbao established municipal chemical laboratories in the 1880s to control the conditions of food and water—​with bacteriological laboratories being added in the 1890s (Puerto and Cobo 1983; Roca Rosell 1988, 1991; Canet et al. 1996; Navarro Pérez 1996). At the beginning of the twentieth century, these laboratories were integrated into well-​organized institutos municipales de higiene [municipal hygiene institutes] that focused on controlling safe drinking water, food quality and adulterations, and providing vaccines and serums (Roca Rosell 1991; Barona et al. 2005). In contrast, most rural areas lacked the resources to deal with the most basic public health policies.They often requested bacteriological and chemical analysis of their water supply by municipal laboratories in the larger cities, but there is no clear evidence that such services involved practical measures to resolve chemical and bacteriological contamination. Regional initiatives in large cities were regulated under an Instituto Central de Bacteriología e Higiene [Central Institute of Bacteriology and Hygiene] established in 1894 in Madrid as a central state institution. In 1899 this central institute evolved into the Instituto de Seroterapia, Vacunación y Bacteriología Alfonso XIII, with the aim of coordinating state health policies on vaccination, immunization campaigns, and bacteriological tests (Porras Gallo 1998; Barona 2019). Health organizations were mainly based in urban areas. They were the axis of preventive campaigns to improve living conditions and health statistics. Health indicators became seen as a sign of modernization. High mortality and infant mortality rates were viewed as indicators

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of intolerable backwardness, an obstacle to wealth and economic development, and the upper classes and the state felt obliged to assume the social costs of disease. The expression “public health is wealth” was widely accepted in Spanish society, becoming the starting point for the establishment of a health administration defined in collaboration with the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, under the influence of international agencies such as the Office Internationale d’Hygiène Publique, the Health Committee of the League of Nations, and the International Health Conferences (Barona and Bernabeu-​Mestre 2008; Barona 2015). However, the state budget for public health policies was limited, and sanitary campaigns and health institutions mainly depended on charity. Echoing Max von Pettenkoffer’s demonstration of the benefits of public investment in health in Bavaria, Antonio Espina y Capo, a liberal doctor, presented a document to the Social Security Conference organized by the Spanish Ministry of Development (Ministerio de Fomento) in 1917, in which he estimated that excessive and avoidable mortality cost 5 million pesetas for the first decade of the century. However, attempts to involve the state in financing health campaigns and organizations often ended in failure, as happened with the political campaigns of Francisco Moliner to promote the state construction of a network of tuberculosis hospitals. The government health budget in 1920 represented just 0.2% of the total spending, a level that only tripled in the Bienio Reformista (1931–​1933) during the Second Republic (Barona 2008). Liberal reformers in the 1880s, supported by part of the labour movement, created a Comisión de Reformas Sociales [Commission for Social Reform], which represented a change in public policies regarding poverty. The reformers, Gumersindo de Azcárate and Segismundo Moret, belonged to the progressive middle-​class liberal elite. In the context of the economic and social crisis, new sociological methods, and social reforms in other European countries (including Bismarckian programmes and British Fabianism), the Commission for Social Reform represented something completely new in Spain. The liberal government published a project for social reform in 1883 to reconcile the interests of the working and middle classes and established a commission to identify the social disadvantages that affect the working class (both agricultural and industrial workers). The commission was consultative and technical and included a central structure with provincial delegations. Its first action was the preparation of a survey of professional opinions, including doctors, teachers, judges, lawyers, workers, and organizations such as the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, Ateneo Casino Obrero in Valencia, Facultad de Derecho and Ateneo in Madrid. However, parts of the labour movement criticized the initiative. The socialist unions criticized the reformist ideology of the commission and the anarchist union simply did not participate. Poverty was no longer considered by liberals as a natural and inevitable phenomenon that threatened social stability.The reformers tried to analyse its causes and dimensions in an attempt to involve the providential state in preventive actions and social policies that would help the working classes and excluded population groups at a time when urban growth was damaging living conditions. A deterioration of the environment in rural districts also had negative consequences for living standards and health. Political action under the influence of the sanitary movement and surveys made by the Commission for Social Reform stressed a public debate about la cuestión obrera. Liberal social reformism was also directly related to fears generated by the growing strength of the workers’ revolutionary movement. In 1884, the survey of the Commission for Social Reform provided a grim picture of malnutrition, poor clothing, poor housing, and high incidences of disease among industrial and agricultural workers. The circulation of these findings, the growing influence of the labour movement, and the impulse given by the Berlin Conference to encourage state social interventionism created a positive background for political action. The commission changed its purely 54

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consultative status after 1890 and directly participated in efforts to improve the living conditions of workers. This was a fundamental step in the Spanish institutionalization of social reform and state intervention. By 1900 the commission included permanent sections devoted to public health and sanitation that were focused on housing and living conditions, health and safety in factories and schools, and quality control for food and water. Between 1900 and 1936, the liberal commitment to social affairs and the increasing political influence of socialism led to the creation in 1903 of an Instituto de Reformas Sociales [Social Reform Institute]. In 1908, an Instituto Nacional de Previsión [National Insurance Institute] was also established, which became integrated into the Ministerio de Trabajo y Previsión Social [Ministry of Labour and Social Insurance] in 1920. After the Spanish Conference on Social Insurance (1917), social policies included compulsory social security, retirement pensions, labour insurance, and social measures for workers (Salort 2008, 93–​94). Many movements (liberal, socialist, regenerationist, anarchist and conservative republicans) became deeply involved in this extensive programme of social and cultural regeneration. However, liberal ambiguities about state intervention in social reforms and fears about its controlling effect on individual freedom continued, while social reformers argued that social relations could not be left to private management and demands.This antagonism on social issues led to a third important group in Spain: the Krausists. This group represented a liberal democratic perspective and strongly supported regeneration and social reform through education and the establishment of an elite committed to progress, but while they supported state intervention, they strongly opposed state intrusion into decision-​making by individuals, professional associations, and institutions. Therefore, only the socialists fully supported the active role of the state as the main social regulator. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, health policy addressed the prevention of venereal diseases through the control of prostitution. Although these attempts originated in the mid-​nineteenth century, the first appointments of inspectores de sanidad [health inspectors] were made during the 1880s (Castejón Bolea 2012, 33–​34). Health inspectors expanded their functions in 1892 and were appointed in some cases as provincial health officers with broader responsibilities in health policies. However, the salaries and facilities were insufficient to fulfil their tasks. At the end of the nineteenth century, the national debate over the loss of Spain’s last colonies and possessions in America and the Philippines increased the perception of backwardness and decay. Backwardness and modernization were highlighted in the annual reports of the Sociedad Española de Higiene [Spanish Hygiene Society] (Bernabeu-​Mestre and Robles 2000, 34–​35). The political crisis aggravated the perception of the backwardness of Spain with respect to Europe, not only in relation to health, but in other aspects of social life. Therefore, a political and social programme of reforms and international commitments emerged. The relationship between health and social development became a prominent feature in social debates (Huertas 1993, 1995a). This was the background of attempts made in the first quarter of the twentieth century to establish the foundations of a regional health administration in urban and rural areas for launching public health services. The emphasis was mainly on the municipal and local authorities, although except for the main cities, there were insufficient financial resources to make adequate provision (Barona et al. 2005). The first initiatives did not take place until the second decade of the twentieth century (Rodríguez Ocaña 1994; Huertas 1995). After several unsuccessful attempts to update the 1855 Health Act, limited changes were approved under the Instrucción General de Sanidad [IGS, General Health Instruction] in 1904 (García Guerra and Álvarez Antuña 1994). The new legislation turned the focus from external 55

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health risks to a detailed investigation of the state of health of the population.The IGS established a health administration based on three main axes. An executive branch, including the Dirección General de Sanidad [General Health Board] was established under the Ministerior de Gobernación [Home Office]. Executive policies were coordinated in each province by civil governors. The new legislation established a central consultative body, the Real Consejo de Sanidad [Royal Health Council], supported at the regional level by the juntas provinciales and juntas municipales [provincial and municipal health boards]. Thirdly, a technical branch supported by health officials at a general, provincial, and municipal level was established to monitor and manage the state of public health, providing specialist knowledge and technical support for all other institutions. The position of the inspector provincial de sanidad [provincial health inspector] was reinforced by the new legislation, which placed under their responsibility the control of health risks in the provinces and rural districts, although again without the necessary financing and resources. The main objectives were to protect the population against infectious diseases; improve public health; control food hygiene; improve housing; launch vaccination campaigns; and compile health statistics. These inspectors were considered as an embryonic service, constantly alert to epidemic diseases and any deficiency in public health, and focused on improving the health of the rural population. As they had limited capacity for action, they essentially became a professional lobby that denounced health deficiencies and demanded constant improvements (Perdiguero-​Gil 2001). From the mid-​1920s they became a key component of the regional health administration within the framework of the institutos provinciales de higiene [provincial hygiene institutes]. Under other central legislation, prevention and health care was reorganized between 1909 and 1912. A Brigada Sanitaria Central [Central Health Unit] was founded in 1909 with mobile brigades to deal with any outbreak of infectious diseases, and the former Instituto de Serotepapia,Vacunación y Bacteriología was reorganized as the Instituto Nacional de Higiene [National Hygiene Institute] in 1914. All these initiatives focused on the prevention of epidemics and infectious diseases. However, other health problems began to attract greater attention. Guided by the concept of social medicine (a transnational concept disseminated by experts from the health organization of the League of Nations) new public policies were developed (Weindling 1995). While rural districts were basically subject to analysis by rural physicians through medical reports and local health reports, the search to attract the attention of health authorities in large cities and towns assumed greater importance and became the focus of health interventions. Unhygienic conditions in workers’ homes, chaotic urban planning, and lack of sanitary and hygiene facilities gave rise to the concept of social hygiene, particularly in the control of drinking water and food quality, street cleaning, public spaces, housing, and health care centres. Architects and engineers played an active role within the Cuerpo de Ingenieros Civiles [Civil Engineering Institute], an active liberal reformist group that became influential after the Ministry of Development (1851) was founded to encourage the implementation of infrastructure and urban projects for the expansion of cities, railways, sanitation, and water supply. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Revista de Obras Públicas included a permanent section on Urban Hygiene, which later included a section on Sanitation and Town Planning Expansion (Salort 2008, 88). This sanitary movement helped to transform the Spanish urban landscape and architects played a key role. Ildeforns Cerdà designed the Eixample in Barcelona and published a Demografía estadística de la clase obrera de Barcelona (1856) that analysed the deplorable living conditions of workers. With urban improvements underway, the focus was on the living conditions of agricultural workers, described as shameful by reformers, architects, and rural doctors (Rodríguez Ocaña and Molero Mesa 1993). Dispensaries were mainly concentrated in urban areas, but rural centres were also established to coordinate measures against specific problems such as 56

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tuberculosis, malaria, venereal diseases, or high rates of maternal and infant mortality. Health problems, such as alcoholism, trachoma, and mental illness were also identified and the subject of campaigns. A short-​lived attempt to improve the health situation of rural districts was the creation in 1910 of the Inspección para el Saneamiento del Campo (Inspectorate for Rural Sanitation) to improve the land, subsoil, and manage water in rural areas. Although the organization was closed in 1918, its activities included the investigation of diseases such as malaria and hookworm and it surveyed living conditions in rural areas (Barona and Bernabeu-​Mestre 2008). The concern of the Inspección for malaria was a precedent for the campaign against this endemic disease funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in several rural districts during the 1920s. A cooperation agreement between the Spanish government and the Rockefeller Foundation was applied to programmes in specific fields of public health, including training grants for health officials at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore (Barona and Bernabeu-​Mestre 2008). Another milestone in the modernization of Spanish public health services was the establishment of an Escuela Nacional de Sanidad [National School of Health] for training public health officials, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation (Bernabeu-​Mestre 1994). Grants were also awarded for the training of health officials and other health personnel (such as public health nurses) in American and European institutions (Barona and Bernabeu-​Mestre 2008). Another important service launched within the framework of the General Board of Health, and also under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, was the Department of Health Statistics (1929) (Rodríguez Ocaña and Bernabeu-​Mestre 1997). The 1925 legislation established the responsibilities of municipalities and provinces to create a public health administration in every province. Previous efforts to establish laboratories in all provincial capitals and towns with more than 15,000 inhabitants had been more or less successful (Barona et al. 2005). At the beginning of the 1920s, there were some seventy municipal and provincial institutes equipped with chemical and bacteriological laboratories, inspection services, and vaccination departments in cities and major towns in some thirty provinces. The regional health system received reinforcement with the constitution of the brigadas sanitarias provinciales [provincial health units] in 1921 (Perdiguero Gil 2001, 48–​49). Depending on the municipal budgets, these units were concerned with the control of infectious diseases. Thus, it was not until the reform of the mid-​1920s that a provincial health administration was formed, based on the incorporation of all previous health institutions of the institutos provinciales de higiene (IPH) under the direction of provincial health officers. Each IPH supposedly had three technical sections that grouped its activities: epidemiology and disinfection; clinical, hygienic, and chemical analysis; and vaccinations. Although the IPHs were located in provincial capitals, most of their activities focused on rural districts, mainly in the control of infectious diseases and the management of health campaigns. Two campaigns in particular, against hookworm (that affected miners) and malaria were specific to rural areas and both were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (Rodríguez Ocaña 2003). Each campaign was also planned according to strictly technical and professional criteria and managed by experts. In this context of a relative modernization of health services, the proclamation of the Second Republic in April 1931 marked a brief but intense period of health policy reforms.The difficult situation of the rural population that gave rise to conflicts during the republican years led to the prioritization of rural health. After an earlier meeting in Budapest in 1930, the International Conference on Rural Hygiene held in Geneva in June and July 1931, under the sponsorship of the League of Nations, was an initiative led by the Spanish government (Barona and Cherry 2005). In proposing this conference, the government sought discussion of the fundamental 57

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guiding principles and the most appropriate methods for the provision of medical care in rural communities and rural districts, as well as the most effective and economical sanitation methods.The Spanish proposal suggested a general approach including all the important factors that affected the organization of medical care, such as health care centres for the rural population and discussion about public health organization. The role of doctors, nurses, and other professionals in rural districts was discussed, as well as rural hospitals and dispensaries. These included a rational hierarchical organization of health centres, dispensaries, sanatoriums, and measures for sewage disposal, water purification and supply, disposal of manure and waste, and hygienic housing. The advance of medical science would be useless if industrial and agricultural workers were not incorporated into the mainstream of modern civilization—​and as hygiene standards were changing, so were the political responsibilities for public health. The state administration assumed the duty to provide citizens with healthy living conditions (Muñoz Machado 1995). In Spain, the process of creating a central and regional health administration also involved a transition from charity to secular institutions. Social and medical care was traditionally managed by organizations linked to the Catholic Church (including hospitals, nursing homes, asylums, and maternity homes).The liberal reforms launched another model based on public administration. This meant a transition from a charitable social and health care for the poor to a secularized model managed by professionals: doctors, nurses, surgeons, health inspectors, school medical inspectors, and public health nurses.This cast of professionals handled health care as a service of the public administration and a right of citizens, rather than as an act of Christian charity. Consequently, the Church was especially sensitive and hostile to state intervention in the organization of health care, and resisted liberal reforms because it meant a loss of social and political power. These liberal reforms challenged the essentially ecclesiastical charity model, which tried to control two traditional roles: teaching the elite and taking care of the poor in a society fundamentally divided into the privileged and the excluded (Carasa Soto 2007). The Church in Spain was socially powerful and did not easily accept the new liberal order, nor the emerging role of the urban middle class. The Church always opposed the role of the state as a social regulator, considering state intervention as a threat to its long-​standing autonomy and hegemony in social affairs. Consequently, conservative and Catholic groups tried to deal with the new social relations through charities and poor laws, and sought to counteract social reformism and state regulation. As Catholic traditionalists saw the emergence of the state in public policy as running counter to Spanish tradition, opposition to the Church (or anticlericalism) became a key issue for Spanish liberals and republicans. It should be noted that republicans of various ideologies and political orientations considered the Catholic Church the nation’s greatest obstacle to progress and modernity.

Some final comments Disease and health have changed in their social and political significance since the final decades of the nineteenth century. Public health care was traditionally associated with poverty and philanthropy, but in the twentieth century it became a central issue of biopolitics, and aroused the interest of broad sectors of society. Progress and modernity became associated with hygiene, positive health indicators, and safe living conditions. The beginning of the demographic and health transition coincided with the origins of a modernization impulse in Spanish society, which consolidated public health and social medicine. The transformations experienced by the Spanish health care system since the mid-​nineteenth 58

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century were influenced by the international sanitary movement, especially by some of its most outstanding protagonists: such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations Health Organization. The Spanish administration incorporated most of the recommendations made by international organizations.The sanitary movement was the motor for developing public health in urban and rural areas, and the health officer (a public health expert) was the key actor in incorporating health statistics and laboratory techniques. Rural health became a major part of the civilizing programme in Spain during the second half of the nineteenth century, especially through the reformist policies implemented by liberals, and then socialists, during the first years of the Second Republic. Health, education, and sanitary transformations in rural Spain formed part of the modernization and social regeneration project boosted by Krausists and socialists. A  new category of agents became involved that included health officers, public health experts, bacteriologists, schoolteachers, doctors, nurses, architects, engineers, and politicians. Furthermore, the European Conference on Rural Health gave external legitimacy to Spanish rural health reforms. Since rural practitioners constantly reported on “an insufficiently civilized way of life” in rural districts, propaganda, information on hygiene, medical action, and sanitary campaigns were mobilized to change habits and “civilize” rural areas. Avoidable diseases that included trachoma, malaria, tuberculosis, venereal diseases, and alcoholism were tackled. Rural health centres became key institutions, and housing, school hygiene, and mother-​child health care were the main fields of action. Rural districts were also included in the traditional public health policies involving the regulation of water, food, slaughterhouses, cemeteries, lavatories, and markets. Together with rural health and the fight against infectious diseases, maternal and child health formed the nucleus of health policies in the nineteenth century. High infant mortality rates became a factor of political attention and a scourge for the economy. That is why women, as mothers, were the axis around which all social health care policies revolved. Educating mothers about the principles of hygiene was essential. Mothers were the central figure in the home as they spread moral values, managed cooking and diet, handled cleanliness, child education, domestic economy, and family habits. For this reason, they became the centre of action of policies at the municipal level. Maternal and child health care dispensaries were created to improve outcomes around pregnancy and childbirth. A series of institutions aimed at educating mothers. Milk deliveries, childcare institutes (institutos de puericultura), regulation and control of breastfeeding and wet-​nursing, popular lectures at community centres (casas del pueblo and ateneos) aimed at educating and transforming domestic culture and habits in accordance with the principles of hygiene. Women as mothers were the main agent for introducing biopolitics (health policies) into the private sphere: including in terms of housing, diet, sexuality, morality, and hygiene habits. The state aimed to transform industrial and agricultural workers into citizens by providing them with the means for a healthy way of life.

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Josep L. Barona Puerto Sarmiento, Francisco Javier, and Josefa Cobo Cobo. 1983. “El Laboratorio Municipal de Madrid en el último tercio del siglo XIX.” Dynamis 3: 149–​172. Ramiro Fariñas, Diego, and Alberto Sanz Gimeno. 1999. “Cambios estructurales en la mortalidad infantil y juvenil española, 1860–​1990.” Boletín de la Asociación de Demografía Histórica 17(1): 49–​87. Reher, David S. 2001. “In search of the ‘urban penalty’: exploring urban and rural mortality patterns in Spain during the demographic transition.” International Journal of Population Geography 7: 105–​127. Roca Rosell, Antoni. 1991. “La higiene urbana com a objectiu:  notes sobre la història de l’Institut Municipal  de la Salut (1891–​1936).” In Cent Anys de Salut Pública a Barcelona, 75–​103. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona. —​—​—​. 1988. Historia del Laboratori Municipal de Barcelona de Ferrán a Turró. Barcelona:  Ajuntament de Barcelona. Rodrigo Pertegás, José. 1922. Ensayo sobre topografia preurbana de València. Madrid: Tipografía Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas. Rodríguez Ocaña, Esteban. 1994. “The making of the Spanish public health administration during the first third of the twentieth century.” Quaderni internazionali di Storia della Medicina e la Sanità 3(1): 49–​65. Rodríguez Ocaña, Esteban, and Josep Bernabeu-​Mestre. 1997. “Physicians and statisticians: two ways of creating demographic health statistics in Spain, 1841–​1936.” Continuity and Change 12(2): 247–​264. Rodríguez Ocaña, Esteban, and Jorge Molero Mesa. 1993. “La cruzada por la salud. Las campañas sanitarias del primer tercio del siglo XX en la construcción de la cultura de la salud.” In La salud en el estado de bienestar, edited by Luis Montiel, 133–​148. Madrid: Editorial Complutense. Rodríguez Ocaña, Esteban, Rosa Ballester Añón, Enrique Perdiguero, Rosa María Medina Doménech, and Jorge Molero Mesa, eds. 2003. La acción médico-​social contra el paludismo en la España metropolitana y colonial del siglo XX. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Rosen, George [1958] 1993. A History of Public Health. New York: MD Publications. Salavert i Fabián, Vicente Luis, and Jorge Navarro. 1992. La Sanitat Municipal a València (segles XIII-​XX). València: Edicions Alfons el Magnànim. Salort Vives, Salvador. 2008. Vivir y morir en Alicante. Higienistas e inversiones públicas en salud (1859–​1923). Alicante: Publicaciones Universidad de Alicante. Swaan, Abram de. 1988. In Care of the State. Oxford: Polity Press. Torres Fornes, Cayetano. 1886. Estudio topográfico-​médico de Segorbe. Castellón: Imprenta de Vicente Giner. Valenzuela Candelario, Jose. 1994. “El espejismo del ejercicio libre. La ordenación de la asistencia médica en la España decimonónica.” Dynamis 14: 269–​304. Varela Peris, Fernando. 1998. “El papel de la Junta Suprema de Sanidad en la política sanitaria española del siglo XVIII.” Dynamis 18: 315–​340. Weindling, Paul, ed. 1995. International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–​ 1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Xalabader, Eduardo. 1896. “La mortalidad de las poblaciones rurales de nuestras comarcas y disposiciones higiénicas más prácticas y eficaces que podrían dictarse para disminuirla.” Boletín de la Academia de Higiene de Cataluña 4(4): 25–​29. Xalabarder, Eduardo, and Alberto Presta. 1906. “Estudi sanitari general de les Comarques Catalanes.” In Primer Congrés d’Higiene de Catalunya.Temes Oficials, 5–​29. Barcelona: Acadèmia d’Higiene de Catalunya.

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5 EQUATORIAL GUINEA Colonization and cultural dislocation (1827–​1931) Justo Bolekia Boleká Translated by Linda Grabner, University of Pennsylvania

Sumarse no es borrar de los pueblos las marcas propias, su identidad. [Joining does not mean erasing from the people their own styles, their identity.] (Jerónimo Rope Bomabá) The ethnocultural identities of the country known today as Equatorial Guinea should be considered from two perspectives:  first, from a view of indigenousness; that is, before the natives had any contact with White people, whether slavers or colonizers. We are referring here to the particular characteristics and customs of the Bubis, the Fangs, and the Ndowès as autochthonous, endoglossic ethnicities established in their respective territories. The second perspective is that of allogenicity; that is, from the initiation and maintenance of contact with White slavers and colonizers, primarily from Spain. Here we will speak of the Ámbö or Annobonés, Bisió or Bujeba, Bubi, Fang or Pamue, Krió or Fernandino, Ndowè or Combe identities, according to the nomenclature used by the colonizers. This collision between autochthonous and allochthonous has given rise to identities summarized by the demonyms “Guinean” or “Equatoguinean,”1 to encompass these new transformed or dislocated identities since the imposition of the allochthonous elements of religion (Catholic or Protestant), language (Spanish or Pidgin English), work (centered primarily around the cultivation of cocoa and coffee), the redefinition of the family (unregistered common-​law marriages vs. registered Church marriages), parentage (classifying children as legitimate or bastards; i.e., those born out of religious wedlock), and social status (emancipated heads of household vs. those under guardianship). The Spanish colonization of Equatorial Guinea was a long-​drawn-​out process (1778–​1968). In the present study, I will focus on the period 1843–​1931 and on the problem of identity dislocation within Hispanic Africanism. The chronology I present attempts to show the distinct phases of colonization and their protagonists, whether these be principals (rulers or political leaders) and their underlings (direct collaborators of the leaders, who hold very important posts in the government), or the common people, those being ruled (Bolekia 2001). The collision between African and Spanish refers to a turbulent context in which a colonial power strives to dominate and modify the behaviors of the colonized peoples to impose on them an identity that conforms to imperial interests (Creus 1994, 114).

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First period of identity dislocation in the Spanish Guinean territories (1827–​1843) Although there are very few monographic studies of the period before 1827, at least we have the reports of the first explorers that Spain sent to the lands they received from Portugal (Castro 1999), as well as the drafts of current studies that have shown a certain interest in this part of the history of Spain in Black Africa. In this period characterized by such documentary paucity on the relations between Spain and its territories in the Gulf of Guinea, we can distinguish different moments. From 1778 to 1817 there are certain details we must keep in mind. First, we must go back to 1778, the year that Portugal ceded to Spain its African possessions: the islands of Fernando Poo and Annobón and the mainland territories that had yet to be precisely defined geographically but that approximately corresponded to the geographical area of post-​1885 Equatorial Guinea. Arnalte (2005, 49) holds that Spain bought these territories from Portugal. Secondly, the effective takeover of these lands happened in October 1778, with the expedition led by Brigadier Felipe de los Santos Toro y Freyre, Count of Argelejo. Third, Spain neglected these lands, not because they were unproductive or wracked by epidemics and death, but because, aside from the many colonists who died due to the climate and local illnesses (yellow fever, sleeping sickness, etc.), Spain was facing both internal (at home in Spain) and external (in their Latin American colonies) conflicts that prevented them from focusing on the colonization of their African territories. Between 1779 and 1843, the period when Spain ignored the African lands ceded to them by Portugal in 1778, the Dutch, the Germans, the French, and the British struggled for control of the territory with respect to the Black slave trade (the former) and the persecution of the slavers (the latter, starting in 1817). The British officially arrived at what was then the island of Fernando Poo (today Bioko) in 1827, with the expedition led by Captain William Owen, who soon realized that he needed to establish a settlement. Thus, he promoted the construction of Clarence City (embryo of the future city of Santa Isabel, today called Malabo).There were geostrategic reasons that led the British to take advantage of Spain’s absence in these territories and seek to purchase them to add them to British domains.The apparent goal of Owen’s expedition was to establish the definitive seat of the mixed (Spanish-​British) tribunal in the fight against slavery (the provisional seat was in Sierra Leone). So the pretext used by the British in the case of Fernando Poo was to fight against the slave trade. Their real motive, however, was different. Great Britain abolished slavery in the metropolis in 1772. Because of this, they suddenly found themselves with several thousand freed but poor Blacks who could not adjust to the society and which also didn’t accept them as equals (Arnalte 2005, 32). In 1827–​1837, Great Britain took advantage of Spain’s indifference to begin a policy of extensive demographic repopulation on Fernando Poo. The purpose of this massive move, as would also happen in Sierra Leone and in the later-​created Liberia, was to make Fernando Poo into the third space of relocation or settlement for the Black ex-​ slaves, now freed and westernized, and turn it into a place where they could put into practice a distorted—​although supposedly identical—​colonial replica of the British political system that disguised their colonizing interests and hid the violent acculturation of the indigenous population. The enormous presence of freed Blacks from British lands fostered the use of Pidgin English as a language of communication on Fernando Poo. Hence, we may speak here of a colonial subject not only coerced by acculturation and forcible submission, but also dysfunctional in their own environment, creating a political and cultural reliance on the colonizers, the new owners of the territory. 64

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The 1817 British Declaration on the prosecution of the slave trade, signed by Spain in 1823, indicates that the slave trade continued in the Spanish Guinean territories as late as that date. Information about the sale of 307 slaves in 1821 confirms that Spain was still engaged in this lucrative business. When Spain signed this Declaration, it joined the fight against slavery and established the foundations for abolishing the trade in the Crown’s domains, whether in South America or in Africa, according to the bill prepared by Félix Varela in 1822 (Castro and Calle 1992, 90). Between 1837 and 1843, Port Clarence, the only city at that time, boasted an Anglicized urban population. Confident that there would be no resistance and that the Black subjects of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (1837–​1901) would promote and accelerate the Anglicization of Fernando Poo, Annobón, and Corisco, Lord Melbourne’s government made an offer to the Spanish authorities to buy the island of Fernando Poo, to formalize British possession of this territory. However, the Spanish political opposition took advantage of this situation to attack the government of the moderate decade (with Narváez several times the head of the government under the reign of Isabel II) and accused it of wanting to sell the Guinean Spanish possessions (Ballano 2014, 56).

Second period of identity dislocation in the Spanish Guinean territories (1843–​1899) After refusing to sell Fernando Poo, Spain began to send new expeditions of occupation. Official Spanish colonization began with the expedition led by Juan José de Lerena y Barry in 1843 (Bolekia 2003, 47–​48). Upon discovering not a single Spaniard, and given the massive presence of a pidgin-​speaking population, he had no choice but to name John Beecroft, a mestizo British citizen and consul, as the Spanish governor of Fernando Poo (known today as Bioko) (Liniger-​ Goumaz 1988, 28; Martín 1993, 119) and other as-​yet-​undefined territories. Beecroft was governor from 1843 to 1854. In the period of 1843 to 1899, Spain reclaimed the possessions of Río de Oro, specifically between 1884 and 1885. At this time, Spain carried out two types of expeditions. First were the expeditions sent from the Peninsula to the islands of Fernando Poo, Annobón, and Elobey. These were expeditions of verification, of occupation, to take possession, to transfer prisoners from Cuba, to send workers (officials, laborers, etc.), and so on. Among these should be included missionary expeditions, often instituted from the seats of power, to “evangelizar a sus súbditos de la isla de Bioko [Fernando Poo], de Corisco y Annobón” [evangelize their subjects of the island of Bioko, and of Corisco and Annobón] (Martín 1993, 169). The second type of expeditions were internal to their already occupied territories. These were carried out to meet and establish contact with the representatives of traditional local power, for example, the Bubi kings Möadyabitá, Möókáta, Ësáasi Eweera, and Malabo Löpèlo Mëlaka, and the Ndowè kings Boncoro I, Otambo, and Boncoro II. Here we should also mention the private scientific expeditions, such as those led by John Clarke, Óscar Baummann, Günter Tessmann, Manuel Iradier y Bulfy, and Doctor Ossorio. Apart from punitive expeditions (carried out by the Germans and the French towards the end of the nineteenth century, and by the Spanish in the first quarter of the twentieth), the main strategy for colonizing the territory and constructing a colonial subject (identitary dislocation) that was used around the Gulf of Guinea followed the principle of sociological colonization defined by the governor of the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea, Juan María Bonelli Rubio, as a civilizing project:  “Doctrina y método que ha de seguir el colonizador para civilizar al colonizado, entendiéndose por civilizar, elevar el nivel cultural, social y moral del que se civiliza” 2 (1946, 1). This acculturation of the colonial subject should guarantee the 65

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assimilation of future generations of Africans to the principles of Western civilization (Ballano 2014, 115). This notion of the “civilizing” task of the colonial power implicitly includes the authoritarian linguistic, religious (Catholic), political, administrative, and cultural paternalism that characterized the imperial project: “El paternalisme és una forma d’ autoritarisme. Implica una negació de la capacitat de l’altre, de la cultura de l’altre, dels valors de l’ altre”3 (Creus 1994, 111). All of the transformation of autochthonous identities into allochthonous identities planned by missionaries and other colonial agents like the military, administrative officials, and teachers to create a new social class of emancipated slaves or assimilated natives, was directed at entirely dismantling the native societies: to teach them to despise their own values and animist beliefs, to change their social organization (matriarchal in the case of the Bubis, or the particular form of patriarchy of the Fangs, the Ndowès, the Fernandinos, and the Annobonese) and their economic structure. In this sense, the expropriation of lands—​sometimes violent and sometimes in exchange for gifts that the colonial agents offered the colonized peoples (such as pieces of mirror, alcohol, bracelets, fabrics, glass beads, necklaces, tobacco, or flintlocks)—​and their later concession to Spaniards, Portuguese, and Fernandinos (necessary collaborators of the Spanish colonizers) for the planting of both cocoa and coffee (export products) involved the imposition of forced labor and private property at the expense of the communal system of the native peoples. As Castro and Calle note, “El trabajo, generador de beneficio y de propiedad, llevaba a la respetabilidad y a la civilización” [Work, that generator of benefits and property, brought respectability and civilization] and had as its object to create in those natives “[l]‌a mística del individualismo, de la propiedad individual como elementos aculturadores” [the mysticism of individualism, of individual property as acculturating elements] (2007, 280). There was resistance to colonial violence both from the traditional leaders (village chiefs or councils of elders) and from the people themselves, who on numerous occasions refused to work for the colonizers, and fought the latter’s expropriation of their lands and invasions of indigenous space and possessions, especially when they realized the stratagems and tricks of the Whites, such as gift giving or encouraging alcohol consumption. When the colonizers began kidnapping children who were culturally adept at helping their elders both at home and in the fields, the resistance of those being colonized became open revolt against forced labor and the attempt to use violence to force the native peoples, particularly the Bubis, to work as laborers on the White or Black colonizers’ cocoa plantations. The revolt against this exploitation was further supported by the strong feelings of humiliation about this colonial treatment inflicted on the population. Faced with the indigenous population’s refusal to submit to the will of the colonizers, Spain organized expeditions to punish them. According to Ballano (2014, 193), the Black Fernandinos Balboa and Kinson led some of these expeditions, accompanied by colonial guards to repress the Bubis’ insurrections. The arrival of White colonizers, who were generally accompanied by military forces whose objective was to repress any indigenous uprising in defense of their territory and against the cultural occupation, forced the natives to abandon their lands, which were appropriated and colonized, and to seek refuge in other places. The abolition of transatlantic slavery and the need for a work force to develop the new enterprise in cocoa and other products in Africa led to the conception of another means of recruiting workers that had significant repercussions for the process of acculturating the native populations. Deportees from Cuba and the Spanish peninsula (Catalans, Valencians, Aragonese, Galicians, etc.), sent to Fernando Poo to swell the influential group of foreign White (those already mentioned) and Black (the Fernandinos or Kriós) colonizers, became necessary allies in the process of colonization, due precisely to their high degree of westernization (British or Hispanic). These immigrants, upon becoming owners of cocoa plantations, needed cheap labor, 66

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Equatorial Guinea Table 5.1  Cocoa produced on Fernando Poo, 1889–​1913

Sundiata

Castro y Calle

Year

Kilograms

Year

Kilograms

1889 1899 1909 1913

475 1,440,398 2,725,000 5,250,000

1897 1898 1899 1900

744,987 1,057,770 1,141,092 1,320,000

Sources: Author’s own elaboration based on Sundiata (1972, 234–​235) and Castro and Calle (2007, 234).

and resorted to the Bubis and the Fangs. But when they realized that the Bubis refused to work as laborers, in many cases with the support of some governor, the cocoa plantation owners decided to hire workers from the British territories of Sierra Leona, Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, British Cameroon, etc., who were considered the most efficient at this kind of work, or from the continental Spanish territories in Africa (the Fangs). A few authors note that the treatment accorded these laborers was similar—​and offered similar physical violence—​to that given to the slaves, despite whatever wage or stipend they might receive for their contracted labor. Furthermore, the authorities of their home countries were aware of their transfer to Spanish territories as laborers. The North American Professor Sundiata (1972, 234–​235) gives us an account of colonists (Black and White Fernandinos) who were granted hundreds of hectares to produce cocoa on Fernando Poo. Both the statistics that this professor cites and those given by Castro and Calle (2007, 234) show the volume of cocoa production and explain the need for the massive hiring of laborers (see Table 5.1). With the enormous presence of pidgin-​ speaking laborers from these countries in the Spanish colony, the process of Anglicization was not interrupted between 1817 (Declaration on the trafficking of Blacks) and 1883 (arrival in Fernando Poo of the Claretian missionaries). This immense presence of cocoa plantation laborers, both of pidgin speakers—​more than 20,000 on the entire island, according to Ballano (2014, 289, 311, 318)—​and of Spanish speakers, brought with it linguistic, sociocultural, and religious acculturation: first the Anglicization and later the Hispanization of the native peoples, and in some cases, through education, their creolization (Sundiata 1972, 364). The project of imposition of colonial order and acculturation unleashed other strategies based on the presence of religious missions. In addition to establishing military posts at the entrance to the villages with the aim of “mostrar la autoridad española a los indígenas” [showing Spanish authority to the natives], these were obliged to establish their settlements around the missions built by the Catholic Church (Yturriaga 2018, 77). The Spanish missionaries actively involved in the colonizing project of the Spanish territories in the Gulf of Guinea were first the Jesuits (between 1856 and 1872) and later the Claretians (between 1882 and 1968). Both missionary orders used the same methods of evangelization that were still current in Spain (Canals 1993, 47) and with clear objectives: first, to reduce and eliminate the confessions of Protestant faith that abounded in Spanish colonial territories (the first governor of the colony, Carlos Chacón, decreed in 1858 that Catholicism was the only religion of the Spanish Guinean territories); second, to force conversion to Catholicism through exogenous enculturation. The attack on Protestant confessions of faith culminated in Governor Chacón’s 1858 decree for

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their expulsion (Líniger-​Goumaz 1988, 35; Bolekia 2003, 52; Arnalte 2005, 55). Forcible conversion to Catholicism was carried out through the construction of missionary establishments (churches, housing, etc.), and the creation of day schools and boarding schools run by Catholic missionaries where Spanish was imposed and Catholicism was indoctrinated. The ultimate goal of these schools was the creation of a Creole class of colonial subjects who were both faithful and useful to the Spanish imperial order. Negrín (1993, 55–​56) explains this missionary activity as well as the resistance to it: El primer problema con el que se encontraron los misioneros fue el rechazo mostrado por los nativos de la isla, los bubis, a aceptar las costumbres, ideas y prácticas de los religiosos blancos y de la colonización europea en general. Ante tal situación, los misioneros idearon el recoger niños, en colegios regentados por claretianos, y niñas, en colegios de monjas, para sacarles de las influencias de sus mayores y poder educarles en los principios de la civilización occidental y en un ambiente adecuado. Pero dicha decisión traería [m]‌uchos problemas, porque se hacía por la fuerza y creaba un descontento aún mayor entre los indígenas, que podría hacer peligrar la seguridad de la colonia española.4 The Ghanian novelist, poet and university professor Ama Ata Aidoo, author of Nuestra hermana Aguafiestas o Reflexiones desde una neurosis antioccidental makes reference to this training of young girls by White nuns in the former Guinea, which she had heard about: Érase una vez, hace mucho tiempo, una misionera que llegó a la costa de Guinea. No para encontrar el polvo de oro legendario que hacía brillar la arena de la playa. Quizás no. Sino para ser la directora de un colegio de niñas … Dedicó primero su juventud y después el resto de su vida a educar y a escuadrar a niñas africanas.5 (2018, 104) Indeed, the schools and all the students (the boys with the Claretian missionaries and the girls with the Conceptionist nuns) were key for the transformation of the younger generations. It must be said that these centers were concentrated on the island of Fernando Poo, specifically in towns like Claret de Batete, Bososo, Basilé, and Basakato del Oeste, and on the island of Corisco. The typical stay in these centers varied between three and five years, and the age upon admission between 14 and 15 years old. At the end of this time, the beneficiaries were then considered capable of practicing the precepts of the Catholic religion. To carry out this indoctrination, the Spanish missionaries learned the Bubi language, spoken by the native population with whom they maintained normal relations, and prepared a book of catechisms in that language.The other indigenous languages of the Spanish Guinean territories, such as Bujeba (or Bisió), Combe, and even Fang, received less attention from the missionaries. It should be remembered that, in 1890, the Spanish missionary Juanola published the book Primer paso á la lengua bubi ó sea ensayo á una gramática de este idioma. It is significant that in both this book and that of the Baptist missionary Clarke (1848) loanwords from Pidgin English are included in the Bubi language (see Table 5.2). The Spanish language training of the Black subjects of Spanish Guinea was done with the aim of constructing a new, acculturated identity for them, to stop both the adoption of and the use of terms from Pidgin English. As Mukundi (2010, 185) says in analyzing the essay of the Kenyan novelist and political activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “If language is the frame within which cultural identity is constructed, expressed and retained, efforts by colonialists to replace 68

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Equatorial Guinea Table 5.2  Pidgin English in the Bubi language

Clarke (1848)

Juanola (1890)

pleti (p. 11), from plate. opootu (p. 21), from Portuguese. dibuku (pp. 27–​29), from the book. adibuku (pp. 28, 29), from the book. ingkila (p. 44), from England. dibuka (p. 28) from the book.

amabuku (p. 118), from book. basótcha (pp. 40, 46), from soldier. bateri (pp. 98 y 143), from padre. batuki (p. 106), from Portuguese. bieche (p. 74), from bridge. bientala (p. 32), from one dollar. boleddi (p. 49), from bread. boni (pp. 77, 98), from money. boteddi (pp. 47, 81), from bottle. cha (p. 183), from jug. chabita (p. 117), from carpenter. coru, goro (pp. 74, 110), from Good. cruba (pp. 15, 16, etc.), from Kruman. eilapa/​ilapa (p. 147), from wrap.

Source: Author’s own elaboration based on John Clarke and Joaquín Juanola.

indigenous languages with foreign ones amounted to an attempt at replacing the colonized people’s identities.” Furthermore, the colonizers’ educational model, just as in Peninsular Spain, was not limited to religion, but rather, affected all areas of African collective life. Hence, as Miampika asserts, “La identidad de raíz única justifica la pretensión de civilización, es decir, conquistar para civilizar”6 [An identity from a single source justifies the aspiration to civilization, that is, conquering to civilize] (2005, 62). The missionaries’ efforts to “civilize” also met great resistance among the native populations that refused to be assimilated by the colonizers. Father Aymemí (1942, 191) gathers this rejection in a collection of articles published in the magazine La Guinea Española. He relates that, on March 13, 1889, Father Puente and Brother Puig, both Claretians, met with King Moka (king of the Bubis) to beg him to make schooling mandatory, which the king denied, saying,“nosotros no somos europeos y no la necesitamos” [we aren’t Europeans and we don’t need it] (Aymemí 1942, 191). In the face of this resistance, acculturation was enforced by violent means, such as making it mandatory to send the boys to the boarding schools opened and run by the missionaries, and kidnapping boys and girls to instruct them in the way of the Christian Catholic faith (Bolekia 2008, 28–​30). To this violence perpetrated on the indigenous population to force acculturation must be added the generalized violence imposed by colonization, whose object was submission to the colonial order, such as public whippings or imprisonment of all those aboriginal Blacks who dared to confront their White owners, punitive expeditions to the towns by the colonizers, the rape of Bubi women by foreign cocoa laborers, and even the destruction of towns. The highest Bubi political figure, King Malabo, communicated his resentment of the abuses aimed at the Bubi laborers (Ballano 2014, 193–​194, 206). Another basic strategy of acculturation was anthroponymic assignment through mandatory baptism, even of the dead. In this latter case, when Spanish missionaries arrived in certain hamlets and the people fled from them, the former baptized the tombs to justify their evangelizing work. Some people (the Bubis, the Fangs, the Ndowès) were able to keep their names, while others (the Annoboneses and Fernandinos or Kriós) were baptized and registered with their indigenous names changed. To the first group they assigned last names that generally 69

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derived from Spanish cities (Valencia, Alicante, Zamora, Badajoz, Estrada, Ávila, Gerona, Huesca, etc.), while the latter retained the British names they already had as their last names (Dougan, Williams, Johnson, Davies, Jones, Brown, Kinson, Tray, etc.) or they assigned them Spanish names (for example, Balboa) when they were sent to Spanish Guinea (today Equatorial Guinea).

Third period of identity dislocation in the Spanish Guinean territories (1900 to 1931) In the years 1901–​1931 colonial violence against the native peoples intensified. The increase in agricultural productivity (cocoa) demanded the development of transportation infrastructures (highways, railroads, etc.) that were lacking in the colonized territories, and greater workforce availability. Then all pretense of rapprochement and pacts with indigenous leaders was abandoned, and there began a more aggressive policy against African political and religious powers that, with other priorities, proved to be a hindrance to the plans for colonial economic expansion.The goal was to weaken and dismantle indigenous power to gain total control of the territory and turn its inhabitants into an available labor force. To avoid uprisings promoted by any of the indigenous leaders, a policy was adopted of appointing African chiefs favorably disposed towards colonial power. As Granados explained: Los nombramientos de jefes indígenas, hechos de forma apropiada, son de gran importancia, pues tienden á afianzar los lazos de unión entre el Estado y los indígenas, á consolidar la autoridad del gobernador sobre los pueblos, a preparar la transformación moral y material de estos.7 (1907, 90) This is the case of the first Spanish governor Carlos Chacón’s appointment of Lieutenant Governor Munga in Río Muni (Yturriaga 2018, 62). At the same time, he set in motion the repression of those African chiefs who would not yield to Spanish interests. This was the case with the detention, imprisonment, and death of the Bubi king Ësáasi Eweera, opposed, like many other traditional chiefs, or batúkku (Bönéí Riokaló, Lubá de Ri’aába), and just like his predecessor King Möókáta (Moka), to colonial submission. New punitive expeditions were carried out against both the Bubis and the Fangs (Ballano 2014, 156, 175–​176). In view of the violence and harassments of the colonizers, the indigenous chiefs prohibited their neighbors from associating with the Spaniards. King Ësáasi Eweera, far from maintaining relations with the Spanish, as King Möókáta (Moka) had done, openly proclaimed his anti-​Spanish stance as a defense strategy against intense colonial acculturation. Confident that his warriors could defeat the Spanish in a battle, he did not hesitate to punish all those Bubis who were sympathetic to the colonizers. Some Bubis sought refuge and protection in the missions, and those responsible for these places, on seeing themselves threatened by King Ësáasi Eweera’s armies, begged the protection of the governors of the time: don José G. de la Serna (21 April 1903 to 16 April 1904) and don Juan Montero (14 April 1904 to 17 August 1904) (Bolekia 2003, 80–​81, 111). The king and his armies were defeated by the colonial troops. While this was going on with the indigenous leaders, the strategy of control and indoctrination of the population intensified, with efforts focused around the Catholic missions, as had been done in the previous period: “Varios Gobernadores y los PP. Misioneros han trabajado sin descanso por conseguir que se agruparan en poblados [los indígenas] en lugar de vivir diseminados en el bosque”8 (Bonelli 1934, 18).The missionaries publicized the statistics of their colonizing work to ensure the state funds that supported them: 70

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[Bishop Armengol Coll] Confirms that between July 1903 and July 1904 there have been performed:  824 baptisms, 254 confirmations, and 57 church weddings. Currently there are 224 catechumens, 533 students in the missionary boarding schools and 187 students in day schools. The boarding school and regular students that the Conceptionist nuns educate total 357. In all, that is 5,347 Catholics. There is no doubt: this African Church is vigorously growing. (Canals 1993, 332) With such statistics, it was clear that the Claretian missionaries’ colonizing work was bearing fruit. The legal justification for this violence against the indigenous peoples practiced by different colonial agents (missionaries, plantation owners, the military, etc.) is found, on one hand, in the Decree Law of 11 July 1904 that foresaw the creation of a Board of Trustees for Natives, and on the other, in the Royal Order of 17 July 1928 regarding the constitution of that Board. Among the basic objectives found in the articles of these regulations we find: to promote the culture, moral training and well-​being of the natives and their allegiance to Spain, to legally protect the unemancipated natives, to exercise guardianship over them to make up for their legal incapacity, to accord the timely emancipation of those natives able to rule themselves, to intervene in labor regulations, to counsel the Governor regarding anything to do with the natives. (Yturriaga 2018, 96–​97) Hence, the economic and political dispossession of the African peoples and their identitary dislocation was centered around the forcible imposition of three fundamental spaces that had the missions as their central axis:  school, church, and work. Through these, the “civilizing” mission was carried out that caused the sociocultural and psychological deterritorialization of the peoples of Spain’s colonial territories.

Conclusion Between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the identities of the space we now call Equatorial Guinea were subjected to ruthless policies of cultural transformation. The acculturation that was imposed from schools, the Church, boarding schools, and work (cocoa plantations, highway building, etc.) affected the basic structures of the autochthonous African peoples of the former Spanish Guinean territories. We are referring here to indigenous languages, their traditional customs and beliefs, their ways of understanding and being in the world (their symbolic and spiritual world), their material culture (celebrations, foods, dress, buildings, etc.), and their social organization. All these aggressions and/​or transformations had a great impact on Fernando Poo (the present-​day island of Bioko), although their impact was much greater on the people of Río Muni, brought to Fernando Poo as laborers to work the cocoa fields. This involved the separation of families and the desertion of their respective villages. The space of Fernando Poo was inundated demographically with foreign laborers whose participation in the dislocation of the cultural identities of the Equatoguineans was indirectly provoked by colonial power, outside the functioning of the organizational structures of their colonized populations. All of this transformation at the hands of the various agents of the colonial state and the missionaries through acculturation (Catholic Christianization) and westernization, and through the destruction of the Africans’ ethnocultural fabric, involved their psychological defeat in general (Mana 1993). The suffering caused by the violent political and cultural imposition of the 71

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colonizers or exogenous acculturators in this sociocultural clash created what Eibl-​Eibesfeldt calls “cultural dependence” (1993, 168), which came to affect (and still affects) the Africans’ spheres of life, such as the religious, the linguistic-​communicative, the organizational, and the political. This usurpation of formative responsibility by the Spanish has caused the younger generations to embrace the dominant culture imposed by education and indoctrination. The indigenous African peoples, marginalized from their particular African cultural identities, had to honor their new identity, formed in the Spanish language and the Catholic religion, as well as synthesize the adoption or incorporation of lexical terms, the religious coexistence between Catholicism and traditional beliefs, between church marriage and cohabitation. As Deleuze and Guatari indicated, Toda la estupidez y arbitrariedad de las leyes, todo el dolor de las iniciaciones, todo el aparato perverso de la education y la represión, los hierros al rojo y los procedimientos atroces no tienen más que un sentido:  enderezar al hombre, marcarlo en su carne, volverlo capaz de alianza.9 (1973, 197) Hence, the autochthonous identities (those that remain) are doubly threatened by the imposition of an identity from a single source (the homogenization of globalization or Europeanization and Christianization) by both the former metropolises (Spain, France, United States, Great Britain, Portugal) and the complicity of the African elites with the colonial order. We have produced, then, a “suspens d’identité” [suspension of identity] (Lavou 2013, 15) that does not allow for the conception of identities from the Hispanic-​African space without the foreign element, whether that be Hispanic (the Spanish language) or British (Pidgin English). Africans, wherever they might be from, suffer different categories of deficits (religious, linguistic, cultural, political, organizational, moral) that prevent them from defining themselves within the set of peoples who have taken the road to globalization. Some words from Ama Ata Aidoo express the decommunitarization or cultural deterritorialization of the present-​day Equatoguinean community, obliged to live according to cultural models foreign to their respective realities and from the allochthonousness lived in their own ethnocultural spaces, or from the weak or false recognition of post-​colonial diversity: Nos hemos convertido en maestros en pescar nuestra propia muerte, no importa en qué envoltorio venga embalada. Justo como nuestros grandes profesores. Que siendo conscientes del trabajo agotador que es desaprender lo que los amos nos enseñaron, y de que aprender algo nuevo es todavía más difícil, se pasan las horas entre cervezas bien frías, aconsejándonos que ‘no atrasemos en reloj ni intentemos cambiar la historia’ … Dicen que, después de todo, la literatura, el arte, la cultura, toda la información es universal. Así que debemos apresurarnos a perder nuestra identidad para unirnos a la gran familia del hombre.10 (Aidoo 2018, 176)

Notes 1 In Spanish this latter term may appear as “ecuatoguineano” or “guineoecuatoriano.” 2 “Doctrine and method that the colonizer should follow for civilizing the colonized, understanding by ‘civilizing’ the elevation of the cultural, social and moral level of those being civilized.” Concepto del indígena en nuestra colonización de Guinea. Conference talk delivered 17 November 1946 at the Institute of International and Colonial Political Studies of Madrid.

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Equatorial Guinea 3 “Paternalism is a form of authoritarianism. It involves a negation of the capacity of the other, the culture of the other, the values of the other.” 4 “The first problem the missionaries encountered was the rejection by the island natives, the Bubis, of the customs, ideas and practices of the White clergy and of European colonization in general. Faced with this situation, the missionaries conceived the idea of gathering young boys in schools run by Claretians, and young girls in schools run by nuns, to remove them from the influence of their elders and be able to educate them in the principles of Western civilization in an appropriate environment. But this decision would bring many problems, because it was carried out forcibly and created an even stronger dissatisfaction among the natives, which could endanger the safety of the Spanish colony.” 5 “Once upon a time, a long time ago, a missionary nun arrived on the shores of Guinea. Not to find the legendary gold dust that caused the sand on the beach to glitter. Perhaps not. But to be the principal of a school for girls … She dedicated first her youth and then the rest of her life to educating and indoctrinating African girls.” 6 And one of the ways of halting or retarding this cultural conquest is found in these words that we have taken from the novel A Man of the People, by Chinua Achebe (1966, 38): Apparently the Minister insisted that his children must be taken home to their village at least once a year. ‘Very wise,’ I said. ‘Without it,’ said Mrs. Nanga, ‘they would become English people. Don’t you see they hardly speak our language? Ask them something in it and they reply in English. The little one, Micah, called my mother “a dirty, bush woman”.’ 7 “The appointment of indigenous chiefs, done appropriately, is of great importance, since they tend to strengthen the ties between the State and the natives, consolidate the authority of the governor over the people, [and] prepare their moral and physical transformation.” 8 “Several Governors and the Missionary Fathers have worked unceasingly to get [the natives] to live in towns rather than living spread out through the forest.” 9 “All the stupidity and arbitrariness of the laws, all the pain of the initiations, all the perverse apparatus of education and repression, the red-​hot irons and the atrocious proceedings have but a single meaning: to stabilize man, to imprint it on his flesh, to make him capable of alliances.” 10 “We have become masters of looking for our own death, no matter what package it comes wrapped up in. Just like our great teachers, who, aware of how exhausting it is to unlearn what our masters taught us, and that learning something new is even harder, pass the time with ice-​cold beers, counseling us ‘don’t push back the clock or try to change history’ … They say that, after all, literature, art, culture, all information is universal. So we should hurry up and lose our identity to join the great family of man.”

Works cited Aidoo, Ama Ata. 2018. Nuestra Hermana Aguafiestas o Reflexiones desde una Neurosis Antioccidental. Translated by Marta Sofía López. Oviedo: Cambalache. Arnalte, Arturo. 2005. Richard Burton, cónsul en Guinea española. Una visión europea de África en los albores de la colonization. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata. Aymemí, Antonio. 1942. Los bubis en Fernando Poo. Colection de los artículos publicados en la revista colonial La Guinea Española. Madrid: Imprenta de Galo Sáez. Ballano Gonzalo, Fernando. 2014. Aquel negrito del África tropical. El colonialismo español en Guinea (1778–​1968). Madrid: Sial Ediciones. Bolekia Boleka, Justo. 2001. Lenguas y poder en África. Madrid: Editorial Mundo Negro. —​—​—​. 2003. Aproximation a la historia de Equatorial Guinea. Salamanca: Amarú Ediciones. —​—​—​. 2008. La Francofonía. El nuevo rostro del colonialismo en África. Salamanca: Amarú Ediciones. Bonelli Rubio, Juan María. 1934. Un año viviendo entre los bubis. Madrid: Publicaciones de la Sociedad Geográfica Nacional. —​—​—​. 1946. “Concepto del indígena en nuestra colonización de Guinea.” Conference talk delivered 17 November 1946 at the Instituto de Estudios Africanos de la Dirección General de Marruecos y Colonias. Madrid. www.asodegue.org/​hcdf1d.461217.htm (accessed December 2018). Canals, Eugen. 1993. El “Padre Grande” de Guinea. Barcelona: Editorial Claret.

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Justo Bolekia Boleká Castro Antolín, Mariano Luis. 1999. Conde de Argelejo. Noticias, documentos y avisos. Expedition de 1778. Vic (Barcelona): Ceiba Ediciones. Castro Antolín, Mariano Luis, and María Luisa de la Calle. 1992. La colonization española en Equatorial Guinea (1777–​1860).Valladolid: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valladolid. —​—​—​. 2007. La colonization española en Equatorial Guinea (1858–​1900).Vic (Barcelona): Ceiba Ediciones. Clarke, John. [1848] 1971. Introduction to the FernandianTongue. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries  Press. Creus, Jacint. 1994. “Guinea Equatorial, 1883–​1911:  La invenció d’una identitat.” Recerques:  Historia, Economía, Cultura 30: 103–​119. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1973. El antiedipo. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia. Barcelona: Barral Editores. Eibl-​Eibesfeldt, Irenäus. 1993. Biología del Comportamiento Humano. Manual de Etología Humana. Translated by Francisco Giner Abati y Luis Cencillo. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Granados, Gregorio. 1907. España en el Muni. Estudios y observaciones hechos en el País. Madrid: Imprenta del Ministerio de Marina. Juanola, Joaquín. 1890. Primer paso a la lengua bubi ó sea gramática de este idioma, Madrid: Imprenta de A. Pérez Dubrull. Lavou Zoungbo,Victorien. 2013. Les blancs de l’histoire.Afrodescendance: parcours de représentation et constructions hégémoniques. Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan. Liniger-​Goumaz, Max. 1988. Brève histoire de la Guinée Équatoriale. Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan. Mana, Kä. 1993. L’Afrique va-​t-​elle mourir? Essai d’éthique politique. Paris: Karthala. Martín del Molino, A. 1993. La ciudad de Clarence. Malabo: Centro Cultural Hispano-​Guineano. Miampika, Landry-​Wilfrid. 2005. Transculturation y poscolonialismo en el Caribe.Versiones y subversiones de Alejo Carpentier. Madrid: Editorial Verbum. Mukundi, Paul M. 2010. “Reappropriation of the colonial language and reconstruction of postcolonial African identity.” In Discursos poscoloniales y renegociaciones de las identidades negras, edited by Clément Animan Akassi and Victorien Lavou Zoungbo, 185–​ 200. Perpignan (France):  Crilaup/​ Presses Universitaires de Perpignan. Negrín Fajardo, Olegario. 1993. Historia de la education en Equatorial Guinea. El modelo educativo colonial español. Madrid: UNED. Rope Bomabá, Jerónimo. n.d. Álbum poético. Malabo: Centro Cultural Hispano-​Guineano. Sundiata, Ibrahim. 1972. “The Fernandinos:  Labor and Community in Santa Isabel de Fernando Poo, 1827–​1931”. PhD diss., Northwestern University. Yturriaga Barberán, José Antonio. 2018. Equatorial Guinea:  cincuenta años de independencia. Madrid:  Sial Ediciones.

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6 GLOBAL HISPANOPHONE CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN THE NINETEENTH-​ CENTURY MAGHREB AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE Adolfo Campoy-​Cubillo Global Hispanophone cultural production designates the oral and written literature in any of the languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula of communities living in regions other than Spain and Latin America. This eclectic corpus includes works published in Algeria, Morocco, the Philippines, and Equatorial Guinea among other areas. This designation is not contemporaneous with the works it identifies; it has only recently come into place as a result of institutional efforts to structure the Global Hispanophone as a field of study. The term can be misleading as to the linguistic diversity of the works it designates; far from being a collection of texts written in Castilian, it reflects the cultural diversity of the Iberian Peninsula as well as considering their interaction with the different languages spoken throughout these regions, often complicating the already complex diglossic context in which they were produced. This chapter focuses on Global Hispanophone cultural production in the nineteenth-​ century Maghreb and, to a lesser extent, the Ottoman Empire. It pays special attention to the different communities that coexisted throughout the region and considers the circumstances that informed their cultural production. From the oral tales of Sephardic and Morisco communities collected and analyzed by Menéndez Pidal and Angel Pulido, to the newspapers that sought to organize the Spanish migrant workers in Algeria, to the grammar manuals written by Franciscan missionaries in an effort to outline the intricacies of Maghrebi Arabic and Amazigh, or the travelogues of the explorers who sought to map the territory, this diverse Global Hispanophone corpus reveals itself as a space that gathers both the cultural expression of those that settled in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire as well as the articulation and subversion of orientalist literary tropes.

Sephardic communities I will begin with an overview of the Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Marginated and isolated from one another for centuries, these communities continued to communicate up until the end of the nineteenth century in Ladino, a combination of medieval Spanish and Hebrew that was enriched by Arabic, Turkish, and Aramaic, the languages of the 75

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countries where they settled after leaving the Iberian Peninsula, as well as neologisms from Italian and French (Wexler 2006; Borovaya 2012). Medieval Spanish also incorporates numerous elements from other medieval peninsular languages like Aragonese, Astur-​Leonese, Catalan, Galician-​Portuguese, and Mozarabic. Political instability and the colonization by European nations of the region contributed to the decadence of Ladino as a vehicular language in North Africa from 1850 on. The creation in 1860 of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a French organization that promoted solidarity among the different Jewish communities, was, paradoxically, an important factor in the decline of Ladino language and culture. Its founder, French Minister of Justice Adolphe Cremieux, saw the role of the Alliance as akin to the mission civilisatrice that French colonial authorities invoked to justify their occupation of different countries throughout North Africa. The schools created by the Alliance promoted French over Ladino as the vehicular language of these communities and embraced secular culture over Sephardic religious identity. As a result, usage of Ladino began to decline and Ladino cultural production throughout North Africa was practically non-​existent. In the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, Ladino literature experienced a renaissance of sorts in the eighteenth century that, compounded by the process of secularization and modernization that these communities underwent during the following century, would culminate in a renewed sense of Sephardic national identity by the beginning of the twentieth century. The origins of this Sephardic renaissance have been traced back to the publication of Jacob Culi’s Me’am Lo’ez, a rabbinical commentary written in Ladino instead of the traditional Hebrew, published in Turkey in 1730. Culi’s biblical encyclopedia aimed to make rabbinical commentary available to the large number of Sephardim that did not read Hebrew. In choosing to publish his work in Ladino and thus parting with Hebrew-​based rabbinical authority, however, Culi contributed to the gradual process of secularization that characterized the nineteenth century. Like in the case of the Sephardic communities in North Africa, the process of secularization was accelerated by the work of the Alliance Israelite Universelle. In the Ottoman Empire, however, the social coherence and increased cultural awareness that the Alliance promoted contributed to the resurgence and modernization of Ladino literature. Abrevaya Stein indicates that, although the Alliance Israelite Universelle looked down on the use of Ladino, a language that they associated with Sephardic conservatism, and promoted French as the main vehicular language, it “enabled Sephardi intellectuals to produce new forms of Jewish cultural expression, among them numerous genres of Ladino in print” (2002, 226). Olga Borovaya explains that one of the requirements of conforming to modernity was the articulation of the equivalent of Sephardic belles lettres departing from the traditional biblical commentary (2012, 139–​165). A  large part of this new literature that was published in the Sephardic press in serialized form was not original but rather adapted translations of Western popular titles into Ladino.The Ladino adaptations published in the press often failed to mention the name of the rewriter or the name of the original author in an effort to articulate a modern Sephardic literary tradition by blurring the lines between the Western cultural model they imitated and their own (Borovaya 2003, 38–​39).Titles like La dama a las kamelias, Los dos viazhes de Guliver, or Manon Lesko contributed to the sentimental education of their readers thus becoming a subtle but extremely effective agent of secular modernization. The abundance of French and British titles in this serialized literature speaks of the wide scope of cultural influences that informed Sephardic modernization. Not surprisingly, as Spanish academics like Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo began to study these communities towards the end of the nineteenth century in an effort to articulate a Spanish literary history, they chose to focus on collecting medieval romances rather than considering contemporary Sephardic cultural 76

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production. An analysis of the popular literature of the Ladino feuilleton would have indicated that the ethnic and national identity of these communities was as fluid at the end of the nineteenth century as it was before 1492. The vindication of the Spanishness, avant la lettre, of the Sephardim characterized most of the academic and political discourse in the peninsula on the topic.This philosemitic narrative was initially tied to the criticism of the intransigent role played by the Catholic Church in Spain. Emilio Castelar, deputy of the Spanish parliament and later president of the First Spanish Republic, famously said in a speech delivered on April 12, 1869, after condemning the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and pointing out the names of several illustrious European Sephardim: “¿Y qué eran esos judíos? Judíos españoles” [And what were those Jews? Spanish Jews.] (42). Anticlericalist philosemitism, however, quickly morphed into a proto-​imperialist vindication of the Spanishness of the Sephardic communities as members of the emotional community that Ramiro de Maeztu would later designate as Hispanidad. The teleological appropriation of Sephardic cultural production to substantiate a narrative of Spanish national identity and justify the country’s colonial expansion became a commonplace in the repertoire of Africanista politicians and publicists.The Revista de Geografía Colonial (1885–​96), the bi-​weekly journal of the Sociedad Española de Geografía (previously known as the Sociedad de Africanistas y Colonialistas) showcased numerous articles by Spanish politician Joaquín Costa and other collaborators presenting the Sephardic communities as potential commercial agents for Spain. Shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century, Spanish senator Angel Pulido published his book Los israelitas españoles y el idioma castellano (1904) and a series of articles in the Spanish weekly La Ilustración Española y Americana extolling the historical and emotional ties between Spain and their “españoles sin patria” [Spaniards without a homeland], as he referred to the Sephardim. For Pulido, re-​establishing contact with the Sephardim amounted to a double regeneration by promoting Castilian among the Sephardic elites and opening new markets to the Spanish merchants (Díaz-​Más 2015, 184). Pulido surveyed the different Sephardic communities to confirm the prevalence of Judeo-​Español and identify the nations that were already exercising their cultural influence over them. The results of these surveys were published in Los españoles sin patria y la raza sefardí (1905). He sent his articles to Sephardic journalists and writers throughout the Ottoman Empire and North Africa encouraging them to publish the articles in their local Ladino newspapers. He also approached the Spanish government to ask them to promote the teaching of Castilian among the Sephardim to counter the effect of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and persuaded the Spanish Real Academia de la Lengua to name several Sephardim as correspondents to inform about the proximity between Ladino and Castilian. In 1910, Spanish King Alfonso XIII sponsored the creation of the Unión Hispano-​Hebrea, an institution that aimed to promote cultural links between Sephardim communities and Spain. The Junta de Enseñanza de Marruecos was created by the Spanish Ministry of Education in 1913 and was tasked with inspecting the existing educational system and making suggestions to improve it, but by 1925 the Junta was hardly active. Several schools were built throughout Morocco but the steps taken in the Ottoman Empire were much more modest (Delgado Gómez-​Escalonilla 1992, 20–​26). Coinciding with the campaign of commercial fraternity launched by Costa and continued by Pulido, several Ladino plays were published in Salonica, Romania, and other Sephardic enclaves that reminded their audiences of the atrocities committed by the Spanish Inquisition against the marranos or crypto-​jews that remained in the peninsula (Romero 1979, 581–​583). Unlike Spanish philosemitism that presented Ladino as evidence of the cultural bond with the peninsula, these plays invoked the memory of the expulsion from the peninsula as a way to isolate the Sephardic communities from Spanish influence. 77

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Late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century philosemitism in Spain is clearly informed by an imperialist drive to expand the country’s area of influence in the Maghreb and Eastern Europe. Paradoxically, other Hispanophone communities, like the large numbers of Valencian and Balearic migrants that traveled to Algeria during this time did not elicit the same interest from the Spanish authorities.These communities, as I explain in the next section of this chapter, developed their own strategies to integrate themselves into Algerian society, negotiating a complex rearticulation of their ethnic identity.

Spanish migration to Algeria Algeria, particularly the region surrounding Oran, became the main destination of Spanish immigrants from the late 1830s until the 1940s. The bulk of the immigrants came originally from Mallorca, but peasants from Alicante, Murcia, and Valencia joined them in the following decades.The Oranesado, as this region is known, had been under Spanish control until 1792, but it was really the colonization of Algeria by the French and the opportunities of employment and prosperity for a largely underemployed Spanish population that attracted these immigrants to the area. Since the beginning of the occupation of Algeria, France encountered numerous difficulties in attracting and retaining colonists to Algeria. French colonial authorities had hoped to attract northern European workers, but most of them abandoned the country, unable to endure the climate and the harsh conditions in which they were expected to work. Unlike other migrants, Spanish workers proved to be resilient and quickly became with the French the main European community in Algeria. From 1840 on, the Spanish population in Oran surpassed the French, at times doubling it. The myth of the resilience of the Spanish workers, greatly appreciated by the French colonial authorities as cheap labor, was later rearticulated by Africanista ideologues to defend Spain’s suitability as a potential colonizer of North Africa. If the Spanish workers had been praised for their stoicism and productivity, the ideologues of Spanish imperialist regeneration like Joaquin Costa, Angel Ganivet, and others touted the cultural affinity of Spain and North Africa as a clear sign of its suitability to undertake the colonization of the region. Historian Gustau Nerín Abad has coined the term Hispanotropicalism to designate the idea that cultural affinity between Spaniards and Maghrebians makes the former particularly effective as colonizers of North Africa (1997, 11–​14). Algeria was also one of the preferred destinations of Spanish political expats. Liberals were the first in this group to arrive to Oran, but Carlists represented the bulk of this type of migration all the way to the 1870s. Jean Jacques Jordi distinguishes two waves of Carlist migrations to Oran: one shortly after Fernando VII’s death in 1833, and the second one after the Carlist War of 1873 (119–​129). Finally, Republican political exiles began to arrive in the second half of the nineteenth century, escaping political repression in the peninsula after the Cantonal Rebellion of 1873. Spanish cultural production in Algeria appeared mainly in the form of periodical publications by means of which the political exiles tried to organize the Spanish peasants to favor their cause. The first to appear was El Correo de Orán (1880–​1925), heavily subsidized by the Spanish consulate and closely aligned with the Spanish monarchy.1 After France’s law of freedom of the press of July 29, 1881 was passed, the number of Spanish newspapers in Algeria began to increase rapidly, reaching a total of twenty-​nine different publications between 1880 and 1931. The majority of the information press (newspapers that covered the news), La Voz de España (1903–​10), El Eco Español (1910–​15, 1926), and even El Correo de Orán, labeled themselves as independent, although their political loyalties could change from time to time. The political press (newspapers that openly took sides with a political party) like El Dimoni Coixo (1883), La Fraternidad Obrera (1883–​8), or La Democracia Española (1885) were partial to the Republicans. 78

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The same could be said of the satirical newspapers like El Patuet (1882–​3), El Mosquito (1887), and La Araña (1887) (Vilar 1980, 59–​64). Another factor that contributed to the sudden proliferation of Spanish newspapers was the reiterated efforts of the French colonial administration to counter the political influence of the growing Spanish population. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, France put in place a series of laws that aimed to expedite the assimilation of the different immigrant populations in the country and its colonies. French legislators, well aware that foreigners were not seeking naturalization, instituted a series of laws (1851, 1865, 1874) that began to chip away at the requirement for individual consent to grant naturalization. This process culminated with the naturalization law of 1889 that automatically naturalized the children of immigrants born in the French territory and complicated the rejection of automatic naturalization in other cases (McGovney 1911, 334–​337).The new citizenship status of Spanish immigrants, however, did not soften the strong xenophobic prejudices that French colonial society harbored towards them. Faced on the one hand with these aggressive assimilation policies and, on the other, with the indifference of the Spanish administration that had little concern for its subjects once they left the peninsula, Spanish immigrants welcomed in many cases their forceful naturalization while they remained attached to the social networks in which they had found support. The result was an ambivalent embrace of French culture combined with a rearticulation of their own cultural identity as Spaniards. The double segregation that the Spanish immigrants suffered at the hands of the French colonial authorities and Spanish government representatives led them to present themselves in a way that highlighted their subaltern position within both cultural fields. Rather than clinging to an idealized Spanish identity as a reaction to French xenophobia, they embraced their marginal status in both France and Spain, often emphasizing their Catalan heritage over the Spanish one as in the case of Francisco Zavala’s writings that I will analyze next. Some of the best examples of this fluid cultural identity of the Spanish community in Algeria are the articles published in El Patuet, a weekly newspaper founded by Francisco Zavala, one of the most active cultural agents in the Algerian Spanish community. Zavala, a Republican political exile, had originally named his newspaper Le Journal de Cagayoux (spelled with an “x” in Zavala’s publication). The term Cagayous designates a stereotypical pied-​noir (individuals of European descent living in Algeria during the period of French rule) from the working-​class neighborhoods of Bab-​el-​Oued and Bab-​Azoun in Alger.They were stereotyped as rough thugs that spoke in patois Algerian French or Patauète, a dialectal variation of French with loans from Spanish, Catalan, Italian as well as words and expressions in Arabic (Lanly 1962, Bacri 1983). The character of the Cagayous was popularized by Auguste Maurice Victor Robinet in a series of satirical comic strips published in the journal Le Turco in the mid-​1890s. He went on to publish a series of comic books with Cagayous as the main character and titles like Les amours de Cagayous (1896), Le marriage de Cagayous (1905), Cagayous philosophe (1906) (Prochaska 1996). Zavala’s early adoption of the term as the title of his first publication suggests an attempt to capitalize on the comedic potential of the stereotypical image of the immigrant, but his decision to change its title to El Patuet indicates a vindication of this pejorative term as a source of ethnic and political identity. Zavala explicitly presents the mission of the newspaper as such in the opening page of the issue published on September 9, 1883: Pues bien, al tomar nosotros este título para nuestro periódico, fue en primer lugar caracterizar, en lo posible, la esencia de nuestros escritos con las aspiraciones de nuestra publicación, y al propio tiempo hacer, de una palabra que se nos prodiga en tono de desprecio, un nombre respetado.2 (Zavala 1883a, 2) 79

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The vindication of the hybrid culture of the Spanish pied-​noirs carried out in El Patuet3 is especially interesting in that it prompts a reflection on the equally multicultural culture of the Iberian Peninsula where the power relations between the different languages was often reminiscent of those in Algeria. The immigrants from the Spanish Levant that arrived in Algeria were mostly speakers of the Balearic and Valencian variants of Catalan that came from areas of Spain characterized by the diglossic relation of dominance of Castilian over Catalan. Most of them grew up speaking Catalan in communities where the authorities always expressed themselves in Castilian. Jaume Fuster has argued that, as a result of this marginalization from institutions of power, Valencian identity always suffered from a chronic “national instability,” even among the middle classes: Es tracta d’una sensació d’inestabilitat “nacional,” que no és fàcil de guarir. El provincià és “provincià” excèntric.Vaga pels afores de l’Estat i pels afores de la mitologia estatal. Ha intentat d’assimilar-​s’hi, i ho ha aconseguit en part. Però els fets de cada dia li demostren que l’altra part d’ell segueix inassimilada : inassimilable.4 (2010, 102) The Valencian Renaixença, a predominantly urban resurgence of Catalan in Valencia that roughly coincided with the increased migration from this region to Algeria, barely reached the communities where these immigrants hailed from. For most of these immigrants, illiterate speakers of Catalan, the mix of Castilian and Catalan in which they communicated with the political and economic authorities in Spain felt quite similar to the patois French that they learnt to use after arriving to Algeria, a similarity that Zavala emphasizes by equating the term Patuet used in colonial Algeria to their own situation in Spain: El pseudónimo de Patuet se apropia á los hijos de un país en donde el idioma nacional, se habla sin perfección ó con dialecto; ejemplo: Valencianos, patuets; Catalanes, patuets; Alicantinos, patuets; y así todas las provincias en donde el Castellano no se habla en generalidad.5 (1883a, 2) Zavala’s call to the Spanish pied-​noirs to take pride in their identity is far from advocating for a pan-​Catalan identity as Fuster did. He, instead, admonishes immigrants to vindicate their hybridity as their source of strength, although he continues to reify the marginalization that he intends to subvert by referring to Catalan with the pejorative “dialect.” Many of the texts published in El Patuet reveal an interesting contrast between Castilian as the official language, and Catalan as the language in which the hard and disappointing experience of the Spanish pied-​noirs in Algeria is expressed. This can be appreciated in a sarcastic ode to Algiers titled “A Argel” written by Francisco Zavala and published in the same issue, where the odd verses are written in Castilian and the even verses in Catalan. I quote the final lines of the poem here: Gracias mil, debes á Francia, Que de tavernes y bodegons t’atesta, Y de industriales que en busca de ganancia Als quinse dies.... Fallita llesta,6 Burros de faena España te regala, Prestamistas, la hebrea grey funesta, Y periodistes d’á sou y consellers sense bengala. 80

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Argel! Cuál Jeremías tus ruinas llora, T’as arremangát? Aguanta la surra, Y tú sangre ardiente, tú altivez mora, Donalila á D. Carlos pá Monte-​Jurra.7 Yo, del fondo del lecho en que gimo, Plé de cantárides y picaes de morfina Te ódio, aunque no te maldigo, Al vore, que al que no té un sou Ningú s’arrima. (Zavala 1883b, 3)8 The gratitude that Algiers supposedly owes to France for its civilizing role as the first line implies is downplayed in the second line that tells us that colonization has filled the city with bars. The ironic message that the constant code switching reinforces is also evident when Zavala chooses to use Castilian to refer to the Patuets as “burros de faena,” thus presenting the negative attitude by which Spain ignores its immigrants once they are overseas. Finally, the closing lines reveal the ambivalence that the Spanish immigrants feel towards Algiers, a city they hate without cursing it, abandoned, as they are, both by the French and the Spanish administrations. The alternating languages in Zavala’s poem seem to echo the kharjas that have traditionally been taken as one of the earliest examples of Spanish literature. Like the medieval kharjas written in Romance that closed muwashshahat poems in Arabic, one cannot read either the verses in Castilian or the ones in Catalan in isolation. Rosa María Menocal’s comments regarding the impossibility of extricating a Spanish essential identity by separating the kharja from the muwashshahat, as Hispanists have traditionally done, are also pertinent in the case of Zavala’s poem. Allow me to quote Menocal directly for the purpose of explaining Patuet cultural production: “[t]‌his is the poetry of a society full of dialectically opposed cultural alternatives” (1985, 100). Zavala’s poem, triangulating between Castilian, Catalan, and the Arabic context in which it is produced, is remarkable for its ability to evoke a similarly fluid cultural identity.

Grammars of Maghrebi/​Standard Arabic and Riffian Just like the hybridity of Algerian society led the Spanish community in Algeria to vindicate their own multicultural identity, Hispanophone cultural production in Morocco reveals a similar interest in further exploring the parallelisms between Moroccan and Spanish multilingual societies. The diglossic nature of Arabic communities throughout North Africa that communicate in both Fus’ha (the standardized variety of Arabic) and the local varieties of the language spoken in each area prompted discussions about what language should be taught to Spanish soldiers, merchants, and diplomats. The debate about the need to study standardized Arabic over the local dialects reveals a deep-​seated bias on the part of academic Arabists in the peninsula in favor of the standardized Arabic, that would only gradually begin to change as it was contested from the Maghreb. Spanish religious missionaries had traditionally worked on developing Arabic grammars and dictionaries with special relevance for the Franciscans since the Pope entrusted them in 1432 with the custody of the Holy Places. One of the earliest Arabic grammars produced was El Arte para ligéramente saber la lengua aráviga (1505) by the Jeronimo friar Pedro de Alcalá. The book included a grammar of classical Arabic, a Catholic catechism, and a dictionary. The first attempt at developing a grammar of Maghrebian Arabic was undertaken at the end of the eighteenth century by Francisco Cañes, a Franciscan missionary based in Damascus. His manual, published in 1775, includes a “gramática vulgar y literal” [a Maghrebian 81

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and Classical Arabic grammar] because “no bastaría el árabe literal sin el socorro de el vulgar” [Classical Arabic would be worthless without the support of dialectal Arabic] (8). The invasion of Spain by Napoleon and the political unrest in the peninsula slowed down the momentum of this initial interest in the study of Arabic variants until the mid-​nineteenth century when Spain’s expansionist efforts in Morocco prompted new efforts to study the Maghrebian variant of Arabic. The retired Lieutenant Colonel Juan Albino published in 1859 his personal notes. Albino’s work presented numerous transcription and phonetic errors that according to Moscoso García may have been the result of Albino’s poor preparation, compounded by the printer’s ignorance of Arabic (2010, 126–​129). In any case, Albino’s manual is further evidence that missionary and military interests in North Africa contributed to counter the traditional bias against the local variants of Arabic. By 1872, when the Franciscan José Lerchundi published his Rudimentos del árabe vulgar, he felt the need to respond to Spanish academics that had traditionally been critical of the study of Moroccan Arabic. In his introduction to the Rudimentos, Lerchundi tells the “enemig[o]‌s de cuanto se refiere al árabe vulgar”: 1. Un literato, europeo o indígena, que hable el árabe literal observando todas las reglas de su gramática, no se hará entender del vulgo de Marruecos, y sólo le comprenderán los llamados en el país Tolbes o Alfaquíes (sabios), cuyo número es muy reducido. 2. Los indígenas letrados, cuando hablan entre sí, jamás se sirven del árabe literal, cuyas reglas observan sólo en la escritura. 3. En la conversación vulgar, los indígenas, así alfaquíes como los que no lo son, emplean las mismas palabras y las pronuncian de la misma manera, aunque no sean en rigor arábigas, ni la pronunciación de las letras sea la que les corresponde. Únicamente en el estilo podrá haber alguna diferencia. 4. El que posea bien el árabe vulgar, no sólo comprenderá a todos, sino que se hará comprender indistintamente de todos los indígenas; cuando el que sólo posea el árabe literal no podrá hacerse entender más que de los sabios, como queda dicho.9 (VII) As Barbara Herrero indicates, Lerchundi’s manual was one of the first to recognize the value of Moroccan Arabic as a language variation of standardized Arabic (1996, 144). Lerchundi’s work went against the general opinion held at the time that standardized Arabic could facilitate communication with any Arabic speaker. Eduardo Saavedra, president of the Sociedad Geográfica, adviser to the Asociación Española para la Exploración de África and founding member of the Sociedad de Africanistas and Colonistas advocated for the study of Arabic in the speech he gave on the occasion of the foundation of the Sociedad, but insisted on combating the “idea de que el árabe literario es diferente del hablado por el vulgo, lo cual no es cierto” [idea that literary Arabic is different than the Arabic spoken by the masses, which is not true] (qtd. in López García 2008, 141). Saavedra’s opposition to what he called the “mania antiliteraria” that had driven the interest in Moroccan Arabic was informed by the reiterated refusal of Spanish academics like Francisco Codera, chair of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic at the University of Granada and one of the founding figures of Spanish Arabism, to grant Moroccan Arabic any recognition. In an article published in 1899 in the Revista Contemporánea, Codera expressed the widely held view in academic circles that “el árabe vulgar es el mismo árabe clásico ó literal, más o menos corrompido por el pueblo” [colloquial Arabic is the same as classical or literary Arabic, more or less corrupted by the people] (qtd. in López García 2008, 149).10 Despite the general misunderstanding of Arabic diglossia of the time, the Rudimentos went through seven editions between its initial publication in 1872 and 1945, four of which were published before the Protectorate of Morocco was instituted in 1912. Lerchundi’s grammatical manual and the need 82

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to train military officers, merchants, and diplomats in Moroccan Arabic to facilitate Spanish colonial expansion helped change the attitude towards what had been known as árabe vulgar among those that established themselves in Morocco. Attitudes towards linguistic variation in Spain, however, would take much longer to change. As late as 1907, Codera published a second article in El Imparcial titled “El llamado árabe vulgar:  quienes deben aprenderlo y cómo” in which he acknowledged the “gran influencia que para captarse las simpatías de los otros pueblos, principalmente si son inferiores en cultura, tiene el hablar su lengua” [the great influence that speaking their language has on other peoples, particularly if they are culturally inferior] and laments that Spaniards failed to do that in the Philippines (qtd. in López García 2008, 158). Ironically, Codera does not reflect on the implications that considering the role played by language variation in Castilian should have in conceptualizing peninsular Spanish or in the wider field of Latin American Spanish. His attitude towards language variation as the corruption of an idealized original linguistic system ignores the fact that languages only exist in their variant forms, and that specific variants are assigned the value of being the originary “pure” language only a posteriori. This is representative of what Burke has called the “normative isomorphism of language nation and state,” the effort to substantiate nationalist claims by identifying a specific linguistic variant as the expression of an essentialized national identity, and arguing that the linguistic community and the polity correspond to each other (2013, 22). The liberal, nation-​building project that characterizes the nineteenth century and begins with the Enlightenment had always seen the teleological normativization of language as a powerful tool to this end. Codera’s position in the árabe vulgar vs árabe literal polemic clearly indicates his alignment with the liberal, nationalist project. He would eventually come around to acknowledging the practical value of learning Moroccan Arabic, but he never fully understood or embraced the notion of language variation as Lerchundi had. In his 1907 article, Codera acknowledged the practical reasons why Spanish diplomats and military officers needed to learn Moroccan Arabic, but continued to warn readers against cuán improcedente resulta la división como hecho especial entre ‘árabe vulgar’ y ‘árabe clásico’ y que difícilmente procederá el enseñar árabe vulgar, como sería ridículo y tonto el que el francés ó el alemán que tratara de venir á España quisiera aprender el castellano vulgar.11 (qtd. in López García 2008, 155) Codera, following the lead of the early Africanistas, supported a pacific colonization of Morocco by Spain based on the development of strong commercial relations in which the study of Moroccan Arabic could be instrumental, but he was not ready to accept that Moroccan Arabic was a language in its own right. Codera, and particularly the Beni Codera, the school of Arabists that followed him, defended an essentialist understanding of Andalusi culture as the main source of Spanish national identity that emphasized the relevance of Berber cultural and linguistic elements while minimizing any Visigothic or Arabic influences. Needless to say, the cross-​pollination among the different Romance languages in the Iberian Peninsula had no place in their teleological account of the origins of Spanish identity. José Lerchundi was also the driving force behind the first grammar manual of the Riffian Berber dialect. Lerchundi entrusted the Franciscan Pedro Hilarión Sarrionaindía with the preparation of a Riffian grammar shortly after the arrival of the latter in Morocco in 1892. In view of the almost non-​existent Spanish bibliography on the topic, Sarrionaindía prepared himself by studying the French articles on the topic. Sarrionaindía understood his work as a tool to facilitate “penetración pacífica en Marruecos, en la única forma en que es posible: a saber, mediante 83

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las mútuas [sic] relaciones de amistad y de comercio” [peaceful penetration in Morocco, the only way that this is possible: cultivating mutually advantageous relationships of friendship and commerce] (XVI). Like Lerchundi, he conceived his missionary and linguistic work as very much in line with the premises of a soft colonization advocated for by the early Africanistas. Sarrionaindía’s and Lerchundi’s pragmatism may have been informed by the fact that their work would not have been authorized for publication had they presented it in any other way, but one cannot help but notice their effort to avoid positioning themselves in the debate concerning the “authenticity” of non-​hegemonic languages versus the “universality” of hegemonic ones that characterized most of nineteenth-​century linguistics. As Basques and speakers of Euskera, the parallelisms between the diglossic situation of the Basque Languecountry and Morocco could not have gone unnoticed for them. The grammatical manuals of Euskera developed during the nineteenth century had been deeply informed by the authenticity vs universality debate. If the linguistic map of Euskera prepared by Louis Lucien Bonaparte in 1863 or Campión’s Gramática de los cuatro dialectos de la lengua euskara published between 1879 and 1882 vindicated the role of language as the main expression of national identity, Lerchundi and Sarrionaindía avoided any discussion of whether Moroccan Arabic or Riffian presented a unique view of the world. Acknowledging the cultural originality of these languages would have entailed the always dangerous suggestion that these linguistic communities could be considered as sovereign nations. Campión famously argued that “cada palabra euskara que se pierde, se lleva un pedazo del alma nacional” [each Euskara word that is lost takes with it a piece of the national soul] (1884, 9), whereas Sarrionaindía emphasized that knowledge of Tamazight “reportaría, a nuestro modo de entender, positivas y múltiples ventajas a todos y, especialmente, a la vecina nación española” [would provide, in our opinion, multiple, positive advantages to all, specially, the neighboring Spanish nation] (XIX–​XX). Sarrionaindía did, however, indicate the negative effect that the Arabic colonization of North Africa starting in the eighth century had had on the Amazigh community that had been forced to “profesar la religión de Mahoma … [y] abandon[ar] su propia lengua para abrazar el idioma del Alcorán” [profess the religion of Muhammad [and] to abandon its language to embrace the language of the Quran] (IIV). This characterization of the Amazigh people as alien to Islam was an Africanista commonplace that emphasized Spain’s cultural connection to the Maghreb by emphasizing their proximity to the pre-​Islamic Amazigh and downplaying their connection to the Islamic Arabic community. As Susan Martin-​Márquez has explained, many of the Spanish regeneracionistas, like Miguel de Unamuno, Azorín, and the early work of Joaquín Costa, extolled their cultural fraternity with the Berbers (2008, 60–​62).

Spanish renegados and explorers in the Maghreb The counterpart of the trope of Hispano-​Berber cultural affinity was represented by the real and imaginary Spanish renegados that populated many of the cities throughout the Maghreb. These renegados were often criminals or political prisoners that had escaped from the Spanish presidios in North Africa. In some cases, the renegados were deserters of the Spanish Army or Carlist soldiers escaping political repression in the peninsula. Their alleged rejection of the Christian faith to embrace Islam, as the term renegado suggests, was also a metaphor of their rejection of Western social norms and morals. The main renegado travelogues of the nineteenth century are Domingo Badia y Leiblich’s Voyages d’Ali Bey el Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie pendant les Années 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, et 1807 (1814), José María de Murga’s Recuerdos Marroquíes del Moro Vizcaino (1865), and Joaquín Gatell’s “L’Ouad-​Noun et le Tekna á la côte occidentale du Maroc” (1869) and “Description du Sous” (1871). As renegados, all three of them adopted 84

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Muslim names:  Domingo Badía became Ali Bey el Abbassi, Joaquín Gatell referred to himself as Caid Ismail, and Murga presented himself as Hach Mohammed El Bagdády. Badía’s and Gatell’s original accounts of their travels were written in French out of necessity. Spanish King Fernando VII’s desire to keep Badía’s mission secret and the lack of scientific venues where his work could be published delayed the publication of his work in Spain. Badía had to cut short his tour of the Maghreb and parts of the Ottoman Empire when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808. Fearful that his role as a Spanish spy could compromise his situation in Napoleon’s Spain, he settled in France. After its initial publication in French, Domingo Badía’s account of his travels was published in English, German, and in Italian in 1816, and would only appear in Spanish in 1836. Gatell was also affected by the political turmoil in Spain, he had escaped to France in 1869 to avoid prosecution for his pro-​republican political views, and ended up publishing the accounts of his travels through the Maghreb there. A heavily edited and censored Spanish edition of his writings was published in 1880 by the Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid. Joaquín Costa published a translation of the original French articles in the Revista de Geografía Comercial in 1886 although a complete edition of his manuscripts did not appear until 1940. Unlike Badía and Gatell, Murga financed the publication of his travelogue, so he was not affected by the political instability and lack of scientific venues in the peninsula like they were. Murga, who joined the ranks of the renegados to travel through Morocco in 1863, explains that the renegados were escaping their own misdeeds as much as they were escaping the ill doings of the society in which they lived. Muslims would not traditionally demand that the Christians that sought asylum in their midst embraced Islam, but they often had to do it to avoid being extradited to their countries of origin. It was “[l]‌a fuerza y la intolerancia de sus correligionarios, y no las de los moros, son las que han obligado a renegar a los cristianos” [the power and intolerance of their correligionaries, and not that of the Moors, is what has forced the Christians to renege] according to Murga (2010, 34). The renegado, accordingly, is both a social derelict and an adventurer in search of freedoms that are not afforded to him in the West. Paradoxically, they were also considered potential allies of Spain in its efforts to further its expansion in North Africa. Both Murga and Codera argue that the renegados could be a driving force of Spanish colonization. Murga explains that France and England had already experimented “expatriando los penados y haciéndoles colonizar lejanas tierras” [expatriating criminals to have them colonize remote lands], something he believes Spain should also do (2010, 89). Francisco Codera expressed the same opinion a few years later in his Marruecos desconocido (1897, 314) where he argued that the renegados would make excellent settlers to aid in Spanish commercial expansion since they have not lost “el sentimiento y el amor de la patria” [the sentiment and love for the homeland]. The renegados were also often recruited to serve as spies for European nations seeking to open markets or to facilitate colonial expansion in Africa.This ambivalent representation of the renegado as both traitor and potential ally was consistent with traditional representations in the West since the Middle Ages. The general consensus among Westerners was that, Islam being an irrational faith, renegades could only have embraced it out of necessity rather than conviction, and that they hence remained Christian at heart. Taking the appearance of a renegado, as Badía explained to Spanish Minister Manuel Godoy, was the best way to explore the African continent without raising suspicions. Both Badía and Gatell used these deceptive tactics to gain the trust of the Moroccan political elite and to report on Morocco’s geography and military capabilities. The decades between the publication of Badia’s and Gatell’s travelogues in French saw the creation of geographic societies throughout Europe:  France’s Société de Géographie (1821), Germany’s Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (1828), and the United Kingdom’s Royal 85

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Geographical Society (1830) were all created during this time. The Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid was not created until 1876 and the Sociedad de Africanistas y Colonialistas in 1883. Despite the late bloom of the Spanish geographical societies, both Badía’s and Gatell’s work are good examples of the imbrication of the universalist scientific discourse generated by the Enlightenment and the European imperialist ethos that drove colonial expansion during the nineteenth century. Badía’s descriptions of nature in the Maghreb are especially interesting in that they also reveal a significant change in perspective brought about by Romanticism. The Enlightened scientist thought that he could never connect directly with its object of study, only apprehend it through intellectual abstractions. Romanticism brought forth the idea that man had once been one with nature and hence could revert to a state of knowing by entering into communion with nature again. In a section of ­chapter  16, significantly titled “Histoire naturelle,” Badia’s narrative goes without much of a transition from the description of open fields into a description of the gardens of his villa at Semelalia, near Marrakech, where Badía prides himself on having been able to create a harmonious reproduction of nature itself, the official object of his travelogue. The section ends with a deliberately paradoxical statement that presents Badía as capable of connecting with Moroccan nature in a way that, according to him, Moroccans could not: Les oiseaux venoient prendre les miettes de pain que je leur jetois; ils venoient se promener dans les chambres, et je dormois la nuit avec les rideaux de mon lit couronnés d’oiseaux libres dans le pays de l’esclavage.12 (1814, 294) Badía’s characterization of Morocco as “le pays de l’esclavage” is rich with unintentional irony. He seems to be telling his potential French readers that, unlike revolutionary France, where slavery had been abolished in 1794, Morocco continued to maintain this “savage” institution. The irony, of course, is that by 1802 France had reinstated slavery in all its colonies including the Maghreb. Unlike the Enlightened naturalists, Badía feels quite capable of connecting with nature itself precisely because of his European scientific background. He claims sovereignty over Moroccan nature, if only intellectually, because he can connect to the thing itself in a way that Muslims (Moroccans included), in his opinion, could never do. unprepared as they were to contribute to the natural sciences. Badía’s harsh criticism of the unnatural institution of slavery helps naturalize the equally unnatural institution of colonization. The paragraph is important also because it reveals the symbolic value that Badía and his European contemporaries attached to the image of the renegado explorer: capable of connecting and becoming one with the wild Muslim civilization that he explored while remaining rational at heart (just like he was expected to remain Christian at heart).

Conclusion Global Hispanophone cultural production in the Maghreb and the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century presents a heterogeneous corpus of work that cannot be easily categorized. From the Sephardic novels translated and adapted by the Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire, to the Algerian dailies published by the Spanish migrant communities, or the pseudo-​scientific, renegado travelogues, they display a wide variety of concerns and rhetorical strategies. The populist journalistic production of the Spanish migrant community in Algeria contrasts with the sophistication of enlightened, renegado, travel writers like Badía or 86

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Murga. Journals like El Patuet and the renegado travelogues share with Sephardic feuilletins the multilingual influences, often showcasing translingual rhetorical strategies as a way to reconcile the multiple cultural allegiances of their authors. The cultural production coming out of these communities captures our attention not only because it represents a remarkable example of multiculturality, but also because it showcases the instability of the identitarian narratives that they inherited from Spain, the Maghreb, and the Ottoman Empire. If the linguistic proximity between Ladino and Castilian can create the mirage of a shared cultural heritage between the Sephardim and the Spanish literatos, their struggle to conform to modernity through the translation of European feuilletins is a reminder that, as Jacques Derrida (an Algerian Sephardim) explained, our mutual languages are always “the coming of the other” (1998, 68). Far from celebrating any form of post-​imperial nostalgia, the study of the Global Hispanophone brings us face to face with the “originarily colonial” nature of all cultures.

Notes 1 In 1925, Manuel Cañete renamed the paper El Correo Español distancing it from the Spanish consulate. It was published until 1931. 2 “In adopting this title for our audience, we sought to characterize as much as possible the essence of our writing and the objective of our publication while at the same time turning a despective word into a respected name.” 3 The French term pataouète was adapted to Catalan becoming patuet. 4 “This is a feeling of ‘national’ instability that is not easy to cure.The man from the provinces is an eccentric ‘provincial.’ He wanders on the outskirt of the State and on the outskirts of State mythology. He has tried to assimilate, and he has only succeeded in part. Everyday events remind him that the other half of him remains unassimilated: unassimilable.” 5 “The pseudonym Patuet fits the children of a country where the national language is spoken imperfectly or in dialect form; for example: Valencians, Patuets; Catalans, Patuets; people from Alicante, Patuets; and so are all the provinces where Castilian is not generally spoken.” 6 “Fallita” refers to the Italian “fallimento,” the liquidation process that takes place after a business goes bankrupt. 7 Montejurra refers to the mountain range in the Spanish region of Navarre where an important battle during the Third Carlist War took place in which the Republican troops were defeated. 8 Great gratitude you owe to France, That has covered you with taverns and bodegas, And with industrialists that seeking financial gain In fifteen days… file for bankruptcy, Work horses Spain gives you for free, Lenders, the ill-​fated, Hebrew flock, And journalists on commission and councilors without a scepter. Algiers! Like Jeremiah you cry over your ruins, Did your roll up your sleeves? Put up with the punishment, And your passionate blood, your Moorish arrogance, Give it to Don Carlos at Monte-​Jurra. I, from the bed in which I moan, Full of cantharides and morphine jabs I hate you, but I do not curse you, Seeing that nobody will come close to Those without a salary. 9 “1st A European or indigenous lettered person who speaks literary Arabic following all the grammar rules will not be understood by the populace in Morocco, and only those known in that country as Tolbes or Alfaquíes (wisemen), a very small group as it is. 2nd The indigenous lettered people, when they speak among themselves, never use literary Arabic, they only follow its rules in written communication.

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Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo 3rd In colloquial conversation, indigenous alfaquis and those that are not alfaquis use the same words and pronounce them in the same way even if they are not strictly speaking Arabic, and the pronunciation of the words is not the appropriate one.You can only find differences in the style. 4th Those with a good command of colloquial Arabic will not only understand everybody, but will be understood by all the locals; on the other hand, those that have a good command of literary Arabic will only be understood by the lettered men, as stated before.” 10 I quote Codera from López García’s edition of the two articles published in the Revista de Estudios Mediterráneos. 11 “how improper it is to distinguish between colloquial and classical Arabic, and that it is as hard to defend the teaching of colloquial Arabic as it would be ridiculous and silly for a French or German person to travel to Spain to learn colloquial Spanish” 12 “The birds came to take the crumbs of bread I threw at them; they went for a walk in the rooms, and I slept at night with the curtains of my bed crowned with free birds in the land of slavery.”

Works cited Abrevaya Stein, Sarah. 2002. Introduction to “Ladino in Print.” Jewish History 16: 225–​233. Albino, Juan. 1859. Manual del lenguaje vulgar de los moros de La-​Riff: apuntes que en lengua castellana para su uso particular hizo en el año 1851, hallándose destacado en el Peñón de la Gomera. Cádiz: Imprenta de la Revista Médica. Alcalá, Pedro. 1505. Arte para ligeramente saber la lengua aráviga:  Vocabulista arávigo en letra castellana. Granada: Juan Varela de Salamanca. Bacri, Roland. 1983. Trésors des racines pataouètes. Paris: Belin. Badía y Leblich, Domingo. 1814. Voyages d’Ali Bey el Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie pendant les années 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806 et 1807. Paris: Didot. Badia y Leblich, Domingo. 1816. Ali Bey’s el Abassi Reisen in Afrika und Asien in den Jahren 1803 bis 1807. Weimar: Landes-​Industrie-​Comptoir. Badia y Leblich, Domingo. 1816. Travels of Ali Bey; in Morocco, Tripoli, Cyprus, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Turkey.: Between the years 1803 and 1807. Philadelphia, PA: James Maxwell Printer. Badia y Leblich, Domingo. 1816. Viaggi di Ali Bey El-​Abbassi in Africa ed in Asia dall’anno 1803 a tutto il 1807. Milan: Tipografia Sonzogno e Comp. Badia y Leblich, Domingo. 1836. Viajes de Ali Bey el Abbassi (Don Domingo Badia y Leblich) por África y Asia: durante los años 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806 y 1807.Valencia: Librería de Mallén y Sobrinos. Badia y Leiblich, Domingo. 1888. Viatjes de Ali Bey el Abassi, Domingo Badía y Leiblich, per África y Assia durant los anys 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806 y 1807. Barcelona: Imprempta La Renaixença. Bonaparte, Louis-​Lucien. 1863. Carte des sept provinces basques, montrant la délimitation actuelle de l’euscara et sa division en dialectes, sous-​dialectes et variétés. London: Stanford’s Geographical Establishment. Borovaya, Olga. 2003. “The serialized novel as rewriting: the case of Ladino Belles Lettres.” Jewish Social Studies 10(1): 30–​68. Borovaya, Olga. 2012. Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theatre in the Late Ottoman Empire. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Burke, Peter. 2013. “Nationalisms and vernaculars. 1500–​1800.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, edited by J. Breuilly, 21–​35. Oxford: Oxforf University Press. Campión,Arturo. 1884. Gramática de los cuatro dialectos literarios de la lengua euskara.Toulouse: Establecimiento Tipográfico de E. López. Cañes, Francisco. 1775. Gramática Arabigo-​Española, vulgar, y literal. Con un diccionario Arabigo-​Español, en que se ponen las voces más usuales para una conversación familiar, con el texto de la doctrina cristiana en el idioma arábigo. Madrid: Antonio Pérez de Soto. Castelar, Emilio. 1984. La palabra de Emilio Castelar: cuatro discursos y un artículo. Edited by José Ramón Valero Escandell. Elda: Sección de Publicaciones del Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Elda. Codera, Francisco. 1897. “Marruecos desconocido.” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 30: 305–​315. Costa, Joaquín. 1877. “Otro viajero español en África.” Boletín de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza 9:  33–​34. Culi, Jacob. [1730] 1989. MeAm loez. New York: Moznaim.

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Global Hispanophone cultural production Delgado Gómez-​Escalonilla, Lorenzo. 1992. Imperio de papel: acción cultural y política exterior durante el primer franquismo. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other, or,The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Díaz-​Más, Paloma. 2015. “Ramón Menéndez Pidal y la cultura sefardí.” Lengua y cultura sefardí, edited by Nicolás Asensio Jiménez and Sara Sánchez Bellido, 179–​210. Madrid: Fundación Ramón Areces/​ Fundación Menéndez Pidal. Fuster, Joan. [1962] 2010. Nosaltres, els valencians. Barcelona: Edicions 62. Gatell, Joaquín. 1869. “L’Ouad-​noun et le Tekna a la côte occidentale du Maroc.” Bulletin de la Societé de Geographie (October): 257–​287. Gatell, Joaquín. 1871. "Description du Sous.” Bulletin de la Societé de Géographie (March): 16–​26. Gatell, Joaquín. 1880. Viajes por Marruecos, el Sus, Uad-​Nun y Tekna. Madrid:  Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid. Gatell, Joaquín. 1886. “El Uad-​Nun y el Teknal.” Revista de Geografía Comercial 12–​15: 197–​205. Gatell, Joaquín. 1886. “El Sus.” Revista de Geografía Comercial 19: 277–​81. Gatell, Joaquín. 1886. “El Sus (Conclusión).” Revista de Geografía Comercial 20–​21: 285–​290. Gatell, Joaquín. 1949. El viajero español por Marruecos, Don Joaquín Gatell (el “Kaid Ismail”), edited by José Gavira. Madrid: Instuto de Estudios Africanos. Gatell, Joaquín. 2012. Viajes por Marruecos, edited by Francisco Javier Martínez Antonio. Madrid: Miraguano Ediciones. Herrero, Barbara. 1996. “Novedades en la obra lingüística del Padre José Lerchundi.” Marruecos y el padre Lerchundi, edited by Ramón Lourido Díaz and Gaspar Calvo Moralejo, 133–​148. Madrid: Mapfre. Jordi, Jean-​Jacques. 1997. Espagnol en Oranie: histoire d'une migration: 1830–​1914. Paris: Gandini. Lanly, André. 1962. Le français d’Afrique du Nord. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lerchundi, José. 1889. Rudimentos del árabe vulgar que se habla en el imperio de Marruecos con numerosos ejercicios y temas aplicados a la teoría. Tangier: Imprenta de la Misión Católico-​Española. López García, Bernabé. 2008. “Textos del arabismo español: dos artículos de Francisco Codera sobre el árabe vulgar.” Revista de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos 5: 139–​159. Martin-​Márquez, Susan. 2008. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. McGovney, Dudley O. 1911. “French nationality laws imposing nationality at birth.” American Journal of International Law 5: 325–​354. doi:10.2307/​2186722. Menocal, María Rosa. 1985. “Pride and prejudice in medieval studies: European and Oriental.” Hispanic Review 53(1): 61–​78. Moscoso García, Francisco. 2010. “Un manual para aprender árabe marroquí escrito en el Peñon de Vélez de la Gomera en 1851.” Al-​Andalus Magreb: Revista Editada por el Area de Estudios Árabes e Islámicos de la Universidad De Cádiz 17: 121–​140. Murga, José María de. [1865] 2010. Recuerdos marroquíes del moro vizcaíno. Madrid: Miraguano Ediciones. Nerín Abad, Gustau. 1997. Guinea Ecuatorial, historia en blanco y negro: hombres blancos y mujeres negras en Guinea Ecuatorial, 1843–​1968. Barcelona: Ed. Península. Pulido, Ángel. 1904. Los israelitas españoles y el idioma castellano. Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra. Pulido, Ángel. 1905. Españoles sin patria y la raza sefardí. Madrid:  Establecimiento Tipográfico de E. Teodoro. Prochaska, David. 1996. “History as literature, literature as history: Cagayous of Algiers.” American Historical Review 101(96): 670–​715. doi: 10.2307/​2169419 Robinet, Auguste Maurice Victor. [1896] 1949. Les amours de Cagayous. Algiers: Mediterranée Vivante. Robinet, Auguste Maurice Victor. 1905. Le marriage de Cagayous. Algiers: V. Rollet. Robinet, Auguste Maurice Victor. 1906. Cagayous philosophe. Algiers: V. Rollet. Romero, Elena. 1979. El teatro de los Sefardíes orientales. Madrid: CSIC. Sarrionandía, Pedro. [1905] 2007. Gramática de la lengua rifeña, edited by José Megías Aznar and Vicente Moga Romero. Melilla: UNED-​Melilla. Torres Amat, Félix. 1836. Memorias para ayudar a formar un diccionario crítico de los escritores catalanes y dar alguna idea de la antigua y moderna literatura de Cataluña. Barcelona: Impr. de J. Verdaguer. Vilar, Juan Bautista. 1980. “La presse espagnole en Algerie (1880–​1931).” In Espagne et Algerie au XXe siècle:  contacts culturels et creation littéraire, edited by Daniel-​Henry Pageaux and Jean Dejeux, 52–​65. París: Ed. l’Harmattan.

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7 FORTUNY AND THE SPANISH-​ MOROCCAN WAR (1859–​1 860) Battle paintings and orientalist pictorial production Jordi Àngel Carbonell Pallarés From Rome to Tetouan In the nineteenth century, when European powers focused their interest on North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, orientalist painting, which was dedicated to portrayals of the Islamic world, became a significant thematic genre in the visual arts. Political circumstances, especially colonial expansion, enabled certain artists to become instantly familiar with this geographical area and to illustrate it in their works. Some artists accompanied diplomatic missions, while others acted as pictorial chroniclers of military expeditions. One such chronicler was the nineteenth-​century Catalan artist with the greatest international renown, Marià Fortuny Marsal (1838–​1874), who visited Tetouan to paint episodes of the Spanish-​Moroccan War (1859–​1860). In 1860, aged 22 and studying in Rome, the young artist began his professional career by accepting a commission from the Provincial Council of Barcelona to produce a series of paintings on the Spanish Army’s military expedition in North Africa, which had begun in late October of the previous year when hostilities broke out with Morocco (Actas de la Diputación Provincial de Barcelona, de 14 de noviembre de 1856 hasta el 26 de marzo de 1860, 29, fol. 512r., 30-​ XII-​1859). Fortuny was commissioned to paint the heroics of General Joan Prim (1814–​1870) and the battalion of volunteers who had supported the Provincial Council and fought under the General’s command. The paintings were intended to decorate the walls of the Assembly Hall in the Palace of the Provincial Council of Barcelona. In the mid-​nineteenth century, Spain had become a second-​rate power after losing a large part of its American empire. The Spanish government hoped to recover its impoverished prestige by protecting its remaining colonies, collaborating with France on expeditions such as those to Indochina (1858) and Mexico (1862), and looking toward Morocco. Two decades earlier neighbouring France had conquered Algeria and now Spain was attempting to strengthen and expand its North African seats in Ceuta and Melilla. It was in this context that the Spanish-​ Moroccan War (1859–​1860) broke out. This conflict, which is one of the most notable episodes of nineteenth-​century Spanish history, had a huge impact on contemporary society. In the aftermath of the events of the 1850s, a series of inconsequential attacks on new fortifications in Ceuta by the Kabyles were exploited by the Liberal Union Spanish government under General Leopoldo O’Donnell 91

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(1809–​1867) as a pretext to begin hostilities with the Moroccan empire. The material outcome of the conflict, which was no more than an image-​saving operation in Europe and a smokescreen concealing serious internal problems, was limited. The propaganda aspect of the conflict, which was intended to enhance pride in the Spanish military, led chroniclers, writers, and artists such as Fortuny to become apologists for military paraphernalia. The decision by the Provincial Council of Barcelona to send an artist to the theatre of war was therefore motivated by the patriotic fever that had led to the armed conflict in the first place. Unlike the graphic chroniclers who created images for newspapers, Fortuny had an exclusively artistic purpose: to produce narrative paintings that depicted this wartime adventure. He had already cultivated this genre by painting scenes from medieval Catalan history while a student at Llotja School of Fine Arts in Barcelona. His task now was to interpret a live, current theme based on experience rather than on literary sources. The artist undertook to paint contemporary wartime episodes that would produce a nationalist exaltation of the triumphs of the Spanish military and portray an apologetic image of State power. Fortuny’s commission was similar to that which the French government had entrusted to Horace Vernet (1789–​1863) several years earlier in relation to the conquest of Algeria. For this reason, Vernet’s paintings were recommended to Fortuny by his commissioners as models for his creations. Ultimately, however, the commission proved unsuccessful and the themes that led to Vernet’s triumph provided little motivation for the artist from Reus. Only the final version of one of the paintings that were initially commissioned, La batalla de Tetuán, which is currently displayed in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona and several sketches of the Battle of Wad-​Ras, the most elaborate of which are displayed in the Prado Museum in Madrid, were completed. To honour his commitment, in February 1860 Fortuny travelled to Tetouan, where he remained until the end of April. His friend, medal engraver Jaume Escriu, who later married Fortuny’s sister Isabel, accompanied him to Morocco as his assistant. During the first few days they stayed at Martil beach camp. After meeting General Prim, they settled into a large house in the medina of Tetouan, which they shared with Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1833–​1891), author of Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África (1859), and Charles Yriarte (1832–​1898), correspondent of Le Monde Illustré, whom they had met a few days earlier when sailing to Morocco on board the Vasco Núñez de Balboa (Yriarte 1888, 7, 8). Throughout his stay, Fortuny devoted himself intensely to taking notes and recording his surroundings. Not a single detail from the war that was likely to be of interest for his future paintings escaped his attention. His notes referred to wartime episodes and covered every aspect of military life. They also portrayed the war’s main protagonists and several officers he had made friends with. As well as focusing on the commission’s objectives, he also discovered the Moroccan world, which helped him to cultivate the orientalist genre painting that became one of the most interesting and successful aspects of his art (Carbonell 1999, 36). Fortuny’s notes reveal his interest in African landscape and architecture. Especially apparent is his interest in daily lives and customs, which are observably exotic to his European eyes (Yxart 1882, 54). However, like other artists, he had difficulty depicting the Muslim population, so he mainly drew members of the Jewish community, who coexisted more easily with Spaniards at this time of occupation. Not only did he meet with Muslim rejection due to the conflict but also with their animosity to being drawn by Westerners. Memoirs and letters of artists who worked in the Maghreb are full of unpleasant anecdotes generated by the hostility provoked by their work. Despite these difficulties, the artist succeeded in taking the notes he needed to record the lives of Tetouan residents. These notes later served to execute the Moroccan-​inspired paintings he created in his Roman studio. Fortuny belonged to a generation of artists that was characterized by a more realistic vision of Islamic society. Previous romantic artists had produced images steeped in a poetic subjectivity 92

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that could rarely escape from their literary nature even if sometimes based on direct experience. Visual form was given to a set of ideals related to the life, history, culture, and landscapes of these places, knowledge of which was obtained through travellers’ eyewitness accounts and colonial expansion.The romantic spirit led artists to go in search of these unspoiled territories. For them, the Orient represented an escape in time and space, a place where the simple values of primitive societies prevailed, where people lived in harmony with their environment and enjoyed a fuller, freer existence (Marí 1988, 10). This escapism grew from a desire to flee a world that was increasingly committed to material progress to the detriment of poetic sensibility. The Orient was the land of dreamy landscapes and palaces of splendid luxury where great passions ruled and eroticism and sex were adorned with mystery and sophistication. It was also where tyrannical power committed unimaginable cruelties. The harems, the Turkish baths of Jean-​Auguste-​ Dominique Ingres (1780–​1867), and the epic visions of Eugène Delacroix (1789–​1863) and Eugène Fromentin (1820–​1876) were the best examples of this orientalist vision. Toward the middle of the century, the artistic ideal evolved toward a more realist approach, a development that brought with it a desire to depict the environment in a more lifelike manner. Without fully discarding the presence of imaginary elements in their paintings, artists such as Fortuny moved closer to reality to illustrate the more colourful aspects of the traditional Muslim world. Fortuny found inspiration for his paintings in the notes he took in Morocco. These notes, which embodied an objective view of the aspects of reality that most interested him, were the first phase of his creative oil painting process. Fortuny also used his imagination as well as visual sources such as photographs, engravings, disguised models, and objects from his valuable collection. This collection, which converted his studio into a veritable museum, was dispersed after his death (Navarro 2007 [2008], 319–​349). Using multiple elements to build his poetic image of Morocco, Fortuny presented what were the most interesting and exotic aspects for the European public. His highly successful paintings exerted a notable influence on many contemporary artists’ representations of the Moroccan world. They also helped to create the thematic clichés that were constantly repeated in paintings of this genre in the last third of the century, when a large number of orientalist paintings were executed. Depicting scenes of a folkloric and atavistic Morocco, these works extracted literal quotations from Fortuny’s paintings. As occurred with many artists who travelled to these southern parts, the intense light affected Fortuny’s style, which until then had been that somewhat restrained and academic. His style then became gradually freer and more vigorous, used more expressive language, and incorporated more luminous colours and an accentuated chiaroscuro. His daily work documenting the paintings he was commissioned to execute undoubtedly encouraged his style to evolve. Charles Yriarte remembers the painter in the fields of Tetouan, indefatigably sketching in his notepad, indifferent to all events, apparently living in a state of profound contemplation while focused exclusively on his work (Yriarte 1888, 8). Despite their strictly artistic purpose, Fortuny’s almost two hundred pencil drawings and numerous watercolours he created in Morocco in the first few months of 1860 are by themselves a genuine chronicle of events as well as testimony to an experience that conditioned his sensitivity and imagination for life (Carbonell 1999). In early 1862, several compositions the artist had despatched while studying in Rome were exhibited in the palace of the Provincial Council.These included his first orientalist oil painting, entitled La Odalisca (Escena doméstica en un interior marroquí) (1861) (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona) and a photograph of a sketch of the battle of Wad-​Ras (Coll 1862, 1300). Surprisingly, his first orientalist painting, La Odalisca (Figure  7.1), which was painted in Rome in 1861 and presented to the Provincial Council of Barcelona, had nothing to do with his recent North African experience. Despite its title, it also had very little Moroccan input, 93

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Figure 7.1  La Odalisca, Marià Fortuny Marsal, 1861. Oil on cardboard, 56.9 × 81 cm. Source: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (MNAC/​MAM 10691). Photograph by Calveras/​Mérida/​Sagristà. © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

except perhaps for the furniture that appears behind the main figure. La Odalisca is an artwork in the same thematic context as Odalisque avec esclave (Harvard Art Museums, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts) by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–​1867) that belongs to the long tradition of sensual female representations dating back to Giorgione and Titian’s Venus. It represents one of the most hackneyed of stereotypes: oriental sensuality and eroticism. Despite the stir caused by the nakedness of the figure, the painting enjoyed great success in Barcelona’s artistic circles. It was the first painting in Catalonia to represent such a theme and even earned the admiration of the prestigious realist painter Ramón Martí Alsina, who made a copy of it (Chillón 2010, vol. 2, 66). His first etchings of this genre were executed in the same year as La Odalisca. These include Familia marroquí (1861) (Figure  7.2), which depicts a Kabyle family in front of what looks like a Tetouan fountain but which is actually the Fountain at Gate of the Chain in Jerusalem, which the painter knew through illustrations; La guardia de la Qasba de Tetuán (c.1861), which shows a group of armed men lying idly by the shaded entrance of the city’s fortifications (Figure 7.3); and an etching titled Tanger, which depicts several static figures shrouded in their hooded djellabas sitting in the street next to an arch. The arch is based on one he drew in Tetouan, as he did not visit Tangier until the following year (Doñate et  al. 2003, 334). He probably called the etching Tanger because that city had become an orientalist reference after it had been illustrated in the works of Delacroix and David Roberts (1796–​1864) almost three decades earlier.

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Figure 7.2  Familia marroquí, Marià Fortuny Marsal, c.1861. Etching on paper. 35.5 × 24 cm. Source: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (MNAC/​GDG 7364G). Photograph by Calveras/​Mérida/​Sagristà. © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

Despite certain differences, these first etchings relating to Fortuny’s recent stay in Morocco were in the same vein as the French orientalist paintings that were being marketed by art dealer Adolphe Goupil (1806–​1893), the biggest representative of which was his son-​in-​law, Jean-​ Leon Gérôme (1824–​1904). These etchings therefore approached what critic Emile Galichon (1868), in an article in the Gazette de Beaux Arts, later defined as ethnographic painting, in reference to the work of the above French painter. However, to qualify the works of Gérôme or, by extension, those of Fortuny as ethnographic, when in truth they manifested such a superficial pan-​Arabism is, at the very least, inappropriate. Such qualifications have been aroused by an alleged faithfulness to reality. It showed itself in the authenticity of the arguments, the precision of the physiognomies, and the adjusted description of the attire. All the above must have had its origin in the artist’s field study, when he observed the human types and most distinctive aspects of their reality to produce credible pictorial results. In fact, while the critics evaluated the supposed authenticity of the oriental resources in pretentious and exaggerated

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Figure 7.3  La guardia de la Qasba de Tetuán, Marià Fortuny Marsal, c.1861. Etching on paper. 21 × 16.5 cm. Source: Private collection.

terms, most of the public who were not so demanding had little regard for this aspect. When contemplating this type of painting, they were generally content to be transported by their imagination to an exotic and distant world without the need for too much precision. Ignorance allowed for all kinds of license since most of these works became no more than decorative objets d’art in Victorian or Second Empire mansions. They were part of what was known as ‘high class painting’, creations intended for an exclusive audience characterized by their impeccable fini, anecdotal and inconsequential content, and high decorative value (Gracia 1989, 132). Also, as several authors have pointed out, these visions of the oriental world showed the European public characteristics once associated with the old regime, which, thanks to social progress, had been overcome. This awakened a feeling of self-​satisfaction and spread the European model of progress to other cultures living on the margin of modernity. In short, it was an invitation to colonial expansion (Moussa 2012, 135). 96

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Fortuny’s second trip to Morocco In Fortuny’s letter dated 14 February 1862 in which he offered La Odalisca to the Provincial Council of Barcelona, he also requested funds to enable him to make a second trip to Morocco to take notes and recordings for the paintings he had been commissioned to execute (Diputación de Barcelona, Archivo General, Expediente relativo al artista D.  Mariano Fortuny. leg 1386, fol 71) (Davillier 1875, 25). The Council accepted his request and in late September 1862 he travelled to Tetouan and from there to Tangiers. This time in Tetouan he was able to tranquilly draw the settings in which the wartime events of a couple of years earlier had taken place without the tension of armed conflict or the presence of Spanish troops. He painted watercolours and drew detailed landscapes of the Wad-​Ras area and the river Martil valley that would later serve to construct the scenes of his battle paintings. He then spent a long time in Tangier, intensely documenting every aspect of the city in dozens of drawings and watercolours. He stayed in Morocco for almost three months. Late that year, just as he was about to return to Spain, he met painter Francisco Lameyer (1825–​1877), who was to stay in Tangier well into the spring of the next year, portraying everyday scenes and members of the Sephardic community. Fortuny’s second stay in Morocco was extraordinarily fruitful. Unlike on his previous visit, he was able to draw and paint numerous watercolours about Moroccan daily life. Since the war was over, he was able to approach Moroccans more easily and could contemplate the environment more freely. His biographer, Baron Charles Davillier, explains that in Rome he had learned the rudiments of Arabic and in Tangier he lived with local people and even adopted some of their customs, such as wearing a djellaba so as to go unnoticed and be able to work without too many problems (1875, 27). Choosing to settle in Tangier also made his work easier because in 1777 sultan Sidi Muhammad Ben Abdallah had made Tangier his kingdom’s diplomatic city and the locals were used to dealing with Europeans. Fortuny created numerous images of the city’s most picturesque places: the dominant eighteenth-​century citadel; the Great Souk, where caravans arrived from the south of the country laden with all sorts of goods and where, according to visitors, he experienced a genuine African lifestyle; the busy main street, which was called Shiaguin or silverware; the Customs office, with its picturesque porch of horseshoe arches near the beach walls; the public baths; the small shops full of exotic products; the cafés full of leisurely Muslims smoking kif, the intricate labyrinthine lanes with their dark parapet walks; and the wide beach and other picturesque places that surrounded the city. His papers reproduced the same places as most other artists who visited the city in search of its most oriental aspects and that would later comprise the most typical tourist route (Carbonell 2005, 105). The notes from his stay in Tangier record the most colourful local customs and traditions, such as the Maulud procession to commemorate the birth of the Prophet, which later inspired his Fantasía Árabe. For these celebrations, the Islamic brotherhoods took offerings and the Kabyles performed a pyrotechnic display in which they danced to the sound of their own gunfire. He also witnessed the tabaurida or ‘gunpowder race’, an epic spectacle of enormous visual appeal traditionally performed outside the city walls and already depicted by several artists. This spectacle interested the romantics, who interpreted it as reflecting the animals’ speed and energy and the riders’ enthusiasm. Fortuny painted it twice, once in 1862 when he portrayed the event’s strength and colour with great precision, and again in 1872, after his third and final trip to Morocco, when he reduced the action to a mere anecdote integrated into a luminous landscape. Tangier was a great discovery for the artist. He was strongly attracted to the appearance of the city, which was quite different from that of Tetouan. La infiel, as the Moroccans called it, on account of the large presence of Europeans and the privileges enjoyed by the numerous Jews 97

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Figure 7.4  Playa Africana, Marià Fortuny Marsal, 1867. Watercolour on paper, 31.5 × 61 cm. Source: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (MNAC/​GDG 10696D). Photograph by Calveras/​Mérida/​Sagristà. © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

who lived there, was a small city of under 10,000 inhabitants. Its conditions for welcoming visitors were not very good but such limitations did not pose an obstacle to artists who, since Delacroix in 1832, had appreciated its picturesque appearance, magnificent extensive landscape, and clear light. Its climate was also better than Tetouan’s, it was well connected to Europe, and it had a small Western colony comprising staff of the diplomatic missions and numerous merchants. Therefore, despite the difficulties, conditions in Tangier were better than in Tetouan for any European who wished to spend a season there. Fortuny knew how to appreciate these advantages and understood why the artists who preceded him appreciated its appeal. From here on, he referred to it in most of his later orientalist paintings, disseminating the stereotypical image of the small and accessible nearby Orient embodied by this city in the mid-​nineteenth century. The drawings and watercolours he created there are true to life but the style is more agile and more mature than those of his previous stay in Tetouan in 1860. On the other hand, the paintings he later derived from them in his Roman studio present the somewhat distorted view of an archaic, mysterious, decadent, and extremely exotic city. In general, the view of the Moroccans he expressed in so many paintings, watercolours, and etchings is deeply ethnocentric and always illustrative of his archaic exoticism. He depicts the locals as almost medieval individuals, often threatening and ragged in appearance, bearing old-​fashioned weapons, sitting or lying in shaded alleys, hiding their faces under their hoods with an air of mystery, and forming part of the scenery (Figure 7.4).

Orientalist works and Fortuny’s final trip to Morocco After he entered into a commercial relationship with Parisian art dealer Adolphe Goupil in the second half of the 1860s, Fortuny produced his most significant orientalist-​inspired Moroccan compositions (Davillier 1875, 40, 41). Most of these compositions depicted Tangier and were initially based on the notes he had taken during his stay in 1862. However, imagination and his

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Figure 7.5  Fantasía árabe, Marià Fortuny Marsal. Photo engraving on paper. Source: Private collection.

work in his studio often transformed reality into a fictional world. He often chose a peculiar subject matter, such as religious traditions that portrayed the most atavistic aspects of society. Examples are the three versions of Fantasia Árabe.These represent the procession held in Tangier during the feast of Maulud to commemorate the birth of the Prophet in which the Kabyles danced to the sound of their own gunfire. As he painted the three versions in succession, the story moved further and further away from reality. In the final version, executed in 1867 and displayed at the Walters Arts Gallery in Baltimore, the participants of the procession are even carrying a pet lion (Figure 7.5). In this thematic context he also painted Oración en la mezquita (private collection), which depicts a Muslim praying inside a mosque, which is actually the church of Santa María la Blanca in Toledo. Other works incorporate objects from his collection. One example of this is the watercolour El mercader de tapices (1870) (Museu de Montserrat) in which, in a shop supposedly located in Tangier, we observe antique Persian carpets, swords, and shields from his collection. Despite the assertions of critic and littérateur Théophile Gautier (1811–​1872), who observed carpets from İzmir, Kabylie, and Tetouan (Laplana 2013, 31), these are not Moroccan at all. Other works, which were based entirely on imagination and therefore even more distant from reality, present an orientalized and sophisticated Morocco reminiscent of scenes from Arabian Nights. Examples of this are the two versions of El encantador de serpientes (1869/​70) (one of which is displayed at

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Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the other at Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), Músicos árabes (c.1872) (held at the Museo Fortuny in Venice), and even Marroquíes jugando con un buitre (c.1867) (private collection). Some of the artist’s most important orientalist compositions, as well as works from other genres, were displayed to the public at the Goupil Exhibition held in Paris in the spring of 1870. Their great critical and commercial success consecrated Fortuny definitively among the international artistic field. Then began his most personal creative phase, in which his pictorial language acquired its ultimate maturity. At the beginning of this new period, he returned for a third and final visit to Morocco. In October 1871 he took advantage of his stay in Granada to travel to Tangier accompanied by Bernardo Ferrándiz (1835–​1885), a Valencian painter established in Malaga, and José Tapiró (1836–​1913), a watercolourist and childhood friend and compatriot. Tapiró enjoyed this trip so much that in 1877 he settled permanently in Tangier, where he devoted himself to portraying the inhabitants of that North African city until he died in 1913. It was a light-​hearted trip that lasted two weeks. The artist Georges Clairin (1843–​1919), who had been living in the city for a year, played host, welcoming them to his studio on the Street of the Synagogues with a large oriental party and accompanying them on their trip to Tetouan (Peña 1968, 32, 33). Though the stay was short, Fortuny was able to take notes that would inspire later artworks such as the oil painting El afilador de sables (1872) (private collection). This depicts an everyday scene in which ragged warriors watch a knife sharpener at work while smoking a sebsi or pipe of kif in front of the gate of Fez in the Medina district of Tangier. Since it was a commonly held belief that the humanity of ancient Al-​Ándalus persisted on the opposite side of the Straits of Gibraltar, he used the notes he made on human types on this visit to populate his later paintings of Granada’s medieval past. One example of this is Tribunal en la Alhambra (1871), which is displayed at the Fundació Gala-​Salvador Dalí in Figueres.This notion also served to justify trips made by nineteenth-​century intellectuals and artists to Tangier after visiting Granada’s architectural sites. It was at this stage that Fortuny’s work evolved into a more modern, pictorial language that focused not so much on materialization of the traditionalist story but on visual aspects such as the representation of light and colour. He also gave prominence to pictorial values like the energetic brush stroke and the texture full of inlays observed in his magnificent oil painting Árabe delante de un tapiz (1873) (private collection). He also created a series of Maghrebian scenes using watercolour techniques. With a spontaneous execution and great expressiveness, these paintings capture the general atmosphere through intense colour, while the story loses importance. Though it has not been ruled out that some of these paintings may have been executed in Tangier, most were painted later in Rome. The most illustrative examples are displayed at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid: Patrulla mora, Marroquíes a caballo, Árabes subiendo una cuesta, El almuédano, Moro ahogado en una playa (Barón 2017, 297–​300). All convey the magic of that world with an unravelled, synthetic style that uncovers the freest and most innovative Fortuny. In summary, from the beginning of Fortuny’s career, Morocco became the source of inspiration for the painter that led him to create of one of the most innovative and significant historical paintings of nineteenth-​century Spanish art. It also inspired his orientalist works, which are among the best examples of this pictorial genre produced in the second half of the nineteenth century. No other artist of his time was as masterful in capturing the human environment on the southern shores of the Straits of Gibraltar or in creating out of that reality such an extraordinary and thought-​provoking orientalist vision. Unfortunately, his untimely death cut short an extraordinarily promising career that was just beginning to bear fruit.

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The great painting During his first stay in Morocco, Fortuny contemplated the warlike events of the Spanish-​ Moroccan War to gain inspiration for the paintings commissioned by the Provincial Council. On his return in April 1860, he travelled to Paris to study the works of Horace Vernet relating to the conquest of Algeria, which the commissioners had recommended to him as models for his own. These paintings were on display in the Constantine Hall of the Museum of Historical Paintings in France, which was built by King Louis Philippe (1773–​1850). The one that most interested him was Prise de la smalah d’Abd-​el-​Kader (Château de Versailles, Versailles), the size of which was spectacular: 21.39 metres long and 4.89 metres high. The painting had caused a stir at the 1845 Paris Exhibition, winning every award and being viewed by a multitude of Parisians. The critic Jules Champfleury (1821–​1889) considered it an enormous ‘panorama’ that magnified the painter’s virtues but, especially, his flaws (Lacambre 1992, 108). Fortuny was undoubtedly impressed both by the enormity of the canvas and the way in which the subject was presented as a broad view of the battle with a multitude of figures. To a certain extent this resulted from the artist’s direct knowledge of the events since he had witnessed the Algerian crusade. The dimensions of the painting made Fortuny aware of the enormous task that confronted him and that ultimately demotivated him. His artistic sensibility was also different from Vernet’s. Despite the commission, he could not be considered an enthusiast of military chronicles. Instead, he preferred the smaller, commercial paintings set in the eighteenth century that were fashionable in the main Parisian galleries at that time. The first painting Fortuny planned to execute on the Spanish–​Moroccan conflict depicted the battle of Wad-​Ras, the final battle of the war. He painted several oil sketches, the most important of which is currently displayed at the Prado Museum in Madrid. However, he never got to paint the final version. This battle, which took place on 23 March 1860, was the bloodiest of all those waged in the Spanish–​Moroccan conflict and put an end to the hostilities. The artist, witnessing the battle from a prudent distance, was in awe of its violence (Davillier 1875, 20). His sketches referred to the heroic performance of the Catalan volunteers, who fought hand-​to-​hand to prevent the advance of the Moroccan cavalry. The battle was an utterly violent event in which the battalion of the Provincial Council lost almost half its forces. In the centre of the composition, Fortuny narrates the most intense moment of the battle. We see a motley crew of figures in different positions and with different attitudes expressing all the ferocity of the fight. In the middle of the fray he depicts one of the anecdotes reported by the press in its chronicles of the day. The protagonist is Colonel Francesc Fort, who had been commander of the volunteers since the death of Brigadier Victorià Sugrañes at the battle of Tetouan.The Colonel’s horse has been killed but he is fortunate enough to land on his feet and, with his revolver in his left hand, he dismounts a Muslim horseman, while the sabre in his right hand pricks the snout of another enemy soldier’s saddle. Falling from his horse, the enemy soldier is skewered by a volunteer’s bayonet (Orellana 1871 [1872], 123).The painting distinguishes between the different types of fighters intervening in the battle: Catalan volunteers; vivandières performing care work; Rif Kabyles with their shaven heads and braids; regular Moroccan cavalry dressed in white and wearing red caps; and the Bukharis or Black Guard. The background landscape, which is merely suggested, delineates the westernmost hills of Beni Idder, which enclose the plain in which the battle took place. In 1863, shortly after he returned to Europe from his second trip to Morocco, the commission from the Provincial Council of Barcelona was reduced to one large oil painting (Diputación de Barcelona, Archivo General, Expediente relativo al artista D. Mariano Fortuny. leg 1386, fol 101

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73–​77) (Davillier 1875, 30, 31). From 1863 to 1865, Fortuny therefore worked on the large oil painting of the Battle of Tetouan, which was 3 metres high by 9.72 metres wide. Increasingly at this time his preferences were less related to cultivating the historical genre, and this commission hindered his pictorial and commercial interests. In 1865 he stopped charging the Provincial Council and discontinued the execution of the painting while hoping he would be able to finish it later with the help of his future brother-​in-​law, Ricardo de Madrazo (1852–​1917). In the end, in 1870 Fortuny decided to annul the contract. In 1873, he paid 4,200 escudos to the Provincial Council, definitively extricating himself from the problem (Carbonell 2013, 84). The artwork was left hanging in the artist’s studio until his death. In 1875 those who had commissioned it acquired it from his widow and for years it was displayed in the Assembly Hall of the Palace of the Provincial Council in Barcelona (González and Martí 1989, vol. 1, 129) until it was transferred to Barcelona’s Museum of Fine Arts. The Great Painting, as the artist called it, was the result of a long creative process whereby direct experience, documented in dozens of drawings and watercolours, combined with the artist’s studio formulations. Fortuny desired to achieve an innovative interpretation of the subject. He therefore painted a broad, panoramic view of the battle in an extensive setting, depicting the plain and the Tetouan coastline and with a high line of horizon, which enabled him to narrate the story better. The work is unfinished and some parts have simply been sketched, which gives the painting a certain chaotic appearance. Despite the shortcomings, the work possesses masterful fragments that remind one of the luminist paintings of the artist’s final creative stage. Light tonalities flood the environment in strong contrast with the few shaded areas, thus faithfully reproducing North Africa’s diaphanous and dazzling atmosphere. The execution, based on colour smudge, renders certain parts strikingly modern, a non-​existent characteristic in contemporary works of the same genre. La batalla de Tetuán or, more specifically, according to its original title, the Expugnación del campamento marroquí por las tropas españolas el 4 de febrero de 1860, portrays the climax to the battle when the Spaniards break enemy lines, storm the enemy’s camp and cause the rout (Figure 7.6). The theme is very similar to the Vernet painting he was recommended, in which the French troops storm the Algerian camp Mahdi Abdel Kader. Fortuny relates the action from the defeated enemy’s camp—​specifically, from the defensive rear-​guard of the camp of Mulay Ahmed, whose elder brother, prince Mulay Abbas, was head of the Moroccan Army. He arranged the Spanish generals in the centre of the composition, where they played the role assigned to them by the commission’s apologetic history. He placed the general staff in the front line of fire, forming a wedge that advances into the enemy camp. Standing in the centre is General Leopoldo O’Donnell, who leads the attack surrounded by his escort of hussars and general staff officers. Defying the dangers, he calmly issues his commands from the most visible location. He is the true leader of the army and, by extension, the true leader of the homeland. It should be remembered that at that time he was the president of the Council of Ministers. To his left, the Catalan volunteers, led by Brigadier Victorià Sugrañes, form the vanguard and make a tumultuous entry into the Moroccan camp. These are the men of action, the protagonists of the victory.Their commander who, with sabre in hand, leads the way to encourage the volunteers, dies in the attack. He represents the martyr who sacrifices his own life while offering his courage as an example to the troops. General Prim is depicted alone on the right of O’Donnell’s group, storming the enemy trench through an embrasure and brandishing his sabre against a Muslim fighter.This is the most glorious moment of the General’s performance. This image, depicting the general launching himself alone into Moroccan lines while carrying the flag in the first important confrontation of the war, has become commonplace. This event occurred on 1 January 1860 in what became 102

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103 Figure 7.6  La batalla de Tetuán, Marià Fortuny Marsal, 1865. Oil on canvas, 300 × 972 cm. Source: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (MNAC/​MAM 10695). Photograph by Calveras/​Mérida/​Sagristà. © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

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known as the Battle of Castillejos. Other artists who portrayed the Battle of Tetouan, such as Francisco Sans Cabot (1828–​1881) and Eusebi Planas (1833–​1897), painted Prim starring in this same audacious role. Since then General Prim has embodied the figure of romantic hero in paintings, etchings, and prints. The best pictorial expression of this is Juan Prim, 8 octobre 1868 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), a painting by Henri Regnault (1843–​71) executed in 1868 when Prim was already a statesman. The war in Africa helped the General to project himself, thus considerably increasing his public prestige and promoting his political career. Charles Yriarte asserted that during the campaign he lived like a prince, with a large number of journalists, artists, and writers following his feats from his home base (Yriarte 1888, 6). On the far right of the painting, General Felix Alcalá Galiano, a commander in the cavalry division, is entering Mulay Ahmed’s camp on the flank with a dignity typical of the figures in Diego Velázquez’s equestrian portraits. He is explaining the enemy’s panic, defeat, and desperate flight, which occupies the entire breadth of the first third. In the centre, on horseback and facing the spectator, is Prince Mulay Abbas. Here he is leading the group of Moroccans who are escaping on horseback. Fortuny painted this figure leading the enemy’s hasty abandonment of the battlefield to highlight their humiliating cowardice. We should also note that the Moroccans’ flight in the centre of the painting was treated as if it were a tabaurida, or typical race. This desire to discredit the enemy is also perceived in an anecdotal image that shows a Moroccan fighter taking the camp’s belongings and abandoning his companions. At his side another fighter is seen robbing a dying man, thus illustrating the lack of morality of an uncivilized populace which ultimately deserves to be militarily punished. Interestingly, among a group of Moroccans fleeing recklessly in the lower right-​hand side of the painting is an elderly Jew who, in the right corner of the first third, is escaping with his riches on a donkey led by a black slave, thus representing the stereotype of the avaricious Jew who never abandons his riches. The convincing appearance of La batalla de Tetuán does not prevent it from being the studio composition of a great artist. Imaginary elements, stereotypes, and conventions such as the arrangement of the main characters conveys a glorious idea of victory. Despite the fidelity of the relief, Fortuny distorted the landscape’s colour scheme, transforming the fertile green plains surrounding Tetouan into an arid steppe. This fitted better the European idea of the North African landscape, the most defining element of which is aridity. If we add this to the artist’s insistence on depicting the exotic appearance of the Maghrebian fighters, La batalla de Tetuán can be seen as an orientalist piece, like the paintings of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and, especially, those of the later French campaign in Algeria. This Great Painting offered a perception of war that was different from the heroic individualism of romanticism, in which the protagonist stands out and imposes himself forcefully on the other mortals. In Fortuny’s artwork, the individuality of many figures is blurred, they form an anonymous human mass, and the heroes stand out only discreetly from the group. La batalla de Tetuán is a great pictorial artist’s studio composition but the notes taken in situ and the artist’s own experience give it an expressiveness and plausible aspect that does not exist in most similar works of the era. Contemporary artists such Francesc Sans Cabot and Eduardo Rosales (1836–​1873), who did not witness the war, were far less convincing than Fortuny in their representations of the Tetouan encounter. Sans Cabot’s work, for example, is dominated by the rhetorical device by which the hero is exalted in detriment to the action, which is reduced to a mere scenario. Fortuny attached great importance to his war experiences.This is proven by the fact that he refused to participate in the Duke of Ferrán Núñez’s art exhibition on the war in Africa, arguing that many participants had not witnessed the conflict and could not paint it in a credible way (González 1989, vol. 1, 64). On another occasion when the play Presa di Tetuán was performed at the Albert Theatre in Rome, 104

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the painter left indignantly at the interval because he believed that it distorted the events (Sedó 1974, 87). In summary, La batalla de Tetuán is a pictorial interpretation that aspired to realism within a genre characterized by literary idealism and academicism. However, if it were not for his brilliant execution, you might think that poet and critic Charles Baudelaire’s sentence (1821–​ 1867) summarizing Vernet’s painting Prise de la smalah d’Abd-​el-​Kader as a set of interesting anecdotes without excessive pictorial qualities may also apply to Fortuny’s (Calvo 1982, 340). In short, though the painting is unfinished and has several formal flaws, it should be considered one of the most interesting contemporary historical compositions of nineteenth-​century art.

Works cited Barón, Javier, ed. 2017. Mariano Fortuny (1838–​1874). Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado. Calvo, Francisco, ed. 1982. Ilustración y Romanticismo:  Fuentes y Documentos para la Historia del Arte VII. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. Carbonell, Jordi Àngel. 1999. Marià Fortuny i la descoberta d’Àfrica: Els dibuixos de la guerra hispanomarroquina, 1859–​1860. Barcelona: Columna/​Museu d’Art Modern de Tarragona. —​—​—​. 2005. Orientalisme, L’Al-​Maghrib i els pintors del segle XIX. Reus: Pragma. —​—​—​. 2013. “De la trinchera al atelier.” In La batalla de Tetuan de Fortuny, 37–​109. Barcelona: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. Chillón, Conchi. 2010. Ramón Martí i Alsina. 2 vols. PhD diss., Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Coll, Josep, 1862. “Exposición de los cuadros remitidos por D.  Mariano Fortuny.” Diario de Barcelona, February 11. Davillier, Jean Charles. 1875. Fortuny, sa vie, son oeuvre, sa correspondance. Paris: Auguste Aubry. Doñate, Mercè, Cristina Mendoza, and Francesc Quílez. 2003. Fortuny. Barcelona: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. Galichon, Emile. 1868. “Gérôme peintre ethnographe.” Gazette des Beaux Arts: Courier européen de l’Art et de la Curiosité 10(24) (Jan.–​June): 150. Gracia, Carmen. 1989. “Francisco Domingo y el mercado de la High Class Painting.” Fragmentos 15: 130–​139. González, Carlos, and Montserrat Martí. 1989. Mariano Fortuny Marsal. 2 vols. Barcelona: Edicions catalanes. Laplana, Josep de C. 2013. El venedor de Tapissos de Marià Fortuny. Barcelona: Mediterrània. Lacambre, Genevieve, ed. 1992. Champfleury. Su mirada y la de Baudelaire. Madrid: A. Machado Libros. Marí, Antoni. 1988.“Espacio del deseo” in Pintura orientalista española (1830–​1939), edited by E. Arias, 9–​23. Madrid: Fundación Banco Exterior de España. Moussa, Sarga. 2012. “Les juifs dans l’orientalisme”. Revue Sociétés et Représentations 33:  233–​237. doi:10.3917/​sr.033.0009 10.3917/​sr 033.0183. Navarro, Carlos. 2007–​2008. “Testamentaría e inventario de bienes de Mariano Fortuny en Roma.” Locus Amoenus 9: 319–​349. Orellana, Francisco José. 1871–​1872. Historia del general Prim. Barcelona: La Ilustración. Peña, Baltasar, ed. 1968. Fortuny y Ferrándiz: El genio la amistad. Málaga: Obra cultural de la Caja de Ahorros Provincial de Málaga/​Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas CSIC. Sedó, Salvador. 1974. “El enfado de Fortuny en una noche romana: ante una parodia de mal gusto sobre la toma de Tetuán.” La Vanguardia 90(33748) (December 8): 87. Yriarte, Charles. 1888. Fortuny. Paris: J. Rouam. Yxart, Josep. 1882. Fortuny. Ensayo biográfico-​crítico. Barcelona: Biblioteca “Arte y Letras.”

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8 THE PHILIPPINES IN THE CONTEXT OF THE NINETEENTH-​C ENTURY SPANISH EMPIRE María Dolores Elizalde The nineteenth century witnessed the collapse of the colonial model that had characterized the Philippines within the Spanish Empire. The independence of the republics of continental America brought the close trans-​Pacific relationship between the Philippines and the viceroyalty of New Spain to an end. For Spain, the Philippine archipelago remained a springboard into Asia, but it would no longer function as the defensive rearguard for Spanish America against potential encroachments by other powers, or as the key base for the maritime routes that linked Asia and America. The Manila Galleon ceased to be a conduit for the exchange of people, news, trends, and goods between both shores of the Pacific. The Philippines no longer acted as a supplier of American silver to Asia, or of Asian goods to America, or as part of a worldwide empire. From this moment the Philippines were just another member of an imperial order consisting of a number of Caribbean and Pacific Islands and a handful of African enclaves. As such, it became necessary to redefine the role and meaning of the Philippines as a Spanish territory; to reinvent the economic system in order to make it profitable; to modify the model of government in order to maintain Spanish sovereignty in the Pacific (12,000 km away from the metropolis); and to reassess the situation in order to control the archipelago and integrate its inhabitants into a common political structure with the other subjects of the Empire.These were difficult tasks, and nineteenth-​century governments undertook them with varying levels of ability.1

Colonial economy: from the Manila Galleon to free trade Beyond subsistence agriculture and some crafts—​especially blankets and other textiles—​and its incipient integration into south-​eastern Asian commercial circuits, which were already the most developed economic sectors in pre-​Hispanic times, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century the economy of the Philippines revolved around the commercial route inaugurated by the Manila Galleon, which once a year joined both shores of the Pacific.This route was instrumental for the distribution of Asian goods, which were highly valued in the international markets. The merchandise was brought to the Philippines on-​board Chinese junks—​the only ships that were authorized to do so—​in exchange for American silver, which was a crucial commodity for the Chinese economy. On their return trips from the Philippines, the galleons unloaded their 106

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cargos in Acapulco, whence they were redistributed. This system determined the economy of the archipelago for centuries (Alonso 2009; Giráldez 2015; Schurtz 1939;Yuste 2007). In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Crown authorized direct trade between Spain and the Philippines, through the route that surrounded Africa via the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean. This broke the monopoly that the trans-​Pacific Galleon—​which generated important revenues, through taxes, for the Crown—​had hitherto enjoyed in the trade with the Philippines, creating new ways to trade with the islands, and promoting new business links with Asian harbours. At the same time, the Bourbon reforms undertaken aimed to stimulate Filipino agriculture; established state monopolies over tobacco and indigenous alcohols, which became the main source of fiscal revenue until well into the nineteenth century; and increased taxes on the population. These measures were adopted in order to increase the capacity to generate revenues in the Philippines, but they ended up fostering the emergence of an alternative economic system to the Manila Galleon, the official demise of which was decreed by the Cortes, the Spanish Parliament, in 1815 (Díaz Trechuelo 1965; Fradera 1999; Martínez Shaw and Alfonso Mola 2013). A few years later, the independence of the continental American republics and the law barring Spanish merchants from operating in Mexico sounded the death knell for trans-​Pacific trade (Elizalde 2013a; Pérez Lecha 2014). However, as one door closed another opened, and new economic opportunities emerged in the Philippines: international demand soared for tropical products, such as sugar, cotton, indigo, rice, as well as, later, tobacco, Manila hemp, and copra, products that could all be produced in the Philippines. If their cultivation in the islands was stimulated, and the archipelago was to open up to international trade, the Philippine economy could be reoriented toward becoming a tropical agricultural economy directed at satisfying the demands of international markets. This could be the beginning of a new time of development and prosperity, based on the archipelago’s own resources and not merely as an entrepôt for foreign goods (Corpuz 1997; Larkin 1993; Legarda 1999; Owen 1984). As part of this process, Manila’s harbour was partially opened in 1789 and was made fully accessible to international shipping in 1834; Iloilo, Zamboanga, and Sual opened in 1855, and Cebu in 1860. In parallel, free-​trade policies were progressively adopted, and the archipelago was opened to international investment and commerce.This was a period of increasing Western interest in Asia and the Pacific. China and Japan were forced to open up to trade, while the Europeans entered the Asian markets and created new communication routes—​especially after the inauguration of the Suez Canal in 1869. This contributed to the region coming to the forefront of European interests, including the Philippines, which were strategically located in a high-​potential area. Moreover, after the Ten Years’ War (1868–​1878) in Cuba, Spanish investors with stakes overseas, especially in Cuban sugar, began to fear the loss of the Spanish Antilles, and set up strategies to re-​orient their interests toward the Spanish possessions in Morocco and the Gulf of Guinea, in Africa, and toward the Philippines and the Micronesian islands, in Asia and the Pacific, two areas of growing international expansion. In this context, Spanish investment and foreign presence in the Philippines increased from the 1860s onwards. This process was led by producers, industrialists, merchants, and investors of diverse origin: peninsular and creole Spaniards, native Filipinos, Spanish-​and Chinese-​Filipino mestizos, Chinese, British, French, Americans, and other foreigners.They all shared an interest in the new potential of the archipelago. Sometimes they cooperated peacefully and sometimes they clashed with one another, in complex patterns of collaboration and conflict (Elizalde 2017). The colonial government passed laws that promoted the development of new economic activities. New cultivation areas were opened up, and agricultural colonies were created, 107

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involving an influx of workers from abroad, especially on the peripheral islands, which had hitherto been all but ignored by the Spanish authorities. Surveying for mining and forestry resources intensified. The state monopoly over alcohol came to an end in 1863 and that over tobacco in 1882, because the operational costs were higher than the revenue generated, and the government came under increasing pressure in the late nineteenth century to liberalize such an important sector for the Philippine economy. The end of the tobacco monopoly triggered an inflow of capital and the creation of new firms to replace the state in the production and commercialization of Philippine tobacco. In 1887, a great exhibition about the Philippines was organized in Madrid; its aim was to present the wealth of the archipelago and incentivize investment. New communication routes between Spain and the Philippines were created with public support, and the number of shipping companies operating on the islands increased. An ambitious project modernized the Philippine ports that were open to international trade, and coastal navigation and maritime services were also improved. The telegraph network was installed in the 1880s and the first railway line in the Philippines was inaugurated in 1892. New roads were also built, facilitating the transport of goods and workers. As a result of all of these measures, haciendas and other economic enterprises increased in number, and trade and investment grew substantially: notable examples are the development of enterprises such as the Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas, the San Miguel brewery, the Inchausti distillery, important sugar companies, several maritime companies, a large number of foreign firms, and a number of banks, both Spanish and foreign (De Jesus 1980; Delgado 1996; Fradera 1999; Huetz de Lemps 2013; Legarda 1999; Rodrigo 2002, 2014). However, Spain was never the main market for the Philippines—​it was only the Philippines’ fifth-​g reatest customer. This led to differences of interest between various sectors, especially after the adoption in 1891 of protectionist measures which prioritized Spanish peninsular products on sale in the islands (Elizalde 1998).

Colonial order: the limits of political reform Political life in the Philippines during the nineteenth century was marked by the Cortes of Cadiz, which for the first time summoned representatives of all the territories that constituted the Spanish Empire.The Cortes of Cadiz proclaimed equality of rights for all Spanish subjects in both hemispheres, according to the ideal of the nation as a community of free people, formed by citizens endowed with inalienable rights; this notion was applicable to both metropolitan Spain and its overseas dominions. Therefore, as was the case with other territories, the Philippines were represented in the national parliament by its own deputies for the first time. The 1812 Constitution endorsed the decisions adopted by the Cortes, and began a new ­political cycle in which the inhabitants of the Philippines, especially the creole groups, the mestizos, and the indigenous principalías, were made to believe that they would have a greater participation in political life and equal economic and professional opportunities. Many Filipinos even hoped that this alleged equality would also result in the end of personal taxes and obligations (Castellanos 2012; Celdrán 1994; Elizalde 2013b, 2013c; Llobet2011). The return of Ferdinand VII to the throne in 1813 meant an end to these hopes and a return to old laws. During the following decades, politics in metropolitan Spain oscillated between absolutist periods, during which freedoms were curtailed, and more liberal periods such as the Trienio Liberal (1820–​1823) and the Estatuto Real (1834–​1837), during which Filipinos recovered the status granted by the Cortes of Cadiz and were allowed to send representatives to parliament. However, the idea of an imperial citizenship that extended over all territories and that treated all subjects as equals soon proved to be unmanageable (largely for numerical reasons—​colonial 108

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populations greatly outnumbered the population of metropolitan Spain, and the differences between the various population groups were too wide), and also detrimental to m ­ etropolitan interests. In 1837, after the independence of the Hispanic continental American republics, the Spanish government, which had become concerned by political movements that aimed to undermine the colonial administration, and was afraid of the numerical weight that the representatives of colonial territories could have in the Spanish parliament, decided to limit the rights of its overseas subjects, bringing their representation in parliament to an end, and ­creating special laws that were adapted to each territory’s circumstances. Cuba and Puerto Rico recovered their parliamentary representatives during the final decades of the century, but the Philippines remained excluded until the end of the Spanish rule. As such, European and overseas Spaniards were to have different rights, and specific legislation was to apply in the various territories that constituted the empire, increasing inequality between regions and their populations. These territories were closely interconnected but were ruled according to different legal frameworks. This process had irreversible consequences on overseas territories. The repercussions of promising equality and then denying it were to reverberate throughout the century, leading to a painful and increasingly acrimonious process: civic demands were followed by the creation of alternative national projects in the colonies and these, in turn, by an unstoppable movement toward independence.2 In this context, two groups formed in the Philippines that were to become locked in an ongoing struggle: those who defended the reforms introduced by the 1812 Constitution and later reformist legislation, and those who wished to maintain the traditional status quo in the islands, in the belief that any change could upset the balance of power and endanger Spanish sovereignty. In general, those who defended the former position included liberal groups, those who benefited from greater participation in Philippine political life, and also those who thought that equality would lead to the cancellation of the taxes and other obligations that had been imposed upon the population of the islands. Defending the status quo were those who held power and did not wish to lose their privileges or see the number of people who could participate in government institutions increase. How to fit the Philippines into the framework of the Spanish Empire and what was the best political model for the archipelago were constantly at the centre of the political debate, and this was reflected in the correspondence exchanged by the islands’ general governors and the authorities in Spain. The government even sent ­political observers to analyse the situation in the archipelago and propose political solutions for the governance of the islands. One such observer was Sinibaldo de Mas, who accurately expressed the situation in the colony: “to reform or to leave,” and “in a colony, liberal and insurgent is the same thing.” It was, however, not merely a matter of conservatism or liberalism, but of supporting reform or the status quo; of how to integrate the population of the Philippines into the government and institutional life of the colony; of the sensibility shown toward Filipino claims; of what role the religious orders were to have in public life; of how power should be exercised; and of how to reform government structures in order to redistribute political power. It has been pointed out that often in the Philippines even the staunchest of liberals turned conservative, because of the potential consequences of overturning the foundations upon which the colonial regime rested. The fear that change could upset the fine colonial balance, encouraging separatist tendencies, worked in support of the status quo. As such, after the Cavite Mutiny, one of the most serious incidents against the Spanish administration, the general governor Rafael Izquierdo argued in a letter sent to the colonies minister that Aquí no debe haber otra política que la conservadora. La libertad de enseñanza, la de prensa, el ejercicio de todos los derechos individuales, todo, en fin, cuanto en la culta 109

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Europa constituye la vida y el progreso de los pueblos, aquí solo serviría para dar armas a los enemigos de España, sin provecho para el país mismo, que, por el atraso en que yace, ni podría apreciar tales libertades, ni hacer uso de tales derechos.3 Throughout the nineteenth century, politics in the Philippines was characterized by this constant battle between reformists and anti-​reformists. The former were convinced that Spanish sovereignty could not be maintained without reform, while the latter believed that, should any change ensue, the islands would be inevitably lost. Except for a few people who believed that there was no point in trying to maintain Spanish dominion over an archipelago so distant and that required so much effort, most Spaniards who had some interest in the islands wanted the same thing: to keep the Philippines within the framework of the Spanish Empire. However, both sides had opposing ideas about how this aim could best be achieved. Beyond the instructions received from the metropolis, it was the policies enacted by each governor, the institutional and governmental set-​up, the participation of different groups in politics, the relationships between different communities and many other things that were salient, all of which depended to a great extent on the personal convictions and attitudes of politicians in power. Certain conservative governors adopted harsher policies than those demanded by the conservative governments in the metropolis, whereas some liberal governors ignored the most liberal governments’ instructions. Distance forced the peninsular government to respect the discretion of the overseas general governor and other officials, as they were better acquainted with conditions on the ground and could determine the best policies to be adopted. This, however, created great tensions in the Philippines and discrepancies between the metropolis and the colony, leading to sudden dismissals, inspections, and protests from local residents—​ creoles, natives, and foreigners—​when respected reformist governors were sacked. Examples of this include Andrés García Camba (1837–​1838), Fernando de Norzagaray (1856–​1860), Emilio Terrero (1885–​1888), and EulogioDespujol (1891–​1893), all of whom, regardless of whether their governorships took place during liberal or conservative periods, were well-​regarded by many of their contemporaries (Elizalde 2016, 2018; Martínez Riaza 2016; Montero Vidal 1895). This constant doing and undoing, the weaving and unweaving of reforms and instructions, as well as the permanent confrontation between opposing groups, did not stop some reforms from sticking for good. In this way, the government of the colony progressively mirrored the steps that were being taken in the Península to create a liberal state with modern governmental structures, in line with the zeitgeist of the period. In the case of the Philippines these reforms were reshaped to adapt to the situation of the islands. It is also necessary to take into consideration that, as was the case in other colonial contexts, these reforms, although some of them may be undoubtedly regarded as positive (for instance those that opened up political participation to previously excluded groups), did nothing more than update old structures to the new needs presented by the liberal order and the new economic system that was being developed in the islands. Different measures contributed to modernizing government mechanisms, for instance those dictated by SegismundoMoret and Víctor Balaguer in the 1870s, by Balaguer again and Manuel Becerra in the 1880s, and by Antonio Maura in the 1890s. The captain general and his provincial delegates had their powers reinforced. New figures, such as the civil governors, replaced the former mayors (alcaldes mayores), who had previously presided over provincial governments. Attempts were made to create a force of specialists in colonial administration and put an end to abuses and corruption in the colonial dominions. New municipal models were created that opened up politics; municipal posts were no longer restricted by inheritance to indigenous principalities, and were thus opened to a broader section of the population. The administration 110

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of justice was reformed, and attempts were made to separate the executive from the judiciary—​ at least in those cases in which qualified personnel were available. Judges of first instance were created, and this changed local power balances because, for the first time, the administration of justice was left in the hands of professionals, instead of being determined by the will of local rulers and of missionaries deployed in Filipino villages. During the closing decades of the century, some attempts were made to assimilate the administration of the colony to that of the metropolis; e.g. the civil, criminal, and commercial codes in operation in peninsular Spain were applied to the archipelago. Taxes were reorganized and were made more dependent on the economic activity of the taxpayer (Celdrán 1994; Elizalde 2009, 2011; Fradera 2005; Huetz de Lemps 2006; Sánchez 2010). These policies also included the creation of professional bodies of teachers, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and engineers, who would play a key role in modernizing the colony. Educational policies were reformed, with the introduction of professional and lay teachers. Learning Spanish—​to facilitate communication between the population and the colonial ­administration, and also as an instrument of assimilation—​was encouraged. A new healthcare policy was pursued in accordance with a new approach that regarded well-​being and hygiene as a matter of public order and governmental responsibility (W. Anderson 2007; Huetz de Lemps 2015; Jiménez forthcoming; Regodón 1990). Different scientific institutions were created, with the aim of analysing the eartquakes and typhoons that affected the colony, surveying natural and mineral resources, and drawing a new map of the islands—​tasks that complemented the scientific work being undertaken by the Manila Observatory (Álvarez 2016; Anduaga 2014; Bankoff 2003; Elizalde 2015; Rábano forthcoming; Rodríguez Esteban and Campos Serrano 2018; Schumacher 1965). At the same time, infrastructure improved, with the construction of new roads, port facilities and maritime and fluvial services, including lighthouses, as well as the introduction of the telegraph, railways, and trams; communication was thus improved, the economy was stimulated and the transportation of products for export was facilitated, as well as the mobility and control of the population. These measures benefited exporters of sugar, abaca, tobacco, and other products, the colonial institutions—​which wanted tools with which to control the provinces more effectively—​and also, ultimately, the population in general, which could now move around the islands more easily (Corpuz 1999; Cubeiro 2011; Donnet 1898). The construction of roads and the development of new means of communication brought cities and the rural provincial areas closer together, triggering an exodus of people toward urban nuclei, in search of jobs and new opportunities (Doeppers and Xenos 1998). However, there was still a very significant gap between the cities and the countryside in terms of way of life, housing, political and social structures, and the life expectations of urban and rural groups. The differences between territories and populations also persisted, as the Spanish administration never managed to exercise full control over the whole archipelago; some mountainous areas in the interior and on the southern islands remained beyond the reach of the Spanish, despite the efforts that were made to extend colonial control, send representatives to neglected areas, and reinforce the colonial administration in vulnerable regions. This process toward modernization and progress was no easy task because it caused internal tensions in the colonial administration, which severely hampered the evolution of the archipelago: not everyone agreed about the scope of the reformist process and the role to be played by Filipinos. Different metropolitan governments tried to modernize the administration, but reinforcing mechanisms of colonial control and trying to curb secessionist movements at the same time. As such, reformist policies were applied in a very restrictive way, because it was feared that they could encourage secessionist movements; Filipinos were, as far as possible, left 111

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out of political structures, except for advisory or local posts. Under these circumstances, it was impossible to adapt colonial policies to the times, during a period in which new Filipino groups were gaining strength. These groups did not yet claim independence, but simply wanted to see reforms introduced into the colonial framework: a more active participation in the political life of the archipelago, their own representatives in the Cortes, and the same rights for Filipinos as for the Spanish from the Península.These demands went unheeded, which, in the long run, was to have a high cost for the colonial rulers.

Peculiarities in the colonial governance of the Philippines In this economic and political context, the nineteenth-​century Philippines exhibited a series of specific features that distinguished the archipelago from the rest of the Spanish territories. First, we should note the important role played by religious orders in the life and governance of the archipelago. From the beginning, one of the main aims of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines was to evangelize its inhabitants. Toward this end, Augustinians, Franciscans, Recollects, Dominicans, Jesuits, and, later, members of other minor orders, settled on the islands, taking residence in indigenous villages and learning their vernacular tongues in order to spread Christian doctrine. They also opened schools for boys, girls, and adults, teaching them to read and write, as well as the basics of agriculture, hygiene, and other skills that could improve their daily lives. Over time, missionaries became very important figures in these communities, advising their inhabitants and arbitrating disputes, which turned them into a crucial mechanism for the control of the local population. They also acted as interlocutors and translators between the native inhabitants and the colonial authorities, acquiring increasing power in the governance of the islands. This situation led them not always to accept willingly the instructions of the colonial authorities, and to resist the government’s attempts to diminish the power of the missionaries and their ability to affect events in the archipelago. As such, and mirroring events in the Península, where civil and ecclesiastical powers were defining their respective areas of influence, the nineteenth-​century Philippines witnessed a struggle between the religious and the civil administration. The religious orders also had to face the opposition of various Filipino groups: the gobernadorcillos, who complained about the constant interference of the missionaries in the local governance of indigenous villages; the Ilustrados, thelocal intelligentsia, which believed that the friars had a negative influence upon the population, hampering dynamics of change and progress; agricultural tenants and peasants, who were dismayed by the size of some religious orders’ properties and the harsh conditions that the Church imposed on tenants and labourers; and, the Filipino secular clergy, because the religious orders tried to limit their authority and restrict the parishes in which they could exercise their ministry, despite the policies aimed at promoting the creation of a native clergy that had been put forward after the expulsion of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century. These tensions crystallized in the form of conflicts for the control of various administrative structures; obstacles to the dissemination and implementation of government instructions; conflicts in places such as Binondo and Calamba; the struggle for the control of parochial and cathedral appointments; violent episodes, for instance the Cavite Mutiny; and constant complaints against the meddling of religious orders, which, at times, even led some to request their expulsion from the archipelago. Although the Spanish government tried to curb the power and influence of religious orders in the archipelago, it always shied away from confronting them head on, in the belief that their role in governing and controlling the population was irreplaceable. Despite ongoing tensions, the official discourse never ceased to stress the importance of missionaries for Spanish 112

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sovereignty over the Philippines (Blanco 2012; Elizalde and Huetz de Lemps 2015a, 2015b; Huetz de Lemps and Elizalde 2014). Indeed, despite this tension, it must be recognized that both the religious orders and the ecclesiastical hierarchy shaped some key features of the Philippines in the nineteenth century, the imprint of which ares still recognisable today. First, their evangelization ran deep, and the Philippines remains to this day among the most fervently Catholic countries in the world. Greatly contributing to this fact was the symbiosis between Catholic teachings and animist and local beliefs, which merged over time to constitute very robust forms of popular religiosity. In addition, religious orders contributed to the fact that the level of education of Filipinos was relatively high, compared with the Philippines’ Asian neighbours, and with other colonial spaces and even some regions in the metropolis. Finally, the missionaries played a decisive role in the preservation of local vernacular languages, codifying the first grammars of many Filipino dialects; they also recorded numerous histories and ethnographic compilations, and greatly contributed to improving scientific knowledge of indigenous flora and fauna, meteorology, and the natural phenomena that affected the archipelago with such frequency. Concerning education, the religious orders created schools in the towns where their missions were active and also, from a very early date, universities, such as the Universidad de Santo Tomás, the first university in Asia, founded by the Dominicans in 1611, and the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán and Colegio Seminario de San Ignacio, founded by the Jesuits. As such, by the nineteenth century Filipinos could study theology, philosophy, law, arts and grammar, pharmacy, and medicine at the university. In 1859, the Jesuits founded the Ateneo Municipal de Manila, an important secondary school in which the children of the Spanish elite, creoles, mestizos, foreigners,and also some native Filipinos studied together. In parallel, from the mid-​nineteenth century onwards, the state promoted the creation of a number of professional schools—​Escuela Naval de Manila, Escuela de Dibujo y Pintura, Escuela de Botánica y Agricultura, etc. With these educational policies, the state aimed to boost public education, enacting a primary education plan in 1863, founding teachers’ schools for local students, and creating a committee for public education to supervise these projects. As a result, during the nineteenth century, substantial numbers of Filipinos were educated in their home islands, although some of them went on to complete their training in Spain or other European and foreign countries.The main characteristic of this group of Ilustrados was their high level of education, rather than their socioeconomic position, and they were to play an essential role in the formation of the Philippine national conscience. One of the most outstanding members of the group was José Rizal, one of the leaders in the construction of Philippine nationhood (Arcilla 1988; Isabel 2014; Mojares 2006; Thomas 2012). Another element that characterized the governance of the Philippines was the cooperation between the colonial government and indigenous principalías, which saw their authority endorsed and protected in exchange for accepting Spanish sovereignty, controlling the local population, organizing labour services, and collecting taxes. Over time, however, municipal administration changed:  the end of these hereditary gobernadorcillos and the creation of new councils opened up the political arena to new sectors of the population. Although the meddling of the colonial administration in the everyday life of the colony was increasingly unpopular, cooperation with the local elites in the pueblos de indios, which dated back to the early stages of the process of colonization, was a factor that facilitated the acceptance and maintenance of the Spanish government on the islands (Bankoff 1992; Inarejos 2015; Sánchez 1991). A third key feature of the Spanish Philippines was the Chinese presence in the archipelago, which in the end became a fundamental pillar of Philippine society. Southern Chinese 113

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merchants had kept close commercial links with the Philippines since pre-​Hispanic times, and were to play a significant role during the operation of the Manila Galleon, exchanging Asian products for American silver. Soon, the Chinese—​approximately 5,000 in 1586—​outnumbered Spanish administrators, who began to perceive them as a threat. As a result, the Chinese were secluded in a parián, where their activities could be controlled more easily. In the early centuries of the colonial period, the relationship was marked by violence, confrontation, massacres, and expulsions. However, the Chinese presence did not decline, but remained a significant factor for the commercial life of the colony. Eventually, the Chinese community underwent a voluntary process of ‘Filipinization’ and integration in the society of the islands, which normalized their presence, the Chinese mestizos assuming an increasingly important role in the economic, political, and social life of the colony. They even occupied important positions in the city councils—​for instance that in Cebu, which Chinese mestizos ended up controlling–​and other political and economic institutions.The agreement signed by Spain and China in 1864—​Tratado de Amistad y Comercio—​endorsed the presence of the Chinese colony in the Philippines, which by the late nineteenth century numbered around 90,000 people (Chu 2010; Elizalde 2013d; Wickberg [1965] 2001; Wilson 2004).

The road to revolution In this context, throughout the nineteenth century, the voices that demanded political, social, and economic equality between Philippine and peninsular Spanish-​born citizens became progressively stronger. At first, the protests were led by the creole and mestizo political and economic elites, the native principalías, and creole and mestizo army officers. Soon, however, these groups were joined by social groups with a wider base of popular support: discontented peasants; new urban classes; employees working for the colonial administration or for one of the growing private firms operating on the islands; the Filipino secular clergy, which had fewer opportunities and less power than peninsular priests; and indigenous religious movements. Throughout the nineteenth century, the revolution was heralded by other protest movements that reflected popular discontent with the colonial order.These included: the conspiracy hatched in 1822 by the Bayot brothers, captains of the King’s Own Regiment, who stood up to demand that the same rights and opportunities be granted to creoles, mestizos, natives, and peninsular Spaniards; the revolt in 1823 of a group of army officers, led by the mestizo sergeant Andrés Novales, in protest against the discrimination suffered by Filipino personnel in the armed forces; the plot in 1828 of the brothers Miguel and Vicente Palmero, with the support of a group of creoles and some Chinese mestizos, natives, and foreigners, to kill the colonial authorities during a religious ceremony and proclaim independence; the ban and harsh persecution in 1841 of the Cofradía de San José, a religious movement encouraged by the Filipino Apolinario de la Cruz; the riot in 1843 of a group of army officers in Tabayas in favour of independence; and, in the 1860s, the circulation of various pamphlets written by Filipino clerics defending their rights against the discriminatory policies that were implemented by the ecclesiastical hierarchy in order to keep them away from the parishes and diminish their influence on the population. The most significant action against the Spanish regime was the Cavite Mutiny, which began on 20 January 1872. The mutiny was joined by various military, civil, and religious elements. Although the mutiny failed and was harshly repressed, the fear that a revolutionary movement would spread partly explains why the government, instead of responding to the demands of the Filipinos for greater reforms and equality within the colonial framework, chose to develop a policy of repression and to further strengthen the colonial administration. However, this policy did not stop the opposition, and new protests followed, such as the public demonstration held 114

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in Manila in March 1888 in favour of the reformist policy implemented by Governor General Terrero and against the religious orders (Blanco 2012; Ileto 1979; Llobet 2011, 2009, 2014; Schumacher 1981, 2011). From the 1870s onwards, the local intelligentsia assimilated these expressions of discontent, which came under the umbrella of the movement known as “La Propaganda,” the aims of which were to fight for legal equality, institutional reform and economic modernization. They still channelled their demands within the mechanisms of the colonial administration and did not question the archipelago’s relationship with Spain. However, after repeatedly failing to find answers to their demands, they finally understood that the Spanish authorities were not going to meet their requests and would not recognize them as equals; therefore, from 1890 they raised the stakes, at first demanding self-​government and, later, independence (Schumacher 1973, 1991; Rafael 1990). During this process, the figure of José Rizal, who at that point was the main point of reference for Philippine nationalism, was to play a central role. In 1892, after a long struggle for the rights of the inhabitants of the Philippines and some years living in peninsular Spain and other countries, Rizal decided to return to the archipelago and found the “Liga Filipina.” It was a political movement that promoted his ideals and aimed to educate Filipinos for full sovereignty, a target that, in his opinion, should be achieved by peaceful means. However, the governor general at the time, fearful of Rizal’s influence among the people, exiled him to Dapitán on the island of Mindanao, where he remained for four years. There, Rizal received visits from those who, as we shall see in the following paragraphs, dreamt of a revolution in the Philippines and wanted to recruit him for their cause. Rizal, however, refused to commit himself to an armed uprising. He would neither lead nor initiate such actions; in his opinion, both he and his family had suffered enough for his lifelong struggle for the rights of Filipinos. As such, he tried to stay away from the fray, asking permission to work as a doctor in Cuba. Although this was granted him, when the revolution broke out he was arrested aboard the ship that was carrying him to the Antilles and brought back to the Philippines to be tried. He was shot in December 1896, after a military trial (B. Anderson 2007; Barón 1980; Elizalde 2011; Goujat 2010; Quibuyen 1997; Zaide 1984). The struggle against the colonial regime continued after the death of Rizal under the ­leadership of the Katipunan, an opposition group led by Andrés Bonifacio.Founded in the 1890s and possessing a broader social base than the Ilustrados, this movement demanded full political independence and equality of rights for all, regardless of education, wealth, or race, and also the recovery of the pre-​Hispanic Filipino essence.Their ideas were more radical than those of Rizal and most of the enlightened elite, and they did not shy away from using violence to achieve their ends. They garnered the support of the small bourgeoisie and the less favoured social groups, in both urban and rural settings. Their mouthpiece, the newspaper Kalaayan, openly called for an armed insurrection against colonial rule. Progressively, the movement organized a guerrilla movement which had widespread popular support. In this context, on 26 August 1896, in a meeting known as the Grito de Balintawak, Bonifacio destroyed his personal identity card as a symbolic gesture against the colonial authorities and ratified the decision to take up arms against the Spanish government. The revolution began four days later, and the guerrillas rapidly spread throughout Manila and the surrounding region, and soon extended to other islands (Agoncillo 1956; Churchill 1997). From the start, the revolution brought the motivations of different groups together. First, the Ilustrados demanded equality, liberty, and political rights, in continuation of the previous struggle of creoles and mestizos; this was compounded with popular discontent with the survival of a colonial regime that limited the free development of the Filipinos. In addition, there 115

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was widespread anger at the prominent role played by Spanish religious orders in the life of the islands; this feeling was further aggravated by the unequal treatment afforded to Spanish and native clergy. Finally, there was considerable discontent over economic policy; it was believed that taxes and the prevailing land property and lease systems were hampering the development of the different economic sectors that were increasingly committed to the economic transformation of the nation. However, the revolution was no immediate success. A significant proportion of business and enlightened elites did not support the armed struggle, and were suspicious of political power being assumed by the new political sectors represented by Andrés Bonifacio and the indigenous principalías, whose role in the revolution would become critical. Furthermore, the revolutionaries were poorly armed. In addition to this, the revolutionary camp was soon riddled with internal dissent about who should lead the movement, which led to a change in leadership. Bonifacio was displaced by the growing influence of Emilio Aguinaldo—​the victor in the battlefield of Cavite—​who represented sectors that were closer to the principalías and espoused a more conservative form of republicanism. In an event that has never been fully clarified, Bonifacio was murdered and Aguinaldo stood alone at the head of the revolution (Ileto 1998; Richardson and Fast 1979; Rodao and Noelle 2001). After months of battling, the strength of Spanish arms and the weight of a colonial structure that still dreamt of a brilliant future in the islands gained the upper hand. The Pact of Bic-​Na-​Bató, signed by Spaniards and Filipinos in December 1897, brought the revolution to an end. The revolutionaries lay down their arms and their leaders were exiled to Hong Kong. In exchange, the Spanish government promised an amnesty, economic reparations, and reform. None of the parties fully met their commitments. Peace was just a brief interlude during which both sides imagined a different outcome: the Spaniards, the revival of a colony where peace had been restored and where Spanish rule could continue; the revolutionaries, an independent republic, the first colonial territory in Asia to achieve independence. However, the American intervention in the Philippines was to frustrate both projects.

The American intervention In 1898, Spanish sovereignty over the Philippines faced an unexpected and, in the event, final challenge. The United States was embarking on a new foreign policy, and wished to increase its influence in the Pacific and China. Against this background, on 20 April 1898 the government of William McKinley declared war on Spain in order to put an end to instability in Cuba, which was affecting American economic and strategic interests in the area. In principle, the conflict had no connection with Asia. However, when the hostilities began, the first act of war launched by the United States was an attack on Manila. Ostensibly, the operation against the Philippines aimed to destroy the Spanish fleet in the Pacific, thus preventing it from attacking the western coast of the United States and forcing the Americans to open a second front. The official explanation also argued that this would give the Americans an extra lever for the peace negotiations. However, there was also an obvious interest in taking advantage of the war to acquire a naval base in a region that was rapidly becoming a strategic priority for the United States. A station in the Philippines would be an ideal complement for the network of bases that the United States was creating throughout the Pacific, while helping to open Asian markets to American trade at a time when colonial competition was at its height and China seemed to be on the verge of being divided into different spheres of influence. In this context, McKinley tried to solve the situation in the Caribbean and the Pacific with one stroke. By acting simultaneously in both theatres, he could finish the insurrection in Cuba while 116

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simultaneously creating a military base in one of the Spanish-​ruled islands in the Pacific, from which to defend American interests in the region. For this reason, a few days after the declaration of war, on 1 May 1898, the American navy attacked the Spanish fleet in the Philippines, destroying it, and dragging the archipelago into a war with which, in principle, it had little to do. After the naval victory of Cavite, McKinley consolidated his advantage also on land, securing the American beach heads in Manila and Luzon, and then occupying the rest of the archipelago. At the same time, American forces occupied a string of islands across the Pacific—​Hawaii, Samoa, Guam, Wake—​through which they could ensure communication and supply. When it came to defining the limits of the campaign, McKinley followed the recommendation of some of his advisers and a large number of experts, and decided to annex all the Philippines for political, strategic, economic, and moral reasons.This decision inaugurated a new policy of expansion in Asia and the Pacific by the United States. In this context, the Philippine nationalist leaders, who had initially supported the American presence in the belief that this would help them in their struggle against the Spanish rule, were forced to give up the republic proclaimed on 12 June 1898, the Constitution of Malolos enacted a few months later, and the desired independence, at least for the time being. When the real intentions of the United States became clear, a four-​year war began between the Filipinos and the Americans.The war was followed by a long period of American protectorate, until full independence was finally granted in 1946 after the end of the Second World War. Spain, for its part, was forced to renounce the Philippines and Guam in the Paris Peace Treaty signed with the United States in December 1898. A few months later, a secret negotiation that had taken place while the Spanish-​American War was still being fought resulted in the sale of the rest of the Spanish islands in Micronesia to Germany. Spain thus lost its last Pacific colonies and began a new period of internal regeneration and reconstruction (Dobson 1988; Elizalde 1997, 2003; Kramer 2006; Lafeber 1963; McAllister 2000; McCormick 1967; Morgan 1964; Miller 1983; Offner 1992; Welch 1979).

Notes 1 This work has been carried out within the framework of the project “La modernización de Filipinas, 1868–​1898” (HAR2015-​66511-​P), and was supported by the Spanish National Research Plan and FEDER funds. 2 Josep M. Fradera, La nación imperial (1750–​1918). Derechos, representación y ciudadanía en los imperios de Gran Bretaña, Francia, España y Estados Unidos, Barcelona:  Edhasa, 2016, 2  vols. These arguments are masterfully presented in this work, where the author stresses that the process was not exclusive to the Spanish Empire, but rather was a common problem faced by all empires after the Atlantic revolutions. He demonstrates this through a comparison of the Spanish, British, French, and American empires. 3 Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), Madrid, Spain. Ultramar, 5242, exp.  816, Carta reservada del gobernador general de Filipinas al ministro de Ultramar, 1872: “Here no policy has any place but conservatism. Free teaching, the freedom of the press, the exercise of individual rights, all those things that, in short, express the life and progress of peoples in cultivated Europe, would have no effect here other than giving arms to the enemies of Spain, without real profit to the country, which because of its own backwardness is in no condition to appreciate such liberties or use such rights.”

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9 NINETEENTH-​C ENTURY REALISM AND POLITICAL ECONOMY The plot against the equation Luis Fernández Cifuentes Economic theory and its discontents Scholars have been warning readers over the past hundred years: nineteenth-​century fictions generally grouped under the labels of realism and naturalism cannot be fully understood without sufficient command of the “economic circumstances” that decisively mold their plots and characters (Auerbach [1946] 1973, 455).The historical grounds for this phase in the history of the novel are twofold. On the one hand, the Industrial Revolution brought unprecedented economic growth throughout the nineteenth century in all of Europe, including Spain (Tortella 2017, 89). On the other, this empirical growth was accompanied by an equally unprecedented development of economic theories that tried to pin down the laws governing it. As a result, the so-​called “rise of the novel” and the “emergence of modern economic analysis” not only occurred at the same time, but it is during that period that realist novels take in distinctive economic activities of contemporary societies and give them pivotal roles in their plots (Lewis 2000, 2). Moreover, presence or absence of money separates “deceptive fiction (an operation without reference to any stores of gold)” from “truthful realism based on the solid support of gold existing ‘in person’ ” (Goux 1994, 92). Like Brooks (2005, 14–​15) and others, Goux (1994, 94–​96) also associates money with a specific view of language in realism: money and words shared a similar “power of representation” as “neutral mediums” in this “great economic age of gold-​language.” But this historical coupling of fiction and economics was hardly a simple correlation: nineteenth-​century economy-​conscious realism thrived, in great part, against the rational and tidy grain of a Political Economy that had realism in its blind spot. Here are the basic traits of this productive discord. Nineteenth-​ century Political Economy was much more concerned with modern free markets than it was with consumers and consumption. Within markets, it was more concerned with the self-​regulating mechanics of supply and demand than it was with types of commodities. At the same time, sociologists and novelists were especially interested in the economists’ neglected areas. They observed two “divorced” city markets: the financier’s banks and stock exchange, where money (mostly invisible) was the commodity, and the consumer’s market, where money (visible and tangible) was but the means of exchange 122

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for two types of commodities: necessities and luxuries (Appadurai 1986, 49–​50). They realized from the start that necessities were of little interest to capitalism: “the principal cause of the expansion of trade, industry, and finance capital was the demand for luxury goods” (37). Up until the Industrial Revolution, sumptuary laws and the Church’s predicates tried to control the inordinate and sinful consumption of luxury goods (as well as its corollary: money lending at abusive interest). The onslaught of capitalism—​“the child of luxury” (Sombart 1967, 113)—​ dismantled those legal and ethical frames, and facilitated the onset of luxury fever with “the understanding of luxury in terms of [capitalist] economic prosperity rather than political morality” (Calefato 2014, 5–​6). Luxury will be one of the main objects (sometimes the main object) of the novelist’s attention. If there remained “a substratum of moral disapproval” of luxury under capitalism (Berry 2016, 55), it will appear in the realist novel mostly under the guise of clinical diagnoses: not a sin but an illness. In their study of markets, sociologists and, especially, novelists found fault primarily with the economists’ theory of consumption and consumer: “economics does not effectively have a distinct theory of consumption”—​it just makes do with the one-​size-​fits-​all idea of a paradigmatic consumer driven only by “utility maximization” (Fine 2002, 125). That is, for Political Economy, “consumption is predominantly determined by the maximization of utility, subject to the prevailing budget and price constraints [of rational consumers]” (127). Consequently, regarding “luxury goods, the norm is for those to have them only if they are wealthy and of a particular socio-​economic class” (152). Economists ignore not only gender and other cultural factors conditioning consumers but such prevalent irrational phenomena as “conspicuous consumption” (127) and similar forms of “addiction” (139). In economic theories, “individual acts of obtaining and enjoying individual purchases become irrelevant” (129). Realist novelists fill that gap with case after case of an epidemic of luxury fever:  distinctive consumers, generally female and of insufficient means, who, motivated not by rational utility but by “limitless desires for superfluous luxuries” (Berry 2016, 49–​50), end up in ever spiraling debts when they embark on the neurotic acquisition of (very specific) luxury objects. Louis Menand sharply summarizes the conflict in a New Yorker book review (Sept. 3, 2018): But, how was that model of the rational economic actor ever plausible? It’s not just that human beings are neurotic; it’s that, on the list of things human beings are neurotic about, money is close to the top. … Don’t economists ever read novels? Practically every realist novel, from Austin and Balzac to James and Wharton, is about people behaving badly around money. Free markets didn’t change that. They arguably made people even crazier. Morson and Shapiro demonstrate throughout Cents and Sensibility (2018) that Political Economy deals with all things measurable through master equations, while realist novels, interested mostly in consumers’ unmeasurable whims, require intricate plots to expose them. As I turn now to the realist/​naturalist novels themselves (and flesh out and nuance this oversimplified summary), I will be reading primarily for the plot, and the ways plots and their agents quarrel with economics’ provisions. First, I analyze plots (and their cartographies) in three novels of the financier: Narcis Oller’s La febre d’or (1890–​1892), Galdós’ Novelas de Torquemada (1889–​ 1895), and Pardo Bazán’s Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886). I move then to a masterful novel of the consumer (and of consumerism): Galdós’s La desheredada (1881). I will close with a singular novel of necessity, Galdós’s Misericordia (1897), published at a time when the crisis of representability—​“a crisis of linguistic currency … when the realist referent and the mechanisms of representation had broken down” (Goux 1994, 97)—​was making headway, and the overpowering success of 123

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capitalist markets was invalidating dichotomies like luxury versus necessity. (To be sure, early symptoms of this crisis can be discerned in the novels studied here. See Martí-​López 2017, passim.)

Diagnosing the financier’s ailments The figure of the male financier and/​or money lender—​one of realism’s stock characters, who often makes brief but decisive appearances in many a prototypical realist plot, from Clarín’s Doña Berta to Galdós’ La de Bringas—​takes here center stage in three different guises and three distinctive locales: Oller’s Barcelona, Galdós’ Madrid, and Pardo Bazán’s rural Galicia. All three novels grapple with “el mal de la época, la fiebre de los negocios” [business fever, the evil of the times] (Galdós Torquemada 1889 [1895], 1434). Their plots are focused to a considerable extent on the growth of capital through the circulation of money, with special attention to the characters that govern that circulation, as well as those (often the same) who suffer or perish in the process. In every case, money means no longer “la materialitat dels diners” (Oller [1890–​1892] 2012, 379)  or “el materialismo del dinero” [the materiality of money] (Galdós Torquemada, 1349); in other words, not the accumulation of visible and tangible cash in which only antiquated “fetish-​worshippers of metal money” (Marx [1932] 1964, 153)  found satisfaction. Here most of the money is forever invested and reinvested; that is, neither visible nor tangible except indirectly, in the words and, especially, the numbers endlessly discussed in pervasive male conversations; or registered in accounting books (now as large and sacred as ancient antiphonaries: Oller 2012, 84); or printed in stock documents (like those ironically embellished by Francesc, anti-​capitalist artist: Oller 2012, 73). Oller’s La febre d’or is the rigorously documented story of an individual’s precipitous rise and fall at Barcelona’s “Borsa” [Stock Exchange] (36). Gil Foix is the seemingly one-​piece financier sketched by the book: he abides by the rational and unifying principles of Political Economy. As a sterling businessman, he rises in the manly and all-​powerful Borsa because he is exceptionally talented at the job. What’s more, “no sabia apreciar altre talent que el de fer diners” [He could appreciate no talent but the talent of making money] (277). As the plot gets underway, this talent is more and more exclusively devoted to a modern, all-​consuming, “pure” way of making money. Bernat—​the critical and doubt-​r idden intellectual in the family, equally versed in Political Economy and general ethics—​explains it as follows: unlike the masses of different professions that Gil despises (131), the financier makes money not from ordinary work but from money management; la massa és rutinària, incrédula, sempre refractària a tota innovació.Apoderada dels diners en petites fraccions, impossibilitaria les reformes amb les seves pors i desconfiances. … És just arrencar els diners de les mans avares que els acaparen … Sols així es concentren en mans intel-​ligents i útils aquels grans capitals que la indústria, el comerç i el progres general reclamen.1 (99–​100) In the pure financier’s understanding, progress means but growth of capital at an ever-​faster  pace. However, the novel’s plot slowly disassembles such pristine, plotless configuration of the financier. For one thing, a thread of the plot follows a dangerous fissure in the financier’s apparently solid makeup:  Gil has a gift for finances, but is a “totxo” [fool] (343) for everything else. The plot’s logic runs here like this: Gil has amassed great wealth; great wealth brings 124

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enormous power, for capitalism has replaced old castes with new economic hierarchies (178); Gil, unwisely enticed by power, “postergat el negoci a últim terme” [pushed business to the back burner] (395); his associates, wanting in both financial skills and moral integrity, badly mismanage his investments; Gillet loses both power and money (441; Resina 1994 [1995], 262). At the end Bernat ponders over this fall’s rationale: “El veritable jugador no sent sinó una ambició; no es distreu ams altres coses; non es fia de ningú; no perd de vista la marxa del joc ni un moment;” but the Foixes fail the test: “no sabem raonar fredament, com cal”2 (Oller, 473–​ 474). For another thing, in the course of a realist plot that thrives on detail and individuality, reversals and imponderables, the mandatory features of the model financier are revealed at the same time as troublesome deficiencies of the individual, new fissures in the block, symptoms even of a distinctive pathology (figurative and literal), already foreshadowed in the fever of the title. La febre d’or pays special attention to two deficiencies (or two versions of one). First, in Gil’s words to his wife, “M’he acostumat ja a veure les coses a l’engròs, en gran, a abarcar d’una mirada els grans horitzons del negoci … i a despreciar, per insignificants, els detalls”3 (175). Second, the individual turns out to be but one of those insignificant details, as Gil declares to Bernat: “Vostè es fixa sempre en l’individu: jo miro més alt” [You latch onto the individual. I aim higher] (101). As the plot evolves—​with a fast pace that mimics the pace of the city’s economic “evolució” (163)—​individuals (women, in particular, but also artists and intellectuals) and details (mostly related to cash and luxury) disrupt the financier’s totalizing economic project (Resina 1994 [1995], 264), which reads at that point like an “opera buffa” (Oller, 339). One episode brings these shortcomings together under a sharp focus. In the midst of “el desamor i el menyspreu que anava guanyant-​se entre els seus” [the enmity and disdain that his family was feeling toward him] (329), precisely because of his indifference to details and individuals, Gil decides to make a characteristic luxury purchase (167), one that, in his view, constitutes an “episodi indispensable a la biografia de tot home milionari” [indispensable episode in every millionaire’s biography] (336): he takes a big-​ticket mistress, Mimi, “en veritable demi-​mondaine” [a genuine demi-​mondaine] (343). The purchase of luxury objects—​including expensive cocottes—​is arguably the favorite yardstick in realism’s exploration of economic quandaries, but it acquires a special character in the novels of the financier. Unlike realism’s addicted and improvident consumers of luxury, the canny financier not only can afford luxury purchases but computes them as productive investments. In Marx’s words: “pleasure is therefore subsumed under capital, and the pleasure-​ taking individual under the capital-​accumulating individual” ([1932] 1964, 157). The luxury of Gil’s new home, for example, “atrauria clients com la mel a les mosques” [would lure customers like honey lures flies] (Oller [1890–​1892] 2012, 64). The demi-​mondaine would add to his reputation as successful financier before she added to his personal pleasure. Typically, Mimi is at the same time a luxury object and a master consumer of luxury objects with which to surround herself for the benefit of the financier. More significantly, though, such an economic environment makes Mimi no different from other women, including the more central, regular family women of the story: Gil’s wife, Caterina, and his daughter, Delfina. Indifferent to the world of business or afraid of it (Oller 315), they are, like Mimi, the recipients of the financier’s abundant (though marginal) cash, which they are expected to spend in the conspicuous consumption of luxuries, as a public reflection of the financier’s economic magnitude. “Concordança de fons y forma” [An accord of form and content], in Delfina’s words (217). Like Mimi, though, they are or become distinct individuals who, rising above the initial “desvaliment de son sexe” [defenselessness of their gender] (376:), manage to resist and even sabotage capital’s power. Mimi, in Paris, abandons the financier for the artist, and turns her conspicuous consumption with the capitalist’s money into a form of restitution: “Ells despullen el vestit; jo vesteixo el despullat” 125

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[They strip the clothed; I cloth the naked] (354). Caterina, angry at Gil’s neglect of family life and later at his adultery, displays “l’enteresa i valentia en que acabava de reptar-​lo i humiliar-​lo” [enough composure and courage to defy and humiliate him] (377). An unflappable Delfina withstands Gil’s monetary siege: “m’ha posat cents i cents de duros a les mans, i non ha pogut treure res” [he has given me hundreds and hundreds of duros to absolutely no avail] (277); like Mimi, she loves an artist over a financier. With Gil’s economic, social, and familial defeat, the closure, wrapped in illness and guilt, typically unveils the ultimate pathological condition of the financier. Brown (1959, 253), following Keynes, traces such pathology all the way back to Aristotle, for whom “money-​making is an unnatural perversion,” a form of neurosis. Gil does not die or go to jail (like Dreiser’s Cowperwood in his Trilogy of Desire or Zola’s Saccard, in his L’Argent), but he suffers two serious ailments. First, a turbulent fever, from which he “resurrects” an impoverished man (Oller, 409). Last, a neurosis that manual labor may cure (477).The financier vanishes and—​Bernat observes—​the plot returns to the point of departure (477), to a sort of non-​monetary, almost primal state of grace. The cartography of Gil’s rise-​and-​fall is as significant as his economic trajectory, and both work together to relay a story of nation building under capitalism. On the one hand (and however ironically noted), Gil’s Barcelona is a rich city (175), rapidly and self-​consciously advancing (110, 123)  toward a status of modern “grand capital” with “great gentlemen” (277). On the other, Barcelona strives to be part of a Europe that is “congestionada d’or” [bursting with gold] (193). Witness the grand opening of the racetrack, a historical event that Oller’s plot pushes back a few years in order to make it represent the European luxuriousness of Gil’s prosperous city. More importantly, in the novel’s cartography, Barcelona has a distinguished center and two aligning points of reference. A detailed description of the center—​la Borsa—​opens and frames the novel, signaling in the process the displacement of both the power of the Church (from which la Borsa retains the “majestic proportions,” solemnity and “thaumaturgical force” of a “temple” 36–​37) and the power of the State (from which it steals the male talent to become “més poderosa que els governs, que la política” [more powerful than governments and politics], 46). Precisely, Brown (1959, 249) associates that “transvaluation of religious values” with “the institution of interest-​bearing capital investment” and calls it “the key factor in the economic development called the urban revolution.” Barcelona’s aligning points of reference—​ Paris and Madrid—​position it on the map of nineteenth-​century metropolitan models. Paris—​“la moderna Babilònia […] amb son formidable ferment de vida” [modern Babylon …, with its powerful leaven for life] (Oller, 361), where “el mon presenciava la més gran y profitosa de les lluites, la lluita per el benestar general” [the world contemplated the greatest and more profitable of all struggles, the struggle for general welfare] (193)—​is the novel’s major economic and cultural reference and the financier’s primary destination outside the Peninsula (Resina 1994 [1995], 266–​268). Madrid—​the nation’s capital, with a languorous and corrupt government and scant economic power (Oller, 331, 379, 385)—​is generally (and sparsely) treated with subdued mockery, as if unworthy of serious political and economic consideration, just like “la petita part de l’alta societat de Barcelona que pren per patró la de Madrid” [the small group within Barcelona’s high society that models itself after Madrid] and speaks flawed Spanish (158). Curiously, Galdós’ depiction of Madrid will underwrite, in its own negative way, Oller’s representation: in Torquemada, Madrid has no center nor strong points of reference. Its political centrality, neither questioned nor enhanced, seems to be taken for granted (politics is for senator Torquemada but a “useless comedy”: Galdós, Torquemada, 1455). Neither Paris nor Barcelona, or any other emblematic city, make any defining contribution to the map in the novel (if there is indeed a map, other than the one traced by Torquemada’s business routes around town). Torquemada, for one, finds no reason to ever leave his city (1490). Much like Barcelona’s, 126

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Madrid’s society appears “envilecida por los negocios y el positivismo” [debased by businesses and positivism] (1447). Torquemada suffers from the same business fever (1367) as Gil. However, the four Torquemada novels do not chronicle modern ways of quickly amassing enormous wealth (and/​or quickly losing it). They mostly trace a slow and irresolute “metamórfosis” (1396) from unwholesome moneylending to “negocios limpios como el sol” [impeccably clean businesses] (1483):  “el vampiro de los pobres hecho financiero de tomo y lomo” [the vampire of poor folks become an out-​and-​out financier] (1486). Interestingly, though, this transition, even at its best, does not encompass or reflect a modernization of city and society; rather, it constitutes a form of historical recycling with hybrid results. It yields to yet another “ley del siglo, por la cual la riqueza inmueble de las familias históricas va pasando a una segunda aristocracia cuyos pergaminos se pierden en la oscuridad de una tienda o en los repliegues de la industria usuraria”4 (1555). Here is the story. The rich widower Torquemada loses both his revered son, a prodigy in “las santísimas matemáticas” [very holy mathematics] (1385), and his religious faith when his last-​minute charities—​his one and only unproductive investment—​fail to procure from God and the Virgin his child’s recovery. Later, after a dream promises him the rebirth of his lost prodigy (yet more “recycling”:  Fuentes 2007, 39), Torquemada, honoring friends’ recommendations, makes his one far-​reaching investment in luxury: he remarries into an indigent but genuinely titled family of three siblings whose perfect manners seduce him (Galdós, 1406). Womanly Fidela del Águila becomes the compliant new wife who gives birth to a symbolically “degenerate” son (Fuentes 2007, 68–​83) and dies of consumption. Unwomanly Cruz holds all the power. Attentive mostly to inner voices of reason and necessity (Torquemada 1423), she is the skillful despot (1551) who plots, with talent and good taste (1449), the aristocratic family’s “restauración” (1428)—​a charged word, in Madrid’s conservative political climate—​as well as Torquemada’s transformation from shabby miser of low origins to the elegant financier marquis of Saint Eloy. Finally, Rafael, alien to work and business (1430), that is, alien to modern reality and its new economic hierarchies (1428), is the neurotic aristocrat (1460) who commits suicide over his family’s disreputable economic rehabilitation. The realist plot, however, is less invested in the “law of the times”—​the Águilas’ return to old splendor (1450) and Torquemada’s adoption of an aristocratic demeanor—​and more in Torquemada’s (economic) resistance to both, in the midst of enormous capital growth. The endless power (and class) struggle between Cruz and Torquemada over luxury expenses is the plot’s strongest driving force (and arguably a symbol of the state of the nation). Accordingly, the more constant focus of the plot is not the increase of capital through investments and reinvestments—​which Torquemada masters with unrivaled ease and not a single failure—​ but the accomplishment (or not) of the financier’s productive “accord of form and content.” Donoso—​Bernat’s equivalent in Madrid—​educates Torquemada in bank and stock exchange operations (1395), and repeatedly enunciates the one rule that Torquemada just half obeys, half disallows: this financier’s “sobriedad sórdida” [sordid temperance] and “apariencias de miseria” [façade of squalor] are “costumbres que debemos desterrar, si queremos que haya bienestar y progreso, y que florezcan el comercio y la industria” [habits that must be banished, if we want progress and wellness to prevail, and commerce and industry to bloom] or (inadvertently quoting Adam Smith) “la riqueza de las naciones” [the wealth of nations] (1390–​1391). In other words (the words of Torquemada’s final confessor), “sin la dirección de Cruz no habría llegado usted a poseer lo que posee … Sin Cruz no sería usted más que un desdichado prestamista, que se pasaría la vida amasando un menguado capital con la sangre del pobre”5 (1586). But Torquemada partakes in all essential features of the model financier—​infallible financial eye, exclusive dedication to business, disregard for individuals and details, etc.—​except for one: he never quite strikes that accord;“no soy compatible, no caso, no ajusto” [I am not compatible, I can’t 127

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pair up, I can’t fit in] (1400). Torquemada’s inadequate transition toward luxury living demotes his success story to a “farsa” [farce] (1451), analogous to Gil’s “opera buffa.” In both cases, to demonstrate the social incongruities of the financier, realism seeks evidence in its usual testing grounds: food, dress, habitation, language, and death. Torquemada had stated early: “vengamos a la realidad de las cosas.Yo soy muy dado a lo real, a lo verdadero, soy el realismo por excelencia” [let’s abide by the reality of things. I have a strong preference for the real, the truthful, I am realism above all] (1602). Torquemada dies indeed an equivocal realist death, not only for his undecipherable last word (“¡Conversión! ¿Es la de su alma o la de la deuda?” [Conversion! His soul’s or the national debt’s?], 1626), or for the suggestion that the multimillionaire may be dying of hunger in the supreme luxury of his palace (1625), or for the battles regarding charities in his will (Fuentes 2007, ­chapter 3), but mostly for the final intricacies of the economic power struggle. While Cruz completes a straight trajectory, securely settled now in proper (though antiquated) grandeur thanks to the financier’s money, Torquemada ends his journey with his squalid origins hopelessly shining through the flimsy armor of luxury and nobility imposed by Cruz. (In a bit of a Freudian foresight, Rafael identified Torquemada’s money as muck; his monetary contributions as defecations: 1525.) The locale of Los Pazos de Ulloa—​a derelict manor, isolated in a remote and rugged corner of rural Galicia, whose residents live a rowdy life of excesses in food, drink, and sex—​appears to be the furthest point, physically and conceptually, from Madrid, Barcelona, or any other enclave of capital and consumption. And yet, Pardo Bazán—​who is writing primarily for readers in metropolitan centers—​makes it the stage of a plot that combines a rustic-​gothic surface with the hidden tactics of a modern, cunning financier.The following summary means to engage that paradox and its embroilments. Julián, a devout young priest of strict principles, easily disturbed by all things material and disorderly (Pardo Bazán [1886] 2017, 58–​59), is sent to Los Pazos from Santiago, the seat of religious, cultural, and political power in the area. His mission is to bring traditional moral and financial order to the profound “desarreglo” [disarray] (117) of the Ulloa estate. The priest considers sex and finances the matters most clearly in need of discipline. He is outraged that the faux-​marquis, Pedro de Ulloa, fathered a son out of wedlock with Sabel, the voluptuous and unprincipled daughter of his employee Primitivo, and continues to sleep with her. He is also appalled at the shamble of records and contracts left to rot in the musty archives of the house. Julián’s mission is a failure for two main reasons. First, his effort gives undue priority to the adultery, “el feo vicio, el delito infame” [the ugly vice, the vile crime] (168), over the economy’s apparent chaos. Second, he believes that the explanation of such disarray is “la lógica de la barbarie” [the logic of barbarism] (71): lust and sloth run amok in an uncivilized “nature” he doesn’t even understand (27). Julián manages to bring Pedro to Santiago where he marries Nucha, a righteous urban virgin of the priest’s choice, a “moral beauty” (131) more than a physical one, and an heiress who is eventually disinherited. Then Julián starts to deal with the financial disorder and he finally realizes that his enemy—​the evil in that world—​is not so much lust or sloth, but a secretive financier whose power reaches the minutest capillaries of the manor’s body politic (to use Foucault’s wording): “la encubierta pero real omnipotencia de Primitivo” [Primitivo’s hidden but real omnipotence] (40). In Pedro’s summary: “manda en todos, incluso en mí” [He bosses everyone around, including myself] and “no se me rinden cuentas jamás” [he never reports back to me] (69). Barbarism then turns out to be here but a creature of civilization (capitalism’s civilization), as in Benjamin’s incisive epigram: it is the calculated modus operandi of a modern financier who implacably imposes his hidden agenda from secluded offices that Julián doesn’t even know exist (the reader does not access those offices until p. 246). Primitivo, expressionless (156), unclassifiable as an employee (“no hay nombre adecuado para [su] empleo” [there is no suitable title for Primitivo’s position], 37), extremely diligent and 128

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apparently unencumbered by ordinary vices, is but the radical version of the modern financier. Keynes classified financiers as “semi-​criminal, semi-​pathological” (quoted by Brown 1959, 304). Gil and Torquemada, Cowperwood and Saccard, would fit the bill. Primitivo wouldn’t: he comes through as fully criminal and pathological, the radical financier as a form of evil: “no se para en barras con tal de lograr sus fines” [nothing can stop him in the pursuit of his goals] (Pardo Bazán, 109–​110). In the end, nearly every step of the plot seems to submit, one way or another, to Primitivo’s plan: the plot of the financier’s plotting. Julián is banned from the Pazos after Primitivo contrives (or discovers?) evidence of an adulterous relationship between the priest and Nucha (“horrenda calumnia” [horrible slander], 259). Condemned to isolation and subject to Primitivo’s purposeful negligence, Nucha dies not long after giving birth to a girl. In the meantime, Sabel returns triumphantly to the marquis’ bed and, after Nucha’s death, marries him. Finally, after elections in the area, Primitivo is killed by the local politicians he betrayed in his most devious and most successful financial stratagem. With manipulable debtors in both of the competing parties, he first finances Pedro’s candidacy to Madrid’s senate, only to arrange his defeat in the last minute, leaving the candidate heavily indebted to the financier, and forever tied to Los Pazos (214–​215).The last chapter provides paradigmatic evidence of the financier’s success. Julián, after purging his alleged sin, returns to the area and visits Nucha’s and Primitivo’s tombs. (The reader and, perhaps, Julián himself discover at that point that the virtuous priest’s “religious respect” (94) toward Nucha was not exactly free of the barbaric passions that bloomed in Los Pazos’ crude environment.) At the cemetery, Julián observes two other visitors, the marquis’ two children. Sabel’s bastard boy—​Primitivo’s grandson—​who used to run wild, dirty and raggedy, is now clean and richly dressed, ostensibly the family’s heir. The girl, Nucha’s legitimate daughter, appears now unkempt and poorly clothed, no longer the neatly attired heiress. A fundamental hierarchy (Veblen 1994, 34) or perhaps two, if we include the gender upheaval, are upended, leaving the enriched servant—​or his legatees—​on top, and the feudal lord (Pardo Bazán, 147) forever enslaved to the financier by economic debt and imposed marriage. (The novel has a continuation, La madre naturaleza, where this straight reversal is deconstructed by a seemingly fated incest.)

Regarding beauty in commodities and consumers When we move from the realm of the financier to the much more populated realm of the consumer—​or “from the love of money as a possession” to “the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life” (Keynes, quoted by Brown 1959, 304)—​we encounter a different set of plot priorities. Woman often replaces man at the center of the plot (man is frequently a devious partner or just an obstacle in the plot’s development). Superfluous expenditures, not investments, sustain the urban circulation of money (money that is hardly ever sufficient and hardly ever earned through labor). Desires distort or displace calculations. Conspicuous consumption replaces gold fever. Life replaces power. The city center is no longer the stock exchange, the bank, or the office, but shops with shop windows everywhere: all of Madrid is an “abierto bazar” [open bazaar] with “el charlatanismo de sus escaparates … llenos de objetos de vanidad y lujo” [pattering shop windows … displaying the wares of luxury and vanity] (Galdós Desheredada [1881] 1970, 1078 and 1121). Surrounding that civilized center (1005), however, La desheredada’s cartography displays a disturbing mosaic. First, as a frame, Leganés’ insane asylum, where the protagonist’s father, who believes himself to be the country’s minister of finances handling huge figures, is dying a pauper’s death. Then, a miserable, violent periphery where unsuccessful businesses are stranded and only infinitesimal transactions take place (1021). At the very end, “el voraginoso laberinto de las calles” [a whirling labyrinth of streets], a hell or abyss 129

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(1180) that whisks away the degraded protagonist. Paris, in the meantime, looms in the distance as standard of luxury values: “Vete a París … aquí no las gastamos de tanto lujo como tú” [Go to Paris … here you are a luxury we cannot afford] (1135), Miquis tells Isidora, the counterfeit aristocrat turned expensive cocotte. The complexity of La desheredada—​even more so than that of the other novels—​cannot be grasped from any single point of view, but every point of view should account for the economic makeup that so rigorously controls its plot. A conventional family romance (as Freud defined it, only fabricated by her own father), brings Isidora back to the city. She carries with her spurious documents that intend to prove that she is not Isidora Rufete but Isidora de Aransis, a child born out of wedlock in an aristocratic family and entrusted to the humble Rufetes as a cover up. Isidora believes that the time has come for the wealthy Aransis to acknowledge her as an heiress. City life, though, slowly transposes Isidora from the plot of her unrealistic (1058) family romance—​which will be proven a fake in court—​to the realist plot of modern markets. First, from regular village worker (990, 993) she turns into a city flaneuse and avid consumer (Tsuchiya 2011, 33–​34): “su delicia mayor cuando a la calle salía [era] ver escaparates, solicitada de tanto objeto bonito, rico, suntuoso” [when taking a walk, nothing delighted her like window shopping, lured by so many pretty, rich, sumptuous objects] (Galdós, Desheredada, 1032). Soon, such luxuries become for her neurotic necessities: “el loco amor al lujo y a las comodidades eran los puntos débiles de Isidora; su necesidad” [an insane love of luxuries and comforts were Isidora’s weaknesses, her needs] (1127). “Estado morboso” [morbid condition] is her doctor’s diagnosis (1163). Consequently, Isidora mismanages her limited funds and starts running up debts. Second, and most important, throughout Part I Isidora grows into an arresting beauty (1075). For a time, she holds the old-​world belief that beauty means something, it is a categorical signifier, especially when enhanced by good taste and remarkable elegance: “bastaría a darle la ejecutoria su gran belleza, su figura, sus gustos delicados, sus simpatías por toda cosa elegante y superior” [her great beauty, her figure, her exquisite taste, her affinity with all things elegant and superior, would be enough to grant her a title of nobility] (1134). By the same token, superior beauty entitles her to all the beautiful things in the market (1032, 1059, etc.), and makes her unfit for ordinary labor. When, in the Aransis’ and the law’s factual assessment, this interpretation is proven “completamente equivocada” [totally mistaken] (1074), she quickly realizes that her beauty—​like the beauty of the luxury objects in shop windows—​may have no meaning but it has monetary value. One irony of the market is that a residue of the old belief in the meaning of beauty can contribute greatly to this beauty’s monetary value. For example, what Baudrillard (1981, 120) called “genealogical value”: “parecía una duquesa” [she looked like a duchess] (Galdós, Desheredada, 1085) and “nadie que la viese, sin saber quién era, podría dudar que pertenecía a la clase más elevada de la Sociedad” [nobody who saw her and didn’t know who she was would have any doubt that she belonged in the highest social class] (1106). Isidora—​saleswoman and wares in one, as in Benjamin’s famous dictum about prostitutes—​ sells then the luxury of her aristocratic, and therefore expensive, beauty in order to both pay her debts and obtain the luxurious lifestyle such beauty, helped by her never-​entirely-​shed nobility, is entitled to. Curiously, it’s also something she now needs, if she is going to continue luring rich consumers. At that point of Isidora’s serpentine reasoning, the realist narrative typically confronts the reader with the dilemma of reality principle versus pleasure principle. On the one hand, somewhat in line with period moralists like Ruskin (1860), Withers (1914), and La Veleye (1891), the novel is intensely critical of the luxury consumer in general and of Isidora’s weaknesses (1127)—​her overall “apreciación falsa de la realidad” [wrong understanding of reality] (1159)—​in particular. On the other, however, the novel correlates Isidora’s economics of luxury not just with the squandering of money but also, emphatically, with the enjoyment 130

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of life, “las delicias del mundo” [the world’s delights] (1155), a defense of luxury that Bataille (1988) and Sloterdijk (2016) will herald in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. Doctor Miquis, who, as the voice of the reality principle, follows Isidora’s trajectory from the start, laments at the end: “Habiendo descubierto un tesoro, permitió que ese tesoro fuera para todos menos para él … A su lado pasó, coronada de rosas y con la copa en la mano, la imagen de la Vida”6 (1131). Isidora costs Bou 2000 duros, but he will admit, after coming to his (financial) senses:  “aquello es vivir” [that’s a life] (1151). Constantly ambushed by “el tormento de la realidad” [the torments of reality] (1151), “la realidad asquerosa” [disgusting reality] (1169), “las miserias de la realidad” [reality’s miseries] (1181), Isidora herself proclaims: “Yo quiero vivir, y esto no es vivir” [I want a life, and this is not a life] (1135). Isidora’s market logic regarding beauty would be similar to a financier’s, except for one thing, her fatal flaw:  she deals expertly (and incessantly) only in unquantifiable matters, but “la realidad de las cifras” [the reality of numbers] (1033, 1072, 1089, 1129, etc.) eludes her. As it turns out, sociologists and most critics tiptoe (at best) around the concept of beauty making vague references to the ties that connect beauty, luxury, and prices, or focusing on beauty in art and fashion (like Ruskin and Baudrillard). Veblen (1994, 78–​81) comes closer to the point in a chapter called “Pecuniary Canons of Taste.” He considers beauty inseparable from high cost; beauty has to be expensive: it is one of the “marks of expensiveness in goods,” and “by habitually identifying beauty with reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which is not expensive is accounted not beautiful.” However, for one thing, the notion of “beauty” as a selling point was not restricted to the realm of expensive “luxury” (Withers 1914, 156); Galdós (Desheredada, 1099)  notes that “empezaba a desarrollarse el gusto por presentar los objetos mercantiles con primor, halagando los ojos del que compra” [it was becoming a trend to present [any] merchandize tastefully, in order to charm the consumer’s eyes]. For another, the beauty of woman (or man) is a rare consideration among economists and sociologists. Kopytoff (1986, 84), for example, refers in passing to “a perennial moral concern in Western thought … about the commoditization of human attributes,” but then he does not list beauty among those attributes. And yet human beauty is not only overwhelmingly present in realist novels; it tends to be a main pivot of the plot, for such beauty’s value, resistant to mathematical equations, depends very much on a narrative where ethics, esthetics and economics strike dubious partnerships. La desheredada’s plot (Part II) follows the sequence of incidences that degrade (or elevate) the value of Isidora’s beauty as she moves between exclusive luxury markets and all-​inclusive second-​hand markets (much like her furniture: Galdós, Desheredada, 1084). After her romance with Joaquín, Isidora’s needs push her to hook up with millionaire Botín. She is at the peak of her beauty and yet not worth what she used to be when brand new: “por donde quiera que iba hacía sombra de blasones.Y, sin embargo, por desgracia suya, empezaba a ser conocida, y cuantos la encontraban sabían que no era una lady”7 (1106). Dismissed for having misallocated Botín’s money, she can still turn his dismissal around: “Su dinero de usted no basta a pagarme … Valgo yo infinitamente más …” [You don’t have enough money to pay for my favors … I am worth infinitely more …] (1114). With Bou she becomes more conscious of her increasing devaluation: “Ella valía infinitamente más que él …; pero la dudosa ejemplaridad de su vida podía hacerla inferior” [She was worth infinitely more than him …, but her questionable conduct could make her seem inferior] (1126). Even at the end, after Melchor’s and Gaitica’s episodes and her brother’s execution, she seems to predicate a closure by giving up her name (or names) and family (or families), while, at the same time, she cancels that closure by holding on to her beauty’s unfinished trading history:  “Todavía soy guapa… y cuando me reponga seré guapísima. Valgo mucho y valdré muchísimo más” [I am still beautiful … and when I recover I will be incredibly beautiful. I am worth a lot, and will be worth a lot more] (1178). 131

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It is precisely luxury, in the form of fashionable dresses—​“muestras de vestidos” [samples of dresses] (1177)—​, that prompts such cancellation of the closure. As a consumer, Isidora was not fixated on dresses alone, but she did consider them irresistible charms that enthralled her—​and those who contemplated her wearing them (Galdós, Desheredada, 1113, 1134). Accordingly, her long and tortuous itinerary as a beautiful luxury commodity was unfailingly punctuated by references to dresses, their contribution to Isidora’s success, and the import of their deterioration. Fashionable dresses, in Parisian designs, are crucial pieces of the consumer games in most realist novels. “Fashion that never goes out of fashion” (Calefato 2014, 54) makes dress consumption a central cogwheel for capitalist machines. Not only “next to the silk industry, the wool industry was the most important in the early period of capitalism” (Sombart 1967, 155) but “no line of consumption affords a more apt illustration [of pecuniary culture] than expenditure on dress” (Veblen 1994, 103); dresses, that is,“as a special register of consumption …, as goods whose principal use is rhetorical and social, goods that are simply incarnated signs” endowed with “semiotic virtuosity” (Appadurai 1986, 38; Baudrillard 1981, passim). Charles Frederick Worth, grand couturier of European queens, courtesans, and cocottes, was a reference de rigueur in realist novels from Wharton and Dreiser to Pardo Bazán and Galdós. Through him, Paris became a colonizing power, as much for exclusive and costly (de)signs as for the parlance of fashion that pervaded the city’s ordinary language (as in Galdós’ quintessential novel of fashion, La de Bringas). Within the realist plot, a fashionable dress generally combines representation with mediation: it mediates (or fails to mediate) the relationship between desire and the body (the woman’s body as the top luxury commodity: Calefato 2014, 56; inasmuch as the root of capitalism’s luxury was men’s radical conversion from the sacred love of wives to the secular enjoyment of courtesans’ “free love”: Sombart 1967, 93–​94).

Plotting the end of necessities and the return of luxuries A family’s struggle to cope with extreme necessity—​after falling from relative wealth into “los abismos de la miseria” [abysmal misery] (Galdós, Misericordia [1897] 1971, 726)—​is the basic premise of Misericordia, a novel whose discourse has unusual economic density and specificity. Luxury (“lujo” is a term that appears forty-​six times in La desheredada and only three in Misericordia) has, until almost the end, no visible market in Misericordia’s Madrid. “Miseria,” on the other hand, is likely the most persistent common noun in Misericordia: it appears forty times here but only thirty-​two in La desheredada (a text nearly twice as long).The city is still a market, many of the miserable characters (including Benina, “negocianta” [business woman], 722) have some talent for commerce, “aunque fuese en cosas menudas” [even if only for trifling stuff] (722), and (miniscule) monetary transactions take place constantly among friends and family. However, “los próceres del dinero” [moneyed notables] and “los que explotan la vida suntuaria” [those fully entrenched in a life of luxury] (726) emerge, when they emerge at all, on a different dimension: they inhabit mostly the “imaginary world” (724) of stories and conversations with which the wretched ones disengage from daily “reality” (724). Inevitably, Misericordia is the realist novel of both food, “the core of the necessary” (Brown 1959, 257), and of charity, the last resort to obtain food—​or money to buy food. (“Hambre” [hunger] appears thirty-​three times in Misericordia and seventeen in La desheredada). Benina—​an intriguingly tainted evangelical figure—​is an old housekeeper and, mainly, a cook, with an irrepressibly compassionate heart: when the middle-​class family she worked for fell from economic grace to absolute indigence (through economic misbehavior), she did not leave them; moreover, she became the family’s only support. In that self-​imposed position, “la fiera necesidad le impuso el triste oficio mendicante, privándola en absoluto de todo otro medio 132

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de atender a los suyos. Llegó por sus pasos contados, por ley social, económica, si es que así se dice”8 ([1897] 1971, 708). One of the shifting (and strikingly equivocal) centers of Benina’s Madrid is the church of San Sebastián, where she goes not to pray but to mendicate, that is, “sacar las perras del fondo de la masa humana” [wrest coins from the depths of the human masses] ([1897] 1971, 767). From the beggar’s point of view, charity consists here almost exclusively in the direct or indirect provision of food. From the point of view of the well-​to-​do benefactors, exercising charity could be either a sort of luxury (Isidora’s case in La desheredada) or a form of negotiation with God (the case of Torquemada and, here, don Carlos). Except for minor adjustments, this life of charity-​for-​food continues inalterable “until death” (708). In other words, charity doesn’t generate or drive a plot; it is but the perpetuation of a status quo at an economic rock-​bottom, impermeable to the oscillations of capitalist markets; “aquí no hay salvación para el pobre” [here there is no redemption for the indigent] ([1897] 1971, 761). Unlike the novels of financiers and consumers, Misericordia’s actual fall (rather an ascent) into the plot—​to borrow Barbara Johnson’s concept—​occurs near the end as a “cosa súbita” and “milagrosa” [sudden … miraculous thing] ([1897] 1971, 787:). The closure—​and the plot—​ start with the “suerte” [good luck] (788) of the unexpected arrival of ample funds that a distant cousin left in his will to his impecunious middle-​class relatives—​yet another form of charity that plays no role in Political Economy but initiates economic “normality” in this novel’s plot (797). Just as suddenly, luxury expenditures reappear: the inheritor “dejábase vencer de la tentación de adquirir superfluidades dispendiosas” [indulged in the purchase of superfluous and expensive things] (782), which the novel lists in detail—​most pertinently, the menus of celebratory banquets (777–​778). More than anything, this inheritance modifies power structures. Benina’s empowerment was due to her merciful sacrifice and her miraculous capacity for fixing multiple survival meals with a few coins. Juliana, a young daughter-​in-​law, is now in charge and her regime, called “despotismo” (788, 794), “el absolutismo puro, el régimen de terror” [undiluted absolutism, a regime of terror] (796), is fed by an economist’s merciless utilitarianism: “el eterno predominio de la voluntad sobre el capricho y de la razón sobre la insensatez” [the eternal predominance of will over whim, reason over folly] (784).The logical first victim of such reasoning is the old and now useless Benina: unemployable in the normalized economic plot, she is never rescued from charity’s plotless reiteration, “saliendo a pedir sola todos los días para ver de sacar con qué vivir” [going out alone every day to seek alms with which to secure a living] (793). The novel could have ended at this point, once the course of “normalidad próspera” [prosperous normality] ([1897] 1971, 797) began. But, as in the other novels, a pathology of economic power—​a neurosis—​materializes here to meddle in the closure’s reasonableness. Juliana appears to be the winner, but power has made her ill with “embelecos nerviosos y ráfagas de histerismo” [nervous misapprehensions and bursts of hysteria] (797). Benina appears to be the loser, but she understands her defeat as a “glorioso triunfo” [glorious victory]: not only “sentíase victoriosa, después de haber perdido la batalla en el terreno material” [was she feeling like a winner after having lost the material battle] (793), but she also showed “buenas apariencias de salud” [signs of good health] (797).What is more, she continues to be empowered with a type of realist reason—​a sort of psychiatrist’s reason. All along, Benina is not only a prodigious cook and a paragon of sanity but a healer for the insane: “a Almudena lograba contenerle en la razón” [she managed to keep him within the confines of reason] (755) or “traerle a la realidad y sujetarle a la vida común” [to bring him down to reality and fasten him to ordinary life] (761). The end of a chapter called “End” narrates a dialogue between Juliana and Benina which is announced as “breve y de mucha sustancia o miga psicológica” [brief but full of substance or psychological import], especially because despot Juliana acknowledges Benina’s superior power: “Usted, usted sola, me puede curar” [You, and only you, can cure me] (798). And, reasonably enough, it 133

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involves the last financial transaction of the plot. Juliana gives Benina 15 pesetas, with which she seems to be paying Benina’s mending (and closing) words—​typically interweaving sacred scriptures and medical textbooks, charity and market economy: “Vete a tu casa, y no vuelvas a pecar” [go home and sin no more] (798).

Coda: realism as luxury The previous analyzes try to show how these realist novels (and very many others that could be adduced) engage a fundamental conflict. Nussbaum (1995, 1) sums it up neatly in a book on Dickens: “literature expresses, in its structures and its ways of speaking, a sense of life that is incompatible with the vision of the world embodied in the texts of Political Economy.” Recent books on this quarrel assume and often declare that novelists are generally insightful and pertinent where economists tend to be blunt or negligent. I would like to close my analysis by signaling to a different verdict on the subject. More than a century after the heyday of the realist novel, as prominent a philosopher as Peter Sloterdijk declares the real of realist novels entirely unfounded. The realist novelist was writing for (and about) a society that enjoyed unprecedented wealth, and for which “the democratization of luxury” was “the true project of modernity” (Sloterdijk 2016, 742). Such prosperous society, however, held on to a residual belief that identified the “real” with “the tradition of the oppressed” (637). The novelist was the “approved advocate” (690) of that “poverty realism” (688):  “All published speech is subject to the law which demands translating the luxury in power back into the jargon of hardship” (637) and the results are but “black books on the lives of the infamous, unsupported, superfluous people” (696). Realism then would not be a provider of credible documents but “the stablished form of the belief that the disaster is always right” (690). Sloterdijk may even be suggesting that realism’s “professionalized complaint” (637) or “the pretense of lack … in the rich ‘society’ ” (638) is but one of that society’s luxuries, just another form of entertainment or perverse pleasure for the affluent leisure class.

Notes 1 “The [working] masses stick to routine, are distrustful and impermeable to new ideas.They keep money partitioned in small fractions, and they make reforms impossible with their fears and lack of confidence. … It is only fair to snatch the money from the miserly hands that hoard it: … that’s the only way for useful and intelligent hands to put together the important capitals that industry, commerce and general progress require.” 2 “The true gambler has but one ambition; nothing else distracts him; he trusts no one; he does not lose sight of the action for a second; we don’t know how to think coldly, as we should.” 3 “I am now used to contemplating the larger picture, to encompassing the business’ full horizon in a single glance … and to despising the details as something insignificant.” 4 “Law of the times, according to which the real state wealth of noble families of old, is passed on to a second-​tier aristocracy whose shady credentials vanish in the obscure recesses of a shop or in the creases of loan-​shark businesses.” 5 “Without Cruz’s leadership, you would not own what you own today … Without Cruz you would be but a wretched moneylender, and in all your life would have amassed but a meager capital exploiting indigent folks.” 6 “Having discovered a treasure, he let everyone but himself enjoy it … He allowed the image of Life to pass him by with a crown of roses in her head and a cup in her hand.” 7 “Wherever she went, she radiated nobility. And yet, unfortunately for her, people knew who she was, and everyone who saw her was aware that she was not a lady.” 8 “Fierce necessity inflicted upon her the sad craft of begging, leaving her with no other means whatsoever to support her folks …; it happened by implacable social or economic law, if that’s what it is called.”

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Works cited Alas “Clarín,” Leopoldo. [1892] 1995. Doña Berta. In Obras completas, vol. 2. Madrid: Turner. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction:  commodities and the politics of value.” In The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–​64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Auerbach, Eric. [1946] 1973. Mimesis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bataille, Georges. 1988. The Accursed Share, vol. 1, Consumption. New York: Zone Books. Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. New York: Telos Press. Berry, Christopher J. 2016. “Luxury: a dialectic of desire.” Chap. 3 in Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media, edited by John Armitage and Joan Roberts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brown, Norman.1959. Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. New York: Vintage Books. Brooks, Peter. 2005. Realist Vision. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Calefato, Patrizia. 2014. Luxury. Fashion, Lifestyle and Excess. London: Bloomsbury. Fine, Ben. 2002. The World of Consumption.The Material and Cultural Revisited. London: Routledge. Fuentes Peris, Teresa. 2007. Galdós’s Torquemada Novels: Waste and Profit in Late Nineteenth-​Century Spain. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Goux, Jean-​Joseph. 1994. The Coiners of Language. London: University of Oklahoma Press. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–​91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. La Veleye, Emile de. 1891. Luxury. London: Swan Sonnenschein. Lewis, Charles R. 2000. A Coincidence of Wants: The Novel and Neoclassical Economics. New York: Garland Publishing. Martí-​López, Elisa. 2017. “Death and the crisis of representation in Narcís Oller’s La febre d’or and Pérez Galdós’s La de Bringas.” In The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies, edited by Muñoz-​Basols et al., 357–​367. London: Routledge. Marx, Karl. [1932] 1964. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. New York: International Publishers. Morson, Gary Saul, and Morton Shapiro. 2018. Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1995. Poetic Justice.The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Oller, Narcis. [1890–​1892] 2012. La febre d’or. Barcelona: Cossetània Edicions. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. [1886] 2017. Los Pazos de Ulloa. Madrid: Real Academia Española. Pérez Galdós, Benito. [1881] 1970. La desheredada. In Obras completas, vol. 1. Madrid: Aguilar. —​—​—​. [1884] 1970. La de Bringas. In Obras Completas, vol. 2, Madrid: Aguilar. —​—​—​. [1897] 1971. Misericordia. In Obras Completas, vol. 3. Madrid: Aguilar. —​—​—​. [1889–​1895] 1970. Las novelas de Torquemada. In Obras Completas, vol. 2. Madrid: Aguilar. Resina, Joan Ramón. 1994–​1995. “The sublimation of wealth and the consciousness of modernism in Narcís Oller’s La febre d’or.” Journal of Hispanic Research 3: 259–​276. Ruskin, John. 1860. The Political Economy of Art: Being the substance (with additions) of two lectures delivered at Manchester, July 10th and 13th, 1857. New York: John Wiley & Son. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2016. Spheres, vol. 3, Foams. Plural Spherology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (Semiotext). Sombart, Werner. 1967. Luxury and Capitalism. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Tortella, Gabriel. 2017. Capitalismo y Revolución: Un ensayo de historia social y económica contemporánea. Madrid: Gadir Editorial. Tsuchiya, Akiko. 2011. Marginal Subjects:  Gender and Deviance in Fin-​de-​siècle Spain. Toronto:  Toronto University Press. Veblen, Thorstein. 1994. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover. Withers, Hartley. 1914. Poverty and Waste. London: Smith, Elder.

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10 COLONIAL WARS, GENDER, AND NATION IN NINETEENTH-​ CENTURY SPAIN Soldiers’ writings, metropolitan views Albert Garcia-​Balañà To start with: on colonial women in letters home from Spanish soldiers At the beginning of April 1896, Dionisio—​or Dionís—​Torruella, a Catalan textile worker and conscript soldier who had arrived in a war-​stricken Cuba aged barely 19 in autumn 1895, wrote to his mother Cándida Alujas, in Sabadell, near Barcelona, from Güira de Macurijes in the Cuban province of Matanzas. Answering a letter from home that had reached him in the previous weeks, Torruella wrote: He recivido otra [carta] suya del 2 de Febrero en la que me encarga que no beva mucho rhum y deje las negritas, en cuanto a lo último debo advertirle que no hay ningún soldado en la compañía que no tenga una [“negrita”] por su cuenta[,]‌por las circunstancias que como que están pasando tanta miseria y muchas tienen los maridos al campo, aunque sea solo por un poco de rancho[,] hace uno lo que quiere de ellas. Poco tenga Vd. en cuenta que para mí no quiero que llegue este caso[,] porque demasiado sé lo que tienen de malo y más ésas de raza de color.1 (Quoted in Garcia-​Balañà 2019, 172–​173) A few months later, in early September, Torruella insisted on drawing a link between the by-​then-​improved progress of the war against the Cuban Liberation Army (Ejército Libertador Cubano, ELC) and his own personal experiences and expectations with Cuban women. Now that the ELC’s guerrillas had been weakened by the recent offensive led by the new Captain-​ General of Cuba,Valeriano Weyler, and thousands of women and children “reconcentrated” in garrison villages controlled by the Spanish army, Torruella radiated an optimism that was more personal than political, and which, precisely for this reason, he knew to be fragile and perhaps only fleeting. From the westernmost province in Cuba, Pinar del Río—​where Weyler had effectively cornered the mulatto Antonio Maceo, most popular and charismatic of the ELC generals—​Torruella wrote home in a letter dated 8 September 1896: Voy más nuevo y limpio que un espejo ..., si dura mucho esta vida, y no nos tocan de Pinar del Río, creo que me prometo con una cubanita blanca que tiene más oro que 136

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pesa, por ahora nada más hago que lo que quiero de ella, Dios quiera que no varíen las cosas, que quien sabe si la guerra habrá servido para bienestar mío. … Adiós, no hay que fijarse mucho con lo que digo, pues hoy me encuentro mejor que Rotchil [sic] y mañana puedo encontrarme lleno de miseria y de hambre[,]‌abandonado[,] de manera que no podemos hacernos cargo de las cosas.2 (Quoted in Garcia-​Balañà 2019, 173–​174) Soon, however, Torruella saw his hopes of winning his “white cubanita”—​whom he referred to as his niña, “girl”—​disappear, and so for the moment he ignored the admonitions of his mother and did the same as so many other Spanish soldiers. “De la niña aquella”—​he wrote in mid-​September—​ná[da], ya ha roto filas, la suple una morena que no tiene tantas monedas pero que me trata de lo mejor, no hay más que ver, que me lava, cose y demás sin costarme un céntimo y eso que el lavar vale cinco pesetas”3 (quoted in Garcia-​Balañà 2019, 174). By this time, the autumn of 1896, the fortified villages of Pinar del Río were full, as a military circular confessed, of “women and children of the insurgents,” with thousands of women “with no occupation” whose only activity was to “serve [the troops],” chiefly because “the heads of their families were in the insurrection,” making them the focus of attention for the forced Reconcentración (“reconcentration”) of peasant families decreed by Weyler (Stucki 2017, 151–​ 153). This was why Torruella, when his plans for his cubanita blanca failed to prosper, was easily able to find a morena in the provincial capital who treated him “the best you could want” and “without costing [him] a céntimo.” Soldier Torruella’s letters illuminate two historiographical questions about Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century that, until recently, have barely been addressed. First: what experiences and languages did the thousands of metropolitan young men use to narrate, to their relatives and friends, the colonial wars in which they fought, before the “Desastre” [Disaster] of the year 1898? And secondly:  can such personal letters, and in particular their gendered and racialized languages, be understood without also considering “national” public discourses that legitimized those colonial wars—​in Cuba, in the Philippines, in Santo Domingo, in Morocco—​long before the turn-​of-​the-​century imperial collapse? This chapter aims to provide some answers to both questions, while introducing them as recent contributions to a greater and collective historiographical renovation on the colonial and extra-​European dimension of nineteenth-​century peninsular Spain. In the letters from Private Dionisio Torruella women of colour are morenas without further adjectives, and his relations with them consisted of them “washing, sewing and doing other things” or, more crudely, that “you can do what you like with them.” In contrast, white (blanca) Cuban women always merited the paternalistic but familiar diminutive, potentially indicating consanguinity and shared nationality, as in cubanita blanca, niña, or criollita. They deserved, moreover, to be approached with modes of behaviour and in settings very different from those of the morenas, with forms of public courtship through which the Spanish conscript might intuit—​or wish to intuit—​a degree of personal recognition that might lead to something more (Garcia-​ Balañà 2019, 172–​182). The primary feature notable here, the explicit racialization of the crude personal and sexual power of the metropolitan soldier over the colonial woman, is repeated in other collections of letters from the Cuban War of 1895–​1898. It reoccurs, for example, in the letters of conscripts from the Basque province of Vizcaya collected by Manuel Montero (2015, 285–​557). “También te digo”—​wrote recruit Cosme Melus to his “friend Baltasar” in June 1897—​que hay buenas mulatas que hay que darles un meneo como se dice aquí[,]‌que valen más que muchas blancas, y también que a pesar de ser negras cuesta el chingarlas, porque no puedes encontrar bacalao más 137

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barato que un peso”4 (quoted in Montero 2015, 479–​480). Melus seemed surprised, in Santa Clara in that summer of 1897, that “even though they’re black it costs to fuck them,” given his previous experience of Cuba during the war. When referring to women of colour, in addition, soldiers’ expectation of social recognition took the form of arrogant masculinity, a language of imperial virility that nourished a sense of metropolitan and popular camaraderie that was also potentially national. Laudelino Fonseca was sent to war in the Philippines during those same months of 1896–​1897. As soon as he arrived in Cavite, south of Manila, he boasted in a letter to his family—​perhaps, too, to calm their fears—​that: tenemos las chicas [que “son negras como la morcilla”] a nuestra disposición porque les tiene cuenta, nos lavan la ropa y si no quieren les pegamos y lo hacen luego con los golpes encima, así que no quieren fiestas con nosotros. Ya le digo [padre], si les decimos tenéis que estar todo el día con nosotros están por el miedo que nos tienen, les mandamos que nos traigan fruta y nos la traen enseguida, andan por máquina.5 (Quoted in Montero 2015, 440–​442)

Colonial wars, metropolitan men, and historiography: indifference and restitution It is surprising to see the scarce historical interest that has been aroused, until very recently, by the expectations and experiences of the tens of thousands of young men from peninsular Spain who fought—​most as quintos or conscripts, a smaller number as volunteers—​in the successive colonial wars that broke out in Spain’s overseas territories in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is surprising, first of all, in view of the social and demographic magnitude of these repeated military expeditions. As just one example, according to some estimates “the [military] mobilizations at the end of the nineteenth century forced the departure from Spanish [mainland] territory, principally toward Cuba and the Philippines, of 20 per cent of the male population between the ages of 21 and 30” (Yáñez Gallardo 1992, 115). The 220,000 officers and recruits from metropolitan Spain who sailed to Cuba between 1895 and 1898 formed the last chapter in a sequence of colonial military expeditions that, for the Spain of the four decades from 1858–​1898, represented an enterprise of colossal dimensions in human terms. The Spanish Caribbean was the core of this chain of campaigns:  180,000 troops had already been sent to the first Cuban war, between 1868 and 1878, and a few years earlier, in 1861–​1865, at least 15,000 Spanish peninsular troops had died in the attempted re-​annexation of Santo Domingo and subsequent war. Later, over 18,000 men were sent from Spain to Puerto Rico in the decade prior to 1898 (Yáñez Gallardo 1992, 110–​114). We can go on adding to these figures with the expeditions sent to Asia and North Africa, such as the more than 45,000 troops, 41,000 of them conscripts, that the Compañía Transatlántica shipping company carried to the Philippines between 1888 and 1898 (Yáñez Gallardo 1992, 124); or the no fewer than 100,000 troops who served in Moroccan campaigns, from the 48,000 men involved in the so-​called Guerra de África or “African War” of 1859–​1860 to the 42,000 required by the Rif campaign at the turn of the new century and the nearly 10,000 troops committed to the smaller “Melilla War” of 1893–​1894 (Garcia-​Balañà 2012, 92–​103). The sum total of these military ventures represents a major challenge to the historiography of nineteenth-​century Spain. For there can be no doubt that these thousands of men and their

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expectations of and experiences in the colonies fed in turn into expectations and experiences in the imperial homeland (through letters home, the following of their progress in the local press, their eventual repatriation, the permanent emigration of some of these men overseas, and, equally, the possibility of them suffering disease or very likely death across the ocean). And vice versa. There is no doubt either that the major historical narratives dominated by the Spanish military collapse in the Caribbean and the Pacific in 1898 have omitted, or set aside, the record of many other experiences that were prior to, and different from, the Desastre suffered at the hands of the United States in the spring and summer of 1898. Experiences of everyday power, both masculine and as representatives of the imperial hub, and expectations of social advancement unheard of in peninsular Spain, such as those related back to their families by the authors of the letters with which we opened this chapter. The little we know of the experience of colonial war as lived through and narrated by these Spanish ordinary soldiers contrasts, however, with the great deal we have learnt in recent decades about the experiences and motivations of the colonial rebels who fought against them. Ada Ferrer (1999) has investigated the social origins and racial identities—​and with them the anti-​colonial motivations—​of participants in the Cuban insurrections of 1868–​1878, 1879–​1880, and 1895–​1898. Anne Eller (2016) has undertaken a similar study of the armed resistance to the Spaniards in Santo Domingo, re-​annexed by Spain in 1861–​1865, and traced the “rumours of slavery” that made it possible to raise large parts of the black Dominican population in revolt, and gain the support of their “brothers” in Haiti. Nor is there a shortage of studies illuminating the Tagalo rebellion in the Philippines in 1896 and its conversion into a guerrilla force in 1897–​1898 (May 1991, Rodao and Rodriguez 2002). All these studies have confirmed that these armed uprisings against Spanish rule took on the overwhelming character of a “people’s war,” in Asia and the Americas. In other words, they have confirmed that Spanish conscripts and volunteers were driven into an intense, even intimate, interaction not only with armed guerrillas but also with the supposedly “non-​combatant” local population. John Tone (2006) and Andreas Stucki (2017) have provided names and numbers for the humanitarian catastrophe (at the same time as military innovation) represented by the forcible “reconcentration” of rural communities suspected of providing support for the ELC in Cuba, about which soldiers Torruella and Melus wrote home. No fewer than 150,000 people died from hunger or disease among the over 400,000 reconcentrados, most of them women, between 1896 and 1898. A better knowledge of the metropolitan experience of colonial war can also contribute to throwing new light on two major questions for historical studies on nineteenth-​century Spain. Two problems, closely related, which have recently aroused well-​deserved attention. First, the question of what Josep M. Fradera has called “the late españolización or ‘Spanishization’ of the American world,” that is, the mass migration of Spaniards from the peninsula, the Balearics, and the Canaries not only to Cuba and Puerto Rico but also other destinations in already-​ independent Hispanic America, which occurred precisely during the last four decades of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth (Fradera 2006). Military ventures and civilian emigration should not be seen here as following separate histories, but as experiences that repeatedly coincided and even overlapped. The nearly 200,000 Spanish migrants who travelled to Cuba between 1880 and 1890 followed in the wake of—​and once on the island, were often confused with—​the 180,000 soldiers who had disembarked during the war of 1868–​1878 (Garcia-​Balañà 2012, 94–​98). The migrants would provide hundreds of pro-​Spanish civilian volunteers who, in 1895–​1896, would fight against the same enemy as the thousands of recruits newly arrived from Europe.

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Paradoxically, these large communities of Spaniards far from Spain were being formed—​in Havana, in Santiago de Cuba, in Buenos Aires, in Montevideo, in other cities—​during decades that were of decisive importance in the socialization of political life and the overall experience of national identity throughout Europe. Here lies, then, the second major historiographical challenge: that the question of the nation cannot be seen, in the Spain of the late nineteenth century, as a strictly, or even principally,“peninsular” problem.Today we know a good deal about the ways in which the Cuban wars contributed to the birth of an “integrist” or anti-​separatist nationalism, a doctrinal Spanish nationalism that rapidly sought to mobilize mass support (Ucelay-​Da Cal 1997). We also know that the migratory patterns followed by connections and cultures from the regions of origin of many new arrivals contributed, among other factors, to the reformulation of a transatlantic nationalism into Catalan, Basque, or Galician diaspora nationalisms, and that all this took place in interaction with the transformed political landscape in mainland Spain prior to and after 1898 (Núñez Seixas 2019; Moya 1998, 277–​384). We scarcely know anything, however, about what specific transoceanic experiences led those thousands of ordinary men, expatriates by choice or of necessity, to re-​examine or remake their own attitudes in national terms. Experiences which, like those of colonial war, could propel them into acting, and perceiving themselves, as members of a shared community of resources, identity, and “of struggle, ready for war” (Langewiesche 2012). Of one nation. This chapter has three main aims. It seeks to argue, first, that the experience of colonial war for metropolitan Spain in the late nineteenth century cannot be reduced to the suffering and loss symbolized by the defeat of 1898. A very different range of experiences can be perceived in the letters that soldiers wrote home prior to ’98, such as those quoted earlier in this chapter. Epistolary sources and memoirs produced by troops dispatched on colonial expeditions have been employed in other imperial and colonial contexts from the late nineteenth-​century world (Das 2011; Gill 2010). The second objective of the chapter is to trace the imperial genealogy of one experience in particular related by Spanish soldiers prior to 1898, that is, their frequent contacts and daily relations with local women. The next section focuses on this experience in the particular context of the Cuban wars from 1868 to 1898. What exactly were the crossovers between gender, race, and nation in Spanish Cuba, we ask, that fed into the narratives deployed by the Spanish soldiers to relate back to their families at home, and legitimize those “intimate” relationships? Lastly, the final aim (and chapter section) argues that the language and experiences encouraged by the colonial wars circulated around an extensive late-​imperial geography, and so cannot be reduced simply to the connections between mainland Spain and the Antilles. A transoceanic geography that was simultaneously European, American, African, and Asian. It was across this vast area that the nation, as a “community of recognition” that was also based on assumptions regarding race and gender, rebuilt itself ceaselessly up to 1898. If the making of the nation in nineteenth-​century Spain was also an imperial process until at least 1900, then the historiographical analysis cannot ignore the racialized and gendered dimensions of that (Spanish) fabrication of what Fradera has conceptualized as “the imperial nation” (Fradera 2018).

Racializing and genderizing the nation through colonial war: images and experiences of rebel Cuba in metropolitan Spain, 1868–​1898 War overseas shortened distances between the imperial hub and its colonies. The Cuban wars set off a massive increase and acceleration in transatlantic traffic, to a point where the lives of the colonies and metropolitan Spain became fused in a shared experience. The construction of the nation—​whether Spanish, Cuban, or others that might arise—​as a lived community took place,

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therefore, amid this transoceanic criss-​crossing of social hierarchies and subjectivities. Thus, for example, the letters with which we opened this chapter were received and read in mainland Spain in an atmosphere in which the Cuban Liberation Army was being entirely racialized even by the pro-​democratic republican press and its associated popular culture. The total Africanization of the enemy as Mambises (the derogatory “African” name used for the Cuban rebels), in spite of the multiracial composition of the ELC guerrillas, stemmed from the republicans’ use of racial images of the national and colonial crisis to discredit, because of its “weakness,” the conservative monarchist government in Madrid under Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (Garcia-​Balañà 2019, 160–​161). The racialization or Africanization of the Cuban enemy also incorporated powerful gender-​related visions of this same opponent and, with them, similarly powerful genderized images of the republicans’ own nation as a “community of struggle.” One early genderized image of the Afro-​Mambí enemy, seen from summer 1895 onwards, insisted on the supposedly uncontrolled sexuality of the non-​white leaders of the ELC. A metropolitan vision or image that crystallized in the stories of the “concubines” said to live with these commanders in the rebel camps. An image that confirmed that theirs was a masculinity that still needed to be civilized, without any sense of control nor ability to govern their own bodies, and therefore incapable of governing others. Readers of the republican press in Spain were soon informed that the “black” guerrilla leader Guillermo Moncada was “taken care of by a mulata,” and that “very pretty mulatas” were the “mistresses of the chieftains,” a demonstration, and an accusation against the Cánovas government, that “los insurrectos están como les da la gana” [the insurgents are doing whatever they like] (quoted in Garcia-​Balañà 2019, 167). The manner in which these images were sustained and reinforced on both sides of the Atlantic is illustrated by the case of Quintín Bandera, which exploded within the rebel ranks in 1897. Bandera, most popular of the generals of colour in the ELC after the death of Antonio Maceo in 1896, was tried, condemned, and stripped of his command by the insurgent army itself in mid-​1897. He was accused of avoiding combat, but also, and above all, of “immorality,” since it was claimed he had done so in order to seek a quiet life living openly with his current “concubine.” Bandera denied the charge of cowardice but proclaimed that he had a well-​ deserved right to live unmarried with his lover during the campaign, which, together with his status as a non-​white “rustic,” as Ada Ferrer (1999, 173–​177) describes, led the “white” leadership of the ELC to make him a scapegoat, in a context in which the Liberation Army was weakened and increasingly dependent on support from the United States. By this time, summer 1897, some of his supposed sexual victims, “white” women from mainland Spain said to have been attacked with machetes and raped by “los negros de Quintín Bandera” [the blacks of Quintín Bandera], had already made public appearances and been the object of tributes in theatres in Madrid (Garcia-​Balañà 2019, 167–​169). A second genderized image of the (Afro-​)Cuban rebellion also gained ground in Spain in 1895–​1896. Inseparable from the first, this image, relying on metropolitan gender expectations, loaded with negative significance the constant presence and visibility of Cuban women of African descent in the theatres of war, as alien to all ideas of Spanish femininity.There were large numbers of women in all the rebel enclaves and camps from 1895. Aline Helg (1995, 59–​67) has documented the growing scale of the impedimenta, the female baggage train that followed in the steps of the ELC as a kind of mobile rearguard.The virtual non-​existence of front lines, and the pressure imposed on the peasant population by the Spaniards, increased the value of women for the rebels, acting as healers or nurses, intelligence gatherers or message carriers, not to mention the handful who actually took part in fighting, the majority women of colour from Oriente province. The popular press in Spain wrote ironically about the “amazons of Quintín Bandera.”

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In April 1896 the most popular Catalan republican newspaper, La Campana de Gràcia, published a cartoon showing voluptuous black “amazons” riding on the backs of pigs, barefoot and with white scarves around their heads, accompanying Maceo and his band of “incendiaries.” This inversion of the gender hierarchies of combat and warfare, as the same republican weekly had suggested the previous March, could perhaps give the Spanish soldiers an opportunity to assert a very personal power, simultaneously both racial and sexual, over the anti-​Spanish rebellion: Siquiera pera agraihils’hi /​lo mal que als mambissos fan /​quan las tropas espanyolas /​ agafin una bastaix /​de las d’aquesta quadrilla, /​res de pensá en fusellar, /​ni desenveyná ‘l matxete: /​se li dona a dugas mans /​una surra... en lloch ben propi, /​y res més ¡á rentar plats!6 (Quoted in Garcia-​Balañà 2019, 171–​172) This paradoxical duality, this tension between the public agency of Cuban women of African descent and their supposed personal and sexual servitude (the obverse of the supposed unbounded sexuality of men of colour), expressed, in fact, a dual experience of gender that thousands of Spanish men had encountered in Cuba since long before 1895. It reflected, in first place, the very frequent extra-​marital sexual contacts between Spanish men and women of colour in nineteenth-​century Cuba, which always took place from positions of power—​social, institutional, demographic—​that favoured the former. Tens of thousands of young single men had emigrated to Cuba from Spain since the middle decades of the century, and women of colour, both slaves and free women, constituted the largest part of their occasional sexual market, and provided most of the women they lived with in consensual informal unions. For, as Verena Stolcke (2017) has explained, the act of marriage, and that of baptism, had the effect, in colonial Cuba, of establishing and confirming one’s “colour” as a legal category. This formed part of a web of family protection through racial and community segregation that became set as a social norm in the middle years of the century, by means of a racialized interpretation of the royal decree of King Carlos III on unequal marriages—​in force in Spanish Cuba from 1805 to 1881, and which originally restricted marriage between classes, not races—​ which effectively banished any possibility of interracial marriage (Stolcke 2017). This long history of racial segregation and sexual power also influenced the writings, and the experiences, of the soldiers sent to Cuba in 1895–​1898, informing them that, even in the midst of war and “reconcentration,” a niña from a white creole family carried with her connotations, meanings, opportunities, and a potential need for precaution that had nothing to do with those associated with a black morena. This regime of intimate racial and sexual power could never be reduced, however, simply to a state of servitude for “non-​white” women. Very much to the contrary of the notions proclaimed in the metropolitan stereotype, parda [mulatto] and morena or black Cuban women, free and enslaved, took leading roles, actively and publicly, in many incidents of opposition to this code of colonial masculinity. This was so particularly after the outbreak of the first Cuban rebellion in 1868. The public role taken by many women of colour between 1868 and 1895, in tandem with the fact that the Cuban revolt was reinforced by the desire for emancipation of all slaves, men and women, clashed with metropolitan (and white criollo) ideals of femininity as equal to domesticity. Spanish soldiers and officials in Cuba witnessed this, or were even more closely involved. This was another experience of gender that, given this clash with expectations, contributed to the distinction seen in 1895–​1898 between the “white” women referred to as niñas and the negras, black women seen as defeminized because they potentially were public women in all its meanings. “I know too much about what’s bad about them and 142

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more so these [women] of the coloured race …” wrote Private Torruella in 1896. Women of colour who were arrested, tried, and sometimes sent into internal exile purely on military orders during the first Cuban war in 1868–​1878. Or the former slave women who had bought their freedom and, following the introduction of the so-​called Moret Law of 1870—​ also known as a law of vientres libres or “freedom of wombs,” because it established, subject to various conditions, that children born to slave women were not automatically the property of their mothers’ owners—​turned to the courts to fight for the full custody, and freedom, of their children, who under this law could still be bound to the “patronage” of their mothers’ former owners until the age of 18. They thus defied, as Camilla Cowling (2013) has studied, the new law itself (which they succeeded in modifying in their favour in 1883), and, no less importantly, the very notion of motherhood as something strictly domestic removed from the public sphere and colonial politics.

Not only Cuba: colonial women and metropolitan masculinities across four continents On 25 February 1897 two enormous columns of Spanish soldiers commanded by General José Lachambre, totalling over 3,000 men, stormed the Filipino village of Pérez-​Dasmariñas (or Dasmariñas) in Cavite province, which the rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo had made into a stronghold after the outbreak of the Philippine rebellion in summer 1896. At dusk on that tropical February day, Lachambre telegraphed the Captain-​General of the Philippines, Camilo Polavieja, with the news that the Spanish dead amounted to scarcely 21, against no fewer than 500 of the Tagalo defenders. Lachambre told Polavieja, without further details, that “Iglesia y convento defensa desesperada, siendo necesario batirla 35 metros con piezas [de artillería] de montaña” [Church and convent desperate defense, [it] being necessary to breach them [from] 35 metres with mountain artillery] (Monteverde Sedano 1898, 287). A slightly more precise description of the taking of the village was given by artilleryman Antonio (or Antoni) Company, a print worker from Palma de Mallorca, in a letter to his mother, writing that “teníamos a la vista los muertos a montones, aquello era un horror” [we could see the dead in heaps, that place was a horror]. What actually happened in the attack on the church of Pérez-​Dasmariñas was related to his family, in a letter free of any kind of remorse, by the conscript Pablo Zapatero, formerly employed in a grocery store in Madrid: Al otro días nos fuimos para Pérez de Dasmariñas que allí acababan de tomar el pueblo cuando llegamos el 2º Batallón. Allí se hicieron bastantes muertos de ellos, se les quemó el pueblo y dos polvorines que tenían y se les quemó el convento, que allí se quemaron más de ciento entre taos, babais y batas (pues los taos son los hombres, las babais son las mujeres y los batas son los chicos), y les quemamos todos los bajais (los bajais son las casas, las casas aquí son de caña y de paja).7 (Quoted in Palanco Aguado 1999, 370–​372) This episode from the war in the Philippines represents a dual reminder in historical terms. It reminds us, first, that the linguistic defeminization of women potentially counted among the enemy, in this case the Filipino babais, was a feature, in the Pacific as in the Caribbean, of the use of the language of racialization as a form of degradation of the rebel guerrillas.The colonial war could not be anything other than a total war from the moment when the military response to a “people’s war” focused on, and placed at the centre of the experience of metropolitan soldiers, the lives and deaths of women (and children). Both these intertwined languages, of racialization 143

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and defeminization, legitimized the everyday power of the soldiers over these women. They thus made natural, through the words with which they gave shape to this experience and this power, their ultimate and most dramatic consequences. As “hembras airadas y maldicentes” [irate and foul-​mouthed females]—​not as “mujeres”—​is how the military bulletins described women taken prisoner during the Cavite campaign (Monteverde Sedano 1898, 233). “Mujeres de aquí”—​another conscript, Felipe Chacarte, wrote home from Manila to his “brother-​in-​law Martín”—​“que andan medio en cueros con un trapo dando vuelta por la cintura[,]‌y son muy calientes[,] y no preguntes lo que pasará aquí”8 (quoted in Montero 2015, 456–​457). The second historical point to be made here is that nothing that Camilo Polavieja did or ordered done during his time as Captain-​General of the Philippines from 1896 to 1897—​and the Cavite campaign was his principal undertaking in Asia—​can be explained in an exclusively Filipino context. To put this another way, the circulation of actors, ideas, and practices between colonial regions was a constant feature of Spanish institutions in the second half of the nineteenth century. Military commanders, for example, circulated throughout a vast late-​imperial geography, and with them went racialized and genderized visions and strategies of colonial war. A simple binary opposition between imperial metropole and its colonies cannot take into account this network of multiple connections and multidirectional traffic. Polavieja had advanced his early military career with promotions gained in battle in Morocco in the “African War” of 1859–​1860 and in the re-​annexation of Santo Domingo in 1863–​1865. His actions during the first Cuban war, and the opportunities for promotion opened up by the fall of Queen Isabel II in 1868, catapulted him into the positions of Commandant-​General of Puerto Príncipe (today Camagüey), in 1878–​1879, military governor of Santiago de Cuba, from 1879–​1881, and a few years later Captain-​General of Cuba itself (1890–​1892). It was also Polavieja who fabricated a supposed “conspiracy of the coloured race” in Santiago in 1880, when the embers were still glowing of Cuba’s so-​called Guerra Chiquita or “Little War” of 1879–​1880, in order to employ a wave of racially selective repression to divide and decapitate the Cuban nationalist movement in the region (López Serrano 2001, 143–​167). And it was Polavieja who in the summer of 1880 took the pioneering, previously unheard-​of decision to give women of colour the same treatment as male rebels when they were captured with them. This was to deport Cuban women of African descent to the Spanish military outposts in North Africa, a punishment never imposed on “white” insurgent women. The events in the Filipino village of Pérez-​Dasmariñas in 1897 thus began to be shaped in Santiago de Cuba, and in the prison-​islands of the Chafarinas near the North African enclave of Melilla, in 1880. It does not seem coincidental that, at the same time as genderized and sexualized images of the wars in Cuba and the Philippines were gaining ground, in soldiers’ letters and elsewhere, other new forms of pro-​colonialist gender discourse were also putting down roots in late nineteenth-​century Spain. A new mode of discourse emerged, for example, regarding the “Moroccan woman.” Manuela Marín (2002) and Ferran Archilés (2017) have called our attention to the origins of this stereotype, fabricated among the Africanista circles in Spain who from the 1880s argued determinedly for the country to pursue imperial expansion in North Africa. It had similar features to those attributed to Afro-​Cuban women, who similarly needed to be placed under tutelage (while men of colour, equally similarly, had to be subjugated). The “Moroccan woman,” the new Africanista stereotype maintained, who worked both in the fields and in towns, and bore upon her back the entire family and community economy, revealed a whole hierarchy of gender domination that in effect indicated the lack of virility of the “Moroccan man,” since the women’s activity demonstrated that their men were incapable of taking any responsibility (Marín 2002). In addition, this “Moroccan woman,” given the state of public servitude in which she lived—​a situation that had come to appear natural due to the 144

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extent to which African and Moslem history had become frozen in time—​also submitted, of course, to the uncontained sexual desires of the African man. Unrestrained desires that were symbolized by the harem (Archilés 2017, 83–​88). It is worth recalling here that the strongest evidence of the “cowardice” of the Afro-​Cuban Quintín Bandera in 1897 was the fact that he lived publicly with “concubines,” and that his supposed sexual victims were put on display in theatres in Madrid. Racialized and genderized legitimizations of colonial war had been travelling back and forth across the Atlantic, on return journeys, since at least the 1850s—​well before, therefore, the series of wars at the century’s end. Moreover, this transoceanic circulation of men and images of the nation at war had not failed to spread into pro-​democratic and popular circles in mainland Spain, even prior to 1868. Fernando Garrido, a republican leader and conspirator forced into exile for much of the twenty years between 1848 and 1868, celebrated the “African War,” because the fighting in Morocco, he wrote in 1860, had demonstrated “la conducta enérgica con que el pueblo español revelaba su nueva virilidad” [the energetic conduct with which the Spanish people reveals its new virility] (quoted in Garcia-​Balañà 2018, 274). A “new virility” that was shown by the “Spanish people,” not its oligarchical and internationalized elites. The assertion of this “Spanish people” as a political (and masculine) subject was also inseparable, for Garrido in the early 1860s, from that of a “raza ibérica” or “Iberian race” which, in his view, should continue to populate and govern territories such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. An “Iberian race” that Garrido coined, revealingly, with the language of “hidalguía” or universal nobility—​a political myth at the service of his democratic republic—​and, consequently, with the long transatlantic history of the doctrines of “limpieza de sangre” [blood cleansing] and the consequent stigmatization of all “sangre africana” or “African blood” (Garcia-​Balañà 2018, 270–​273). Another republican leader, the Catalan Josep Anselm Clavé, insisted on the courage, as a sign of (political) virility, of the civilian volunteers who enlisted to fight in Morocco in 1859–​1860. A  courage and virility that Clavé counterposed to the despotism, political and sexual, of the Moroccan emperor, and the consequent image of the acceptance of servitude by his subjects, who were not citizens nor electors of any kind. The Moroccans were thus an African “rassa d’esclaus” [race of slaves], whom Clavé presented, in his acclaimed republican songs, as the negative, dystopian antithesis of the enormously popular Catalan Volunteers serving in the “Guerra de África” (Garcia-​Balañà 2017, 210–​211 and 216–​217). Francisco Fort, an officer of the Catalan Volunteers in Morocco in 1860, subsequently crossed the Atlantic, carrying with him all this racialized and genderized mythology. A personification of the European nation of ordinary men under arms, indisputably deserving of full political citizenship, Fort would be one of the pioneers of Spain’s attempted re-​annexation and recolonization of Santo Domingo.As such he fought in summer 1861 against the “salvajes enemigos” [savage enemies] of Spain, the “negros vecinos” [black neighbours] who, just months after the war in Africa itself, emerged from the communities of African descent, both Dominican and Haitian, on the Caribbean island (Garcia-​Balañà 2017, 213–​223).

By way of conclusion: beyond 1898 Reflections upon the impact of the Desastre of 1898 in metropolitan Spain are still made today under the influence of the theory of “popular indifference.” That is, of a supposed “insufficient nationalization” of the mass of the population in peninsular Spain—​while the opposite was developing north of the Pyrenees—​that led them to stand aside both from the “patriotic clamour” of 1895–​1896 and its subsequent collapse in summer 1898 (Álvarez Junco 2001, 586–​ 589). This crisis of “98” was also a “crisis of national masculinity” (Aresti 2017). Nevertheless, despite the proliferation of declarations on the fall in “the relative position of the Spanish 145

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man compared to other national masculinities,” this crisis of masculinity, Nerea Aresti argues, affected only “a social minority exposed to this climate and discourse, and evidently more firmly ‘nationalized’ than the popular classes as a whole” (Aresti 2017, 22–​23 and 28). The evidence presented in this chapter leads us to qualify both these arguments, together with the central role they give to a view “from above.” Colonial war was a decisive experience for thousands of ordinary men from the peninsula and, through them, for their families and home communities. An experience these men recounted to those close to them—​and so too to themselves—​employing languages of gender and race, languages charged, moreover, with national connotations (and often impregnated, too, with class resonances). The recurrence of these genderized and racialized forms of language in the intimacy of letters home—​and in the cross-​class republican press—​provides a measure of the extensive social metabolization of this discourse in Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also alerts us to the extent to which these colonial wars were also frequently, though not solely, experienced by metropolitan soldiers as a changing series of experiences of the “politics of intimacy.” Precisely for this reason these wars influenced, and reshaped, popular perceptions of masculinity, and the relationship between such perceptions and a nation or “community of recognition” that—​whether it was Spanish, or Catalan, or Basque, or Galician, or even one of the American nations in which these diasporas established themselves—​continued to be perceived as transatlantic even after 1898. As Susan Martin-​Márquez (2008) has reminded us in her work on Spanish colonialism in Africa, metropolitan perceptions and experiences of empire always generated a diversity of attitudes, according to the specific contexts and social and political correlations that fed into each interaction between the peninsula world and Spain’s future African possessions.“Racial and sexual panic,” alongside distance and a condescending sense of superior civilization, dominated their reception in northern and urban, popular Spain. In contrast, a more complex and ambivalent sense of closeness or familiarity took root in the south, and in an “Africanism” that invoked a connection with historic Al-​Andalus, all ideas which were, ultimately, different tools at the service of colonial enterprises beyond the Straits of Gibraltar (Martin-​Márquez 2008). Similarly, the interactions between Spanish soldiers and junior officers and colonial women in the context of the wars in the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, and the subsequent debacle of 1898, gave rise to varying peninsular and popular reconfigurations of the triad colony-​gender-​nation. Definitive defeat in the Caribbean, for example, generated what Geoffrey Jensen (2014) has described as “anti-​rationalist militarism,” a deliberately virile and vitalist neoimperialism that, conceived largely by junior officers, would be projected into the new Spanish colonial projects in Africa. Ricardo Burguete, a lowly lieutenant in Cuba before 1898, who was immediately “impressed by the countries in which the imperialist spirit transcended class barriers,” carried these convictions with him until he reached the post of High Commissioner of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, in 1922–​1923 (Jensen 2014, 65–​96 and 142–​151). However, 1898 also ignited the anti-​imperialist and republican socialism of the writer and journalist Manuel Ciges Aparicio, who, as a volunteer in the Cuban war, had been imprisoned in General Weyler’s cells in Havana precisely for having revealed to the French press the hidden face of Spanish chivalry toward the women and “niñas de doces años” [girls of 12] forcibly reconcentradas (Ciges Aparicio [1906] 1986, 327–​328). The war in Cuba also had a profound effect on Josep Conangla i Fontanilles, a young conscript who was first sent across the Atlantic in 1895, was repatriated after the defeat in 1898, and then returned voluntarily to the island in 1905 to become a Cuban citizen and a leader of separatist nationalism among the Catalan diaspora in the Americas. In his war memoir Conangla described the personal and political epiphany he experienced when, in 1896, he witnessed the

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sexual harassment to which his elderly Spanish commander submitted a “slim young woman of beautiful features” (“hermosa joven esbelta de facciones adorables”), who was naturally “white” and from a modestly comfortable background (Conangla i Fontanilles 1998, 85–​87). A decrepit, oligarchical Spain of barrack-​room discipline had ruined its own lineage and even profaned its own daughters.The violated bodies of these women constituted the first moral foundation of the new nation detached from it, whether this was to be Cuban (of Hispanic and Creole descent) or Catalan. The opposite of the odious officer had, for Conangla, been a humble NCO, a “Sergeant Caturla” from Alicante, who “dealt [with us] straightforwardly,” and who, he recalled, “conmigo y con los otros catalanes hablaba siempre en valenciano, sin prescindir de la vulgar locución che, indispensable en toda conversación amistosa entre las gentes democráticas del Levante ibérico.”9 It is highly revealing, nevertheless, that Conangla closed his account of the good-​natured camaraderie of Caturla with a final image, without a trace of discomfort after what he had written about the commanding officer: Caturla era también instruido, e impaciente por cultivar aventuras entre las muchachas asequibles del pueblo [Aguacate, in Havana province], con preferencia por las mulatas claras.10 (Conangla i Fontanilles 1998, 92–​93; my emphasis)

Notes 1 “I have received another [letter] of yours of 2 February in which you tell me not to drink a lot of rum and to keep away from the negritas, as to the latter I should warn you that there isn’t a soldier in the company who doesn’t have a [‘negrita’] of his own, [for] because of the circumstances they are going through, [with] so much misery, and many of their husbands away in the countryside, … even if it’s just for a little of our rations … you can do what you like with them. But keep in mind that for me I don’t want this to happen … because I know too much about what’s bad about them and more so these [women] of the coloured race.” 2 “I look fresher and cleaner than a mirror … If life goes on like this much longer, and it’s not our turn to leave Pinar del Río, I think I’ll get engaged to a white cubanita who has more in gold than her own weight, for the moment I don’t do any more than I want to with her. May God help us that things don’t change, and who knows whether the war might be good for my own welfare. … Goodbye, you shouldn’t pay much attention to what I say, since today I feel better than Rothschild, and tomorrow I might find myself wretched and full of hunger …, abandoned, … so we can’t make plans about things.” 3 “As to that niña,” he wrote in mid-​September, “nothing, she has broken it off, she’s [been] replaced by a morena who doesn’t have so much money but treats me the best [way] you could want, you only have to see her, she washes, sews and does other things without costing me a céntimo, and all this when doing laundry costs five pesetas.” 4 “I can tell you too,” wrote recruit Cosme Melus to his “friend Baltasar” in June 1897, “that there are good mulatas that you have to give a try (hay que darles un meneo), as they say here …, who are more worth it than a lot of white girls, [but] even though they’re black it costs to fuck them (cuesta el chingarlas), because here you can’t even find cod cheaper than a peso.” 5 “…we have the girls [who ‘are as black as morcilla,’ blood sausage] at our disposal because they have to pay attention to us, they wash our clothes and if they don’t want to we hit them and then they do it with added bruises, so they don’t want to fool around with us. I tell you [father], if we tell them they have to stay with us all day they do it because of the fear they have for us, we send them to get us fruit and they bring it straight away, they go like a machine.” 6 “Even if it’s just to thank them /​for the all the harm [these women] must do to the mambises, /​when the Spanish troops /​grab a girl /​from among this crew, /​don’t think about shooting her /​nor unsheathing the machete: /​give her a good hiding /​with both hands … in the part where it hurts, /​and, nothing else, [get her] to wash the dishes!”

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Albert Garcia-Balañà 7 “The other day we went to Pérez de Dasmariñas where they had just taken the village when us in the Second Battalion arrived. Quite a lot them had been killed there, their village was burnt, and two powder stores they had, and the church was burnt, and in it more than 100 were burnt, between taos, babais and batas (the taos are the men, the babais are the women and the batas are the kids), and we burnt all the bajais (the bajais are their houses, the houses here are made of stick and straw).” 8 “The women here,” another conscript, Felipe Chacarte, wrote home from Manila to his “brother-​ in-​law Martín,” “walk around half-​naked with a cloth wrapped around their waist, and they’re very tempting, so don’t ask what’s going to happen here.” 9 “always spoke to myself and other Catalans in Valencian, without dispensing with the vulgar expression che, so indispensable in any friendly conversation among the democratic peoples of the Iberian Levant.” 10 “Caturla was also educated,” he wrote, “and impatient to cultivate adventures among the accessible girls of the town (Aguacate, in Havana province), with a preference for pale-​skinned mulattas” (my emphasis).

Works cited Álvarez Junco, José. 2001. Mater Dolorosa. La idea de España en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Taurus. Archilés, Ferran. 2017. “¿Carmen a través del estrecho? Imperialismo, género y nación española ante el espejo marroquí (c.1880-​c.1909).” In Hombres en peligro. Género, nación e imperio en la España de cambio de siglo (XIX-​XX), edited by Mauricio Zabalgoitia, 67–​95. Madrid: Iberoamericana/​Vervuert. Aresti, Nerea. 2017. “La hombría perdida en el tiempo. Masculinidad y nación española a finales del siglo XIX.” In Hombres en peligro. Género, nación e imperio en la España de cambio de siglo (XIX-​XX), edited by Mauricio Zabalgoitia, 19–​38. Madrid: Iberoamericana/​Vervuert. Ciges Aparicio, Manuel. [1906] 1986. Del cuartel y de la guerra (El libro de la crueldad). Alicante: Instituto Juan Gil-​Albert. Conangla i Fontanilles, Josep. 1998. Memorias de mi juventud en Cuba. Un soldado del ejército español en la guerra separatista (1895–​1898). Barcelona: Península. Cowling, Camilla. 2013. Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Das, Santanu, ed. 2011. Race, Empire and First World War Writing. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Eller, Anne. 2016. We Dream Together. Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferrer, Ada. 1999. Insurgent Cuba. Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–​1898. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Fradera, Josep M. 2006. “Las fronteras de la nación y el ocaso de la expansión hispánica.” In Más se perdió en Cuba. España, 1898 y la crisis de fin de siglo, edited by Juan Pan-​Montojo, 483–​557. Madrid: Alianza. —​—​—​. 2018. The Imperial Nation. Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish and American Empires. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Garcia-​Balañà, Albert. 2012. “ ‘The empire is no longer a social unit’. declining imperial expectations and transatlantic crises in metropolitan Spain, 1859–​1909.” In Endless Empire. Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline, edited by Alfred W. McCoy, Josep M. Fradera, and Stephen Jacobson, 92–​103. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin  Press. —​—​—​. 2017. “Patriotismos trasatlánticos. Raza y nación en el impacto de la Guerra de África en el Caribe español de 1860.” Ayer (Revista de Historia Contemporánea) 106(2017, 2): 207–​237. —​—​—​. 2018. “Racializing the nation in nineteenth-​century Spain (1820–​65): a transatlantic approach.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 24(2): 265–​277. —​—​—​. 2019. “‘No hay ningún soldado que no tenga una negrita’. Raza, género, sexualidad y nación en la experiencia metropolitana de la guerra colonial (Cuba, 1895–​1898).” In Vivir la nación. Nuevos debates sobre el nacionalismo español, edited by Xavier Andreu Miralles, 153–​186. Granada: Comares. Gill, Diana. C. 2010. How we are Changed by War. A Study of Letters and Diaries from Colonial Conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom. New York and London: Routledge. Helg, Aline. 1995. Our Rightful Share. The Afro-​ Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–​ 1912. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Jensen, Geoffrey. 2014. Cultura militar española. Modernistas, tradicionalistas y liberales. Madrid: Biblioteca  Nueva. Langewiesche, Dieter. 2012. La época del Estado-​Nación en Europa.València: Universitat de València.

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Colonial wars, gender, and nation López Serrano, Alfredo. 2001. El general Polavieja y su actividad política y militar. Madrid:  Ministerio de Defensa. Marín, Manuela. 2002. “Mujeres, burros y cargas de leña: imágenes de la opresión en la literatura española de viajes sobre Marruecos.” In El protectorado español en Marruecos, edited by Fernando Rodríguez-​ Mediano, 85–​109. Madrid: UNED. Martin-​Márquez, Susan. 2008. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. May, Glenn Anthony. 1991. Battle for Batangas. A  Philippine Province at War. New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press. Montero, Manuel. 2015. Las guerras de Cuba y Filipinas contadas por soldados del pueblo. Cartas de Baracaldo. Barakaldo/​Bilbao: Ayuntamiento de Barakaldo/​Ediciones Beta III Milenio. Monteverde Sedano, Federico. 1898. Campaña de Filipinas. La División Lachambre, 1897. Madrid: Librería Hernando y Compañía. Moya, Jose C. 1998. Cousins and Strangers. Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–​ 1930. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Núñez Seixas, Xosé M. 2019. “Galician immigrant societies in Cuba: local identity, diaspora politics and Atlantic mobilization (1870–​1940).” Journal of Social History 52(3): 705–​730. Palanco Aguado, Fernando. 1999. “Cartas de Pablo Zapatero Galán:  el 98 de un soldado español en Filipinas.” In 1898: España y el Pacífico. Interpretación del pasado, realidad del presente, edited by Miguel Luque Talaván, 367–​378. Madrid: AEEP. Rodao, Florentino, and Felice N. Rodriguez, eds. 2002. The Philippine Revolution of 1896. Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Stolcke,Verena. 2017. Racismo y sexualidad en la Cuba colonial. Intersecciones. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra. Stucki, Andreas. 2017. Las guerras de Cuba. Violencia y campos de concentración (1868–​1898). Madrid:  La Esfera de los Libros. Tone, John L. 2006. War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–​1898. Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press. Ucelay-​Da Cal, Enric. 1997. “Cuba y el despertar de los nacionalismos en la España peninsular.” Studia Historica/​Historia Contemporánea 15: 151–​192. Yáñez Gallardo, César R. 1992. “La última invasión armada. Los contingentes militares españoles a las guerras de Cuba, siglo XIX.” Revista de Indias 194: 107–​127.

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11 GUIDEBOOKS, PANORAMAS, AND ARCHITECTURE Competing national constructions in Catalonia and Spain Josep-​Maria Garcia-​Fuentes The early years of the nineteenth century in Spain were marked by the country’s significant struggle to cope with the fast-​changing nation-​building processes that were quickly redefining the European and worldwide map. The emergence of modern states shaped against revolutionary processes—​either unleashed by major social and political motivation, like in France, or due to technological, industrial, and intellectual revolutions like in the United Kingdom—​were grounded upon the rapid acceleration of national constructions serving as an anvil to forge the fast-​g rowing modern states in Europe. Contemporary nation-​building processes undertaken by Spain’s European counterparts placed the country in a difficult situation. In the early nineteenth century, the kingdom of Spain—​once one of the vastest major empires to ever emerge as a consequence of the domination of the New World—​was weakening while other modern states were rising up and imposing their rule in the international scene. There was perhaps nothing more illuminating in summarizing the extremely difficult challenges facing the country’s geopolitical interests at the time than the commentary provided by Giacomo Casanova (1725–​ 1798). He was a famous seducer and writer, but also a renowned scientist and intellectual, who spent his life moving through—​or rather fleeing from—​most of the courts and elite societies in Europe. The descriptions and reflections he gathered in his memoirs towards the end of his life provide us with a uniquely insightful record of late eighteenth-​century European life. These include observations made during his short visit to Spain between 1767 and 1768, when he even hazarded a guess on the reasons behind the country’s disastrous situation: Pauvres Espagnols! La beauté de leur pays, la fertilité et la richesse sont la cause de leur paresse, et les mines du Pérou et du Potosi sont celles de leur pauvreté, de leur orgueil, et de tous leurs préjugés. C’est paradoxique, mais le lecteur sait que ce que je dis est vrai. Pour devenir le plus florissant de tous les royaumes de la terre, l’Espagne aurait besoin d’être conquise, bouleversée et presque détruite, elle renaîtrait faite pour être le séjour des heureux.1 (1993, 676–​677)

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The vehemence of Casanova’s words somehow presages the humiliating occupation of Spain by Napoleonic troops in 1808. The first ambitious attempts to modernize the nation in line with other European counterparts were initiated in the late eighteenth century during the reign of Charles III and under the lead of his Enlightenment government. However, these transformations were abruptly interrupted by the Peninsular War (1807–​1814), which marked a turning point in the implementation of much-​needed reforms. Some of these reforms were undertaken—​with limited ambition and impact—​over the decades following the Peninsular War and the reign of Ferdinand VII, eras marked by the highly volatile and convulsive alternation of conservative and liberal governments, the change of dynastic Crowns, and the eventual declaration of the First Republic of Spain (1873–​1874). It was against this constantly shifting context that opposing nationalist constructs ultimately emerged based on the coexistence of different interpretations of the Spanish nation. In the Spanish example, this process was conditioned by the need to define a national project that could sublimate the various national ideologies emerging within the entire state. As was the case for other nation-​building processes, Spain also underwent a very complex procedure spanning from erudite and elitist publications (such as formal academic histories) to their more popular counterparts, to performances, regional picturesque trips (Garcia-​Fuentes 2010) and the invention of traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). National affections and ideas were grounded upon the writing and establishing of their respective national histories, and fuelled by the exploration and valorization of national ruins, monuments, and landscapes upon which national identity was forged. History books, guidebooks, travel accounts, artistic voyages, landscape descriptions and representations, and panoramas were not only the product of the nineteenth century, but also contributed to mediating the construction of nation as modern states were forged.This political and cultural production aimed to define and spread the national construct throughout the population of the state as well as among the emergent international community of other nations immersed in their respective nation-​building projects. Thus, this chapter explores the construction of national symbolic discourses in Spain focusing on history books, guidebooks, travel accounts, artistic voyages, landscape descriptions and representations, and panoramas created by locals and foreigners.Together, they constitute an illuminating observatory from which to understand the complexity of the various contending strategies in nation-​building in the nineteenth century as they reveal the entangled relations between politics, intellectual production, and popular culture, and how these forged early modern national monuments and the emergence of preservation.These materials—​the result of dialectic creations arising from the confrontation between foreign and national identities—​were carefully produced and, thus, constitute an essential source in the comprehensive study of the nineteenth century.

Shaping the Spanish identity: conflicting visions of Spain amongst foreign and national travellers The massive interwoven production of artistic voyages, travellers’ accounts, and guidebooks fuelled the idealization and packaging presentation of the history of the countries and cities they described. For this reason, these works played a key role in nation-​building processes. Indeed, as Koshar states, “both tourism and nationalism are grounded in the opposition to the everyday and the desire for authenticity” (1998, 326–​336). Consequently, this nation-​building process was a two-​way street working in relative simultaneity in most European countries: the definition of national idealized histories, and the invention of their traditions, national identities,

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and characters were all forged through dialectic description and reciprocal acknowledgement between foreign authors—​the others—​and national authors—​the self. This is a process that has deep parallels with the construction of personal identities through confronting the self with the other. Certainly, the seduction of difference, of otherness, constitutes an anthropological and philosophical debate rooted in strong intellectual traditions that show how universal the concept of “self-​other” is (Picard and Di Giovine 2014). In this context—​far from being unique to Spain—​the political resonances of the guidebooks and travel accounts were shared by most publications, since all their authors were—​to varying extents—​occupied in their respective nation-​building processes, even when they referred to foreign countries. The French occupation of Spain was seen as an international humiliation of the country, as it also led to the loss of the majority of Spanish colonies. These events raised a strong national consciousness in Spain, and encouraged foreign travellers to visit the country. This attraction was fuelled also by the accounts by French and British military forces and agents that moved around Spain during the Peninsular War, combining their duties with a curiosity to learn more about what was an unknown country at the time. Until then, Spain had mostly been kept out of the traditional Grand Tours of the Northern European elites culminating in Italy. The war represented an unprecedented flow of these European elites to Spain. Their descriptions of the events—​with an already-​established Romantic taste—​included references to the unique Spanish landscape and monuments, and stimulated a growing and consistent flow of travellers throughout the nineteenth century. The French and British were the most represented, but Germans were also known to travel to Spain. These accounts attempted to describe the Spanish character, shaping an image of mysterious idiosyncrasy regarding the uniqueness of the Spanish people—​as we can garner from Casanova’s quotation above—​Spanish architecture, and Spanish landscape. For the European Romantics visiting the country, Spain embodied a rapidly decadent empire with a strong imagery of old prejudices shaped by decades of rumour and a lack of reliable information. These ideas overlapped with the rich history of Spain in regards to Roman and medieval monuments and, above all, its Islamic-​oriental heritage, which was an exclusive and distinctive asset within the European context of the time. Indeed, it was thanks to this uniqueness within the European context that Spain quickly became more attractive than the traditional Grand Tours through France and Italy, now considered monotonous and tedious by most Romantic and bourgeois travellers.Thus, the popularity of Spain as a travel destination increased exponentially when they discovered that “of the many misrepresentations regarding the Peninsula, few had been previously more systematically circulated than the dangers and difficulties” because, as traveller Richard Ford stated in 1855, Spain, which is “the most romantic and peculiar country in Europe, might in reality be visited throughout its length and breadth, with ease and safety” (1855, 5). The different, the unique, and the unknown (but safe for travellers) was therefore exciting and appealing, because as Prosper Mérimée denounced around the same years, “the progress of the century equals everything, I mean it degrades everything” up to the point, he alerted, “all countries will look like the same and there will be no reason to travel” (1988, 223–​269). This was clearly not the case with Spain. The publication of the first accounts by travellers forged an image of Spain as one of the most seductive destinations in Europe for the new emerging Romantic taste with its wealth of unique natural and “oriental” assets, and stimulated the flow of new visitors. Actually, travellers’ accounts and early guidebooks were preceded by the publication of literary and artistic voyages, which became very popular from the late eighteenth century onwards and were characterized by a combination of literary descriptions accompanied by artistic illustrations often reinforced through plans, elevations, and accurate historical accounts about the sites and architecture included in them. Voyages were, therefore, an unusual 152

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combination of literature and science: an essential precedent for the Romantic accounts of the travellers mentioned above.These works were highly refined, exhaustive, and well-​documented, as they often referred to each other. Alexandre Laborde’s famous Voyage pittoresque et historique de l’Espagne (1806–​1820), for example, edited his four volumes on Catalonia, Valencia and Extremadura, Andalusia, and Castile and Aragon—​according to the itinerary of his trip—​as he focused particularly on Roman, medieval, and Islamic ruins, and on unique natural settings such as Montserrat—​following in the footsteps of former travellers such as both Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt (Garcia-​Fuentes 2012, 2016). Cross-​references in traveller’s accounts on Spain were common, as they focused mostly on describing the same landscapes and architectures they considered most representative of Spain’s uniqueness. The most sought-​after landscapes were unique natural settings and mountains like Montserrat, the Pyrenees, or Sierra Nevada. Roman, Islamic, and medieval architecture was considered the most fascinating, and the cities that drew the most attention were those connected to natural and artistic attractions:  Burgos, Salamanca, Toledo, Granada, Cordoba, and Seville, followed by a wider group including Cadiz, Valencia, Barcelona, and even Madrid. Travellers attempted to shape a general appreciation of this architecture and the landscapes and cities as they discussed their like-​mindedness and dissimilarities in relation to foreign counterparts but also to those within the country. Furthermore, their descriptions were often revealingly appreciative of those aspects of people’s characters, society, and political organization they considered most representative of the Spanish originality. Most revealingly, they acknowledged the significant differences they found across the different regions in the country. Indeed, the main aspects that drew travellers’ attention were the vast differences between the Spanish people themselves. This appreciation was perceived as a huge contrast to the most commonplace—​and mistaken—​international image of the country and its people as a homogeneous entity. The traveller Richard Ford, for example, flagged this misrepresentation of Spain in the preface of the third edition of his very successful A Handbook for Travellers in Spain, published in 1855: Since Spain appears, on the map, to be a square and most compact kingdom, politicians and geographers have treated it and its inhabitants as one and the same; practically, however, this is almost a geographical expression, as the earth, air and mortals, of the different portions of this conventional whole, are altogether heterogeneous. (1855, 11) This diversity applied, therefore, to both the geography and the inhabitants. Moreover, Ford even realized a link between the two: “differing like soil and sky, the people, in each of the once independent provinces [of Spain] now loosely bound together by one golden hoop, the Crown, has its own particular character” (1855, 11). Despite all the differences, he was also able to acknowledge a common characteristic shared by all nationals in each province: “To hate his neighbour is a second nature to the Spaniard” (1855, 11). These considerations of the country and its inhabitants led Ford to state (1855, 12) that Spaniards may talk and boast of their country, of their Patria, as is done by the similarly circumstanced Italians, but like them and the Germans, they have the fallacy, but no real Fatherland; it is an aggregation rather than an amalgamation, –​every single individual in his heart really only loving his native province, and only considering as his fellow-​countryman, su paisano—​a most binding and endearing word—​one born in the same locality as himself. 153

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Accordingly, Ford structured his handbook on Spain in a series of chapters for each kingdom within the country (Andalucía; Ronda and Granada; The Kingdom of Murcia; Valencia; Catalonia; Estremadura; Leon; The Kingdom of Galicia; The Asturias; The Castiles, New and Old; The Basque Provinces; Kingdom of Aragon; Kingdom of Navarra). Appreciation of the complex structure of Spain as a modern nation-​state was, indeed, noted by many foreign travellers visiting the country in the early nineteenth century. The circumstances in their own countries of origin—​immersed in their respective nation-​building processes—​probably made them especially sensitive to these appreciations. Spain, a “land of anomalies”—​to use Ford’s own expression (1855, 12)—​somehow became a unique mirror reflecting on the nation-​building process itself, focusing in particular on the definition of a modern national identity, monuments, and political organization. Perhaps the clearest understanding of the challenges Spain was facing in the early nineteenth century regarding its construction as a modern nation can be found in the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Following a visit to Spain in 1801, during which he explored Montserrat and Catalonia, Valencia, and spent four months in the Basque Country, he wrote:  “Cómo debe tratar a la nación vasca la Monarquía española (pues para la República francesa sólo pueden tener sus distritos vascos una importancia muy secundaria) para hacer su fuerza y su actividad tan provechosas para España como sea posible?”2 (1925, 120). In other words: how can we successfully organize a modern state based on the aggregation of different nations around one royal crown and not around the idea of a single nation-​state? For Humboldt, this interrogation posed this key contemporary challenge: tiene un interés práctico superior, y tanto más cuanto que ahora es frecuente el caso de que pueblos diferentes se reúnan en un mismo Estado. Pero hay que confesar libremente que hasta ahora siempre se ha pensado más en desembarazarse sólo de las dificultades, que opone la disparidad, que en utilizar lo bueno, que consigo trae la peculiaridad.3 (1925, 120) Humboldt’s interest in Spain, therefore, was thereby intensified by his interest in exploring innovative solutions for the organization of a state containing various nations. Although this aspect was not so unique to all travellers, as Ford notes in his travel guidebook when he referred to the expression “Las Españas,” this is, as he explained: “the plural title given to the chief of the federal union of this really little united kingdom” (1855, 12). Nevertheless, beyond these various considerations of Spain, it is important to highlight how these accounts on Spain by foreign travellers preceded the first Spanish publications of their kind. Again, Ford was clear to note how “few Spaniards travel in their own country, and fewer travel out of it; thus, with limited means of comparison, they cannot appreciate differences” (1855, 5). However, the huge success and vast number of publications on the country by foreign travellers spurred Spanish authors to elaborate their own personal response to these works on their nation by foreigners, either by adhering to their appreciation or by rejecting it. The analysis of these works is a significant study yet to be undertaken (Rubio Jiménez 1992, 23–​31) but for our purpose here a quick insight will help us to understand the political and ideological ambition of these publications. These reactions were pioneered by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’ famous Letters to Ponz, followed by a series of other contributions that culminated in the first, monumental and most notable publication of Recuerdos y bellezas de España (1839–​1865) by Francisco J.  Parcerisa, a project involving Pablo Piferrer, José María Quadrado, Francisco Pi y Margall, and Pedro 154

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Madrazo—​just to mention the most important co-​authors in the various volumes, one for each province or kingdom within the country. The tone was equally patriotic, as we can read in Pi y Margall’s text for the volume on Cataluña within the wider publication titled España: ¿Permanecerían en España tan ricas maravillas ignoradas por nosotros mismos? Ni está aún actualmente tan falta de excelentes arquitectos, pintores y escultores, cuya frente no haya producido grandes y sublimes creaciones … no desaprovechemos ocasión tan oportuna: levantemos nuestra patria de sus ruinas: renacerá España llena de brío, confundiendo la soberbia de las naciones extranjeras.4 (1842,  11–​12) Therefore, the goal of these publications by Spanish authors was clear: to learn about “themselves,” to rebuild “the nation,” and as such—​as will be discussed below—​their interpretation of their nation’s monuments and landscapes often differed significantly from that of foreign authors.

National histories and competing national discourses: Modesto Lafuente and Víctor Balaguer We find stories about historical events in medieval accounts, but it is not until the Enlightenment that they become proper proto-​national narratives. The association of these stories to old sites was key to this transformation. However, at the time, only the most enlightened circles received them. It was not until the nineteenth century—​when national histories were consolidated and popularized at an unprecedented level—​that they became a key mediator in the shaping of national identities for emerging nation-​states. Citizens were expected to learn about their nation’s history and to be proud of their individuality compared to other nations. Hence it was important to include enthusiastic descriptions and images of the national landscapes and monuments in these popular historical accounts. Furthermore, the implementation of general education programmes in new states also contributed significantly to the spread of these narratives and their implicit appreciation for the national sites and monuments associated with them. They included a selection of the most popular sites that were most closely linked to national myths and offered an interpretation other than the foreigner’s idealized view of imagined exotic remains. For Spanish authors, national heritage represented rather outstanding symbols of a shared European culture. Furthermore, the sites included in the first national stories were usually the first to be listed as national heritage when the first preservation laws were created and implemented. We know these nation-​building processes were not spontaneous, but rather carefully led by politicians, intellectuals, and authors involved in and committed to processes of construction of the state. As, for example,Víctor Balaguer, the Catalan writer, poet, journalist, historian, and liberal politician who, in his memoirs as a traveller through a number of European nations, revealed how traditions, like monuments, were “inventadas por la poesía y conservadas por la credulidad” [invented by poetry and preserved through gullibility] (1852, 5–​6). Indeed, this entangled and complex process became an especially controversial struggle in Spain during the nineteenth century, as it continues to be at present.The first successful and popular publications of a modern national history occurred in the 1850s, when Modesto Lafuente (1806–​1866) published his Historia General de España (1850–​1866), and in the 1860s, when Víctor Balaguer (1824–​1901) published his Historia de Cataluña y de la Corona de Aragón (1860–​1863). Until 155

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the publication of Lafuente’s and Balaguer’s works, the most common history of Spain was the Historia General de España by Jesuit scholar Juan de Mariana (1536–​1624), which became an essential reference during the short Spanish Enlightenment and its early attempt to forge a modern nation-​state—​interrupted by the disastrous emergence of the Peninsular War. Mariana’s history “implicitly” included the Castilian “imperial pretension” of the “pre-​ eminence of Castile as a persistence from the Roman past,” continuing the line of Castilian medieval texts, as Ucelay-​Da Cal sharply points out (2016, 367). According to this idea, the origin of modern Spain was linked to the military campaign of a few noble Christian men from the north of the Iberian Peninsula who fought against Muslims in the south, and managed to progressively conquer the whole peninsula in a process—​the Reconquista—​that eventually culminated with the expulsion of the Islamic population during the rule of the Catholic Kings in 1492. This interpretation of history also shaped the myth of the Battle of Covadonga and the importance of the victory of King Pelagius of Asturias (685–​737) in this battle, which credited him as the founder of the Reconquista and hence as a key national figure within the modern national Spanish universe, which somehow continued to the conquest —​“discovery”—​of America. Modesto Lafuente’s new history of Spain consisted of thirty-​ three volumes published between 1850 and 1866, and carried the same title as Mariana’s work. This was no mere coincidence:  Lafuente’s gargantuan work was aimed to mythicize Mariana’s account of the Reconquista—​a term popularized by Lafuente—​and the legend of Covadonga and Pelagius as the essential origins of modern Spain as a Catholic nation. Furthermore, Lafuente was an historian but also a prolific journalist and popular writer, author of travel accounts such as Viaje

Figure 11.1  Postcard of Covadonga’s landscape and the Gothic temple built next to the historical shrine during the nineteenth century, c.1900. Source: © Josep-​Maria Garcia-​Fuentes.

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de Fray Gerundio por Francia, Bélgica, Holanda y orillas del Rin (1842), satirical volumes like Viaje aerostático (1847), or essays on topics related to his ideology—​like La cuestión religiosa (1855) arguing for the Catholic unity of Spain. Lafuente’s Historia General de España is often considered the most important and influential national historical account of Spain written during the nineteenth century. However, Víctor Balaguer published his Historia de Cataluña y de la Corona de Aragón in five volumes between 1860 and 1863.This was probably the only other contemporary national history that could challenge Lafuente’s work, thanks to its huge popularity and, most importantly, because of its diverse interpretation of Spanish history. Indeed—​as the title suggests—​Balaguer’s account was not aimed at reinforcing Mariana’s story, but rather he faced the task of drafting the story of Aragon and Catalonia in parallel to that of Castile, as he understood both to be equal contributors to the shaping of modern Spain. Accordingly, he interpreted the history of Spain as sustaining a federal nation-​state able to accommodate the challenge of articulating the different nations within Spain. The surprising heterogeneity of Spain mentioned by foreign travellers resonates in Balaguer`s view. To support his argument, Balaguer did not search for the ancient tribal antecedents rooted in Iberian, Celtic, or other different crossbred peoples—​unlike Lafuente’s work with the Romans and the Visigoths—​but he merely acknowledged “que hi havia gent al territori prou” [that there were enough people in the territory], as Ucelay-​Da Cal (2016, 378)  notes brilliantly. Furthermore, Balaguer even reinterpreted the history of Spain according to this understanding, with the aim of forming his national Project for Spain: El orígen y cuna del sistema representativo se hallan en la península ibérica. No hay que ir á buscar modelos de parlamentarismo fuera de casa, como hacen algunos, poco conocedores de nuestra historia, que abundantes los tenemos en ella. Los grandes modelos que pueden presentarnos los extraños, tal vez, y sin tal vez, nacieron de haberse inspirado en las antiguas Córtes de la nacionalidades ibéricas.5 (Balaguer 1852, 6) Thus, Balaguer undertook an ambitious and very compelling construction of a symbolic network of monuments based on a fresh interpretation of the national heritage of Spain and Catalonia with the aim of bolstering his ideological and political federal project. This strategy was shaped through a series of popular and elitist publications that started with the publication of Los frailes y sus conventos. Su Historia, su descripción, sus tradiciones, sus costumbres, su importancia in 1851. In this work, Balaguer quoted an anonymous “eminente viajero [el cuál] después de haber recorrido todas las naciones del globo, nos decía resumiendo sus viajes: el Oriente es un palacio, la Francia un Castillo, la Italia un jardín y la España un claustro”6 (1851, 5). Balaguer understood that old ruined monasteries had the potential to become representative of Spanish and Catalan identity by shaping a modern Romantic interpretation around a narrative combining historical fact with fiction. This project soon gained wide acceptance among diverse social, political, and cultural groups, because nearly all the monasteries selected were canonical Romantic sites known to arouse the popular imagination of both national citizens and foreigners. Balaguer’s creative interpretation of the history of monasteries was thus aimed at converting them into symbolic references for his dreamed fantasized future federation, as opposed to the centralized and uniform nation envisaged in Lafuente’s work. The success of Balaguer’s project was fuelled by his huge production of entangled but carefully articulated works in journalism, politics, history, writing, and heritage-​building, and by his extensive network of personal, 157

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Figure 11.2  Postcard of Montserrat’s landscape including the Catholic shrine built during the nineteenth century upon the former ruins following Balaguer’s political and cultural project on the Catalan and Spanish monasteries, c.1900. Source:  © Josep-​Maria Garcia-​Fuentes.

cultural, and political relations that spanned most of his national and international contemporaries. His writing style was passionate and enthusiastic, inspired by the very best of Jules Michelet. He constantly related vibrant accounts of the national past in contemporary debates in a very consistent attempt to envisage the future of Catalonia and other Spanish nations united within the new modern national state of Spain. Both Lafuente’s and Balaguer’s proposals set the groundwork for subsequent competing narratives in shaping the modern national Spanish state, representing as they did two differing ideological projects aimed at articulating the diverse and most ambitious identities at the heart of Spain.

Panoramas, landscapes, and national sites: Covadonga and Montserrat Lafuente’s account reinforced the perception of Covadonga as the birthplace of a centralized and uniformed Spanish nation, while Balaguer’s more flexible symbolic universe forged a very unique interpretation of monasteries to bolster his own political and ideological federal project. The interpretation of these sites was thus shaped through dynamic negotiation as opposed to other nation-​building processes taking place across European nations. Illustrated publications—​ guidebooks, artistic voyages, and national stories—​written by both national and foreign authors and aimed at vast popular and educated audiences were the essential mediators of this negotiation, as discussed above. However, the role of these mediators intensified significantly through new media introduced in modern times: the panoramas. Panoramas consisted of a painting on a large canvas presenting a 360º view, with its ends joined to form a loop. Special structures were designed to fit the canvases, some measuring up to 158

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15 metres tall. To reach the central observation platform, the viewer followed a small dark passageway at ground level and climbed a stairway. The canvas could be seen very clearly from any point on the elevated observatory; this eliminated any privileged positions, meaning all observers were equal. Designers of panoramas tried to reproduce the real experience of the actual original space or site. To this aim, panoramas included special lighting techniques, including skylights and electric lamps. Panoramas aimed to inspire an intense feeling of being immersed in a scene, not unlike the experience of watching a three-​dimensional movie today; they are, in fact, considered the early predecessors of cinema. Panoramas were designed to reach a broader popular audience. They presented themes that deviated from the allegorical or mythical figures represented in traditional painting, aimed at a more educated audience. In panoramas, biblical and religious scenes were replaced by recent political events, military battles, or places of potential interest to the average newspaper reader. Therefore, information on the themes and sites they represented came directly from contemporary travellers’ books, artistic voyages, and national stories. For these reasons, panoramas quickly spread across Europe as modern attractions, becoming essential mediators in the construction and spreading of national narratives due to their highly ideological and political content (Ottermann 1997; Comment 1999). They were important builders and disseminators of European national identities, which were being redefined in the very years that this medium was being displayed.This role of panoramas as a nation-​building medium has been compellingly described regarding Germany (Oettermann 1997, 11–​45), the United Kingdom (Blake 2011), and France (Comment 1999). A study of these devices in the various nation-​building processes in Spain is yet to be addressed consistently; nevertheless, a quick look at those produced in Spain reveals the importance they had in negotiating the Spanish national universe. In 1817, Carlos Champeville sought royal permission to get an exclusive permit to establish a panorama in Madrid with the aim to “exponer en él las principales y hermosas vistas que la Europa y la España ofrecen” [exhibit there the foremost beautiful sights that Europe and Spain have to offer] and “demás brillantes hechos que contiene la historia de los fastos de nuestra nación” [other brilliant events contained in the history of the splendors of our nation] (Vega 2010, 366) as, for example, the view of Cadiz when it was blockaded by the British naval army. Indeed, the first panorama built in Spain following Champeville’s proposal portrayed the Battle of Tetuan fought in 1860 during the Spanish-​Moroccan War (1859–​1860) and the celebration of General Joan Prim’s victory— Víctor Balaguer’s ideological and political colleague and friend. These modern inventions became essential mediators in spreading narratives and historical interpretations of the nation, and ultimately teaching the national population how to appreciate their country’s national monuments and landscapes. The extent of their influence is clear from the fact that many were described in guidebooks, travel accounts, and artistic voyages. They all became strategic mediators on the perception and ultimately on the shaping of these national sites—​an impact that often extended to transforming existing national sites or even building new ones. Panoramas were designed to generate an impression of realism, although what they actually represented was an ideal (Oetterman 1997). This is an important distinction to make, as beyond the propagandistic use of the imaginary for a number of contemporary agendas, panoramas also contributed to projects to define and physically rebuild the architecture and concrete materiality of the sites they represented. By analyzing them we can understand the contending and opposing construction of national sites and landscapes as a dynamic process in which written and visual accounts contributed to a definition of their national interpretation and to raising awareness of them. Covadonga and Montserrat are indeed enlightening examples of these entangled relations. Swiftly, both sites started to symbolize different and competing processes 159

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of nation-​building in Spain. Covadonga turned out to be an essential reference for those envisioning Spain as a centralized modern nation-​state.The imaginary associated to Montserrat, however, was more complex, as it became the main subject of contention between those who envisaged a rather more federal organization of Spain, those who claimed for a stronger Catalan nationalist movement, and even those who interpreted Spain as a single-​nation-​centralized state. The wild mountainous landscape and Catholic shrine of Covadonga, in Asturias, became a key site within the Spanish national universe from the eighteenth century onwards, though it attracted little foreign attention as it did not fit within the specific Romantic idealized view of “otherness.” Actually, little was made of the architectural structures or landscape in travellers’ accounts, and concerns were raised about the authenticity of the legends associated to it (Ford 1855, 290). However, the modern national focus on Covadonga emerged from the Enlightenment government led by Jovellanos during the reign of Charles III, when the destruction by fire of the old shrine opened up the opportunity to build a new shrine with stronger national connotations, based on the former idealization of the site in Mariana’s works. Covadonga was then turned into an essential national site in order to bolster the programme of modernization and construction of a national symbolic universe for Spain. The new project was commissioned to architect Ventura Rodríguez in 1779 and quickly became the epicentre of a tense struggle between the local religious community in charge of the shrine, and the national government in Madrid aligned with the Royal Academy of San Fernando and the architect himself. The bone of contention was in fact the importance of national narrative within the new design. Construction was planned adjacent to the Madonna’s cave and not in it, as the religious community had written it be done. Furthermore, a monument to Pelagius was placed under the dome in a privileged position in the exclusive basement of the new building. According to the priests, the new design undermined the Madonna in favour of the national narrative. Jovellanos’ comments on the new project reveal the national and Romantic understanding in addition to the previous religious one: ¡Oh que maravilloso contraste nos ofrecerá a la vista tan bello y magnífico objeto de una escena tan horrida y extraña! Día vendrá en que estos prodigios del arte y la naturaleza atraigan de nuevo allí la admiración de los pueblos y en que disfrazada en devoción la curiosidad, resucite el muerto gusto de las antiguas peregrinaciones y engendre una nueva especie de superstición, menos contraria a la ilustración de nuestros venideros.7 (1840, 192) Thus, Covadonga was planned to be a modern destination point for national pilgrimages that went beyond its original exclusive religious character. However, the dispute was left unresolved and construction unfinished when the Peninsular War broke out. In the mid-​nineteenth century construction started again with a brand new design following Lafuente’s success and the importance given the shrine in his idealized national history. Subsequently, a new Gothic design was planned according to techniques of the picturesque organization of spaces within a time sequence, aimed at merging architectural and landscape scenes and the idealized national and religious narratives associated to them, including a passionate discussion on the styles and character chosen for the building. These techniques were implemented to produce and promote all sorts of trips and pilgrimages to these sites, and to evoke strong religious and national emotions in visitors. Similar picturesque techniques and schemes were used in other religious and national pilgrimage shrines that were built or rebuilt at the time, such as Lourdes or Montserrat (Garcia-​Fuentes 2010). 160

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The national resonances of the site, associated with Pelagius and the Battle of Covadonga as foundational myths of the Spanish nation, not only persisted but became a constant reference point throughout the debates on the continuation of architectural works, organization of national-​religious celebrations, and even when the site was listed in 1918 as the first natural park in Spain. Throughout these negotiations, therefore, Covadonga progressively became the major national symbol for the royal, Catholic, and most traditional sectors of Spain due to the continual political and economic support by the Conservative governments in Madrid. This interest caused deep-​seated tension with Asturians on their interpretation of the site, as well as with other Spanish interpretations conceptualizing the historical events in Covadonga within the European context beyond purely Spanish or Spanish-​Asturian terms (Boyd 2006, 149–​178). In fact, the official focus on Covadonga awakened tensions around the country, mostly in Aragon and Catalonia, as they also claimed themselves as essential co-​founders of the Spanish nation. Claims made by the bishop of Zaragoza in 1918 disclosed the long-​lasting nature of this struggle, when he explained in an open letter to the King that “ni Aragón puede ser menos que Castilla—​tanto monta—​, ni Zaragoza menos que Covadonga” [Aragon cannot be less important than Castile, and—​what amounts to the same thing—​nor can Zaragoza be less so than Covadonga], and therefore demanded that “vamos a celebrar el octavo centenario de la conquista de Zaragoza” [we celebrate the eighth centennial of the conquest of Zaragoza] (Jardiel 1918, 1). Thus, Covadonga was one of the most important epicentres of struggle between the competing national and ideological projects for Spain. Though it was not the only one. Montserrat—​ the inimitable mountain next to Barcelona—​ became a key symbol for many different political and ideological groups who competed to control its symbolic—​and economic—​capital throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was a complex process commenced by Balaguer in the 1850s, when he forged his ideological project based upon his interpretation of the history of Catalonia through the publication of a series of related guidebooks and artistic voyages inspired by authors including Laborde and Humboldt, or Piferrer and Parcerisa. Through his publications, as discussed above, Balaguer managed to define a new monumental universe for his political project based upon a compelling resignification interpretation of the old ruined monasteries in the country. Montserrat became the main symbol of this new national universe because of the unique mountain home to the monastery and shrine. In fact, the strange sedimentary conglomerate geological formation had drawn the attention of foreign travellers way before Balaguer shaped his monumental project around it. Many accounts and foreign visitors had referred to the site since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but this number increased significantly over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, international interest and understanding of the mountain changed for good after Alexander von Humboldt’s visit to the mountain followed by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s travel in 1800 and his essay on Montserrat published in 1803. The Humboldt brothers—​Wilhelm in particular—​were not at all interested in the monastery or the shrine, but rather in the exuberant nature of the mountain and the happiness of the hermits living there. For the Germans, Montserrat’s unique natural environment and hermitages revealed the possibility of a new spirituality beyond the existing religions founded on the modern interpretation of nature and mediated by the contemplation and experience of unique natural landscapes (Garcia-​Fuentes 2012, 2016). This idea was influenced by all contemporary debates on the myth of the noble savage and scientific debates on nature. This was, indeed, a modern understanding of Montserrat opposed to the Catholic imaginary that was previously associated to the mountain, the Madonna, and the shrine found there. The symbolic universe that Balaguer created around monasteries and Montserrat aimed to reinvent the symbolism thereof to suit his own vision of Catalonia and Spain. For this reason, 161

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Figure 11.3  Postcard of the late nineteenth-​century Pelagius’ statue placed in Covadonga in close relation to its landscape. Source: © Josep-​Maria Garcia-​Fuentes.

Balaguer took advantage of the German Romantics’ unique understanding of Montserrat’s mountain, and combined it with the traditional Catholic view, in order to shape a modern national symbol representing all Catalans and Spanish people regardless of ideology. In short, Balaguer tried to shape Montserrat—​together with all other Spanish monasteries—​into truly ‘national’ symbols, shared equally by all people regardless of their nationality: Castilians, Catalans, Basques, and all other nationalities within Spain and Portugal. He attempted to forge monasteries as symbols that could overcome all differences across the many ideological groups that were competing to lead the nation-​building process of Spain (Garcia-​Fuentes 2013). Therefore, Montserrat—​unlike Covadonga—​and, by extension, the network of all Spanish monasteries, was capable of overriding differences across the different ideologies and national constructions defined around it. Balaguer, thus, inaugurated his interest in Montserrat in the 1850s with a very prolific series of popular publications on Montserrat later followed by a growing number of 162

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Figure 11.4  Postcard of the Madonna of Montserrat dressed up in her royal clothes, c.1890. Source: © Josep-​Maria Garcia-​Fuentes.

religious and picturesque guidebooks that eventually culminated in the shaping of the mountain and the shrine in it as national symbols for both Catalonia and Spain. However, despite the inclusive symbolism originally planned by Balaguer, Montserrat soon became a focus of struggle between different Catalan ideological groups following the frustration of his federal project due to the abdication of Amadeus I in 1873. In the 1880s, the emergent Catalanist culture and Catalan political movements adopted Montserrat as their main symbol, with different factions of liberal and Catholic Catalan groups competing between them. The first, including early Catalanist leaders as Valentí Almirall, were close to a more liberal position and interpreted Montserrat as an inclusive Catalan symbol, similarly to Balaguer’s ideas. However, the Catalan Catholic group was led by the Group of Vic, including priests like Josep Morgades, Jaume Collell, Josep Torres i Bages, and Jacint Verdaguer, and interpreted Monsterrat as a purely Catalan and Catholic symbol, since they perceived the historical national origin of Catalonia as linked to the raising of the monasteries in its land. All these groups used the publication of numerous intentional descriptions, guidebooks, postcards, and panoramas as vehicles to spread their ideas (just as Balaguer continued to do) in an exponentially growing struggle between all groups in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Most interestingly, as in Covadonga, these struggles had a strong impact upon the contemporary architectural works in Montserrat and in Barcelona, as well as the construction 163

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Figure 11.5  Postcard of the Catholic monument designed by Antoni Gaudí for the mountain of Montserrat, c.1900. Source: © Josep-​Maria Garcia-​Fuentes.

of the shrine in the mountain that evolved in parallel with the ideological debates around them (Garcia-​Fuentes, 2012, 2016). The struggle in the 1880s and 1890s between Balaguer’s understanding of Montserrat and the Catalan Catholic appropriation of Montserrat and the Catalan monasteries led by the Group of Vic (Garcia-​Fuentes 2013) is particularly revealing.The religious group organized two successful festivals in Montserrat to bolster their strategy: the famous patriotic-​ religious campaigns to celebrate the millenary of the monastery’s foundation in 1880, and the crowning of its Madonna as the patron saint of Catalonia in 1881. Furthermore, they inspired and fostered the construction of numerous religious monuments spread throughout the mountain to represent and spread their ideas of Montserrat as a purely religious national site linked to Catalonia as a Catholic nation, as well as rebuilding old ruined hermitages scattered around the mountain. These reconstructed buildings and new monuments 164

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were built on picturesque arrangements, making them closely related to the unique nature of the mountain (Garcia-​Fuentes 2010). Balaguer and his ideological circles, on the other hand, promoted the construction of the rack railway as a way to guarantee popular access to the top of the mountain and to spread the Romantic understanding of Montserrat. Furthermore, they also supported the construction of a panorama of Montserrat built for the World Fair Exhibition held in Barcelona in 1888 in order to spread Balaguer’s and Humboldt’s ideas on the natural and liberal appreciation of the mountain (Garcia-​Fuentes 2016, 66–​72). These struggles shaped the architectural works and restorations in Montserrat, also influencing the architectural debate in Barcelona—​in works such as the Sagrada Familia or the Ciutadella Park—​and beyond in other gardens and religious buildings that strongly resembled the unique skyline of the mountain of Montserrat (Garcia-​Fuentes 2012, 210–​252). But most importantly, these tensions exponentially increased the monastery’s and mountain’s symbolic capital and set the scene for the huge ideological competition on Montserrat that took place over the twentieth century as the dispute around its symbolism continued throughout the Spanish Civil War and the years of Franco’s dictatorship. However, it was in the final decades of Franco’s dictatorship when Montserrat came closer to becoming an exclusive national Catalan symbol, after the complex ideological celebrations of 1947 that culminated with the monastery siding with the Catalan resistance against the totalitarian regime (Garcia-​Fuentes 2012, 361–​463).

A privileged observatory to revisit the emergence of modernity Guidebooks, artistic voyages, and panoramas played a key role in the forging of national histories, heritage, and monuments, as they revealed the mechanisms used to invent traditions (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), and to idealize a country’s past within the nation-​building process (Lowenthal, 1985). These media became necessary mediators in the building of nations due to their ability to attract wide audiences and draw the attention of both the people and scholars. They were created—​written, painted, or researched—​and consumed—​read, enjoyed, or visited—​by both nationals and foreigners. These exchanges fed nation-​building processes, and turned them into a dynamic international confrontation through which nations defined themselves against each other, in a process similar to the anthropological definition of the individual identity—​the self—​as opposed to others. This reveals the nature of nation-​building processes as projects that are carefully planned by their leaders. In the case of Spain, the view by foreign authors focused much more on the exotic and oriental aspects of the country as opposed to other European nations, while national authors concentrated their efforts on articulating a modern political and monumental project in keeping with their European counterparts. The entangled analysis of travellers’ accounts, artistic voyages, guidebooks, and panoramas—​studied together in the definition of modern national histories, and competing national ideological projects—​provides us with a privileged insight into nation-​ building processes and how they played an important role in the definition of the spatial construction of modern national monuments, in the shaping of early preservation policies, and how they informed contemporary architectural and restoration works and debates on the essence of national style and architecture.

Notes 1 “Poor Spaniards! The beauty of their country, its fertility and wealth are the cause of their idleness, and the mines of Peru and Potosi that of their poverty, of their pride, and of all their prejudices. This is paradoxical, but the reader knows that what I say is true.To become the most prosperous of all the kingdoms

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Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes on earth, Spain would need to be conquered, shaken to its core, and nearly destroyed; then it could be reborn as the land of the blessed.” All translations are by Linda Grabner, University of Pennsylvania. 2 “How should the Spanish monarchy treat the Basque nation (since for the French Republic their Basque districts can only have a secondary importance) to make their effort and their activity as advantageous for Spain as possible?” 3 “This is of greater practical interest, and even more so now that it is often the case that different [cultural] regions are united under a single State. But it must be freely admitted that until now more thought has been put into merely eliminating difficulties, which involves resisting differences, than into utilizing the beneficial aspects, which could introduce unique [cultural] traits.” 4 “Could there be in Spain such rich wonders unknown even to ourselves? Nor is it now the case that we lack excellent architects, painters, and sculptors whose vanguard has not produced great, extraordinary creations … Let us not pass up such a propitious opportunity: let us raise our homeland from its ruins: Spain will be reborn full of spirit, confounding the arrogance of foreign nations.” 5 “The origins of the representative system are found in the Iberian Peninsula. We do not need to look elsewhere for models of a parliamentary system, as some who are not familiar with our history do, since we have them in abundance here.The great models to which foreigners might wish to introduce us were inspired by the ancient Cortes of the Iberian peoples.” 6 “eminent traveler [who] after having visited all the nations of the world, told us, in summarizing his travels: the Orient is a palace, France is a castle, Italy a garden, and Spain a cloister.” 7 “Oh, what a marvelous contrast we shall see in such a beautiful, magnificent object [arising] from such a horrible, strange scene! The day will come when these prodigies of art and nature again draw people’s admiration, and when curiosity, disguised as devotion, revives long-​dead interest in the former pilgrimages and engenders a new kind of superstition, less opposed to the enlightenment of our offspring.”

Works cited Balaguer,Víctor. 1851. Los frailes y sus conventos. Su historia, su descripción, sus tradiciones, sus costumbres, su importancia. 2 vols. Barcelona: Librería Española. Balaguer,Víctor. 1852. Recuerdos de viaje. Barcelona: Imp. Brusi. Blake Oleksijczuk, Denise. 2011. The First Panoramas. Visions of British Imperialism. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Boyd, Carolyn P. 2006. “Covadonga y el regionalismo asturiano.” Ayer 64: 149–​178. Borrow, George. 1843. Bible in Spain. London: John Murray. Casanova, Giacomo. 1993. Histoire de ma vie:  suivie de textes inédits. Édition présentée et établie par Francis Lacassin. 3 vols. Paris: R. Laffont. Comment Bernard. 1999. The Panorama. London: Reaktion Books. De la Madrid Álvarez,Vidal. 2009. “El arquitecto Ventura Rodríguez y Covadonga: la accidentada historia de un proyecto frustrado.” Liño. Revista Anual de Historia del Arte 15: 199–​220. Ford, Richard. 1855. A Hand-​book for Travellers in Spain. London: John Murray. Garcia-​Fuentes, Josep-​Maria. 2010. “Rethinking pilgrimage through the theories of the architectural character and the picturesque.” In Tourism and Seductions of Difference. 1st International Conference Tourism Contact Research Network. Conference Proceedings. Lisbon: Universidade de Lisboa. —​ —​ —​ . 2012. “The construction of modern Montserrat” PhD diss., Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-​BarcelonaTECH. —​—​—​. 2013.“A nation of monasteries: the legacy of Víctor Balaguer in the Spanish conception of national monuments.” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History,Theory, and Criticism 10(1): 41–​51. —​—​—​. 2016. “Guidebooks, postcards, and panoramas: the building of Montserrat through modern mass media.” Memory Studies 9(1): 63–​74. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Humboldt, Whilhelm von. 1803. Der Montserrat bey Barcelona. Allgemeine Geographische Ephemeriden, 11: 265–​313. —​—​—​. 1925. Los Vascos. San Sebastián: Eusko Ikaskuntza. —​—​—​. 1951.“Goethe y el Montserrat.” In: Wilhelm von Humboldt. Cuatro ensayos sobre Europa y América, translated by Miguel de Unamuno. Madrid: Espasa-​Calpe, 117–​150.

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Guidebooks, panoramas, and architecture Jardiel, Florencio. 1918. “Por y para Aragón.” El Sol 16 (Sept.): 1. Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de. 1840. Obras de Jovellanos. Barcelona: Imprenta de D. Francisco Oliva. Koshar, Rudy. 1998. “‘What Ought to Be Seen’: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Indentities in Modern Germany and Europe.” Journal of Contemporary History 33(3): 323–​340. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maier Allende, Jorge. 2004. “La Real Academia de la Historia y la arqueología española en el siglo XIX.” Eres. Arqueología/​Bioantropología 12: 91–​121. Méndez Rodríguez, Luis. 2010. “Patrimonio y turismo. Del Cicerone a la profesión de guía turístico (1830–​1929).” Laboratorio de Arte 22: 371–​386. Mérimée, Prosper. 1988. Viajes a España, edited by Gabino Ramos González. Madrid: Aguilar. Oettermann, Stephan. 1997. The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. New York: Zone Books. Ortega Cantero, Nicolás. 1990. “El paisaje de España en los viajeros románticos.” ERIA 22: 121–​138. Pi y Margall, Francisco. 1842. España. Obra pintoresca en laminas, ya sacadas con el daguerrotipo, ya dibujadas del natural, grabadas en acero y en boj por los señores D. Luis Rigalt, D. José Puiggarí, D. Antonio Roca, D. Ramón Alabern, D. Ramón Sáez, etc. y acompañadas por texto de D. Francisco Pi y Margall. Barcelona: Imprenta de Juan Roger. Picard, David, and Michael A. Di Giovine, eds. 2014. Tourism and the Power of Otherness:  Seductions of Difference. Bristol: Channel View. Puig-​Samper, Miguel Ángel, and Sandra Rebok. 2007. Sentir y Medir. Alexander von Humboldt en España. Madrid: Ediciones Doce Calles. Rubio Jiménez, Jesús. 1992. “El viaje artístico-​ literario:  una modalidad literaria romantic.” Romance Quarterly 39 (1): 23–​31. Ucelay-​Da Cal, Enric. 2016. “Víctor Balaguer, historiador i politic, i la invenció de la retòrica nacionalista catalana. Un assaig d’interpretació.” Cercles. Revista d’Història Cultural 19: 351–​393. Vega, Jesusa. 2010. Ciencia, Arte e Ilusión en la España Ilustrada. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Ediciones Polifemo.

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According to scholarly consensus, nineteenth-​ century European and North American interests in Spain resulted in the country’s conversion into Europe’s “other” in the Western imaginary (Aymes 2003; Calvo Serraller, 1995; Hoffman 1961; among others). Foreign writers, architects, and artists not only indulged in orientalizing reveries when admiring Spain’s “Moorish” monuments in the South but also viewed Spain’s present, especially the Andalusian world of gypsies, dancers, and bullfighters, as quintessentially exotic, backward, and by implication inferior to their own country. The nineteenth-​century saying “Africa begins in the Pyrenees,” often cited in scholarship to sum up foreign perceptions of Spain (Colmeiro 2002, 130), suggests a hierarchical North–​South divide between a supposedly more developed northern Europe and a backward Spain. This clearly resonates with the Occident–​Orient divide articulated by Edward Said’s seminal theory of Orientalism (1978), which argued that the Western descriptions of the Arab East resulted in a construct of the East as a primitive “Orient” inferior to the West, and that this orientalist discourse justified Western imperialism and economic interests in the region.Yet many scholars have demonstrated how brittle Said’s binary East/​West framework is (Lewis 1996; Mackenzie 1995; Roberts 2015; Schmidt-​Linsenhoff 2010): whilst foreign writers all too often repeated exotic clichés of the East, these were not consistently mediated by power politics, but other issues (such as gender, class, aesthetics) also came into play; what is more, European obsessions with the so-​called Orient involved cultural exchange and instances of recognition of similarities between East and West. With regard to Spain, it is tempting to explain the construction of Spain’s exotic image with reference to Said’s concept of Orientalism as a vehicle for exercising suppression. After all, northern European nations and the US had considerable influence over nineteenth-​century Spain, from the Napoleonic occupation (1808–​1814) to the US–​Spanish war over Cuba in 1898, putting a definite end to Spain’s former empire. As an example of correlations between politics and cultural production, Colmeiro has pointed to François René Chateaubriand: as a writer, he cast Spain as an oriental other in his Romantic novel Les aventures du dernier Abencérage (1826); as French Minister of Foreign Affairs, he decreed the military intervention in 1823 to restore absolutism in Spain (Colmeiro 2002,129). Spain’s subordinate position on the international stage in the nineteenth century is an undeniable fact.Yet, should we understand the construction of Spain’s exotic image merely as the symbolic outcome of this imbalance of power? In 168

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light of the advancements made in scholarship concerned with questions of “difference” since Said, a reassessment of nineteenth-​century perceptions of Spain is overdue. A complex picture emerges if we approach the subject from a less preconceived viewpoint, looking beyond the “Africa-​begins-​in-​the-​Pyrenees” paradigm. Following the coinage of “demi-​Orientalization” by Wolff (1994) for the Western image of the Balkan states, the Hispanist Xavier Andreu Miralles (2005) suggested the term “(semi-​)Orientalisation” to indicate that not all responses to Spain were orientalizing. Rather than putting “semi”into brackets, this article will focus on visual and textual material that disrupts the idea of a full-​blown Orientalization of Spain. Inasmuch as the image of “Spain” was charted by foreign artists/​writers as “other,” many of them also reflected on cultural connections with it, and what could be learned from it. The notion of a one-​sided foreign-​made image of Spain is also called into question when we recognize that Spanish artists/​writers had agency. Far from being passive bystanders, they were able to “speak back” to stereotypes, and they also knew how to turn their supposed “exotic” identity to their advantage. As an alternative to the cumbersome and value-​laden term “demi-​Orientalization,” this chapter proposes “translation” as a more neutral concept for understanding the process by which writers/​artists translated Spanish culture into books, pictures, and architecture for diverse audiences. The concept, as understood in Translation Studies, forces us to acknowledge that cultural representation always involves a transformation of the object of translation and the generation of new meanings. Lawrence Venuti (2001) distinguishes between two translation strategies:  a domesticating (or assimilationist) approach disguises the cultural difference of the translated object, bringing it in line with the values and concerns of the translator’s culture; a foreignizing strategy highlights difference. As a consequence, as George Steiner famously put it, there are “innumerable shadings of assimilation and placement of the newly acquired, ranging from a complete domestication, which cultural history ascribes to, say, Luther’s Bible … all the way to the permanent strangeness of an artifact, such as Nabokov’s English-​language Onegin” (Steiner 1975, 298). Bearing such reflections in mind, this chapter is based on the idea of Spanish culture as a text that may be read and translated by artists/​writers for presentation in different contexts. It will begin with a brief overview of popular tropes in foreignizing translations of Spain. It then sets out to reveal a wider spectrum of approaches, involving both Spanish and foreign artists/​writers.

Tropes of oriental Spanishness Tropes of oriental Spanishness, which had been inconsistent in the eighteenth century (Andreu Miralles 2005; Bólufer 2016), fully took shape in the first half of the nineteenth century in tandem with military and political events on Spanish soil in which international powers took sides (in 1808 a British army joined Spanish guerrilla fighters in their struggle against Napoleonic occupation, securing a victory in 1814; in 1823 the Holy Alliance of Prussia, Russia, France, and Austria sent an army to restore King Ferdinand VII’s absolutist regime; after his death, Britain sided with the supporters of Isabella in the First Carlist War). Whilst such turmoil placed Spain into the spotlight on the international stage, it was the advent of the Romantic movement—​marked by a distancing from the classical tradition, a rejection of industrialization, and a yearning for the unknown—​that lured many foreign artists and writers to Spain. Excluded from the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, Spain represented untrodden and therefore ideal ground for the Romantic sensibility. Washington Irving, in Spain between 1826 and 1828, reveled in it: “what a country is Spain for a traveller, where the most miserable inn is as full of adventure as an enchanted castle, and every meal is in itself an 169

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achievement! … give me the rude mountain scramble, the roving, hap-​hazard wayfaring, the frank, hospitable, through half-​wild manners, that give such a true game flavour to romantic Spain!” (Irving 1832, 23). Many of those prepared to rough it transformed what they saw into travelogues and pictures, creating an alluring if carefully manicured vision of what was described as Europe’s “racy” country (Ford 1845, 77). Certain elements of Spanishness were created, however unwittingly, by Spaniards themselves. As Zanardi (2016) and Noyes (1998) have argued, in around 1800 in a reaction to French influence and Spanish enlightened circles pushing for reform, Spain’s aristocracy attempted to establish a distinct identity by locating a cultural authenticity in the lower classes, the majos and majas of Madrid, embracing forms of popular entertainment (bullfight, markets) and traditional dress. Goya’s portrait of Queen María Luisa, in a Mantilla (1799–​1800) is an example. This traditionalism nurtured foreign ideas about how Spanish people were meant to look and behave. The Romantic vision of Spain was predominantly focused on Andalusia, granting limited attention to the rest of the country. In the south, the Islamic past was clearly imprinted in its architecture, especially in Granada where Muslim rule had persisted the longest (711–​ 1492). Irving’s bestselling The Alhambra: A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and Spaniards (1832) popularized the Nasrid abode as a “dreamy palace” that had the “power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past” (Irving 1832, 141), an idea repeated throughout the nineteenth century. It was also a stimulus to an idealized vision of an exotic and exquisitely sophisticated Muslim civilization that had “diffused the light of oriental knowledge” in Western Europe (Irving 1832, 72). The cities of Granada, Seville, and Cordoba were also perceived as essentially Moorish both for their architecture and the supposedly “oriental” character of modern Spaniards (Aymes 2003, 278–​279). In contrast to medieval Spain under Muslim rule (al-​Andalus), modern Spanish culture was seen as primitive. Foreign artists/​writers typically focused on folklore, religious life, and the lower classes. Ford’s Gatherings of Spain (1846), marked by trenchant prejudice, humor, and stylish prose, fractioned Spanish society into “types” (bullfighters, robbers, muleteers, innkeepers, barbers, doctors and “druggists,” clergymen, dancers, gypsies), forming a picturesque ensemble of a lively, passionate, religious, but also irrational, infantile, and backward people. The superiority with which European artists looked upon Spanish society can be grasped in the paintings by John Phillip, a Scottish artist who made a successful career from his Spanish pictures. In Evil Eye he depicts himself in Victorian attire in a picturesque street in Seville, attempting to sketch an Andalusian woman (Figure  12.1). She recoils from his gaze, because she believes she is being given the “evil eye” that would bring bad luck. In La Lotería nacional:  Buying the ticket (1867), Phillip suggests moral corruption (Melville 2005, 64–​75). When the painting was exhibited in London, a reviewer observed: “Priests, aquadors, toreadors, muleteers and street Arabs are all interested in the lottery” and among the crowd is “a priest, who carefully deposits his ticket in his pocket, while a child behind reverentially kisses the hem of his garment. This passage alone were theme rich enough for a picture.” (Anon. 1867, 153). Protestant writers/​artists were fascinated by but equally suspicious of Spanish Catholicism, a stance that tapped into the Black Legend: anti-​Spanish propaganda, spread mostly by the Protestant North during Spain’s imperial expansion, which associated Catholic Spain with fanaticism, hypocrisy, and intolerance, and blamed the Inquisition for Spain’s decline (Maltby 1971). Arguably the most famous stock type of oriental Spanishness is the gypsy (Colmeiro 2002). In 1843, George Borrow’s The Bible of Spain, or the Journeys, Adventures and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula (London, 1843) cast the 170

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Figure 12.1  The Evil Eye. John Phillip, 1859. Oil on canvas, 44.7 × 35 cm. Source: The Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum. Wikimedia Commons.

gypsy as primitive, untrustworthy, social outcasts, but admirable for their unconventional life, free spirit, and interest in magic. Entertaining and commercially successful, the travelogue was translated into German and French. The most powerful construct of the Spanish gypsy was Prosper Merimée’s Carmen, first published in 1845 (Robinson 1992, 1–​14; Murphy 2009, 295). It was catapulted to international fame by Bizet’s opera version, premiered in 1875 at the Opéra-​comique in Paris to an initially shocked audience. Carmen came to symbolize Spain as a land of passion, erotic pleasures, primitivity, and danger. Flamenco dancing, closely associated with Carmen, became a major attraction in the context of universal exhibitions and popular music entertainment in the second half of the nineteenth century; in art, paintings of sensual gypsies proliferated in Europe and North America (Figure 12.2) (Boone 2007, 127). In 1900 the tropes of oriental Spanishness were spectacularly brought together in a vast theme park built by a French entrepreneur at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris: Andalousie au temps des Maures (Figure 12.3). Its main architectural structures consisted of a full-​scale version of the Lion Court of the Alhambra and a replica of the bell-​tower of Seville Cathedral, as well as a Toledo-​inspired lane and a “Moorish village.” Real people posing as “Moors” and gypsies from Andalusia provided context for the entertainment taking place in the central arena, including Christian–​Muslim tournaments, re-​ enactments of the defeat of Granada in 1492; processions; camel-​ r iders 171

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Figure 12.2  El Jaleo. John Singer Sargent, 1882. Oil on canvas, 232 × 348 cm. Source: Isabella Gardner Museum, Boston. Wikimedia Commons.

attacking a caravan etc.; and, of course, gypsy dances (Benjamin 2005). In this conflation of past and present, Spain and North Africa, the park brought literary musings and scenes from orientalist paintings alive, giving fresh impetus to oriental tropes that had been reiterated since the early nineteenth century.

Domesticating al-​Andalus Whilst not denying the pervasiveness of the exotic vision of Spain’s Islamic past and a “dreamy” Alhambra in literature and visual culture, alternative positions emerged in the work of historians, architects, and writers who did not mobilize the idea of “Moorish Spain” in order to undermine Spain’s European-​ness. Instead they “domesticated” al-​Andalus, integrating it into Europe’s past history and revealing its potential for the present. Such responses, although not unknown, have not been fully appreciated within broad discussions about the “image” of Spain. As Raquejo (1986) revealed in her seminal article “The ‘Arab Cathedrals’…” an important body of eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​century British responses to the Hispano-​Islamic architecture was dominated by the theory that European Gothic architecture had been influenced by the Saracens and the Iberian Muslims in particular. The idea was spread by Parentalia by Christopher Wren, published posthumously in 1750. It found visual expression in the works of many artists and architects. William Chambers’ “Alhambra pavilion,” commissioned by the Prince of Wales for Kew Gardens, London, featured Alhambresque details and Gothic crockets (Heide 2010, 203–​204). Subsequent architects/​artists-​travelers turned the compact interiors of the Alhambra into lofty spaces, with arches taller and more pointed than they are in reality, as in James C. Murphy’s pioneering architectural publication of Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1815) and the engraved views of the Alhambra by David Roberts. Respected historians in Britain as 172

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Figure 12.3  “L’Andalousie au temps des maures—Les Arènes” (Andalusia in the time of the Moors – the arena). Photograph from Baschet 1900. Source: Le Panorama: Exposition universelle 1900, with photographs by the Neurdein Brothers and Maurice Baschet (Paris: René Baschet, 1900). © Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

well as Spain supported the Gothic-​Saracenic theory well into the nineteenth century, with Henry Hallam describing Anglo-​Norman cathedrals as “on the whole an awkward imitation” of “Saracenic” buildings in Spain (Raquejo 1986, 555). Still in the 1830s, one writer, commenting on Roberts’ view of the Tower of Comares at the Alhambra, explained to his readers how the palace-​fortress resembled aspects of England’s most prominent medieval buildings: the towers of “our minsters,” the “massive and square” Norman donjons, the outline of the palace and castle of Durham, and the “rounded softness” of Windsor castle (cited in Howarth, 2007, 198). In parallel to the Saracenic-​Gothic link in architecture, writers also found points of connections between medieval Muslim Spain and Christian Europe in literature. For instance, Thomas Warton (1774, 76) suggested in his History of English Poetry that the fashion for romance in English literature had been influenced by the Arab East via al-​Andalus. Such commentaries function to level out difference and to integrate al-​Andalus into Europe’s medieval heritage. 173

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Important advances in Arabist scholarship also promoted a positive view of al-​Andalus and strongly refuted negative prejudices against the Iberian Muslims, which had been transmitted by early modern Castilian chronicles. A groundbreaking work was Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España (1820–​1) by Antonio Conde, the first attempt at writing a complete history of Islamic Spain, based on Arabic sources. Conde confirmed what eighteenth-​century historians had already intuited, namely that the Iberian Muslims had been medieval Europe’s most sophisticated civilization, of which Spain could be proud. Conde’s work—​quickly translated into German (1824), French (1825), and English (1854)—​became an important source of knowledge for scholars, creative writers, and artists—​ both Spanish and foreign, including Irving, who declared that the Nasrid civilization was superior to all other Christian empires of that time (Irving 1832, 71–​72). Building on Conde’s efforts, the scholar Pascual de Gayangos unearthed, translated, and annotated Arabic primary sources, thereby revealing Spain’s history from the perspective of the Muslims themselves. His History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, completed in London at the expense of the Oriental Translation Fund (1841–​3) was immediately recognized as a major work, leading to Gayangos’ appointment to the first Chair of Arabic at the University in Madrid in 1843. Gayangos’ expertise also provided a platform for a fertile network of scholars, and major Hispanists came to depend on Gayangos for guidance (Heide 2008). The positive view of al-​Andalus disseminated by Arabist scholarship also impacted Spanish writers. In the 1820s and 1830s, the fate of the Muslims after the Christian conquest of Granada—​ repressed, forced to convert to Christianity and finally expelled—​particularly resonated with Spanish liberal intellectuals who suffered suppression under Ferdinand VII (Labanyi 2004). Al-​ Andalus often featured in the patriotic-​liberal writings of exiled political writers, denouncing absolutism and Catholicism, as for instance in the Ocios de españoles emigrados, a London-​based magazine for Spanish émigrés. One article criticized the repression of Muslim culture in the sixteenth century, the destruction of “mas de ochenta mil volumenes” [more than 80,000 volumes] of Arab manuscripts under Cardinal Cisneros (Anon 1824b, 16). Other articles, referring to Conde as an authority, aimed at revealing the importance of al-​Andalus, describing medieval Seville, Granada, and Cordoba as the Athens of Europe (Anon 1824a, 295). A well-​ known literary example, citing Conde for historical facts, is Martinez de la Rosa’s play Aben Humeya (premièred in Paris, 1830), which narrates the Rebelión de las Alpujarras (1568–​1571), the Morisco uprising against Philip II’s troops and their defeat. Although the play triggers empathy toward the Moriscos as victims of the tyrannical Philip II, both Moriscos and Christians are shown capable of cruelty. As Ginger (2008, 52) has argued, the play ultimately rests on “a double judgement”—​on the one hand, it criticizes Spanish Catholic intolerance and calls for the recognition of Islamic achievements; on the other, it reaffirms the moral superiority of Christians over Moriscos. To understand this further, Andreu Miralles has pointed to the author’s own shifting position from radical to moderate liberalism. In this sense, for Martínez de la Rosa, a politician of the “justo medio,” for whom neither radical liberalism nor extreme absolutism was desirable, the Moriscos’ defeat under Philip II mirrors the failure of Spain’s most radical liberals vis-​à-​vis Ferdinand VII’s absolutist regime (Andreu Miralles 2016, 155). By contrast, works by progressive liberals, such as Moro Exposito by the Duque de Rivas, suggest that the Moriscos’ defeat was due to fate, not Christian superiority. Moro Exposito could therefore be read as a plea for freedom and tolerance that was missing in Ferdinand VII’s regime. Spanish liberals thus refrained from casting the Iberian Muslims and Moriscos as any more or less exotic than their Christian counterparts (Ginger 2008). Similarly, Spanish architectural historians began to accept Hispano-​Islamic buildings into their accounts of Spanish architecture, arguing that the originality of Spain’s architecture 174

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depended on its contact with Islamic architecture (Calatrava 2015, 12–​14). Key publications include Antonio Caveda’s Ensayo histórico sobre los diverso géneros de arquitectura (1848) and various writings by José Amador de los Ríos, who argued for the insertion of Hispano-​Islamic architecture into Spain’s history of a “national” architecture. This integration rests on a strategy of suppressing difference. As pointed out by Urquízar Herrera (2014, 211), Amador de los Ríos considered the Christian “reconquest” of territories under Muslim rule as a foundational period for Spain’s identity, in which Islamic architectural style passed from Muslims to Christians, producing mudéjar. This interpretation made it possible for Spanish writers to integrate an Islamic aesthetic legacy in Spanish architecture, without diminishing a Christian identity for Spain as a nation. In parallel to the “nationalization” of Hispano-​Islamic architecture by Spanish writers, European art historians and architects developed a focused aesthetic interest in Hispano-​ Islamic architecture (Karge 2018). As early as 1831, the Munich-​based writer Ludwig Schorn produced a careful description of the Alhambra, the Alcázar in Seville, and the Mosque of Cordoba (1831a–​1831e). In 1844, Karl Schnaase—​a major figure for the development of German art history—​attempted to analyze the architectonic arrangement and ornamental systems of the Alhambra (Karge 2018, 219). The most important figure in this development is undoubtedly Owen Jones’ Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra, from Drawings Taken on the Spot in 1834 by the Late M. Jules Goury and in 1834 and 1837 by Owen Jones. With a complete translation of the Arabic inscriptions, and historical notice of the Kings of Granada, from the conquest of that city by the Arabs to the expulsion of the Moors, by Mr Pasqual De Gayangos. Unlike Romantic travel writers who insisted on the “dazzling” and “magical” atmosphere of the interior spaces of the palace, Jones explained how such effects were achieved by revealing the mathematical and geometrical principles underlying Nasrid architecture (Figure 12.4). Jones’ analysis was complemented by Gayangos’ essay on the history of Granada and his translations of the Arabic inscriptions from the walls in the Alhambra, enabling further understanding of the decorative and functional use of epigraphy in the building. Jones did not wish to conjure up dreams of the past, as Irving had done, but to show how modern architects could learn from the Nasrid’s rational principles of ornament and use of color. In 1855, Jones declared Hispano-​Islamic art the most perfect expression of all Islamic art, comparing its status to that of the Parthenon to Greek art. Jones’ promotion of color—​at a time when most British architecture was uncolored—​struck a familiar note with architectural debates at the time. In this context, the Alhambra satisfied an interest in a new aesthetics of polychrome ornament but without threatening the need for order in architecture. Jones himself put words into action in a number of projects, most spectacularly in the ultramodern Crystal Palace, made of steel and glass at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. According his understanding of Nasrid polychromy, he used the primary colors—​red, blue, and white gold—​to visually articulate the interior of the Crystal Palace. Four years later, Jones offered the public a tangible flavor of the Alhambra through the so-​called Alhambra Court at the new Crystal Palace, erected in Sydenham in 1854 for permanent educational and recreational use. Part of a series of “Fine Art Courts,” the Alhambra Court was designed to enable the visitor to discover the history of culture. In the accompanying guidebook, Jones not only explained the Nasrid methods of construction, materials, principles of design and color, etc., but also outlined the differences between the original Alhambra and his replica, thus revealing the gaps in his reconstruction in terms of size, proportions, and details, admitting that he had been “driven to bungles or imperfect finishings which no Moorish eye could have endured” (Jones 1854, 33–​34). 175

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Figure 12.4  Diagram of ceiling of the “Hall of the Two Sisters.” Owen Jones/​Jules Goury, 1842. Source: Jules Goury and Owen Jones, Plans Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra (London, 1842). ETH-​Bibliothek Zürich, http://​doi.org/​10.3931/​e-​rara-​9057.

If Jones’ approach to the Sydenham replica was a genuine attempt to educate the public, his work did not eliminate the exotic vision of the “dreamy” Alhambra. It also stimulated a fashion for Alhambra-​inspired spaces, ranging from “Moorish smoking rooms” in private settings to Alhambresque theatre buildings, music halls, hotels, exhibition pavilions, cinemas, as well as synagogues and other types of buildings in Europe and beyond. The application of Nasrid-​inspired architecture to recreational spaces responded of course to the association of the Alhambra with exotic grandeur and sensuality—​qualities eminently marketable in the new world of leisure, consumerism, and entertainment. But as international audiences from Europe to Latin America and the Ottoman world became increasingly exposed to Alhambra-​ adaptations (Giese and Varela-​Braga 2018; Heide 2010; López Guzmán and Gutierrez Viñuales 2017; McSweeney 2015), the Alhambresque was also normalized in the process. It was one of many late nineteenth-​century revival styles. In late nineteenth-​century Spain, the discourse on the Alhambra evolved through a complex matrix spun by issues of national identity, economic concerns, and new colonial ambitions in 176

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Morocco. As a key tourist destination, the Alhambra was a major source of income. Declared a national monument in 1870, it was a source of collective pride. As an emblem of al-​Andalus, it signaled a historical connection with northern Morocco. Accordingly, approaches to the Alhambra varied. In Granada, Spaniards did not hesitate to cater to the travelers’ expectations for an “oriental” experience, as suggested in Irving’s Tales, even if that meant reinforcing the association of Spain with the “Orient.” The restorations of the Alhambra undertaken by the Contreras family of architects (without any archaeological evidence) from the 1830s to 1907 physically made it look more oriental. For instance, the replacement of several gabled roofs with polychrome tiled domes had nothing to do with Nasrid architecture but referenced Eastern Islamic architecture. Rafael Contreras also specialized in the production of exquisite miniature models of the (restored) palace, attracting wealthy collectors (Pérez Gonzales 2018). His self-​ serving orientalist approach to the Alhambra was complemented by the presence of photography studios near the Alhambra, offering tourists the opportunity to have their portraits taken in Arab costume against the painted backdrop of a Moorish courtyard (a type of business that has survived to this day) (Sánchez 2017). Spanish architects turned to Hispano-​Islamic architecture for national representation at universal expositions. They distinguished between the neo-​mudéjar, inspired by medieval Christian architecture with Islamic-​style elements (featuring brick, square turrets, horseshoe arches, sebka motifs) and the more showy Alhambresque (featuring Nasrid-​style capitals, slender columns, polychromy), made fashionable by Jones and his followers, including Contreras (McSweeney 2017). The neo-​mudéjar had the advantage of acknowledging the Islamic origins of its architecture without compromising Spain’s Christian identity. An example was Spain’s pavilion at the Vienna Exposition in 1873. But the neo-​mudéjar was later abandoned in favor of the internationally fashionable Alhambresque in the Spanish pavilion at the Paris Exposition in 1878. Although it referenced other buildings too, the French press described it as “a hidden corner of the Alhambra,” Spain’s most famous building (McSweeney 2017, 63). The pavilion thus played into foreign expectations. Rather than seeing this playing into external preconceptions as a weakness, it must be remembered how Spanish intellectuals also cultivated a nostalgia for al-​Andalus within the context of colonial ambitions in North Africa, which crystallized in the aftermath of the Spanish–​Moroccan war in 1859–​1860. Martin-​Márquez (2008) and Calderwood (2018) have recently shown how Spain’s colonial rhetoric mobilized the memory of al-​Andalus to reveal connections between Spain and Morocco (geographical, historical, ethnic, aesthetic). In 1884 the historian Joaquin Costa argued for ethnic links between modern Moroccans and Spaniards, coining the concept of a Spanish-​Moroccan brotherhood. It served the idea that Spain, among all other European nations, was best placed to “regenerate” North Africa—​a colonial project that became real with the establishment of a Spanish Protectorate of Morocco in 1912. In this discourse, the traditional nineteenth-​century saying that “Africa begins in the Pyrenees” was turned on its head. As the Arabist Tomás García Figueras stated in 1947: “Europa termina en el Atlas” [Europe ends in the Atlas] (García Figueras 1947, 12).

Beyond Moors, gypsies, bandits, bullfighters … The previous section has shown how the positive appreciation of al-​Andalus, especially in the context of architecture and national identity, opens a fissure in the notion of Spain as a primitive exotic country with nothing to contribute to Western civilization. Further cracks appear if we add to this positions that criticize tropes of oriental Spanishness and emphasise instead similarities or points of connection between Spanish and European culture. Such instances can 177

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be found in letters and travelogues, art writing, and in art and architectural practice. Starting with private comments that circulated in British circles in the 1830s, Julian B. Williams, the British vice-​consul in Seville, was critical of foreign artists for sacrificing accuracy for effects of the picturesque. Referring to a painting of a religious procession by the artist J. F. Lewis, Williams thought that Lewis would be “pulled to pieces for such deviations from truth, as placing the Archbishop carrying the Host. Such a thing was never known nor were the dancing Boys ever seen in that street or at Cordova. I consider it quite ridiculous” (Williams 1834). More generally, David Wilkie, the first major British artist to visit Spain in 1827–​1828 and dedicatee of Irving’s The Alhambra, observed that the dinner etiquette in an opulent Spanish household was not so wildly different from what he was used to at home. It prompted him to assert that “Indeed, I find less difference in the essentials of foreign societies than I could have expected” (Cunningham 1843, vol. 2, 518; my emphasis). Other travelers also resisted the clichéd equation of modern Andalusian people with “orientals.” As Serrano Mañes has pointed out, the published comments of the Belgian travel writer Juliette Robersart, in Spain in 1866 and 1879, even showed an interest in establishing similarities between Belgian people and the inhabitants of Seville. Perhaps recalling the early modern period when Seville had a large contingency of Flemish merchants, she thought that there was “du sang belge ici, beaucoup de familles viennent de cette source” [Belgian blood here, many families come from that source] and that Spaniards seemed Belgian in character “tant ils ont d’urbanité et le fond solide et excellent” [in their refinement as well as their solid and excellent substance] (Serrano Mañes 2012, 271, 273). Although the comments by Williams, Wilkie, and Robersart may not amount to an independent discourse, they exemplify a critical awareness of exotic clichés that surfaces in nineteenth-​century travel writing on Spain. Nineteenth-​century debates about art developed a solid discourse of aesthetic connections between Spain and Europe, mostly focusing on Diego Velázquez, who was turned into a catalyst for modern painting. Wilkie’s remarks about him, published posthumously in 1843, were influential. In the first instance,Wilkie detected a Netherlandish trait in some of Velázquez’s paintings, comparing him to his favorite Belgian old master David Teniers. Velázquez was “Teniers on a large scale” (Cunningham 1843, vol. 2, 486). More importantly, Wilkie aligned Velázquez with contemporary British art, stating that the affinities were such that it was “unnecessary to advocate his style” in Britain: We appear as if identified with him; and while I am in the two galleries of the Museum half filled with his works, I can almost fancy myself among English pictures. Sir Joshua, Romney, and Raeburn, … seem powerfully imbued with his style, and some of our time, even to our landscape painters, seem to possess the same affinity … To the British artist he is more captivating than to any other; for it is he we must try to follow. (Cunningham 1843, vol. 2, 472, 519) For Wilkie, Velázquez was an intellectual and masculine painter, all “sparkle and vivacity,” who could provide fresh impetus for modern art (Macartney 2010). Wilkie’s ideas were developed by important publications—​notably William Stirling’s The Annals of Artists of Spain (1848), Carl Justi’s foundational book Velázquez and his Times (1889), and Velázquez by the British artist R. A. M Stevenson (1895). They provided the scholarly foundation for the cult of Velázquez by major artists of the time—​Manet, Sargent, Whistler, Sorolla to name but a few—​whose search for a modern style was mediated by Velázquez’s bold handling of paint, apparent simplicity of composition, visual games (pictures-​in-​pictures), restrained color scheme, and naturalism. By the late nineteenth century Velázquez also became a standard source for society portraiture, as 178

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in Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2. Portrait of Thomas Carlyle (c.1872), or John Lavery’s The Royal Family at Buckingham Palace (1913), whose composition is based on Velázquez’ Las Meninas. Such references were particularly appropriate in Edwardian Britain, which now connected to Spain through the marriage of Princess Victoria Eugenie to King Alfonso XIII in 1906. The status of Velázquez as a major catalyst for modern painting thus counters the reductive idea of Spain as a “land of the castanet” that had nothing to offer for modern development. As has been noted by Martí-​López and others, Spanish literatos resented the foreign disdain of Spanish contemporary culture, calling for “the urgent need to produce an autochthonous literary discourse from and on Spain that would reclaim both the representation of Spanishness and the literatos’ rightful place within modern European culture” (Martí-​López 2002, 49). Although little research has been done on this, an example of an active “speaking back” to stereotypes can be detected in the collaboration between Spain’s most important landscape painter of the Romantic period, Genaro Pérez Villaamil, with the writer Patricio de la Escosura in España artística y monumental, a three-​volume album of 144 lithographs, augmented by a bilingual French/​Spanish commentary by Escosura and other writers (Hopkins 2016). Published in Paris between 1842 and 1850 with financial support by the banker Marques de Remisa, it was addressed to Spanish and foreign audiences. According to Escosura’s preface, the aim is to provide “seguros medios” [safe means] in order to instruct foreign and Spanish readers in the true character of the Spanish nation through the study of its architecture (Pérez Villaamil and Escosura 1842, vol. 1, 3–​10). He criticizes foreign obsessions with Andalusia and asserts that there was no novelty in writing about Granada, Seville, and Cordoba (Pérez Villaamil and Escosura 1842, vol. 1, 91). Indeed, the first two volumes only feature twelve views relating to Andalusia, while the third volume does not include any. Most significantly, Granada and the Alhambra, emblem of “Moorish” Spain, do not feature at all. As an alternative to the Andalusian-​centred perspective promoted by most foreign travelogues and fine art prints, the España artistica y monumental reveals the architectural beauty of central and northern regions and cities, such as: Toledo, Burgos, Illescas, Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, Guadalajara, Huerta, Lerma, Segovia, Tormes, Valladolid, Zamora, Zaragoza, Oña, Irun, Fuenterrabia, Tolosa, San Sebastian, Bilbao, Olite, Pamplona, and Betanzos (Figures 12.5 and 12.6). Escosura’s text presents this world of architecture through the lens of a Christian-​centric history. On the one hand, he positively acknowledges the achievements of the Iberian Muslims and the imprint of Islamic architectural style in Spain’s architecture (Pérez Villaamil and Escosura 1842, vol. 1, 6, 78). On the other hand, he conceptualizes the period in terms of a Church-​led mission against the Muslims, leaving little doubt about the rightfulness of Christian triumph over Islam. Architectural representation often triggers the memory of the “heroes” of that Christian Spain. For example, the view of Pórtico del Monasterio de Benevívere prompts Escosura to evoke Pelayo’s defeat of the Muslims in the Asturian mountains in 722 (Pérez Villaamil and Escosura 1842, vol. 1, 18); Burgos Cathedral serves to describe its founder King Ferdinand as a liberator of Cordoba and Seville from the “infieles” [infidels] (Pérez Villaamil and Escosura 1842, vol. 1, 30); the monastery of Santa María at Las Huelgas prompts a reference to Alfonso XIII’s victory over the Muslims at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (Pérez Villaamil and Escosura, vol. 1, 10). Visually, the many interior views of cloisters and churches in the España artística y monumental produce an overwhelmingly Christian-​Catholic image of Spain. Correspondingly, the commentary about the image of figures at prayer (La Misa) includes an acerbic attack on Lutheran liturgy in the “el vacío estéril, la seca frialdad” [the sterile emptiness, the dry chilliness] of the Protestant churches in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland. Deploring the iconoclasm that such churches had suffered, the writer specifically addresses his foreign readers to remind them that this destruction had also been their loss because they too had once been Catholic (Segovia 1842, 83). 179

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Figure 12.5  Entrada del coro en la clausura del monasterio de las Huelgas de Burgos (Entrance from the choir into the cloister of the monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos). By Bachelier and Adam after Genaro Pérez Villaamil. Lithograph 37 x 50.5 cm (size of sheet), from España artística y monumental, vol. 1 (Paris: Hauser, 1842). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

España artística y monumental eventually impacted on foreign authors, in particular the pioneering Scottish architectural historian James Fergusson, the first to attempt a survey of world architecture in Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (2 vols, 1855), which went through several editions in Britain and the US. It included important sections on “Saracenic” and Gothic architecture in Spain. Echoing Escosura’s ennui about the obsession with “Moorish” Spain, Fergusson too criticizes travelers for neglecting Spain’s cathedrals (Fergusson 1855, vol. 1, 452), but also notices that “now … that the people are getting satiated with the plaster prettiness of the Alhambra, we may hope that attention will be turned to the grander and simpler works of the Christians in that country” (Fergusson 1855, vol. 1, x). Fergusson points to España artística y monumental for visual information about Spanish Christian architecture and reproduced eight of Pérez Villaamil’s lithographs as woodcuts (Fergusson 1855, vol. 2, 817, 822, 823, 837–​841). Among his other sources were Ceán Bermúdez’s Noticias de los arquitectos y Arquitectura de España desde su Restauración (1829), Antonio Ponz, Viage de España (Madrid, 1772–​94), Enrique Flórez’s España Sagrada. Teatro Geográfio-​Histórico de la Iglesia de España (Madrid, 1764), as well as Ford’s Handbook of Spain (1845), as it included short notices of buildings. Based on such information, Fergusson writes that Spain’s Gothic architecture in “Aragon and Navarre, with Catalonia and a great part of Valencia, appear to rank with Gascony, Rouergue, and Roussillon. In fact, in the middle ages, the Pyrenees, to use the expression of 180

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Figure 12.6  Yglesia de San Antonio Abad, en Bilbao (Church of San Anton in Bilbao). By Bichebois and Bayot after Genaro Pérez Villaamil. Lithograph 38 x 54 cm (size of sheet), from España artística y monumental, vol. 3 (Paris: Hauser, 1850). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Louis XIV, did not exist” (Fergusson 1855, vol. 2, 818). He also favorably compares Burgos Cathedral with northern European examples (Fergusson 1855, vol. 2, 828), greatly praises the Cathedral of Toledo, and describes the church of St Juan de los Reyes as the “gem of this age” (832), and the royal monastery at Las Huelgas as: unrivalled for beauty both of detail and design, and is perhaps unsurpassed by anything of its age and style in any part of Europe. With those in Germany, France, and Sicily, it makes up a series of arcaded alleys as exquisitely beautiful as are to be found in any other age or clime. (Fergusson 1855, vol. 2, 836–​837) He was particularly taken by Pérez Villaamil’s view of the picturesque ruin of a mudéjar church at Humanejos, which he chose as the frontispiece of his book, and he pointed to the Church of Illescas as worthy of comparing with the best examples of Gothic art (1855, vol. 2, 839–​841). Fergusson thus integrated Spain’s Gothic and mudéjar architecture into a wider European picture, offering up two competing theories for its development, i.e. the old Gothic-​Saracenic theory, and the alternative theory that located the origins of the Gothic in northern Europe (Fergusson 1855, vol. 2, 821–​823). 181

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For all his openness, Fergusson’s account is also marked by prejudice. He doubts the capacity for creativity of Spanish architects and reduces their architecture to a borrowing of foreign styles (830, 841, 839). He also lapses into anti-​Catholic sentiment, typical in Britain at the time in reaction to the re-​establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1850. On balance though, Fergusson’s work was a significant introduction to Spanish Christian architecture, arranged chronologically within a wider European context (Basarrate 2018, 16). The path for a scholarly interest in Spain’s northern churches and cathedrals was set by the mid-​nineteenth century. As Howarth has demonstrated, Spain became important in the British imagination, precisely because it was a Catholic country against which concerns about Catholic emancipation in Britain and relations with Rome might be better understood (Howarth 2007, Chapter 3). Interest was stimulated by the Gothic revival and the search for the appropriate style for ecclesiastical architecture and décor in both the Anglican and Catholic Church. Spain’s cathedrals were seen as possible models. In 1851 Cardinal Newman wished to find “the best engravings of churches in Spain” because “everything is going the way of Gothic … it is very important we should do something really good. The Spanish and Sicilian style seem to me one, which must strike, whereas the Roman, or most ancient Basilica, is somewhat like an omnibus” (cited in Howarth 2007, 78). The High Church Anglican John Mason Neale traveled to northern Spain and Portugual in 1853 for ecclesiological research. Entering Spain through the Basque Country, instead of emphasizing difference as previous travel writers had done when crossing the border, he compared the landscape to Wales, visited local churches as well as the birthplace of St Ignatius of Loyala in Azpeitia (Neale 1853a, 207). His itinerary included Miranda de Ebro, Tolosa, Burgos, Valladolid, Palencia, Toros, and Zamora. His factual account of churches, décor, sermons, church music, liturgy, breviaries, and the arrangement of sees in the Spanish Church was published in three parts in the Ecclesiologist, the mouthpiece of the ecclesiological late Cambridge Camden Society, which promoted medieval Gothic architecture and its associated piety as a means for restoring piety in the modern world. Neale was particularly impressed by Burgos Cathedral, the collegiate church of Toro and the cathedral of Zamora (Neale 1853c ). His account is remarkably free from the prejudices about Spanish life so common in travelogues. In fact, Neale reports that in his interactions with Spanish people there “was not the slightest incivility; not there, nor elsewhere, did we experience the difficulties which Spain is generally thought to present for an impertinente curioso” (Neale 1853b, 257). Escosura, Pérez Villaamil, Neale, and Fergusson put Spain’s Gothic architecture on the radar for architects. George Edmund Street, a fervent High Anglican, member of the Ecclesiologist society, and leading architect of the Gothic revival traveled in Spain three times between 1861 and 1863. Street states that he deliberately avoided traveling to Andalusia in order “to see how the Christians and not how the Moors built in Spain in the middle ages” (Street 1914, 6). Pérez Villaamil’s lithographs—​although too inaccurate for his purposes—​were still a reference for him (Street 1914, 44, 118, 124, 299, 318–​319). His research resulted in Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain (London, 1865)—​the first detailed account of Spanish Gothic architecture in Castile, Navarre, Catalonia, Leon, Aragon, and Galicia. This was followed by Matthew Digby Wyatt’s book An Architect’s Note-​book in Spain. Principally Illustrating the Domestic Architecture in that Country (1872). It covered medieval architecture in northern and southern Spain, and also referred to Fergusson, Street, Pérez Villaamil, and Escosura. As Basarrate points out, the interest in Spain’s Gothic architecture had a certain impact on architectural practice. He identifies the influence of San Millán in Segovia on Street’s design for the Crimea Memorial Church (1868) in Istanbul. In Britain, the tower above the entrance hall in the Victoria and Albert Museum, designed by Aston Webb in 1899, appears to be modeled on the lantern of Burgos Cathedral; Zaragoza’s cathedral was useful for Robert Rowand 182

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Figure 12.7  Canal de Isabel II. Puente-acueducto de la Sima (Canal of Isabella II. Bridge-aqueduct of la Sima). Photograph by Charles Clifford, c. 1855. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Anderson’s design of a chapel for the Marquess of Bute at Mount Stuart (Scotland); Giles Gilbert Scott, who traveled to Spain in 1902, took inspiration in the reredos of St Gregorio in Valladolid and St Nicholas in Burgos to design the reredos of Liverpool Cathedral (1922) (Basarrate 2018, 27–​29). Even though the interest in Spain’s Gothic did not result in an international Spanish revival style, it demonstrates that in the second half of the nineteenth century British perceptions of Spain were not solely based on an exotic vision of Andalusia. In Spain, patrons, writers, and artists also made efforts to reveal Spain as changing, becoming a modern nation.The Welsh photographer Charles Clifford, based in Madrid from 1850 onwards, received important civic commissions to document important engineering projects, such as the canal of Isabel II built to supply fresh water to Madrid (1856–​1859), the building of bridges, and urban transformations in Madrid (Figure 12.7). Together with his photographs of historical monuments in his Álbum monumental de España, Clifford presented Spain as a country with an important heritage and as a progressive nation based on an industrious people and industrialization (Fontanella 1999). At the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris, audiences would have seen Genaro Pérez Villaamil’s oil painting of the opening ceremony of the newly constructed railway line connecting Langreo with Gijón in Asturias in the Spanish fine art section (Figure 12.8) (Arias Anglés 1986, 259). French critics chose not to comment on it (Planche 1855), preferring to draw attention instead to paintings of bullfight scenes also on display (Gautier 1856, 233). If French critics preferred the “exotic” to modern Spain, Madrid audiences in turn were critical of what was France’s greatest production of oriental Spanishness: Bizet’s Carmen (already mentioned above). When the opera was staged at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 1887, it was largely dismissed as 183

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Figure 12.8  Inauguración del ferrocarril de Langreo por la Reina Gobernadora. Entrada del tren en Gijón. Genaro Pérez Villaamil, 1852. Oil on canvas, 109 × 140 cm. Source: © Courtesy of the Ministerio de Fomento.

an inauthentic French view of Spain (Christoforidis and Kertesz 2019, 113–​115). The opera was then creatively adapted and reinterpreted by Spanish composers, producing new versions, including a parody that became popular with audiences in Barcelona in the early 1890s. At the same time, Spanish artists such as Joaquín Sorolla created new iconographies that revealed a modern Spain, highlighting social issues, moral dilemmas of modern life, as well as positive portrayals of industrious men and women, elegant bourgeois families, and children at play. In 1906, on the occasion of the artist’s large retrospective exhibition in Paris, the intellectual Max Nordau published his views in several articles (Pons-​Sorolla 2016, 38), which were quoted at length by others: La España que Sorolla glorifica no es la de las corridas, ni la de las guitarras, las castañuelas y el fandango (…) No; la España que Sorolla ha querido mostrar al extranjero es la del pensamiento moderno, del trabajo fecundo, del progreso radical, en una palabra, la España europea, y no la antigua España, morisca, es decir africana.1 (El Progreso, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, October 4, 1906) If Sorolla’s work projected a modern Spain in 1906, it was not possible to maintain this vision when he was commissioned by the wealthy US patron and collector Archer Huntington to paint 184

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a cycle of murals representing Spain’s different regions for the Hispanic Society of America in New York (completed between 1911 and 1918). In 1915, he stated that he aimed to represent “sin simbolismos ni literatura, la psicología de cada región” [without any symbolism nor literature, the psychology of each region] and insisted that he was not indulging in “españolada” (cited in Pons-​Sorolla 2001, 395). Nevertheless, the outcome of his efforts did not disturb the cliché of Spain as a traditional pre-​modern society. Sorolla’s mural cycle exceeds the scope of this essay, but it serves here to point out the paradoxical position of a Spanish artist vis-​à-​vis “Spanishness” as he is able adjust his own vision of the country, switching between “modern” and “traditional,” or between more or less European.

Conclusion The examples discussed in this essay show that foreign writers/​artists were able to see beyond clichéd views of Spain as an exotic, alluring, traditional, and by implication inferior country to their own. Foreigners and Spaniards found common ground in Spain’s Islamic past, reinforcing each other in their idealized views of al-​Andalus as a civilization which Spain and Europe could be proud of. If the vision of the Alhambra as a place for dreaming was the most viable one, it did not prevent its integration into Europe’s culture. The Gothic-​Saracenic theory, now long dismissed, served to integrate al-​Andalus into a broader picture of European history. The systematic study of Nasrid architecture also granted Spain an important place in debates about the use of color and ornament in modern architecture and design. Whilst the heritage of al-​ Andalus presented an anti-​classical tradition, it was not perceived as a threat for order and logic in architecture. What matters here is that the idea of “Moorish Spain” is not employed in architectural debates to denigrate Spain as a non-​European or primitive country. If the invention of Alhambresque turned out to be a fashionable style in the non-​classical tradition, it also resulted in a normalization of Hispano-​Islamic style architecture in Europe and beyond. In the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain, the Gothic revival, combined with Catholic emancipation, led to the discovery and appreciation of Spain’s cathedrals and churches, which also impacted, to some degree, on architectural practice. At the same time, nineteenth-​century artists appointed Velázquez as a guiding light in their search for a new way of creating modern paintings.What is more, Spanish artists, writers, and patrons were not passive recipients of foreignizing translations of Spain. They had agency. If on the one hand, they knew how to mobilize clichés of their supposed exotic identity for their own advantage, they also spoke back to such clichés. To speak of an “Orientalisation” of Spain is therefore too simple a truth. To think in terms of such absolutes would mean the end of nuance.Whilst the term “semi-​Orientalisation” goes some way to suggest wider possibilities, it is still negatively attached to the notion of mis-​representation. The concept of “translation” has the advantage of acknowledging that any form of cultural representation involves manipulation, depending on the translator’s motifs and translation strategies. Echoing Steiner’s ideas on translation, there are then different shadings of assimilation and placements of Spanish culture in the nineteenth-​century context, ranging from a complete domestication, which we can ascribe to the notion of Velázquez as a catalyst for modern art, all the way to the permanent exoticism of Mérimée’s creation of Carmen.

Note 1 “The Spain glorified by Sorolla is not that of bullfights, guitars, castanets and fandango … . No, the Spain that Sorolla has wished to show abroad is that of modern thought, fertile work, radical progress, in one work, a European Spain, and not old Moorish Spain, that is African Spain.”

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Works cited Andreu Miralles, Xavier. 2005. “El triunfo de al-​Andalus. Las fronteras de Europa y la ‘(semi)orientalisación de España en el siglo XIX.” Saitabi 55: 195–​210. —​—​—​. 2016. El descubrimiento de España. Barcelona: Tauris. Anon. 1824a. “Historia de España. Idea general de ella desde los primeros tiempos hasta nuestro días.” Ocios de españoles emigrados 2(8): 289–​299. Anon. 1824b. “Contraste de la Protección. Dispensada á la l iteratura árabe en España por Don Alonso el sabio, con la persecución que sufrió después.” Ocio de españoles emigrados 2(5): 16–​21. Anon. 1867. “The last works of John Phillip R.A.” Art Journal 29: 153. Arias Anglés, Enrique. 1986. El paisajista romántico Jenaro Pérez Villaamil. Madrid: CSIC. Aymes, Jean-​René. 2003. Voir, comparer, comprendre: regards sur l’Espagne des XVIII et XIXe siècles. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelles. Baschet, René (director). 1900. Le Panorama: Exposition universelle 1900, publié sous la dir. de René Baschet avec les photographies de Neurdein frères et Maurice Baschet. Paris: Ludovic Baschet, Librairie d’art. Basarrate, Iñigo. 2018. “The British discovery of Spanish Gothic architecture.” Journal of Art Historiography 19(1): 1–​30. Benjamin, Roger. 2005. “Andalusia in the time of the moors: regret and colonial present in Paris, 1900.” In Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture, edited by Mary Roberts and Jocelyn Hackforth-​Jones, 181–​205. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bolúfer, Mónica. 2016. “Orientalizing Southern Europe.” The Eighteenth Century 57(4): 451–​467. Boone, Elizabeth. 2007. Vistas de España. American Views of Art and Life in Spain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Calatrava, Juan. 2015. “Hispano-​Muslim art and the universal exhibitions: from Owen Jones to Leopoldo Torres Balbas.” In Andalusi and Mudejar Art in its International Scope:  Legacy and Modernity, edited J. Rosón, 9–​26. Madrid: Casa Árabe. Calderwood, Eric. 2018. Colonial al-​Andalus. Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Calvo Serraller, Francisco. 1995. La imagen romántica de España.Arte y arquitectura del siglo XIX. Madrid: Alianza. Christoforidis, Michael, and Elizabeth Kertesz. 2019. Carmen and the Staging of Spain. New York: Oxford University Press. Colmeiro, José F. 2002.“Exorcising exoticism: ‘Carmen’ and the construction of oriental Spain.” Comparative Literature 54(2): 127–​144. Cunningham, Allan. 1843. The Life of Sir David Wilkie. 3 vols. London: John Murray. Fergusson, James. 1855. Illustrated Handbook of Architecture. London: John Murray. Fontanella, Lee. 1999. Clifford en España: un fotógrafo en la corte de Isabel II. Madrid: El Viso. Ford, Richard. 1845. The Hand-​book for Travellers in Spain, And Readers at Home. 2  vols. London:  John Murray. —​—​—​. 1846. Gatherings of Spain. London: John Murray. García Figueras, Tomás. 1947. África en la acción española. Madrid: Ediciones de la Dirección General de Marruecos y Colonials y del Instituto de Estudios Africanos. Gautier, Théophile. 1856. Les Beaux-​Arts en Europe—​1855—​par Théophile Gautier. Paris:  Michel Lévy Frères. Giese, Francine and Varela-​Braga, Ariane (ed.). 2018. The Power of Symbols. The Alhambra in a Global Perspective. Bern: Peter Lang. Ginger, Andrew. 2007. Painting and the Turn to Cultural Modernity in Spain:  The Time of Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1850–​1870). Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press. —​—​—​. 2008. “Oriental obsessions in the time of Gayangos.” In Pascual de Gayangos: A Nineteenth Century Spanish Arabist, edited by Cristina Álvarez Millán and Claudia Heide, 49–​67. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Heide, Claudia. 2008. “Más veen cuatro ojos que dos. Gayangos and Anglo-​American Hispanism.” In Pascual de Gayangos. A Nineteenth-​Century Arabist, edited by Cristina Álvarez Millán and Claudia Heide, 132–​158. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —​—​—​. 2009. “The Spanish Picturesque.” In The Discovery of Spain. British Artists and Collectors. Goya to Picasso, edited by David Howarth, 47–​51. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland. —​—​—​. 2010. “The Alhambra in Britain. Between foreignization and domestication.” Art in Translation 2(2): 201–​222.

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Stereotypes and perceptions of Spain Hopkins, Claudia. 2016. “Beyond orientalism: the case of Jenaro Pérez Villaamil.” Hispanic Research Journal 17(5): 384–​408. Hoffman, Léon-​François. 1961. Romantique Espagne. L’image de l’Espagne en France entre 1800 et 1850. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Howarth, David. 2007. The Invention of Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —​—​—​, ed. 2009. The Discovery of Spain. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland. Irving,Washington. 1832. The Alhambra: A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and Spaniards. Philadelphia, PA: Carey & Lea. Jones, Owen. 1854. The Alhambra Court in the Crystal Palace. London:  Crystal Palace Library, Bradbury & Evans. Karge, Henrik. 2018. “Zwischen Imagination und Formanalyse. Die Alhambra in der frühen deutschen Kunstgeschichtsschreibung.” In The Power of Symbols. The Alhambra in a Global Perspective, edited by Francine Giese and Ariane Varela-​Braga, 211–​224. Bern: Peter Lang. Labanyi, Jo. 2004. “Love, politics and the making of the modern European subject. Romanticism and the Arab world.” Hispanic Research Journal 5(3): 229–​242. Lewis, Reina. 1996. Gendering Orientalism. London: Routledge. López-​ Guzman, Rafael and Guiterrez Viñuales, Rodrigo. 2017. Alhambras:  Arquitectura neoárabe en Latinoamérica. Granada: Editorial Almed. Macartney, Hilary. 2010. “The Murillo/​Velázquez debate.” In Spanish Art in Britain and Ireland, 1750–​1920, edited by Nigel Glendinning and Hilary Macartney, 162–​187. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis. Mackenzie, John. 1995. Orientalism. History,Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Maltby, William S. 1971. The Black Legend in England. The Development of Anti-​Spanish Sentiment, 1558–​ 1660. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Martí-​López, Elisa. 2002. Borrowed Words. Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-​Century Novel in Spain. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Martin-​Márquez, Susan. 2008. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. McSweeney, Anna. 2015. “Versions and visions of the Alhambra in the nineteenth-​century Ottoman world.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 22(1): 44–​69. —​—​—​. 2017. “Mudéjar and the Alhambresque:  Spanish pavilions at the universal expositions and the invention of a national style.” Art in Translation 9(1): 50–​70. Melville, Jennifer. 2005. Phillip of Spain. The Life and Art of John Phillip, 1817-​1867. Aberdeen: Aberdeen City Council. Murphy, Kerry. 2009. “Couleur locale or the real thing?” In Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer:  Paris, 1830–​1914, edited by Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist, 293–​ 315. Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press. Neale, John Mason. 1853a. “An ecclesiological tour in Portugal. Letter I.  The Basque Provinces.” The Ecclesiologist 14: 171–​177. —​—​—​. 1853b. “An ecclesiological tour in Portugal. Letter II. Burgos, Palencia,Valladolid.” The Ecclesiologist 14: 247–​264. —​ —​ —​ . 1853c. “An ecclesiological tour in Portugal. Letter III. Zamora, Miranda, Bragança.” The Ecclesiologist 14: 359–​366. —​—​—​. 1910. Letters of John Mason Neale D.D. Selected and Edited by his Daughter. London:  Longmans, Green & Co. Noyes, D. 1998. “La maja vestida: dress as resistance to Enlightenment in late-​18th-​century Madrid.” Journal of American Folklore 111(440): 197–​217. Pérez Gonzalez, Asunción. 2018. “Rafael Contreras and the re-​shaping of the Alhambra in 19th-​century Spain.” In The Power of Symbols.The Alhambra in a Global Perspective, edited by Francine Giese and Ariane Varela-​Braga, 165–​207. Bern: Peter Lang. Pérez Villaamil, Genaro, and Patricio de la Escosura. 1842–​ 50. España artística y monumental. 3  vols. Paris: Hauser. Planche, Gustave. 1855. “Exposition des Beaux Arts, Ecole diverses. Espagne, Italie, Belgique et Hollande.” Revue des deux mondes 12(1): 147–​166 Pons-​Sorolla, Blanca. 2001. Joaquín Sorolla, vida y obra. Madrid: Fundación de Apoyo a la Historia del Arte Hispánico. —​—​—​. 2016. “Sorolla and Paris.” In Sorolla and the Paris Years, edited by Blanca Pons-​Sorolla and María López Fernández, 13–​47. New York: Rizzoli.

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Claudia Hopkins Raquejo, Tonia. 1986. “‘Arab cathedrals’: Moorish architecture as seen by British travellers.” The Burlington Magazine 128(1001): 555–​563. Roberts, Mary. 2015. Istanbul Exchanges. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Robertson, Ian. 1988. Los curiosos impertinentes. Viajeros ingleses por España desde la accesión de Carlos III hasta 1855. Madrid: Ediciones del Serbal y CSIC. Robinson, P. 1992. “Mérimée’s Carmen.” In Georges Bizet:  Carmen, edited by S. McClary, 1–​ 14. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rosser-​Owen, Miriam. 2011. “Coleccionar la Alhambra. Owen Jones y la España Islámica en el South Kensington Museum.” In Owen Jones y la Alhambra, edited by Juan Calatrava, 43–​69. Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife. Sánchez, David. 2017. “Allende el Estrecho (Beyond the Straits): The Photographic Gaze on the Orient in Andalusia and Morocco.” Art in Translation 9(1): 71–​91. Schmidt-​Linsenhoff,Viktoria. 2010. Ästhetik der Differenz. Marburg: Jonas. Schorn, Ludwig. 1831a. “Ueber einige Bauwerke der Araber und Mauren in Spanien.” Kunstblatt 1: 1–​2. Schorn, Ludwig. 1831b. “Ueber einige Bauwerke der Araber und Mauren in Spanien (Fortsetzung).” Kunstblatt 2: 5–​6. Schorn, Ludwig. 1831c. “Ueber einige Bauwerke der Araber und Mauren in Spanien (Fortsetzung).” Kunstblatt 4: 13–​15. Schorn, Ludwig. 1831d. “Ueber einige Bauwerke der Araber und Mauren in Spanien (Fortsetzung).” Kunstblatt 5: 18–​20. Schorn, Ludwig. 1831e. “Ueber einige Bauwerke der Araber und Mauren in Spanien (Schluss).” Kunstblatt 6: 23–​24. Segovia, Antonio María de. 1842.“Misa.” In España Artística y Monumental, edited by Genaro Pérez Villaamil and Patricio de la Escosura, 82–​83. Paris: Hauser. Serrano Mañes, Montserrat. 2012. “Regards de femmes: l’Andalousie du XIXe siècle au ‘féminin francophone’.” Çédille, Revista de estudios franceses, 8: 266–​282. Steiner, George. 1975. “The Hermeneutic Motion.” After Babel, chap. 5. London: Oxford University Press. Street, George Edmund. [1865] 1914. Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain by George Edmund Street. Edited by Georgiana Goddard King. London and Toronto: Dent & Dutton. Urquízar Herrera, Antonio. 2014. “La caracterización política del concepto mudéjar en España durante el siglo XIX.” Espacio,Tiempo, y Forma 7: 201–​216. Venuti, Lawrence. 2001. “Strategies of translation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 240–​244. London and New York: Routledge. Warton, Thomas. 1774. History of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the Close of the Sixteenth Century. London: Reeves & Turner. Williams, Julian B. 1834. Letter to David Roberts, June 4. Roberts Papers. National Library of Scotland. ACC. 11760. Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zanardi, Tara. 2016. Framing Majismo: Art and Royal Identity in Eighteenth-​Century Spain. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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13 PARTIAL PROTAGONISTS Biography, fiction, and the nineteenth-​century legacy in Rosa Chacel and Benjamín Jarnés Geraldine Lawless

In his article on the reception of Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–​1870), James Mandrell considers the nineteenth-​century literary legacy in terms of the relationship between text, biography, and gender. Bécquer’s biographers fostered the image of an isolated figure who faced repeated disappointment in his quest for the ideal woman. According to Mandrell, Bécquer’s life and work were revised and appropriated to reinforce specific gender stereotypes; the biographical narrative functioned as a space where not only the past, but also the present and the future could be shaped (Mandrell 1995). This chapter takes up Mandrell’s suggestion that biographies of literary figures offer a way of gauging the legacies of nineteenth-​century Spanish literature, looking at two biographical accounts:  Doble agonía de Bécquer (1936), a vanguard biography by Benjamín Jarnés, and Rosa Chacel’s Teresa (novela de amor) (1941), a novelized account of the life of Teresa Mancha, lover of Romantic poet José de Espronceda. Both texts focus on legendary figures of Spanish Romanticism, Chacel writing about a muse and Jarnés about a poet. Both Jarnés (1888–​1949) and Chacel (1898–​1994) were closely associated with the vanguard novel of the 1920s and 1930s and they approached biography in an experimental spirit. Doble agonía and Teresa both fit within the European-​wide phenomena of the New Biography. However, while both texts were initially intended for publication in the Espasa-​Calpe series Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX, only Jarnés’ work finally appeared there. This exploration of Chacel’s and Jarnés’ biographical accounts does not address questions of accuracy or fidelity to the biographical. Instead, these portraits are considered for the way they depict idealized and rebellious figures. I also consider how the reader’s attention is drawn to the processes of overwriting and rewriting literary legacies, and what this says about how the authors construed the nineteenth century. While Chacel and Jarnés both considered it a century of failure, I suggest that there are nevertheless important differences in how they treat this failure.

The new biography in Spain and Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX In the first decades of the twentieth century and particularly in the interwar period, authors across Europe sought to redefine biography. They dismantled the conventions of the exemplary 189

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life, taking a more critical and sometimes scabrous approach to their subjects. Nigel Hamilton (2007, 129ff.) surveys the iconoclasm of authors such as Edmund Gosse and Lytton Strachey when they wrote about the Victorians, Virginia Woolf ’s “fictitious portraiture” in Orlando (162, author’s emphasis), as well as the influence of Freud and the increasing tendency of the biographer to “write his portrayal on egalitarian terms with the subject” (166, author’s emphasis). Hermione Lee notes Woolf ’s 1927 essay “The New Biography” where Woolf “argued for fearlessness, brevity, and vividness as ‘modern’, anti-​Victorian biographical qualities.” For Woolf, “the true life was the inner life” and facts could be manipulated accordingly (Lee 2009, 80). Strachey and Woolf were well-​known in Spain, as were the French author André Maurois, the Austrian Stefan Zweig, and the German Emil Ludwig. Gayle Rogers in Modernism and the New Spain has tracked the progress of the New Biography across the pages of Spanish periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s. Reading Antonio Marichalar’s Riesgo y ventura del duque de Osuna (ensayo biográfico) (1930) beside Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Rogers argues that the “similar hypocrisies of the British and Spanish states in the nineteenth century … provide the common text for both writers” (2012, 97). Modernism and the New Spain is one in a group of recent studies looking at Spanish biography in the first half of the twentieth century (see particularly Cáliz Montes 2013; Jiménez Naranjo 2012, 2011; Arnas Mur 2011; Pulido Mendoza 2009; Serrano Asenjo 2002; Soguero García 2000; Rodríguez-​Fischer 1990). This scholarship has revealed a fascinating panorama and two things in particular have become clear: first, Spain was a hive of biographical activity in this period, producing texts that varied widely in form, length, method, and intent; and second, the nineteenth century was a major focal point. Soguero García counts reviews of 313 biographies in the periodical El Sol between 1929 and 1936. Of these, 141 were originally written in Spanish (Soguero García 2000, 208). Pulido Mendoza’s Plutarco de moda: la biografía moderna en España (1900–​1950) (2009) notes “la presencia de una tradición hispánica de escritura biográfica heredada del siglo XIX” [the presence of a Hispanic tradition of biographical writing inherited from the nineteenth century] (87) and provides details of the collections and series that appeared, and the different ways in which, as business ventures, publishers looked to snag a share in a growing market (84–​120). By all accounts, the publishing house Espasa-​ Calpe launched the most important and successful of these ventures in 1929 with the publication of El general Serrano, Duque de la Torre by the Marqués de Villa-​Urrutia, the first volume of Vidas españolas del siglo XIX (e.g. Pulido Mendoza 2009; Soguero García 2000; Cáliz Montes 2013; Arnas Mur 2011). The rubric was soon broadened to Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX (Cáliz Montes, 2013). In 1942, Juan Antonio Cabezas published the fifty-​ninth and final volume, Concepción Arenal; o, El sentido romántico de la justicia. Rodríguez-​Fischer (1990) has described the series as “el proyecto más ambicioso y sólido de cuantos se llevaron a cabo en España por aquel entonces” [the most ambitious, most solid project of all those that were undertaken in Spain at that time] (133). Subjects included a hefty proportion of the aristocratic, military, and political elite. Nevertheless, the titles also reveal more diverse and sometimes even eclectic interests; Sor Patrocinio, la Monja de las Llagas, Benjamín Jarnés (1929); Luis Candelas, el Bandido de Madrid, Antonio Espina (1926); Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, el novelista romántico, Julio Romano (1933); Fernán Caballero, la novelista novelable, Angélica Palma (1931); Fortuny, la mitad de una vida, Alfonso Maseras and C. Fages de Climent (1932). Measures of the success of the series include plentiful reviews in key periodicals and good sales figures, with some volumes quickly running to second editions. A number of copy-​cat series started up in the 1930s: Biblioteca Atlántico’s Vidas extraordinarias del Siglo XIX; Editorial del Norte’s Episodios políticos del Siglo XIX; or Librería Beltrán’s Políticos españoles del siglo XIX (Pulido Mendoza 2009, 113–​116). 190

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Two biographers in search of a subject Soguero García and Rodríguez-​Fischer trace the proliferation of experimental biographies in Spain to a moment when the novela vanguardista was struggling to find a suitably engaged readership. Rodríguez-​Fischer notes the publication of second editions of both Jarnés’s Sor Patrocinio and Espina’s Luis Candelas within two years, “hecho no ocurrido con ninguna de sus novelas” [something that never happened with any of their novels] (1990, 136). Soguero García points to a winning combination of the formal complexity and innovative prose of the novela vanguardista with a celebration of “lo humano y lo vital en los contenidos” [what was human and vital in the contents] (2000, 213). On the one hand, experiments with biographical form catered to popular demand, while on the other they allowed for the exploration of the subjective, internal experiences of an individual life in a highly rarefied form. Though directed by Melchor Fernández Almagro, Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX is most often associated with José Ortega y Gasset. In comments that are widely quoted in the scholarship on twentieth-​century Spanish biography, Chacel credited Ortega with the idea for Teresa’s biography. An early version of the first chapter of Teresa (novela de amor) was published in Ortega’s Revista de Occidente in November 1929 (as was Jarnés’ essay on biography “Vidas oblicuas”). Chapters from several other titles in the series also appeared in the Revista, alongside theoretical essays about the new approaches to biography by Jarnés, Francisco Ayala, Antonio Marichalar, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, and translated excerpts from texts such as Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) and Stefan Zweig’s Decisive Moments in History (1927). According to Rodríguez-​Fischer, Teresa “estaba ultimada en 1936 y a punto de aparecer en la colección ‘Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX’ ” [was finished in 1936 and ready to appear in the collection Spanish and Spanish-​American Lives of the Nineteenth Century] (2000: 26–​27; see also Bordons and Kirkpatrick 1992: 297). However, it was not published until 1941, and then by Ediciones Nuevo Romance in Buenos Aires. Almost two decades later, at a lecture in Argentina at the Universidad del Sur in 1958 titled “Cómo y por qué de la novela,” Chacel spoke about the genesis of her novel and Ortega’s role in the Espasa-​Calpe series (Obra completa, vol. 3, 140): En aquel momento estaban en boga las biografías noveladas, pero los españoles no sólo no teníamos fe en nuestra propia vida, sino que ni siquiera creíamos tener héroes dignos de perdurar. Ortega señaló con el dedo y dijo: Éste, éste, éste, éste… Nosotros obedecimos; la responsabilidad era de Ortega y nos pusimos a estudiar los modelos dados. En seguida vimos que valían la pena.1 Chacel states unequivocally that the series was Ortega’s brainchild and that he was responsible for choosing the subjects. Jiménez Naranjo (2011), however, is justifiably suspicious of this claim. Jarnés, she contends, would have chosen his own subjects while Ortega was unlikely to have treated Marichalar, Espina, or the Conde de Romanones so peremptorily. Whatever the truth of the matter, Jarnés and Chacel were among many to write about the lives of nineteenth-​ century figures. Nor is it difficult to credit Ortega with urging Chacel, a woman and an author herself, to focus on the muse rather than the poet. Teresa represents an attempt to experiment with biographical form and to respond to the particular demands of a subject who left very few traces. In the 1958 lecture and again in a prologue to the 1963 Aguilar edition,“Advertencia a Teresa,” Chacel spoke about the lack of reliable information. Teresa was, after all, a secondary figure in Spain’s literary history. As the biographer of a shadow, all Chacel had to work with were archival lacunae, paeans to Espronceda, and trite 191

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second-​hand anecdotes replete with “todos los lugares comunes, toda la galantería periodística que derretía de placer a nuestras abuelas” [all the commonplaces, all the journalistic gallantry that made our grandmothers melt with pleasure] (vol. 3, 142). And, of course, Espronceda’s poetry; but Chacel was not a fan.The Spanish Byron, she said, “cantaba en falso” [was insincere] (vol. 3, 145). Yet this difficulty could be turned to advantage: Yo tuve la suerte de que me tocase la más carente de hechos, la más persona desnuda en su humanidad. Esta condición de mi protagonista empezó pareciéndome una dificultad insalvable y, si me hubiera empeñado en hacer una biografía, lo habría sido, porque Teresa no hizo en toda su vida nada más que ser Teresa.2 (vol. 3, 158) For Teresa to work, Chacel had to take a different tack fiction. Told in the third person, the “biografía novelada” [novelized biography] evokes the moods and follows the movements of the heroine during the time she spent with Espronceda. It dwells on intimate sensory and emotional experience and subtle manifestations of character and relationships. The turn away from fact and toward fiction allows Chacel to reconstruct a life using only the barest of facts, while still capturing the idiom and tone of the world inhabited by Teresa. Pérez Firmat said of Sor Patrocinio, la monja de las llagas (1929) that “Jarnés insiste en la imposibilidad de captar el auténtico relieve de la monja, pues todos los sucesos de su existencia han sido recubiertos por capas de leyenda y superstición”3 (1986, 185). The same might be said of Doble agonía de Bécquer (1936), fifty-​third in the Espasa-​Calpe series. Writing about a poet rather than a muse, Jarnés had ready access to much more material than Chacel, though his sources were no more reliable for that. “Sobre Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer se han escrito muchas falsedades” [Many falsehoods have been written about Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer] notes Luengo (1999: 122), referencing Rafael Montesinos’s La semana pasada murió Bécquer (1992). Without moving frankly from biography to fiction, Doble agonía generally avoids making factual claims. A skeleton outline of Bécquer’s life is given: childhood in Seville; arrival in Madrid, failure, and poverty; contemplation of remote and idealized women; visits to monasteries; marriage and children; an early death at the age of 34. This skeleton is fleshed out with swathes of digression and commentary on Bécquer’s epoch and Jarnés’ own, on the nineteenth century and the 1930s. Quotations taking up pages at a time are drawn from Bécquer’s writing, from earlier critics and biographers such as Juan Valera or Espina, and from Jarnés’ own previously published work (see Luengo 1999). As quotations, they call attention to the multiplicity of subjective responses to Bécquer, rather than to the poet himself. Jarnés’ role as biographer is given prominence; it was characteristic of the New Biography to place biographer and subject on such an equal footing. Jarnés said as much in his short essay “Vidas oblicuas” (1929) where he reviews Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Efigies and comments more generally on the task of the biographer: “ningún creador renuncia a sus derechos de primogenitura, y él se ingeniará para, en el trance de no concederle inventar una vida, transfigurarla, al menos” [No creator renounces his right of primogeniture, and, when faced with not being allowed to invent a life, he will devise a way to at least transform it] (252).

Nineteenth-​century  revolt Chacel’s essay, “Cómo y por qué de la novela” is revealing, not only because it credits Ortega with initiating the Espasa-​Calpe series, but also because of what it says about attitudes to nineteenth-​century Spanish literature and its legacy. Chacel likens writing a novel in the 192

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pre-​Civil War period to looking in a mirror when the lights are out (vol. 3, 139). While she and her fellow novelists were polishing the mirror, refining, and experimenting with their prose, they were nevertheless afraid to turn on the light: No nos atrevíamos a mirar cara a cara nuestra vida y no por miedo a encontrarla borrascosa, sino por la seguridad de que la encontraríamos mediocre. España no supo nunca vivir la era democrática  —​seguramente sigue sin saber—​, si hubiera sabido, Galdós sería un novelista de valor universal. Pero no lo es y los escritores de mi generación no queríamos correr la misma suerte.4 (vol. 3, 139) Ortega, she said, found the solution to this impasse when he “ideó la colección «Vidas extraordinarias [sic] del siglo XIX»” [came up with the idea for the collection Extraordinary Lives of the Nineteenth Century] (vol. 3, 139). This obliged Chacel’s contemporaries to revisit assumptions about their own recent past. They had been afraid of finding nothing but mediocrity, yet when they looked in the direction indicated by Ortega and in the way Ortega suggested, through a study of a life lived, they quickly found something worth studying: “En seguida vimos que valían la pena” [We immediately saw they were worth the trouble] (vol. 3, 140). Chacel’s recollections signal an enduring problem in the reception of nineteenth-​century Spanish culture, one which Stephen Miller has approached from a different angle. Writing about the Spanish novel “from Pérez Galdós to [Javier] Marías,” Miller argues persuasively that “anti-​realist, anti-​tradition modernists” failed to recognize that La Regenta and Fortunata y Jacinta “epitomized and questioned” socio-​mimetism, just as they failed to engage with “the post-​realist careers of Galdós and Alas” (Miller 2001, 49). Without having to look far beyond an established canon, Miller argues that nineteenth-​century “Realist” authors were innovative in ways that undermine subsequent claims of radical innovation. At the same time, he shows that writers such as Galdós, Alas, Pardo Bazán, and Valera were frequently rejected or simply ignored by the successors, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. Miller takes this observation further: Spanish novelists for the past century and a half, from Galdós himself all the way down to Marías, have repeatedly announced radical breaks from preceding literary generations, all the while avoiding acknowledgement of intellectual or artistic debt and effectively pretending that the experimentation and innovation of the previous generation simply did not happen. Miller frames his discussion in terms of a perceived opposition between modernist aspirations toward universalism on the one hand and a national tradition of literary Realism on the other. In this sense, Chacel’s claim that Galdós’ novels never held “valor universal” [universal appeal] is worth noting. Yet as with any attempt to establish a broad pattern, exceptions can always be found. Chacel’s contemporary, the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano, for example, vindicated Galdós in 1960 in her essay La España de Galdós. Novels such as Tristana or El amigo Manso, she says (20): contradicen al extremo la primera impresión que la obra de Galdós pueda producir y en la que tantos se han quedado detenidos —​ese «prosaísmo»—​y por su escasez de materia, de cuento o fábula, por su poesía de la existencia, de la simple existencia sin más, recuerdan y aun tienden a juntarse como en una especie común con las de don Miguel de Unamuno.5 Zambrano, like Miller, thought that some of the innovative and intimate qualities of Galdós’ work were overlooked. Nevertheless, by drawing a comparison with Unamuno and maintaining a sustained interest in Galdós, she showed that this was not the only way of engaging with 193

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nineteenth-​century predecessors. Chacel’s willingness to revise her view of individuals such as Teresa similarly points to a more deliberate and nuanced interrogation of the period. In order to draw out some of these nuances and about-​turns, the following paragraphs look at how Chacel and Jarnés treated their biographical subjects as rebellious Romantic heroes. Chacel does so by effectively rewriting literary history, while I  suggest that Jarnés instead deploys and indeed reinforces familiar tropes. In both cases, the protagonists’ misadventures are closely intertwined with national pasts and futures. Several commentators have remarked on the way in which Chacel’s Teresa usurps Espronceda in his role as a rebellious Romantic hero who scorns social conventions in pursuit of a higher ideal (e.g. Faber 1999; Bordons and Kirkpatrick 1992; Scarlett 1994; León-​Blázquez 2011; Requena Hidalgo 2007). For Requena Hidalgo, Chacel’s Teresa represents “el ideal del individuo rebelde, en plena libertad, que es capaz de luchar contra los valores o, más bien, antivalores morales de una sociedad decadente” [the ideal of the rebellious individual, completely free, who is able to fight the moral values—​or rather, antivalues—​of a decadent society] (100).Teresa is the one who is corrupted and forced to abandon her idealism when she confronts a sordid reality. Her epiphany is induced by the discovery in her attic of pornographic poetry by Espronceda, alongside letters to his mother asking for money and showing serious concern for his social standing. Teresa’s belief in filial love is immediately destroyed, and her understanding of her own relationship with Espronceda disfigured beyond recognition: “su amor, ante aquello … quedaba derruido, demolido desde su raíz. Más aún: quedaba desmentido, negado. El amor, tal como ella había creído vivirlo, no podía haber coexistido con aquel cieno”6 (vol. 5, 276). Unlike Espronceda, in pursuing her ideal Teresa had refused offers that would have given her a more materially comfortable life, a safe social standing, but which would have required her to play a hypocritical and debasing role. If Teresa the character usurps Espronceda, the novel overwrites the conventions of an inherited literary canon. One passage in particular illustrates this. Toward the end, Espronceda’s friend Narciso de la Escosura tells Teresa (who has separated from Espronceda) about the performance of a play by her former lover. The play is called El amor venga sus agravios. Escosura speculates about the title and the plot but Teresa cuts him short, curtailing and rewriting the conventions of a traditional and misogynist literary canon in the process (vol. 5, 379): [Escosura]—​… podemos de antemano, sin haberlo visto, imaginarnos el argumento del drama. Un joven expatriado en lejanas tierras cree encontrar a la mujer soñada, abre su corazón a una beldad que juzga pura, pero que, falsa y liviana … —​¡Oh no! —​Le interrumpió Teresa, con la garganta oprimida por la cólera—​. Si su inspiración se esclavizase a tal episodio, sería realmente mísera. La experiencia, en un espíritu creador, no debe llevarle nunca a relatar sin más los hechos de su historia personal. Son otras las fuentes, los temas generales que trascienden de esas pequeñeces, los únicos que pueden inspirar a un verdadero poeta. Además, por el título, yo presumo que no se trata de la venganza de un personaje, héroe si tú quieres, que el caso no es el de un hombre agraviado. No, yo supongo que es el amor el que se venga, que es el amor mismo el herido, el ultrajado. ¡Ah, no lo dudes! Yo creo que el drama es eso, o, al menos, te aseguro que ese drama merecería ser escrito. Escosura alzó las cejas, incapaz de decir siquiera:  «¡Ah!» Afectó una expectación como si esperase de Teresa las conclusiones de una teoría literaria. —​Tú imagínate —​siguió ella—​lo que puede ocurrir cuando es el amor el que recibe los agravios, a través de un alma tan llena de él que casi no es alma, que casi no

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es más que amor y los ultrajes, como a tal alma, no le atañen. En ese drama, el amor se venga con refinamiento, sin ruido.7 In Escosura’s view, the title El amor venga sus agravios refers to the accepted version of the misadventures of a Romantic poet and idealistic Don Juan who has been deceived and corrupted in his search for the perfect woman. Teresa counters by saying that this could not possibly be the play that Espronceda wrote because anyone who wrote this play would not be a “verdadero poeta” [true poet]. Of course, Escosura’s account synthesizes the narrative that Espronceda bequeathed to Spanish literature in “Canto a Teresa” and Teresa is therefore calling him a bad poet. As Faber has so amply demonstrated, Chacel read the Canto “against the grain”; she used its ambivalence to counteract the vilification of Teresa by Espronceda’s biographers. As well as countering the charges laid against Teresa, and rewriting the Canto in this sense, Chacel also posits an alternative literary theory and literary history and ousts Espronceda from his place in the canon of Spanish Romanticism. Literature must transcend personal experience. If this was not the play Espronceda wrote, Teresa continues, it should have been. As Escosura listens to her “teoría literaria” [literary theory],Teresa goes on to describe what such a drama might look like. Love itself is the victim, “un alma tan llena de él que casi no es alma” [a soul so full of love that it is almost not a soul]. Love “se venga con refinamiento, sin ruido” [takes its revenge with refinement, without noise]. Given that throughout the novel her truthful silences are celebrated over Espronceda’s verbosity and empty promises, this “alma” is clearly Teresa herself and the novel is love’s refined and quiet revenge. Requena Hidalgo observes in Teresa “una verdadera identidad entre su desolada situación personal y la de España” [a true identification between her desolate personal situation and the situation of Spain] (2007, 101). The narrator states that “un dolor como el suyo [de Teresa] … era el que aquejaba a España” [a pain like her own … was what afflicted Spain] (Chacel, vol. 5, 292). Bordons and Kirkpatrick note that, in drawing an analogy between Teresa and the nation, Chacel “refers back to the practice of her realist predecessor, Galdós”. Unlike Galdós, however, Bordons and Kirkpatrick continue, Chacel’s heroine is both conscious and critical of her allegorical role (1992, 296). Overhearing a passerby announce the fall of “el Ministerio Istúriz” while walking through Madrid, Teresa reflects on the nature of politics and the lamentable state of public life (vol. 5, 291): No podía reprimir su repugnancia por la máquina ajetreadora de la vida pública que las gentes llamaban política. Veía tan de cerca la trama de aquel encadenamiento de peldaños, en el que las tribunas parlamentaria y periodística se henchían, se reemplazaban, se desocupaban y volvían a henchirse, tras torneos retóricos, vanos como juegos de pompas, que nada, ninguna institución humana le parecía digna de mayor descrédito.8 Espronceda has sacrificed his life with Teresa in the name of politics. The novel implies that this in fact constitutes a betrayal of Spain because he has abandoned his own intimate and personal truth. Conversely, if Espronceda and his contemporaries had been faithful to their personal truth, Spain would have had a very different experience of the nineteenth century, with clear implications for posterity. They thus betrayed both past and future. Teresa, having lived her own truth to the utmost, can pass judgement on those around her:  “¿Cuál de ellos era capaz de vivir en ella [Teresa /​España] como en el clima de su conciencia, sin traicionarla a cada paso, sin manchar a todas horas su autenticidad íntima?” [Which of them could live in her (Teresa /​ Spain) as in their own conscience, without betraying her at every turn, without tarnishing their 195

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own intimate truth at every moment?] (vol. 5, 293). The answer to this question, of course, is Teresa herself. In short, Teresa proposes that, contrary to canonical belief, Teresa was betrayed by Espronceda, and not the other way around. Espronceda, meanwhile, can be taken to represent the political and ethical deficiencies of Spain’s nineteenth-​century heroes. Where Chacel’s decision to experiment with biography by writing about Teresa seems to have originated with Ortega and did not extend beyond this one project, Jarnés’ interest in both biographical form and biographical subject was more integral to his thought and work. As Luengo (1999) has shown, Bécquer appears repeatedly in Jarnes’ writing while Doble agonía was his fourth contribution to Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX. Furthermore, he was an active participant in the contemporaneous debates about biography in the pages of the Revista de Occidente (see for example, January and November 1929). Pulido Mendoza takes the view that the Espasa-​Calpe series was not just the result of Ortega’s interventions, but that it emerged in the broader context of centenary celebrations of key moments in Romanticism, combined with a widespread interest in the nineteenth century at a moment of political crisis in Spain: “La atención sobre el siglo XIX, además, no puede desvincularse del contexto general de crisis de los sistemas parlamentarios liberales heredados de este siglo durante las dos décadas de entreguerras europeas”9 (2009, 112). This view is borne out by Doble agonía. “Se celebra ahora,” Jarnés writes at the start, “el centenario del poeta, que es tanto como celebrar el del mejor romanticismo español” [we are now celebrating the centennial of the poet, which is the same as celebrating that of the best Spanish Romanticism] (11). The final paragraph lists other authors to have taken an interest in Bécquer at this time—​Dámaso Alonso, Luis Cernuda, Joaquín Casalduero—​and the final sentence reaffirms the poet’s place in the literary canon:  “Otros escritores jóvenes han de contribuir con devoción análoga a situar a Bécquer en el lugar que justamente le corresponde en la historia literaria contemporánea”10 (237). Jarnés’s Bécquer epitomizes the Romantic rebel who would refuse to “contentarse con la simple humanidad” [be content with mere humanity] (22–​23). Like Chacel’s Teresa, this set him at odds with his century. Doble agonía thus reproduces the Romantic trope of the lone individual struggling against human limitations and consequently out of tune with his historical moment: “Bécquer apenas se resigna a conocer a los hombres de su tiempo” [Bécquer scarcely became resigned to knowing the men of his time] (110). Descriptions of Bécquer evoke the familiar trope of the pale, consumptive poet:  “hombre pálido, taciturno, que nos llevará de la mano por las nebulosas regiones del sentimiento” [a pale, taciturn man, who will lead us by the hand through the nebulous territories of emotion] (11). Variations of this recur throughout (105): Me represento a Bécquer pálido, taciturno, ausente, mudo, mal alimentado, lamentablemente vestido, entre estos desmelenados folletinistas que escriben odas, entre unos pomposos dramaturgos que alternaban el escenario teatral con el político, entre docenas de hilvanadores de artículos de fondo para derribar Gobiernos.11 Jarnés, as biographer, takes it upon himself to extract Bécquer from the nineteenth century: “nos aguarda Bécquer con su fardo de gloriosas tristezas, con su llanto, el más fértil de su siglo. … Extraigamos de él—​delicadamente—​lo más valioso, sus Rimas” [Bécquer awaits us with his bundle of glorious sorrows, with his sobs, the most productive of his century. … Let us extract from him—​delicately—​what is most valuable, his Rimas] (21). The aesthetic success of Bécquer’s poetry resides in lamenting the disjuncture between individual ideals and environment: “Lucha—​la más dolorosa—​con la grandilocuencia de su época, con las hinchazones retóricas de lo que en su tiempo era llamado poesía” [A struggle—​the most painful one—​with 196

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the grandiloquence of his era, with the bloated rhetoric of what in his time was called poetry] (218). Bécquer’s “doble agonía” [double agony] might consist, then, in the physical suffering brought about by poverty and ill-​health combined with the malaise of living in a world inimical to his poetics. In Jarnés’ account, it is precisely this dissatisfaction that makes him worth saving, as the exceptional Romantic subject in a doomed yet heroic struggle against an oppressive world. Looked at from another perspective, however, Jarnés’ account makes nineteenth-​ century Spanish mediocrity a precondition for Bécquer’s poetry. He needs the “desmelenados folletinistas”, “pomposos dramaturgos,” and “hinchazones retóricas” [disheveled novelists, pompous playwrights, bloated rhetoric]; without them, the aesthetics of lament could not exist. To put it another way, if Bécquer had been a success, he would not have had so much to cry about. The pale and consumptive Romantic is not the only familiar trope in Doble agonía. Jarnés also builds on the close associations between European Romanticism and the depiction of Spain as Other. By representing him as emblematic of a form of Romanticism that is not tied to any specific historical moment, Jarnés detaches Bécquer from the Spanish nineteenth century: “el gran romanticismo, el de actitud fundamental ante la vida, también ante la artística, es algo de todas las épocas” (77); “El romanticismo de Bécquer se nutre más de substancias antiguas medievales que de inquietudes y de temas del siglo XIX. Por eso se salva de éste”12 (23; see also p. 134). Bécquer can be celebrated because he embodies some timeless or ancient essence. This also serves as a way of denigrating Spain’s experiences of the recent past. Miller, in his article about the modern Spanish novel, focuses on the practice of claiming a special but problematic place for Realism in the Spanish literary tradition. Spain, through Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes, could be celebrated as the birthplace of modern Realism, while at the same time the Spanish Realist novel of the nineteenth century was repeatedly judged wanting. Jarnés draws on similarly persistent notions that Spanish literature had always been Romantic, but had nevertheless failed to produce the goods when it came to the Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Spain was constructed as Other by European spectators (see Saglia 2000); but its literature was also Romantic in a timeless and ahistorical sense that made it possible for August Wilhelm von Schlegel and his follower, the naturalized Spaniard Johann Nicolaus Böhl von Faber, to celebrate the Romantic qualities of Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega (see Flitter 1992). Spain is situated within these very different major European literary movements through a very similar sleight of hand:  Spanish literature holds some quintessential quality that makes it either Romantic or Realist, but these very qualities mean that Spanish literature somehow falls outside modern time.

The reinterpretation of failure The protagonists of both Teresa and Doble agonía are idealists who strive to uphold moral and aesthetic values even when surrounded by grubby mediocrity, and these personal failures are related to a broader collective failure. I want now to explore the different ways that the texts articulate such failures, particularly in relation to the exploitation and deployment of gendered types. Not insignificantly, both Espronceda and Bécquer have been associated with pornographic texts or images. Los Borbones en pelota is a collection of pornographic and satirical watercolours that includes images of Isabel II and various government ministers and Church prelates and signed “SEM.” When these watercolours were first acquired by the Biblioteca Nacional in the 1980s they were attributed to the brothers Gustavo Adolfo and Valeriano Bécquer. They were reproduced and published, together with studies by Robert Pageard, Lee Fontanella, and María Dolores Cabra Loredo by Ediciones El Museo Universal in 1981.Yet, as Burdiel later noted, it was difficult to 197

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“acomodar la sensibilidad exquisita del más lírico de los poetas del XIX, y la no menos delicada de la pintura costumbrista de su hermano, a la brutalidad manifiesta de aquellas imágenes”13 (2012, 10). Burdiel’s introduction to the 2012 edition of the images shifts the question away from authorship, onto broader questions about the circulation of images or the combination of pornography with political satire at moments of particular crisis for European monarchies. Nevertheless, she summarizes recent scholarly views on the question of authorship, concluding that “SEM” was probably a signature used by a group of artists, including the Bécquer brothers, who published in a selection of revistas (Burdiel 2012; see also Martínez Forega 2014). In one sense, however, whether or not Gustavo Adolfo was involved with Los Borbones en pelota is not what is at issue here. Félix Bello Vázquez takes the view that Gustavo Adolfo’s direct involvement was unlikely but that indirect participation was more probable. More importantly, he notes that “Bécquer, el elevado poeta del amor y de la muerte llevó una vida azarosa y sirvió frecuentemente como esclavo del amor de burdel” [Bécquer, the noble poet of love and death, led a turbulent life and frequently served as a slave to love in a brothel] (2005, 200). Clearly, then, any accounts of Bécquer’s lyric poetry that celebrate his lyricism and idealism while blaming a corrupt world populated by loose women do not tell the full story. Espronceda is credited with writing a series of poems that were explicit and brutal. Cascales Muñoz published these in his curiously titled El auténtico Espronceda pornográfico y el apócrifo en general:  estudio crítico vindicativo al que precede la biografía del gran poeta (1932). This volume provided the historical basis for the account of Teresa’s epiphany in the attic mentioned above; from the collection, the poems “Dido y Eneas,” “La mujer,” and “La Creación” are mentioned specifically in Teresa (276). In “Advertencia a Teresa,” Chacel described El auténtico Espronceda as “una recopilación de poemas de Espronceda y sus amigos e imitadores, de una obscenidad difícilmente superable” [a collection of poems by Espronceda and his friends and imitators, of a level of obscenity that would be hard to surpass] (vol. 3, 161). In 2006 Diego Martínez Torrón became the first editor to include these poems in an edition of Espronceda’s complete works. The introduction sets out the responses of different scholars, noting particularly that Cascales Muñoz was reluctant to allow that Espronceda could be the author: “Cascales está contra la leyenda de un Espronceda calavera como Félix de Montemar y no le considera revolucionario y bohemio sino buen católico y víctima de las mujeres”14 (62). Curiously, Martínez Torrón defends his decision to include the poems, while simultaneously establishing a rhetorical distance that makes the misogyny incidental rather than an integral part of the poet’s worldview (2006, 62): Estos poemas los incluyo en mi edición, aunque algunos no sean de Espronceda, como curiosidad, para que se vea que no todo fue idealismo en la época romántica. Y para demostrar la huella de la figura de Espronceda, como personaje literario y legendario, en los textos de la época posterior, incluso en los más disolutos.15 Emilia Pardo Bazán’s short story “Sor Aparición” could be considered one such “huella” [mark, or trace]. The story appeared in El Imparcial in September 1896. In a preface to the collection Cuentos de amor, Pardo Bazán claimed that “Sor Aparición” was based on a true story and commented on its reception:  “De Sor Aparición se espantó mucha gente. Releo el cuento despacio y no puedo explicarme tal horror sino por la crueldad de lo real que palpita en él” [Many people were horrified by Sor Aparición. I reread the story slowly and I cannot explain such horror unless it is because of palpable cruelty of the reality within it] (11). The story depicts an act of sexual violence suffered by a young girl at the hands of Juan de Camargo, “el glorioso nombre del autor del Arcángel maldito,—​tal vez el más genuino representante de 198

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la fiebre romántica” [the glorious name of the author of Arcángel maldito—​perhaps the most genuine representative of the Romantic fever] (144). Paredes Núñez (1979, 226–​228) has identified the many points of comparison between Camargo and Espronceda while Joyce Tolliver (1994) has explored the story’s devastating critique of the Romantic archetype Don Juan. Pardo Bazán’s retelling of this tale, with its emphasis on the circulation of gossip, shows that stories of Espronceda’s exploits were common currency, part of the poet’s posthumous mythology, even if her readers did react with horror. Situated within such an interpretative tradition, Chacel’s insistence on this aspect of Espronceda’s legacy interrupts the narrative of an idealistic poet corrupted in his quest for the unattainable. Jarnés is much more circumspect than Chacel in his treatment of Bécquer’s affairs, yet this too has consequences. Doble agonía reproduces in full a rima beginning “Una mujer envenenó mi alma, /​otra mujer envenenó mi cuerpo” [One woman poisoned my soul, /​another woman poisoned my body]. Jarnés’ gloss strikes me as both provocative and disingenuous: “¿Qué clase de veneno es éste que envenena los cuerpos?” [What kind of poison is this that poisons bodies?] (203). Russel P. Sebold was blunter when he commented on the same lines: “Bécquer tenía sífilis” [Bécquer had syphilis] (2004, 369; see also Montesinos 1992, 22–​24). If so, then the second stanza has very specific implications: “Como el mundo es redondo, el mundo rueda: /​ Si rodando, mañana, este veneno /​envenena a su vez, ¿por qué acusarme? /​¿Puedo dar más de lo que a mi me dieron?”16 Schneider reports that this was one of three poems omitted from the posthumous collections compiled by Bécquer’s friends, and that it was even … crossed out diagonally with ink and ruler by an energetic hand.The reason for this suppression is quite evident: their tone was too bitter and ironical; and Bécquer was to be presented to the world in his more congenial aspect of grave and sentimental dreamer. (1922, 247–​248) Montesinos, on the other hand, assumes that Bécquer crossed out the poem himself. He also suggests, however, that the poem was in fact well known: “lo más seguro es que la rima fuera muy conocida en el mundillo literario de la época, a través de la transmisión oral” [it is very likely that the rima was very well known in the literary world of the time, through oral transmission] (1992, 23). This would indicate that one of the reasons scholars in the 1980s found Los Borbones en pelota so incongruous was that the image of Bécquer had been carefully curated and stripped of aggressive sexual content. It also, however, implies that another image of Bécquer had nevertheless survived in the rumours and in the margins. Doble agonía evokes this duality perfectly, by including the suppressed poem but also perpetuating the idea of Bécquer as a tragic idealist who “siempre está aguardando a una mujer que no acaba de llegar” [is always waiting for a woman who never arrives] (201). And for Jarnés, one difference between Espronceda and Bécquer is that the former was more strident in his accusations (201–​202): Volvemos a encontrarnos con el cielo, con lo absoluto, con lo inmenso. La mujer y el cielo se confunden. Al medir con ellos la mezquindad que posee el poeta se calla. Espronceda hubiera insultado a Teresa; Bécquer guarda silencio, nada reprocha a Casta.17 Bécquer may have given his wife syphilis, but he did not reproach her as Espronceda might have done. Of course, Jarnés’ words also imply here that Bécquer would have been within his rights to do so, and that these women were in some sense interchangeable. 199

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Both poets ultimately fail in their quest. They have to. Reality must fall short or the poets cannot have been ambitious and idealistic enough in their aspirations. The idealization of the poet and the disparagement of women are integral to the construction of the aesthetic, as are the “desmelenados folletinistas” [disheveled novelists] and “pomposos dramaturgos” [pompous playwrights]. Far from encouraging a progressive approach to change, I  suggest that this is instead a form of fatalism. It thus makes sense that Jarnés sees the problems of nineteenth-​century Spain recurring in the twentieth century, written into an ahistorical present tense. Jarnés comments that “debemos felicitar a Bécquer por su hallazgo insólito en España, entonces y ahora. ¡Una mujer que lee, que sabe escoger sus lecturas!” [we should congratulate Bécquer for his discovery, unheard of in Spain, then and now. A woman who reads, who knows how to choose her readings!] (44). He follows this immediately with an anecdote from a friend, “un técnico de bibliotecas” [a library technician] who “nos da nombres de pueblos españoles que se resisten a aceptar una biblioteca” [gives us names of Spanish towns that refuse to accept a library] (44–​45, author’s emphasis). Nevertheless, Jarnés did sometimes present a more optimistic and less deterministic vision of the Spanish character and future, for example when he blames the actions of a few men rather than “los pueblos” [the towns, or the peoples of the towns] for these cases of “incultura voluntaria” [voluntary ignorance] (45). He even says that “Ha crecido—​también entre las mujeres—​el afán de cultivarse” [The desire to educate oneself—​including among women—​has grown] (45). Yet, overwhelmingly, Doble agonía paints a picture of an ethereal Bécquer against a background of self-​perpetuating worldly corruption (106): Eran—​y son—​trincheras, puntos estratégicos, desde donde se fraguan conspiraciones literarias, políticas, financieras… […] Y la nube innominada de satélites, de mendigos de levita, de parásitos […] lo más opuesto al mundo de rubios mancebos de escarcela y damas de nítido brial, que bulle en la mente de Gustavo Adolfo. Como un recuerdo de épocas desvanecidas aparece allí Gustavo Adolfo.18

Limiting possibilities To conclude, I would like to speculate about the relationship between essentialist views of gender and historical fatalism, and how we might read Teresa as a profession of faith in the possibility of future change. In “Advertencia a Teresa” Chacel considered the comparisons that are sometimes drawn between Emma Bovary and Don Quijote. In her view, these characters are fundamentally different. Whereas magic or madness would be needed for Don Quijote’s vision to become reality, Emma Bovary’s desires fall well within the possible:  “Madame Bovary no desea nunca nada irrealizable, nada anacrónico, no cree en nada mágico ni fuera de lo natural, mientras que todas estas categorías son necesarias a Don Quijote”19 (vol. 3, 166). This reading diverges clearly from clinical appropriations of Madame Bovary that were used “para referirse a la fantasía de la protagonista de Madame Bovary (1856) en su confusión con la realidad” [to refer to the fantasy of Madame Bovary’s protagonist in its confusion with reality] (Godón 2017, 30). Looked at from one angle, Chacel continues, this could be because Emma Bovary’s dreams were less ambitious and less noble: “la ambición genuina de [Don Quijote] es superar la realidad, alcanzando el ámbito ideal de justicia, de virtud, de valor y de gloria. Emma Bovary no quiere superar nada; quiere, sencillamente, lo superior en vez de lo inferior”20 (vol. 3, 166). Teresa, like Emma, becomes a victim of her own “realidad y pasión que, según parece, eran lo menos abundante y, por tanto, lo que había que pagar más caro” [reality and passion which, it seems, were the least abundant things, and thus, what she had to 200

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pay most dearly for] (vol. 3, 167). In one way, this makes Teresa fall short of the standards of the Romantic hero by failing in the scale of her ambition. Alternatively, by making Emma’s and Teresa’s ambitions fully realizable and by refuting the diagnosis of delusion, Chacel opens up a space for change. Teresa’s life can be considered a failure because Espronceda did not live up to her standards, and because Spanish society worked against them, but those standards are not intrinsically and inevitably unrealistic. Whatever it is about Teresa that is to be celebrated does not depend for its existence on nineteenth-​century mediocrity, though it might stand out against this background.Teresa’s defeat is instead the result of missed opportunities—​what might have been and what could have been, and, if Teresa was finished before the outbreak of war in July 1936, perhaps even what could still have been. In contrast, by making Bécquer’s poetics dependent on an ahistorical notion of Romanticism on the one hand, and on a corrupted world populated by fallen women on the other, Jarnés closes down the possibilities of future change.

Notes 1 “At that time, biographical novels were in vogue, but we Spaniards not only didn’t have faith in our own lives, we also didn’t believe we had heroes who were worthy of enduring. Ortega pointed and said, ‘This one, this one, this one, this one …,’ and we obeyed; responsibility lay with Ortega, and we set ourselves to study the models given. We immediately saw that they were worth the trouble.” All quotations from works by Chacel are to the Obra completa, by volume and page number. All translations provided by Linda Grabner, University of Pennsylvania. 2 “I had the luck to be given the one most lacking in facts and deeds, the one that was more of a person, naked in her humanity. I started out thinking this condition of my protagonist was an unsalvageable problem, and, if I had been set on writing a biography, it would have been because Teresa never did anything in her life other than be Teresa.” 3 “Jarnés insists on the impossibility of capturing the true shape and importance of the nun, since all the events of her existence have been covered in layers of legend and superstition.” 4 “We dared not look our life in the face: not out of fear of finding it tumultuous, but because of the certainty that we would find it mediocre. Spain never learned—​no doubt it still hasn’t learnt—​how to live the democratic era. If it had, Galdós would be a novelist with universal appeal. But he isn’t, and the writers of my generation, we didn’t want to risk the same fate.” 5 “[R]adically contradict the first impression that Galdos’s works might produce, and which so many have remained fixed upon—​that ‘prosaism’—​and because of their lack of subject matter, of story or fable, because of their poetic celebration of existence, of plain and simple existence, such novels recall and even tend to be classed together with the novels of Miguel de Unamuno.” 6 “[H]‌er love, confronted with all of that … was destroyed, torn down from the roots. More than that, it was denied, negated. Love, as she believed she had lived it, could not have coexisted with that filth.” 7 “[Escosura] ‘… Without even seeing it, we can imagine the plot. A young exile in a far-​off land believes he has found the woman he has dreamed of; he opens his heart to a beauty he imagines is pure, but who, unfaithful and lewd…’ ‘Oh, no,’ Teresa interrupted, her throat constricting with anger. ‘If his inspiration were enslaved to such a situation, it would indeed be wretched. Experience should never lead a creative spirit to give a bare account of the facts of his personal story. There are other sources, general themes that transcend such trivialities, that are the only things that can inspire a true poet. Besides, from the title I gather that it isn’t about the revenge of a character, a hero if you like; this isn’t the story of a man who has been wronged. No, I think it is love that is avenged, it is love itself that is wounded, wronged. Oh, don’t doubt it! I believe that that is the drama, or at least, I assure you that drama deserves to be written.’ Escosura raised his eyebrows, unable even to say, ‘Oh!’ He feigned a look of expectation, as if waiting for Teresa to provide the conclusions of a literary theory. ‘Imagine,’ she continued, ‘what might happen when it is love that is wronged, through a soul so full of love that it is almost not a soul, that it is almost nothing other than love, and, being such a soul, the affronts do not touch it. In that drama, love takes its revenge with refinement, without noise.’ ”

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Geraldine Lawless 8 “She could not repress her disgust at the incessant machinery of public life that people called politics. She had such a close view of the layout of that chain of steps, in which the parliamentary and journalistic courts became swollen, were replaced, emptied, and swelled up again after rhetorical tournaments as pointless as blowing bubbles, that she didn’t think that any human institution deserved more discredit.” 9 “Furthermore, when attention is paid to the nineteenth century, this cannot be divorced from the general context of the crisis of liberal parliamentary systems inherited from this century during the two interwar decades in Europe.” 10 “Other young writers must contribute with similar dedication to situating Bécquer in his rightful position in contemporary literary history.” 11 “I imagine a pale, taciturn, absent, mute, undernourished, poorly dressed Bécquer among those disheveled novelists writing odes, among pompous playwrights who switch between the stage and the world of politics, among dozens of journalists spinning out feature articles to topple governments.” 12 “[G]‌reat romanticism, the romanticism that consists of a fundamental attitude towards life, as well as towards art, is timeless, something seen in every era; Bécquer’s romanticism is nourished more by ancient medieval substances than by concerns and affairs of the nineteenth century. That’s why he escapes from this century.” 13 “[R]econcile the exquisite sensibility of the most lyrical of the nineteenth-​century poets, and the no less delicate sensibility of the costumbrista paintings of his brother, with the evident brutality of those images.” 14 “Cascales is against the legend of an Espronceda as rakish as Félix de Montemar, and does not consider him as a revolutionary or bohemian, but rather as a good Catholic and a victim of women.” 15 “I include these poems in my edition, although some may not be by Espronceda, as a curiosity, so it may be seen that the Romantic period was not all idealism, and to show the mark left by Espronceda, as a literary and legendary figure, on the texts—​even the most dissolute ones—​of the following period.” 16 “As the world is round, the world goes around: /​If in going around, tomorrow, this poison /​poisons in turn, why accuse me? /​Can I give more than what was given to me?” 17 “Again we encounter heaven, the absolute, the immense. Woman and heaven become confused. When the poet uses them as a measure of the paltriness of what he possesses, he falls silent. Espronceda would have insulted Teresa; Bécquer remains silent, refusing to reproach Casta.” 18 “They were—​and are—​trenches, strategic points from which literary, political, financial conspiracies are forged … And the nameless cloud of followers, of well-​dressed beggars, of parasites … these are as far as it is possible to be from the world of blond youths in plates of armour and ladies in impeccable gowns that teemed through the mind of Gustavo Adolfo. In that other world, Gustavo Adolfo appears like a reminder of bygone eras.” 19 “Madame Bovary never desires anything unattainable, anything anachronous, she doesn’t believe in anything magical or unnatural, while all these categories are necessary for Don Quijote.” 20 “[Don Quijote’s] true ambition is to overcome reality, reaching the ideal world of justice, virtue, courage, and glory. Emma Bovary does not want to overcome anything; she simply wants the best instead of the worst.”

Works cited Arnas Mur, Susana. 2011. “El arte del retratro y de la biografía en Ramón Gómez de la Serna.” PhD diss., Universidad de Zaragoza. Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, and Valeriano Bécquer. 1991. SEM. Los Borbones en pelota. Madrid: Ediciones El Museo Universal. Bello Vázquez, Félix. 2005. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, precursor del simbolismo en España. Madrid: Fundamentos. Bordons, Teresa, and Susan Kirkpatrick. 1992. “Teresa and Ortega’s canon.” Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 17: 283–​99. Burdiel, Isabel. 2012. “El descenso de los reyes y la nación moral. A propósito de Los Borbones en pelota.” In SEM, Los Borbones en pelota, edited by Isabel Burdiel, 7–​74. Zaragoza:  Institución “Fernando el Católico”. Cáliz Montes, Jessica. 2013. “La colección ‘Vidas Españolas e Hispanoamericanas del Siglo XIX’, un lugar de encuentro entre España e Hispanoamérica.” Cuadernos de Aleph 5: 15–​38. Chacel, Rosa. 1989–​2004. Obra completa.Valladolid: Fundación Guillén.

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Partial protagonists Chacel, Rosa. 1929. “Teresa (novela de amor).” Revista de Occidente 7(77): 223–​243. Espronceda, José de. 2006. Obras completas de Espronceda, edited by Diego Martínez Torrón. Madrid: Cátedra. Faber, Sebastiaan. 1999. “Can the female muse speak? Chacel and Poniatowska read against the grain.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 53: 47–​66. Flitter, Derek. 1992. Spanish Romantic Literary Theory and Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Godón, Nuria. 2017. La pasión esclava. Alianzas masoquistas en “La Regenta”. West Lafayette, IN:  Purdue University Press. Hamilton, Nigel. 2007. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jarnés, Benjamín. 1936. Doble agonía de Bécquer. Madrid: Espasa-​Calpe. Jarnés, Benjamín. 1929. “Nueva quimera del oro.” Revista de Occidente 7(67): 118–​122. Jarnés, Benjamín. 1929. “Vidas oblicuas”, Revista de Occidente 7(77): 251–​257. Jímenez Naranjo, Macarena. 2011. “¿Por qué Sor Patrocinio? La elección del sujeto biográfico como exégesis de la biografía (o, dime sobre quién escribes y te diré qué te propones).” STUDIUM. Revista de Humanidades 17: 217–​247. Jiménez Naranjo, Macarena. 2012. “Una biografía ‘metabiográfica’:  Benjamín Jarnés y su Sor Patrocinio (1929).” Dicenda. Cuadernos de Filología Hispánic 30: 235–​249. Lee, Hermione. 2009. Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. León-​Blázquez, Lidia. 2011. “Telarañas: Rosa Chacel y la narrativa femenina de la vanguardia española.” PhD diss., Stony Brook University. Luengo, Elvira. 1999. “Benjamín Jarnés, Bécquer y el arte de la biografía.” El Gnomo 8: 113–​154. Mandrell, James. 1995. “ ‘Poesía … eres tú’, or the construction of Bécquer and the sign of woman.” In Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-​Century Spain, edited by Lou Charnon-​Deutsch and Jo Labanyi, 52–​ 73. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Martínez Forega, Manuel. 2014. Los Borbones en pelota, edited by Manuel Martínez Forega 9–​ 27. Zaragoza: Olifante. Martínez Torrón, Diego. 2006. “Introducción.” In Obras completas de Espronceda, edited by Diego Martínez Torrón, 11–​81. Madrid: Cátedra. Miller, Stephen. 2001. “The Spanish novel from Pérez Galdós to Marías:  tradition and nescience, rupture, and Europeanization.” South Central Review 18(1–​2:  Spain Modern and Postmodern at the Millennium): 45–​65. Montesinos, Rafael. 1992. La semana pasada murió Bécquer (ensayos y esbozos, 1970–​1991). Madrid: El Museo Universal. Paredes Núñez, Juan. 1979. Los cuentos de Emilia Pardo Bazán. Granada: Universidad de Granada. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. 1920. Cuentos de amor. Obras completas de Emilia Pardo Bazán, vol. 16. Madrid: Pueyo. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. 1986.“La biografía vanguardista.” In Prosa hispánica de vanguardia, edited by Fernando Burgos, 181–​189. Madrid: Orígenes. Pulido Mendoza, Manuel. 2009. Plutarco de moda: la biografía moderna en España (1900–​1950). Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura; Universidad de Extremadura. Requena Hidalgo, Cora. 2007. “Teresa Mancha de Rosa Chacel:  personaje histórico y literario.” Letras Hispanas 4: 85–​109. Rodríguez Fischer, Ana. 2000. “Introducción a Estación. Ida y vuelta, Teresa, y Memorias de Leticia Valle.” In Rosa Chacel, Obra completa, vol. 5, Novelas II, 7–​58.Valladolid: Fundación Guillén. Rodríguez-​ Fischer, Ana. 1990. “Un proyecto de Ortega y Gasset:  la colección Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX.” Scriptura 6–​7 (Homenaje a Raquel Asún): 133–​144. Rogers, Gayle. 2012. Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saglia, Diego. 2000. Poetic Castles in Spain. British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Scarlett, Elizabeth. 1994. Under Construction:  The Body in Spanish Novels. Charlottesville, VA, and London: University Press of Virginia. Schneider, Franz. 1922. “Gustavo Adolfo Becquer as ‘Poeta’ and his knowledge of Heine’s ‘Lieder’.” Modern Philology 19: 245–​256. Sebold, Russell P. 2004. Ensayos de meditación y crítica literaria (recogidos de las páginas del diario ABC). Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Serrano Asenjo, Enrique. 2002. Vidas oblicuas: Aspectos teóricos de la “nueva biografía” en España (1928–​1936). Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza.

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Geraldine Lawless Soguero García, Francisco Miguel. 2000. “Los narradores de vanguardia como renovadores del género biográfico:  aproximación a la biografía vanguardista.” In Hacia la nueva novela. Essays on the Spanish Avant-​Garde Novel, edited by Francis Lough, 199–​217. Oxford: Peter Lang. Tolliver, Joyce. 1994. “ ‘Sor Aparición’ and the gaze: Pardo Bazán’s gendered reply to the Romantic Don Juan.” Hispania 77: 394–​405. Zambrano, María. 1982. La España de Galdós. Barcelona: La Gaya Ciencia.

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14 POSTERITY AND PERIPHERY IN LATE NINETEENTH-​ CENTURY GALICIA Helena Miguélez-​Carballeira

Escribir nada máis pra unha provincia Ou, com’os povos árcades fixeron Escribir sobre a casca d’os curtizos Cáxeque todo ven á ser o m-​esmo. (Curros Enríquez, Aires d’a miña terra) In the opening lines of one of the foundational texts of the nineteenth-​century Galician literary revival, Aires d’a miña terra ([1880] 1943), the Celanova-​born poet and journalist Curros Enríquez (1851–​1908) considered the possibility of literary posterity in the peripheries of cultural power. To write with only a provincial readership in mind, he declared, is like writing on the bark of a cork oak: that is, a deliberate act against permanence. The collection’s opening poem thus puts at centre stage one of the fundamental questions of nineteenth-​century Iberian literary cultures: the possibility that languages other than Castilian could serve as fully fledged literary vehicles and erect their own cultural institutions. Curros Enríquez approached this question by proposing a literary programme for Galician that was both anti-​modern and radical. Ventriloquizing the slogans of modernization, whereby a pre-​modern state of chaotic linguistic variety is expected gradually to give way to unity and progress—​“Todo tende â unidá, ley, d’entre todas,/​a máis ineusorabre d’o Progreso” [Everything tends to unity; of Progress, the most inexorable of laws] (Curros Enríquez 1943, 23)—​the poetic voice defiantly announces that the universal language into which all others will merge will be no other than Galician, the language of the pariahs. Merging centre and margins, the triumph of Galician as a literary language will be preconized by the poet “Por cibdades e vilas e desertos” [In cities and villages and deserts] (25), heralding a differently conceived literary modernity, where the prophesied extinction of subaltern dialects for the benefit of a standardized, homogeneous language will not be fulfilled. Instead, a literary world appears possible where the languages of the periphery not only survive but, in fact, become the centre. Curros Enríquez’s preoccupation with the aesthetic, politic, and economic conditions for literary capital in and from the peripheries of late nineteenth-​century Spanish culture was often intertwined, in both his texts and cultural activities, with the notion of posterity. As one of the key agitators of the Galician literary revival (Rexurdimento), whose literary activities spanned 205

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the geographies of Galicia, Madrid, and Cuba until his death on that island in 1908, Curros Enríquez was himself involved with the posthumous monumentalization of key nineteenth-​ century Galician writers (including Francisco Añón (1812–​1878), Teodosio Vesteiro Torres (1848–​1876) and Rosalía de Castro (1837–​1885)). A number of his most significant texts can also be read as meditations on whether the honour of posthumous literary memorialization was at all attainable for writers who, like those spearheading the Galician revival, positioned themselves as writing “only for a province.” A case in point is his satirical poem, O divino sainete (1888), considered to be the peak of his anticlerical writing (Vicente Fernández 1989). An acerbic critique of the Christian notion of atonement and of its earthly administration and dispensation, O divino sainete presents us with a Dante-​like Curros Enríquez travelling on a seven-​coach train from Madrid to Rome in a sceptical quest for papal forgiveness. His guide on this journey will be the spectre of the Galician poet Francisco Añón, a key figure of the mid-​nineteenth-​century Galician revival who, after participating in the provincialist uprising of 1846, lived a life of exile in Lisbon, Seville, and Madrid, where he died in utmost poverty on 20 April 1878 despite having participated in the city’s Galician intellectual circles. Añón’s remains were first buried in a common grave in Madrid’s Cementerio General del Norte by charitable intervention, for neither relatives nor friends took responsibility for his burial. Subsequently his remains were transferred to a common ossuary in Madrid’s ruined and now non-​existent Cementerio General del Sur (also known as the Cementerio de Puerta de Toledo). By the time of O divino sainete’s publication in 1888, Añón’s solitary death and anonymous burial in Madrid had become a discursive emblem of early Galician cultural nationalism, encapsulated by the idea that Galicia, a region that had not yet awoken to history, had no culture of posterity with which to honour its literary glories. Curros Enríquez conveys this critique through the wry voice of Añón’s spectre, who complains about having been robbed of the respite he had finally found in death by the squabbles initiated in Galician literary circles about how to honour him posthumously. Denied these honours by the clergy because of his anticlerical positions, Añón’s spectre is condemned to restless wandering in the streets of Madrid in his afterlife, as the guide of a peculiar estadea (a procession of souls in torment), comprising other Galician patriotic figures with contested posterities such as the Christian dissident priest Priscillian, executed for sorcery by authority of the Emperor Maximus c.385, and the poet Teodosio Vesteiro Torres, whose suicide in Madrid’s Paseo del Prado on 11 June 1876 caused a polemic in Galicia about the suitability of paying tribute to a suicide victim (Álvarez de Granja 1998). In the face of the malice, self-​interest, and apathy of the living, Curros Enríquez presents the dead souls of Añón’s Santa Compaña as the ones who will genuinely watch over the Galician bard’s glory. “¡Groria a Añón!” [Glory to Añón!], they clamour four times, before the locomotive is set in motion (Curros Enríquez 1943, 172), in an image that encapsulates Curros Enríquez’s vision of Galician national modernity. The primary aim of this chapter is to offer a new understanding of how the tension between periphery and centre was integral to nineteenth-​century Galician writers’ engagement with the idea of the region’s awakening to history, and therefore, to national existence. In particular, my commentary will focus on the notion of literary posterity, theorized by Andrew Bennet as Romanticism’s “major trope of reading,” not only because of how it engages, as he says, questions related to “strategies of reading and authorial presence,” but because of how through an engagement with the idea of literary posterity, authors partaking in the formative phases of nascent cultural fields in the European peripheries, such as was the case of Galicia in the second half of the nineteenth century, were able to construct different theories to help argue for and against the emergence of such fields, as well as about their own (often self-​styled) role in this momentous process (Bennett 1994, 9). In other words, my interest here is not in how 206

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nineteenth-​century Galician writers inscribed textually their awareness of the posthumous life of literature: this is a project that remains to be carried out and which would no doubt yield persuasive new readings of Galician Romantic poets, from Francisco Añón, to Aurelio Aguirre (1833–​1858),Teodosio Vesteiro and, of course, Rosalía de Castro. Rather, I am interested in how the notion of literary posterity animated thinking about the possibility of cultural institutionalization in contexts of contested nationality. Such a take on literary posterity as a prism through which to study the literary life in a particular context is facilitated by the way in which the concept brings together questions related to cultural capital and memorialization. The pioneers of Galician nationalism frequently dramatized the region’s cultural subalternity by protesting that Galicia did not appropriately lament the death of its literary champions; or as the Ourense-​ born canon of the Salamanca Cathedral, Camilo Álvarez de Castro, put it in a letter to his personal friend Manuel Murguía, by claiming that Galicia was a “madriguera de ingratos” [den of ungrateful people] (Álvarez de Castro 1865, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 203). The neglect with which Galician literary figures appeared to be treated both in life and after death was seen as evidence of the specific dysfunctionalities of the region’s nascent cultural field, among which were also counted the prevalence of invidious practices of literary canonization or the absence of a full-​fledged reading community. At the core of these preoccupations lay a concern with historical practice in contexts of precarious nationality, and therefore with a community’s ability to inscribe, disseminate, and preserve historical knowledge through nationally identified narratives and institutions. But the period’s focus on the trope of neglectful literary posterity was also entwined with anxieties about the dubious promise of literary canonization in a context of cultural peripherality. For this reason, nineteenth-​century Galician writers’ engagement with the politics of literary posterity projected their (often desperate) awareness of their own marginality to what I  will here term “cultural capitality,” understood as the spatio-​symbolic centre of cultural capital emanating from the Spanish capital city, Madrid. But it also revealed their individual and collective strategies for canonization, authorial self-​fashioning, and (self-​) monumentalization in an aspiring national context where, owing precisely to the nascent state of that nation, competitive dynamics were particularly visible. In exploring the above conventions of literary practice in nineteenth-​ century Galicia, I draw on two principal studies of nation and the cultural field. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983 [2006]) made evident the historical link between nationality and print cultures, and, as Marc Redfield captured it in his exegesis of Anderson’s book, it is “processes of mechanical replication [that] constitute the material condition of possibility of imagining the nation” (2003, 59). Such processes entail the repetition and gradual solidification of certain selective gestures with regard to, say, language and memory politics (in what language variant to print; whose or what modality of death to mourn). Anderson’s commentary on how some language variants become print-​languages and establish themselves as primary vehicles for national consciousness formation includes a passing reference to spatiality, where those dialects which are “inevitably … ‘closer’ to each print language” assimilate into the “languages-​ of-​power,” whilst others remain in its periphery and “lose caste” (Anderson 2006, 45). While the question of how distant one was from the centre of cultural power was acutely felt, as we will see, by the intellectuals of early Galician nationalism, the cases studied in this chapter show further that the redefinition of cultural periphery was an equally pressing concern. In this sense, the main contenders in the programme of defining what constituted Galician literature in the late nineteenth-​century Spanish cultural field (including historians Benito Vicetto (1824–​1878) and Manuel Murguía, literary authors Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–​1921) and Rosalía de Castro, and poets and cultural journalists Manuel Curros Enríquez and Valentín Lamas Carvajal (1849–​ 1906)) strove to consolidate mutually conflicting models, all of which engaged the question of 207

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how and where to pay tribute to Galicia’s literary dead. Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2004) extensively incorporates a consideration of centre–​periphery relations in her study of the global circulation of literary capital. In it she defines the provinces of world literature as “a sort of disinherited country” (95) that has fallen behind the standard of modernity emanating from what she terms “the Greenwich meridian of literature”: that is, the imagined space for the consecration of all literary works and authors, which in Casanova’s design looks very much like nineteenth-​century Paris (87–​91). Focusing on the relationship between the (somewhat reified) national and international dimensions, Casanova refers to the importation of French Naturalism into the Spanish literary field by Leopoldo Alas (“Clarín”) and Emilia Pardo Bazán as examples of how “the international transmission of major revolutions” allowed for the modernization of nineteenth-​century Spanish letters away “from the yoke of academicism and conservatism” (Casanova 2004, 103). Published two years before Casanova’s book, Elisa Martí-​López’s Borrowed Words (2002) provides a much more nuanced history of the mid-​ nineteenth-​century Spanish novel by placing the focus on two peripheral perspectives: that of Spain as a periphery of Europe and that of derivative literary texts (translation, imitation, adaptation) as the sites of a singular generative context, where discourses about aesthetic autonomy, necessary for the national configuration of the Spanish literary market, can be appreciated in all their (often performative) ambivalence. The case studies in this chapter are situated in a different inflection of the centre–​periphery relationship, the one between the national (Spanish) and the proto-​national (Galician) context, which the authors here studied register differently in their work. Again, their awareness of themselves as provincial authors (suppressed in some cases, exacerbated in others) informed their authorial self-​fashioning in a context of precarious nationality. Engaging in acts of desperate self-​monumentalization, competitive canonization, and extractive provincialization, the authors and works analyzed in this chapter animate the period’s preoccupation with Galicia’s culture of literary posterity to build their respective theories about the place of Galician literature in nineteenth-​century Spain.

Winning for eternity: Benito Vicetto and Manuel Murguía In Ferrol’s suburban cemetery of Catabois, in niche number 1082, the visitor can find the unmarked grave of one of Galicia’s first national historians, Benito Vicetto y Pérez. Without epitaph or inscription but for his name and the dates of his birth and death,Vicetto’s indistinct grave is a metaphor of his similarly modest status in Galician modern historiography. Apart from Juan Renales Cortés’ monographic study of Celticism in Vicetto’s work (1996), Josefina López de Serantes’ short biographical panegyric (1978), and a few scattered articles recuperating never-​studied materials (see e.g. Ricón Virulegio 1970, or Pardo de Neyra 2003), the literature on Vicetto has been mainly generated by rare institutional commemorations such as that organized by the Real Academia Gallega in 1928 on the fiftieth anniversary of Vicetto’s death (“Una sesión conmemorativa,” 1929), nine years after the passing of the Academy’s first president, Manuel Murguía. The chronology of Murguía’s death is not insignificant in this context. As contemporaries during the formative stages of the Galician cultural revival in the 1850s and 1860s whose lives and careers were brought together by their respective aspirations as leading intellectuals in the movement, the relationship between Vicetto and Murguía has remained a most suggestive, but still largely recondite key to understanding Galician nineteenth-​century culture. The historiographical literature has encoded their relation as one of lifelong competition, with Murguía coming out as the indisputable winner in the race to become Galicia’s first national historian. Although they both started writing and publishing their own respective, serialized histories of Galicia virtually in parallel (Vicetto’s Historia de Galicia was published in 208

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seven volumes between 1861 and 1873, and Murguía’s in five volumes between 1865 and 1913), Vicetto’s text is conventionally referred to as lacking in historical method, and this given as the main reason why his legacy has been relegated to oblivion and derision (Cartelle Fernández 1997, 191). Renales Cortés’ analysis of the cultural milieu in which their relationship unfolded, however, has rightly indicated that the concomitances between Vicetto’s and Murguía’s historical writing were greater than is customarily acknowledged (Renales Cortés 1996). Reconsidered in this light, Murguía’s successful transformation from romantic novelist and journalist trying to earn a living in 1850s Madrid, to Galicia’s first official historian and founding father of the Real Academia Gallega had much to do with his remarkable tactical utilization of the human, printed, and institutional resources he had at his disposal (as Rosalía de Castro’s husband, as editor of La ilustración gallega y asturiana (1878–​1882), and as chief archivist of the Archivo del Reino de Galicia from 1870 onwards) (Durán 1999). Murguía’s successful posterity as one of the towering figures of modern Galician nationalism cannot be separated from the history of historical practice in Galicia and Spain, and from the ascendancy of empiricist discourses about historical method, objectivity, archival research, and source criticism during the second half of the nineteenth century, which, without a doubt, Murguía apprehended—​and set out to perform—​more quickly than his competitor. It is in this sense that Vicetto’s precarious posterity as a Romantic, and therefore methodologically flawed, historian of Galicia can be understood as a persistent aspect, even to this day, of the nineteenth-​ century configuration between nation-​building processes and the professionalization of history, by which self-​professed historians of the archive started placing themselves ahead of their previous or contemporaneous rivals, whose historical practice became, by virtue of this differentiation, amateur, outdated, feminized, or lazy (Smith 2000). There is no doubt that Murguía placed himself emphatically at the forefront of the modern positivist tendency, mobilizing all the means available for the purpose of publicizing his position and reaping the results well within his lifetime. Significantly, for example, he received a letter in 1866 from the soon-​to-​be Galician bard, Eduardo Pondal, who reported having been reading Vicetto’s and Murguía’s histories of Galicia in parallel, and declared “sin adulación” [without adulation] that: “el trabajo de V. está a tal distancia del de su competidor que no hay término de comparación. El estilo de V. y su severa crítica son magníficos” [Your work is at such distance from that of your competitor that the comparison becomes impossible.Your style and severe criticism are excellent] (Pondal 1866, reproduced in Durán 1999). It has been suggested that a further key to understanding the competitive dynamics informing Vicetto and Murguía’s relationship, which to judge by the preserved letters from Vicetto, went from impassioned epistolary rapprochement in the 1850s to total estrangement from 1863 onwards, was their awareness of their precarious, but also remarkably fluid, position as writers making names for themselves between the capital and the province (Durán 1999, 44). In Vicetto’s first letters to Murguía, where as the editor of the Ferrol-​based periodical El Clamor de Galicia he tried to entice him to return to Galicia as one of his signature authors,Vicetto presents the emerging Galician cultural field as a space free of competition and spacious enough for both of them to carve out a mutually enriching career in letters. “Hay en Galicia una misma misión para los dos” [There is one same mission for us two in Galicia], he asserts, while addressing Murguía with the vocative “hermano” [brother], as opposed to “amigo” [friend], which he sees as too fickle for the kind of interdependent alliance of intellectual destinies that he was envisaging (Vicetto 1856, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 40). There is little question that Vicetto perceived Murguía’s emerging position as a published cultural commentator in Madrid in the 1850s as an asset he did not own. His letters are replete with self-​deprecating remarks about his own peripherality as a writer and editor of Galician periodicals, whilst Murguía was gaining cultural leverage “en Madrid, en el centro intelectual de España” [in Madrid, Spain’s intellectual centre] (Vicetto 1858, 209

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in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 97). From Badajoz, where Vicetto worked as a prison officer in 1857, he wrote a letter to Murguía in which he dramatized his own desperate peripherality with characteristic candour: “todos progresáis—​yo nunca salgo de periodicuchos de provincia” [all of you progress—​I can never leave behind these provincial rags], he said on learning that Murguía had started collaborating with the new Madrid Republican newspaper La discusión (1856–​1887). However,Vicetto’s letters present a very particular outlook with regard to how he envisaged the birth of a distinct cultural field in Galicia. Specifically, he articulated a politics of periphery where Galicia could become the parameter within which men of letters like himself and Murguía could derive a distinct sense of cultural capital, circumventing Madrid altogether. In particular, repeatedly signing his letters as “tu hermano en Galicia” [your brother in Galicia] (Vicetto 1856, 1857, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 42, 59, my emphasis),Vicetto imagines the Galician periphery as a context in which a select group of committed men could eschew the unworthy forms of fame that derive from contact with the “mechanical” literary marketplace taking shape in the capital. Although he does consider the possibility that he and Murguía could, if living in Madrid at the same time, benefit mutually in their writing careers, his failure to carve out a literary name for himself in the capital forces him to recalibrate his aspirations. In his letter to Murguía below, we witness Vicetto’s turbulent theorization of Romantic literary fame as a prospect that both he and Murguía could fruitfully pursue in a provincial context: Confiaba en D. Valentín Ferrer para ir, y aún no me contestó. Si mi hermana pudiera trasladarme a Alcalá, o si mis Hidalgos me granjean alguna consideración de la prensa o mi editor me llama, iré, iré, aunque sea mendigando. Aquí me ahogo: soy muy alto, y el techo es demasiado bajo: a gran escenario, grandes obras; chico, las heremos [sic] ¿Por qué no? No encontramos recíprocamente, al menos yo, lo que nos hacía falta, criterio en consonancia con el desarrollo intelectual de Madrid. ¿No me guiarás tú? […] Chico, nosotros no servimos para redacción de historias de iglesias (esterilidad) y para las de los periódicos de Madrid (más esterilidad). Sólo pudiéramos ser periodistas en Galicia: ya sabes cómo. Si pudiéramos abdicar del hormigueo de nuestros personajes flotando entre las tinieblas de la antigua Calaica, bien; pero si no podemos, qué hemos de hacer. Seríamos escritores mecánicos como los de los diccionarios biográficos, et., qué horror! Trabajar a soldada!1 (Vicetto 1857, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 75) Despite his dramatized abhorrence of the demands brought about by the professionalization of writing in this letter, Vicetto was well aware that the consolidation of a new cultural field, cut off from the commercial and symbolic benefits provided by the Madrid connection, would necessitate substantial material support. Persistently using the first person plural, he tries to convince Murguía that they should together look for editors and create a reading public in Galicia, “nosotros, pobres hormigas hoy, pero artistas de corazón” [we who are poor ants today, but artists of the heart] (Vicetto 1857, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 76). He colludes with the idea, apparently expressed by Murguía in a letter that has not been preserved, that Galicia’s early print journalism was precarious on all fronts. Nevertheless he asserts the possibility that an autonomous cultural field in Galicia could be possible if they channelled their shared talent and resources in one and the same direction. Thus the prospect of attaining cultural capital in the periphery could emanate from their collaborative historical writing: Tienes razón, el D.  de la Coruña es una miseria  –​ya tendremos nuestra Crónica de Occidente ¿por qué no? Yo se lo pediré a Dios. Chico, créeme, la Historia literaria 210

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de Galicia es obra que necesita dinero para recolectar datos:  depende de nuestra fortuna: depende de un mes en Lisboa, y tres en Braga y en Coimbra.2 (Vicetto 1857, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 76) There is ample evidence to suggest that Murguía never seriously considered collaborating with Vicetto a suitable path for his own ascendance in the fledgling Galician cultural field.Vicetto’s letters are replete with desperate requests for Murguía to review and recommend his writings in Madrid, referring to him as “mi encargado de negocios en esa Corte que tanto aborrezco” [my business representative in that Court that I so loathe] (Vicetto 1857, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 59). While Murguía did publish a positive review of Vicetto’s historical novel Los hidalgos de Monforte (1857) for the Vigo newspaper La Oliva in the year when they had met personally for the first time (reproduced in Durán 1999, 47–​48), their parallel self-​fashioning process as foremost historians of Galicia during the 1860s generated a dynamic of fierce competition that would last well after Vicetto’s death in 1878, determining modern appreciations of his legacy to this day. In this, their differently positioned scopes of influence across the province–​capital divide, with Vicetto as a writer and editor whose activities were circumscribed to the Galician milieu and Murguía indisputably closer to symbolic and material sources of cultural capitality (as a writer for Madrid periodicals and publishers and as a corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Historia from January 1866 onwards) partly determined their respective abilities to prevail as leading figures in the Galician cultural revival.Vicetto’s campaign against Murguía, which he aired particularly after 1866 in local newspapers such as El Eco Ferrolano, El Avisador, and El Diario de la Coruña, was described as laughable by Murguía’s acolytes in their private correspondence. Unequivocally, according to Murguía’s advisers, it was the fact that Vicetto was only using provincial outlets for his invective that made his attacks entirely harmless, if not ridiculous. The journalist and politician Manuel Rúa Figueroa (d. 1892)  dissuaded Murguía from taking any legal action against Vicetto in a personal letter of 17 April 1864 in the following manner: Yo que veo las cosas con completa serenidad y conozco las circunstancias de los sujetos, sea del punto en que se escribe y del valor que se da a los periódicos de este pueblo puedo asegurar a U., como aseguraría a un hermano, que lo que tanto exalta a U. y le incomoda, es cosa completamente baladí y despreciable. … El consejo del Sr Bugallal será legal, no lo dudo, pero no lo creo prudente. U. y él verá esto desde la atmósfera de Madrid en que la prensa es un poder; pero la prensa de provincias y especialmente la de este pueblo no es nada, ni siquiera un chisme …3 (Rúa Figueroa 1864, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 236–​237) Vicetto’s fall from grace was precipitated in no small measure by Murguía’s ability to attract a network of cultural agents to a new source of symbolic capital emerging in the Galician periphery, namely the one radiating from the conjunction between empiricist historical method and nation-​building. These were often Galician-​born editors, journalists, politicians, clerics, and historians whose scope of influence spanned the province and the capital city and who on repeated occasions showed their willingness to act to Murguía’s benefit (and pointedly against Vicetto), sublimating their individual interests in the service of serious historical scholarship for Galicia’s national benefit. For example, Coruña-​born historian Carlos R. Fort wrote a letter to Murguía from Madrid on 7 March 1866 to reassure him personally that Vicetto’s manoeuvres to become a corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Historia were not likely to prosper, because Vicetto’s historical writing had little chance of passing the institution’s “examen 211

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académico” [academic test] (Fort 1866, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 357). The regional politician Narciso Pérez Reoyo, who had arranged a publication subsidy for Murguía in exchange for the historian’s personal prologue to his sickly daughter’s poetry collection (Pérez Reoyo 1865), exhorted Murguía to start publishing his Historia de Galicia series as swiftly as possible, “para gloria de U. y del país” [for your own glory and that of the country], as the best riposte to Vicetto’s public attacks (Pérez Reoyo 1865, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 305). The friar Baltasar Yáñez del Castillo, addressing Murguía as “el Hércules galaico” [the Galician Hercules] (Yáñez del Castillo 1864, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 259), described the writing of Galician history in his letters as a heroic act, whose ennobling qualities are also transferred to those “almas generosas” [generous souls] who aid selflessly in the enterprise by paying the periodical’s subscription upfront (258). It is obvious from Yáñez del Castillo’s overblown prose that one way of performing cultural capital in the context of 1860s Galicia was to try to stay close to Murguía’s cultural orbit, and at a distance from Vicetto’s, who by 1865 was being described by one of Murguía’s editors, Manuel Soto Freire, as “[un] hombre y causa perdida” [a lost man and cause] (Soto Freire 1865, in Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 335). With Murguía gradually gaining access to state and provincial institutions of historical writing (the Real Academia de la Historia and the Archivo General de Galicia) and consolidating himself as the writer of the first self-​ proclaimed empirical history of Galicia, remaining in his circle meant securing a foothold in the structures of cultural institutionality emerging in the new “national” periphery. Tellingly,Yáñez del Castillo metaphorizes these structures as a monument of permanence, saying that all of the noble and heroic souls that remain “al lado del Historiador de Galicia … compondrá[n]‌una pirámide que no desmoronarán los tiempos ni las manos de los hombres” [By the Historian of Galicia's side will make up a pyramid that neither time nor the hands of men will ever bring down] (Yáñez del Castillo 1864, Barreiro and Axeitos 2003, 258–​259). Yáñez del Castillo was right to adulate Murguía by capitalizing the word “Historian.” Falling foul of Murguía, as Vicetto had done, meant that he would mobilize the means at his disposal to hinder his antagonists’ entry into the new shrines of national posterity, that indestructible pyramid. Nowhere is this more apparent that in the obituary for Vicetto published in 1878 in La Ilustración de Galicia y Asturias, under Murguía’s editorship (reproduced in Durán 1999, 244–​247). Although penned by Camilo Placer Bouzo (1851–​1887), the obituary bears the unequivocal mark of Murguía’s intention.4 In it, after a courteous nod to the “justo y severo fallo de la posteridad” [just and severe verdict of posterity], which the author claims not to wish to contravene, Vicetto’s literary and historical achievements are diminished owing to his hopeless “conocimiento sin método y … erudición sin base” [knowledge without method and baseless erudition] (Placer Bouzo 1878, in Durán 1999, 244). Enshrining one of the most repeated tropes about Galician nineteenth-​century historiography,Vicetto’s Historia de Galicia is described as a text where his author “creyó suplir con la poesía fantástica la falta de crítica severa y de imparcialidad austera” [thought to compensate with fantastical poetry his lack of severe criticism and stark impartiality] (246). Interestingly for the argument developed in this chapter, however, the obituary contains a sententious message with regard to what kind of centre–​ periphery relation should determine the different modes of national posterity awaiting the first Galician literary figures. In the Murguian (deliberately humiliating) expression, Vicetto had remained a “redactor de varios periódicos de provincias” [writer for various provincial newspapers] throughout his life, where the reference to the province is meant to stress an uninfluential, peripheral, and ephemeral position (Placer Bouzo 1878, in Durán 1999, 246, my emphasis). Murguía, by contrast, is referred to in the obituary as the key facilitator of Vicetto’s early literary fame because of his “envidiable reputación en la corte por sus primeros escritos que anunciaban al que es hoy el primero de nuestros escritores” [enviable reputation in Madrid thanks to his 212

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early writings, which announced the author who is today our foremost writer] (246). In a further twist, Murguía’s access to cultural capitality is further projected as the reason why his writing for up-​and-​coming regional newspapers such as Vigo’s La Oliva distinctly granted them a “marcha verdaderamente provincial” [Veritably provincial direction] (246, my emphasis), where the adjective “provincial,” unlike its usage a few lines earlier to refer to Vicetto’s writing trajectory, is now suffused with gravitas. Thus, in a thinly veiled derogatory obituary that was to hinder his old friend’s access to national posterity for decades to come, Murguía defined the terms of the authorial mode that was to accrue cultural capital in the new proto-​national Galician periphery:  namely that of the new modern national historian, with a foot in the centres of power emanating from the cultural and historical institutions of the state, upon whose model he created the Galician counterparts. Today Manuel Murguía, first president of the Real Academia Gallega between 1906 until his death in 1923, has given his name to prestigious historical publications, national essay awards, public high schools, and street names in all the major Galician cities, while his biography has remained a prestigious theme for Galician intellectuals writing throughout the twentieth century to this day (see e.g. Risco 1975, Barreiro Fernández 2012). His grave can be visited in A Coruña’s most famed city cemetery, the Cemetery of San Amaro, in the company of Eduardo Pondal, Curros Enríquez, and other figures with kindred posterities as the indisputable fathers of the modern Galician nation.

Writing in the dead town: cultural capitality in Emilia Pardo Bazán In light of the above, Murguía’s question “¿Qué prueba una estatua?” [What does a statue prove?], included in his 1896 tirade against Emilia Pardo Bazán, was anything but guileless (Murguía 2000, 71). The article in which it appeared was included in the series “Cuentas ajustadas, medio cobradas” [Adjusting half-​settled accounts], published in the pages of La Voz de Galicia between 20 October and 27 December 1896, in response to a critical piece on Murguía’s ongoing polemic with Juan Valera about the suitability of Galician as a literary language, which the historian thought had been penned by Pardo Bazán herself5 (Barreiro Fernández 2000, xi). Brimming with pent-​up resentment, Murguía claims to welcome the chance finally to settle accounts with the literary author who had tried so mercilessly to warp Rosalía de Castro’s posterity only a few weeks after the poet’s death from uterine cancer on 15 July 1885. Unequivocally referring to Pardo Bazán’s address at the act of remembrance for de Castro organized by the Liceo de Artesanos de la Coruña on 2 September 1885, Murguía has only words of condemnation for how she had waited for her literary competitor to die “para ajustarle[s]‌con el mayor ensañamiento sus cuentas con la posteridad” [in order to settle [her] accounts with posterity with utmost cruelty] (Murguía 1896, 70). In his piece, Murguía dissects Pardo Bazán’s tactics with precision, for he knew them well himself. Pardo Bazán’s obituary speech, said Murguía, proceeded by way of “piadosas restricciones, atenuaciones y reservas mentales” [merciful understatements, attenuations, and mental reservations] that were eulogistic of de Castro’s literary achievements only in appearance. In reality, her words were aimed at throwing “sobre el sepulcro del enemigo, larga y hondamente odiado, el último puñado de tierra que le cierra la boca ya para siempre” [Onto the coffin of the long and deeply hated enemy, the last handful of soil that will seal their lips forever] (Murguía 2000, 70). Pardo Bazán’s obituary of de Castro is undoubtedly an example of the strategies for authorial self-​projection she utilized as an emerging public figure in certain sectors of the Galician regionalist intelligentsia, with the distinct ambition of establishing herself as a leading intellectual figure in Madrid’s literary scene (González-​Millán 2004, 38). Her cautioning that Galician regionalist literature—​in which she acknowledges there lies “a germen de separatismo” [a germ of separatism] (Pardo Bazán 213

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[1888] 1984, 40)—​should avoid harbouring any ideas contrary to the unity of the Spanish nation informs her definition of the nascent Galician cultural field as a context good enough for sentimental lyricism (not for seriously political subjects), where poets such as Rosalía de Castro, writing in the “dialect” of the popular classes, can achieve a “lisonjera popularidad” [pleasantly flattering popularity] (15–​16). Interestingly, Pardo Bazán engages from the outset with the trope of Galicia’s culture of neglectful posterity, which she describes as one of the “lugares comunes admitidos” [received commonplaces] of Galician literary regionalism, effectually to deny it (13). Rosalía de Castro’s poems, she asseverates, enjoy great posthumous fame, and therefore demonstrate that a dignified posterity can be sought within the parameters of the regionalist cultural field. But Pardo Bazán’s seemingly adulatory remark that Galician-​language writers can be “crowned as kings” “en los límites de la propia provincia” [within the limits of the province itself] (16) is carefully curtailed by her theorization of Galician-​language literature as feminine, primitive, and uncouth—​therefore as a medium through which literary fame can be sought, albeit within the context of a naturally second-​rate reading and print culture. In fact, her 1885 address on the occasion of Rosalía de Castro’s death can be read as an argument against the possibility that cultural capital—​and cultural capitality—​could ever be amassed in the Galician periphery for this reason, whilst other intellectuals of the Galician Rexurdimento such as Valentín Lamas Carvajal were trying to prove, by promoting a veritable cultural scene in Galician provincial cities like Ourense, that this was in fact possible.6 Pardo Bazán’s theory of Galician cultural subalternity, which drove her attempt to define Rosalía de Castro’s literary posterity as suitably provincial, was repeatedly developed in those of her novels where the narrative is structured by the interaction between Galicia and Madrid—​ including El cisne de Vilamorta (1885), Insolación (1889), and Morriña (1889). As a novel written during 1884 which deals specifically with a Galician poet’s desperate search for literary consecration in Madrid, El cisne de Vilamorta (where the imaginary place name of “Vilamorta” means “dead town” in Galician) certainly prefigures the ideas about periphery and cultural capitality that Pardo Bazán developed in her 1885 address. Segundo García, the son of a local solicitor in a Galician provincial town that resembles Carballiño, bides his time writing doggerel in a totally outmoded Romantic fashion. Pardo Bazán posits the theory of Galician racial (Celtic) difference, described in her prologue as “nuestras pensadoras y concentradas razas del noroeste” [our pensive and concentrated races in the northwest], as the reason for Segundo’s misplaced inclination toward Romanticism (Pardo Bazán 1928, 7). However, it is the desperate provinciality of his surroundings that makes his attempts at literary consecration utterly laughable.The context in which he tries to construct his authorial figure is characterized derisively as rural, with markers of animality, dirt, and illiteracy everywhere. His (female-​only) readership consists of the middle-​aged school mistress, his adoring (but entirely undiscerning) Leocadia, and the local girl Elvira Molende, who, during the soirées at the visiting Madrid politician’s summer house, recites by rote some of Segundo’s poems “impresos en periódicos de Vigo y Orense” [printed in Vigo and Orense newspapers], which she habitually cuts and pastes onto a personal notebook (159). Such are the rudimentary (and certainly unauthoritative) conduits for literary dissemination available to Segundo in Galicia, a predicament that Pardo Bazán uses to deride the regionalist literary field as a whole (24, 211). Segundo’s doomed attempts to have his poems published and reviewed by the Madrid press are spectacularized via the narrative’s performative engagement with Romantic plots, meant to amuse modern reading communities presumably to be found outside of Galicia.The provincial characters, representing the backwardness and mediocrity that comes from their isolation from modernity, cling to outmoded Romantic solutions to their plight: Segundo considers throwing himself and Nieves (the wife of the Madrid-​based Galician politician spending her summer holidays in Vilamorta with whom he is infatuated) into the river, 214

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enforcing an act of collective suicide on the unattainable woman who represents the perpetually deferred promise of cultural capitality (211). Leocadia, the provincial school-​mistress who unrequitedly adores Segundo, commits suicide after learning that, having sold her last assets to sponsor his leap into literary fame in Madrid, the young man has been sent to America by his father, in a further act of peripheralization. These characters’ desperate manoeuvring into (literary) significance is tragicomic, for their provincial context cannot possibly yield a successful realization of their aspirations in Pardo Bazán’s politics of cultural periphery. In her design, attaining cultural capital in Galicia is made impossible by the region’s inherent subalternity, a subalternity that goes unquestioned in her extensive writings on Galicia and which contemporary intellectuals such as Vicetto and Murguía, as shown in this chapter, were trying to challenge. Nevertheless the theme of Galicia’s subalternity (the poverty of its peasant classes, the rustic disorder of its rural towns, the primitive musicality of its local dialect) certainly gave Pardo Bazán a wealth of opportunities for the literary display of Naturalist tropes and techniques. The importation of these into the late nineteenth-​century Spanish literature gained her a prominent position as a modern Spanish intellectual, and not simply as a regional writer, an epithet she sometimes received, probably to her chagrin (González-​Millán 2004, 45). Thus, Pardo Bazán’s personal investment with the programme of provincializing the Galician literary field was doubly self-​serving:  it entailed discrediting the literary achievements of contemporary competitors such as Rosalía de Castro, whose troubled posthumous fame was thereby considered “good enough” for a Galician-​language poet. But it also relied, paradoxically, on the author’s extractive exploitation of the tropes of Galician subalternity as a source of literary matter, which she utilized extensively—​and, as I have argued elsewhere, via orientalising treatments—​to forge a modern authorial persona in the centres of nineteenth-​century Spanish cultural life (Miguélez-​Carballeira 2017). In contrast to Benito Vicetto and Manuel Murguía, both of whom had (in competitively different ways) imagined the possibility of attaining cultural capital in the province, Emilia Pardo Bazán provincialized the Galician literary field in order to gain cultural capitality away from its demeaning influence. Her grave can today be visited in Madrid’s church of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, by accessing one of the building’s subterranean crypts.

Notes 1 “I trusted that Don Valentín Ferrer would help me go there, but he has not replied to me yet. If my sister can get me a transfer to Alcalá, or if my Hidalgos gain me any attention from the press or if my editor calls me, I’ll go, I’ll go, even as a beggar. I’m drowning here: I am too tall and the ceiling too low: grand sceneries need grand works; boy, will we write them? Why not? We have not found what we needed (at least not in my case): a criterion in consonance with Madrid’s intellectual line. Will you guide me? … Boy, we were not born to write histories of churches (sterility) or to write for the Madrid newspapers (more sterility). We can only be journalists in Galicia: you know how. If we can abandon the ant-​like work of our characters, floating in the mist of Ancient Galicia, okay; but if we can’t, what should we do. We would have to become mechanical writers like those authors of biographic dictionaries, etc. What horror! To work for wages!” 2 “You are right, the Diario de la Coruña is a pittance. We will one day have our own Crónica de Occidente, why not? I will ask God for this. Boy, believe me, the literary history of Galicia is a kind of work that needs money to collect the data: it depends on our fortune: it depends on a month in Lisbon, and three in Braga and Coimbra.” 3 “I, who sees things with utter serenity and knows the circumstances of the individuals, both from the point of view of what is written and of the value given to newspapers in this region, can assure you, as I would to a friend, that that which so agitates and discomforts you is utterly insignificant and worthless

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Helena Miguélez-Carballeira … Mr Bugallal’s advice may be legal, no doubt, but I do not deem it wise. Both you and he are looking at this from the perspective of Madrid’s atmosphere, where the press is powerful. But the provincial press, and particularly the press of this region, is nothing—​not even tattle.” 4 Curros Enríquez interprets it thus in his own commentary on the obituary, where he condemns Murguía for authorizing, in characteristically dishonourable fashion, a slanderous necrology of his erstwhile friend (Curros Enríquez 1879, in Durán 1999, 269). 5 The article, which had been published in the A Coruña newspaper La Mañana on 28 August 1896, was signed with the initial “P.,” which Murguía understood to be Pardo Bazán. The piece was apparently written by a certain J. Pan y Español, whose identity remains unclear in the studies of this polemic (Barreiro Fernández 2000, xi; González Herrán 2004, 139). 6 Lamas Carvajal’s radical programme for the Galician cultural revival, which he tried to develop away from Murguía’s influence, transformed late nineteenth-​century Ourense into what José Antonio Durán terms “incontestablemente, la capital galaicista de Galicia” [incontestably, Galicia’s Galicianist capital] (Durán 1974, 43).

Works cited Álvarez de Granja, María. 1998. Teodosio Vesteiro Torres:  aproximación á súa vida e obra. Vigo:  Instituto de Estudios Vigueses. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Barreiro Fernández, Xosé Ramón. 2000. “Murguía e La Voz de Galicia.” In: M. Murguía. Murguía e La Voz de Galicia, ix–​xiii. A Coruña: La Voz de Galicia. —​—​—​. 2012. Murguía.Vigo: Galaxia. Barreiro, Xosé Ramón, and Xosé Luis Axeitos, eds. 2003. Cartas a Murguía, vol. 1. A Coruña: Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza. Bennett, Andrew. 1994. Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cartelle Fernández, Concepción. 1997. “Benito Vicetto na historiografía galega.” In:  Ferrolterra galaico-​ romana, edited by Víctor Alonso Troncoso, 191–​201. Ferrol: Concello de Ferrol. Casanova, Pasquale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Curros Enríquez, Manuel. 1943. Aires d’a miña terra. O divino sainete. Madrid: Librería y Casa Editorial Hernando. Durán, José Antonio. 1974. Crónicas I:  Agitadores, poetas, caciques, bandoleros y reformadores de Galicia. Madrid: Akal. Durán, José Antonio. 1999. A loita pola vida (1833–​ 1923). Conflictos e tenruras de Manuel Murguía. Madrid: Real Academia Gallega. González Herrán, José Manuel. 2004. “Presencia de Curros y Doña Emilia (cincuenta años después).” In: Actas do I Congreso Internacional “Curros Enríquez e o seu tempo”, edited by Xesús Alonso Montero, Henrique Monteagudo, and Begoña Tajes Marcote, 123–​153. Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura Galega. González-​Millán, Xoán. 2004. “E. Pardo Bazán y su imagen del ‘Rexurdimento’ cultural gallego en la Revista de Galicia.” La Tribuna: Cadernos de Estudos da Casa Museo Emilia Pardo Bazán 2: 35–​64. López de Serantes, Josefina. 1978. Benito Vicetto iñorado. Lugo: Alvarellos. Martí-​López, Elisa. 2002. Borrowed Words:  Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-​Century Novel in Spain. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Miguélez-​Carballeira, Helena. 2017. “Teaching Pardo Bazán from a postcolonial and transatlantic perspective.” In: Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán, edited by Margot Versteeg and Susan Walter, 86–​92. New York: Modern Language Association. Murguía, Manuel. 2000. Murguía e La Voz de Galicia. A Coruña: La Voz de Galicia. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. 1928. El cisne de Vilamorta. Madrid: Compañía Iberoamericana de Publicaciones. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. 1984. De mi tierra.Vigo: Xerais. Pardo de Neyra, Xulio. 2003. “Benito Vicetto na lírica galega do rexurdimento.” Boletín galego de literatura 29: 21–​43. Pérez Reoyo y Soto, Narcisa. 1865. Cantos de la infancia: colección de poesías. La Coruña: Tipografía Galaica.

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Posterity and periphery in Galicia Redfield, Marc. 2003. The Politics of Aesthetics:  Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press. Renales Cortés, Juan. 1996. Celtismo y literatura gallega: la obra de Benito Vicetto y su entorno literario. 2 vols. Santiago de Compostela: Secretaría Xeral da Presidencia. Ricón Virulegio, Amado. 1970. “Encol dun poema esquecido de Benito Vicetto.” Grial 27: 79–​89. Risco,Vicente. 1975. Manuel Murguía.Vigo: Galaxia. Smith, Bonnie G. 2000. The Gender of History: Men,Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. “Una sesión conmemorativa: Homenaje a Benito Vicetto y a Francisco Añón.” (1929) Boletín de la Real Academia Gallega 205: 9–​29. Vicente Fernández, Francisco. 1989. “En el centenario de O divino sainete de Manuel Curros Enríquez.” Estudios románicos 5: 1441–​1457. Vicetto, Benito. 1857. Los hidalgos de Monforte: historia caballeresca del siglo XV. Madrid: Imprenta y Litografía de D. Juan José Martínez.

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15 URBANIZATION IN UPHEAVAL Spanish cities, agents and targets of a slow transformation Jesús Mirás Araujo

Introduction Spain began the nineteenth century in a deep depression. The new scenario caused by the advent of capitalism was the trigger for the liberal reforms undertaken by the State during the first third of the century, without which it is difficult to understand the country’s subsequent evolution. For the urban world, 1833’s municipal and provincial reorganization was especially significant. The liberal revolution implemented a new territorial model giving power to Madrid and provincial capitals. Likewise, early industrialization began in Barcelona, ​​which led to challenges and proposals, which would later be applied elsewhere. As a consequence, new infrastructures were built and implemented, albeit slowly, especially in the capital cities. The aim of this chapter is to examine Spain’s urbanization process in light of the reinterpretations of the development of the nineteenth century. The theory of failure of the liberal revolution, industrialization, etc. has been traditionally held by historiography but recent works suggest less categorical characterizations. The chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section, the transformations experienced by Spanish cities are presented, from the difficult transit that the country was suffering from the Ancient Régime to capitalism. The impact of the new territorial organization, the slow demographic growth, the backward-​looking role of the agrarian sector (including the impact of confiscation or seizure in the urban area) and the new infrastructures are analysed. In the second section, which is focused toward the end of the century, the convergence toward European standards is analysed, thanks to the progressive adoption of the second technological revolution and the imprint that this made on cities.

Historical antecedents Until the end of the eighteenth century, Spain had a consolidated urban tradition (Cardesín 2016, 285). From a long-​term perspective, before the sixteenth century there had been a highly developed urban network in the Iberian Peninsula, more concentrated in the southern half (Andalusia, Castile, Levante) (Reher 1994).There was no significant gap in Spanish urbanization in relation to Europe around 1600. However, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, 218

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urban growth declined due to the inability of many centres to recover until the late eighteenth century from the burden of the crisis of the seventeenth century (Ringrose 1998). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Spain was in a relatively disadvantageous situation. The rate of urbanization was different than that of its surroundings. Reher (1986, 44) in his analysis of the distribution of the working population of the census of Floridablanca (1787) and Llopis and González (2006) corroborate the previous argument, concluding that Spain was not as urbanized as the Europeans.1 At the end of the eighteenth century, only a small fraction of the Spanish population (under 20%) lived in cities and approximately 50% lived in a strictly rural environment (municipalities with under 2,000 inhabitants). Finally, Bairoch’s calculations (1998, 179) confirmed this diagnosis as, between 1700 and 1800, Spain suffered a relapse in its rate of urbanization, recording less growth of the urban population than the total population. The percentage of the urban population in Europe (centres of more than 10,000 inhabitants) stood at 10% in 1800. In Spain, it was 11.1%, well above the average of Central Europe (7.1%) and Eastern Europe (4.2%), and close to Mediterranean Europe (12.9%), although relatively distant from north-​western Europe (14.9%) (Llopis and González 2006, 17).

Spanish cities in the wake of the new liberal regime and nascent capitalism (ca.1830–​c.1890) Spanish historiography has traditionally had a pessimistic view of the development of the country’s cities during the nineteenth century. This could be understood for part of the period, especially for the first third of the century. However, recent research in urban history shows a different view on the processes of urban growth and socioeconomic modernization during the 1800s, highlighting its expansion. The failure as compared to other nations begins to be questioned, since there are clear indications that Spanish society underwent a remarkable transformation as the century progressed (Otero 2007a; Otero 2007b, 17; Pallol and García Abad 2017, 10). At European level, the nineteenth century marks a break in the urbanization process. Until then, cities had stagnated demographically, but they now entered a phase of strong growth. Nevertheless, it was not a century of homogeneous behaviour. The first half of the century underwent relatively slow urbanization, with growth concentrated in England and Belgium. In contrast, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the phenomenon spread throughout all of Europe, increasing its intensity from the last quarter of the century (Pinol and Walter 2011, 27–​34). Spain fell into the Mediterranean pattern. Together with Italy, it entered the nineteenth century with a phase of urban stagnation, or even decline, before resuming more regular urbanization. This pattern also dominates French urbanization (De Vries 1984, 258; Pinol and Walter 2011, 37). Research on Spanish urbanization reinforces the idea of significant urban growth. The country progressed in parallel to its surroundings, although at a slower rhythm until 1860. Although not without discontinuities that were caused by alterations in country-​to-​city migration, between the late eighteenth and mid-​nineteenth century urban growth returned to all regions (Reher 1994, 6). From the middle of the century, this urban awakening accelerated, increasing its speed as we approached the end of the nineteenth century (Tafunell 2005, 457–​ 458; Pallol and García Abad, 2017, 11) (see Table 15.1). The first quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a substantial set of difficulties for urban development which meant significant delays occurred: the War of Independence (1808–​1814), the loss of most of the colonial empire (in the 1820s), the public finance crisis (partly linked 219

220

Jesús Mirás Araujo Table 15.1  Participation of the urban population in Spain according to several criteria (in percentages), 1860–​1910

1860 Urban area > 5,000 Municipal district> 8,000 + urban area > 5,000 Municipal district> 10,000 + urban area > 5,000 Municipal district > 10,000 and capitals Municipal district > 20,000 and capitals

21.0 15.0

1877

1887

1900

1910

24.4 17.5

33.0 28.9 25.8 25.8 18.6

35.5 31.3 29.0 28.8 22.6

37.4 33.8 31.0 30.5 23.5

Source: Barquín, Pérez and Sanz (2012), p. 397.

to the previous problem), and clashes for power between liberals and absolutists, to name but a few (Cardesín 2016). The early years were marked by the peninsular war (1808–​1814). The Napoleonic occupation had a negative impact on cities (Moliner 2007). As well as the effects of the French continental blockade, there was shortage and hunger as well as catastrophic mortality and the burdens of military occupation (Moreno 2004). All this left some cities devastated. Demographic decline was the result of violence but also of various crises that affected the civilian population (the epidemic crisis in 1809 and sustenance crises in 1812) (Canales 2004). The subsequent independence of the American colonies in the 1820s–​1830s increased the difficulties and led to fiscal bankruptcy. While State revenues were halved, public debt increased exponentially (Cardesín and Mirás 2017, 36–​37). The Napoleonic invasion and the war of independence highlighted the need for profound remodelling. Some of the implemented reforms were regenerationist and had long-​term consequences on the state’s institutional organization. Joseph Bonaparte, who was named King of Spain by his brother Napoleon in 1808–​1813, undertook some ambitious reforms (although they were largely frustrated by the monarch’s opponents) in order to regenerate the country’s politics, economy, or education. These included a new political order, a profound fiscal reform, the consolidation of new property rights, and the liberalization of commercial and productive activities (Rojo 1977). In the urban world, this system left its mark (directly or indirectly) mostly due to the impact it had on the activities related to the property sector. It is from this period, approximately from the 1820s, that we can begin to consider the factors that influenced the growth of Spanish cities. A single responsible factor for this growth cannot be identified. Gone are the times when urban growth was identified univocally with industrialization (Gómez Mendoza and Luna 1986, 18). On the contrary, there were multiple and very diverse factors. Furthermore, cities operated within an increasingly integrated urban network, in which mutual and reciprocal influences were fostered. After the interruption caused by the war and the intense struggle for power between decadent absolutism and the nascent liberal project (1814–​1833), the “victors” (the moderate liberals) formulated a new territorial organization as part of the construction of the nation-​state. The most outstanding (in addition to the local reform of 1823 and the municipal laws of 1840 and 1845) was the approval of the Royal Decree of 30 November 1833, which established the new and definitive provincial division of the State.This decision was the main reason why the framework of the Spanish urban network during the nineteenth century remained in the provincial

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Urbanization in upheaval Table 15.2  Annual average growth rates of the urban and rural population, 1860–​1920

1860–​1887 1887–​1900 1860–​1900 1900–​1910 1910–​1920

Capitals

Cities

Rural

Spain

1.15 1.62 1.30 1.86 1.69

1.24 0.30 0.93 1.75 0.94

0.02 0.19 0.08 0.23 0.23

0.43 0.44 0.43 0.69 0.67

Source: Gómez Mendoza and Luna (1986), p. 9.

capitals (Serrano 1998, 148). It is the dominant force which explains urbanization over a large part of the century (Pérez Moreda 1985, 53–​55). Before the Royal Decree, the capitals were towns or cities that had already united administrative, commercial, and artisan functions of a regional scope in previous eras. Most were also ecclesiastical heads, (military) strongholds, active ports of overseas commerce, or university cities. Administrative centralization meant the concentration of several previously dispersed services in fifty capitals. This reinforced the political-​administrative role of the capitals, in which the bureaucracy and government bodies belonging to the State services were concentrated (González Portilla et al. 2017, 81). The decree determined the public positions attached to each capital, multiplying its administrative functions. From another perspective, the decree meant that an economic model of a city of pre-​ industrial heritage, with a non-​advanced tertiary nature, continued to survive in the urban world. It was based on the predominance of administrative activities, low qualification services, and an increasing presence of liberal professions, although of all these the most numerous category was probably that of the civil servants who became one of the most influential social groups in these cities. This model was the dominant one in almost all cities until the middle of the twentieth century (López de Lucio 1993, 167). In fact, it conditioned the structure of the urban network as a whole. By the years of the first official census of the population (1857), it was clearly dominated by provincial capitals. There were 100 cities with over 10,000 inhabitants (with a total population of 2,457,422 inhabitants, 15.9% of the total population of Spain), thirty-​seven of which were provincial capitals. Only thirteen capitals did not reach this population threshold. The highest growth rates corresponded to the capitals (Gómez Mendoza and Luna 1986, 7–​8). In 1900, the number of centres with over 10,000 inhabitants had risen to 136 (with a total population of 4,184,432 inhabitants, 22.6% of the total), and only four capitals did not reach that threshold. Between 1857 and 1900, the fifty capitals incorporated 1,148,760 inhabitants into their population. This represented a growth of almost 74%, six times higher than that of the rural population (12.7%) and almost three times that of the rest of the centres of the urban system (27.3%) (Fernández Cuesta 2011, 7, 21, 26)  (see Table 15.2). The other major event of this period was the confiscations (or acts of seizure), in particular the two most important, those of Mendizábal (1836–​1837) and Madoz (1854–​6), since this had an enormous impact on the structure of the cities.2 From an economic point of view, the volume of land that was put into circulation facilitated the liberation of a significant flow of capital, which would be reinvested in various industrial initiatives. Also, this meant property could be redistributed and led to a reinforcement of the real estate presence of the wealthy classes in 221

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the cities (Oyón 1994, 17). The bourgeoisie obtained substantial capital gains by investing in real estate (Lavastre 2009). The seizures and confiscations freed up urban space. The inherited urban form of the modern age had hardly undergone any alterations, and this is why inner cities began to experience certain congestion. The new land available after demolishing religious buildings increased available space. Thanks to this, some minor internal reforms could be carried out (Vilagrasa 1998) such as the opening of public squares and some streets. In other cases, the conservation of the buildings meant they could be readapted for non-​religious uses, mainly collective facilities (barracks, prisons, charity centres, etc.). The sale of confiscated goods meant they could absorb some of the needs for residential and public facilities during the central decades of the century without having to propose major urban reforms. From the 1860s, the transition to modernity as a social process started to become visible in the cities. The rest of the territory also underwent significant transformations (albeit with limitations). This long stage coincides with the start of industrialization and modern economic growth in Spain, which economic historians place around 1840–​1850. From then on, there were other drivers of the urban push. Of these drivers, agriculture played the main negative role. This sector experienced certain growth during the second half of the century, although this did not suffice to transform its archaic structures and contribute to the country’s greater economic boost. On the positive side of the agrarian sector, we must cite the impact of mid-​century confiscations. This partially liberated production factors and there was a gradual substitution of cultivation in some regions which allowed improvements in productivity and an increase in export capacity. But the changes were of limited scope and only benefited a few regions (Valencia, Aragon, Catalonia). However, in most of the territory, the characteristics of traditional agriculture remained and even became exacerbated (Galicia, Asturias, Basque Country, Cantabria, Castile, Andalusia), largely as a result of the few changes that occurred in the property structure due to the absence of a true agrarian reform. In addition, the sector suffered the onslaught of the agrarian depression of the late nineteenth century and the protectionist trade policies of those times. The other great obstacle was the dilapidated state of the Public Treasury, a particularly serious circumstance because it directly affected the local governments.The only relevant fiscal reforms during this century were those of 1845 and 1899–​1900. These were approved with the aim of reducing the deficit and public debt which in some periods had reached monstrous volumes. However, although they introduced modernizing elements of the tax structure, they were only temporary solutions because the lack of resources was dramatic throughout the entire century. As a result, municipal finances continued to suffer from a chronic shortage of income. This negatively affected the action of city councils, leading to a permanent deficit (García 1996). The seizures and confiscation aggravated the problem, since the (municipal) assets (bienes propios) themselves were also expropriated. Thus, in 1857, the income derived from these goods represented a mere 11.9% of the total municipal revenues obtained in Spain. This situation worsened as local authorities were delegated various public services. The governors’ or the executive power’s strict control also reduced the margin of action of the municipalities (Pons 2009). The only recourse left to them was the State’s authorization to create municipal taxes, neighbourhood charges or surcharges on certain state contributions (territorial, industrial, and consumption), the latter being the most significant. One of the axes on which capitalism was structured in Spain was the new means of transport. The most important was undoubtedly the railway, protected and encouraged by the 1855 and 1877 railway laws. Numerous authors have shown the impact it had, both at the global network level and internally (on the urban form or business network). First and foremost, the railways 222

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were decisive in territorial planning. They modified the interrelations of the Spanish urban system and consolidated the axes of economic growth. They made a powerful contribution to the concentration of the population in a positive sense, promoting urban growth, although they also helped to depopulate unconnected areas (Mojica and Martí-​Henneberg 2011; Barquín et  al. 2012). The railways connected previously isolated territories and favoured enhanced goods exchange and the transport of raw materials and manufactured products, depending on the regional specialization (Gómez Mendoza 1989). Through the railways, certain places were impacted to the extent of having their future completely disrupted. This happened with the ports that were connected early on to the railway network (e.g. Barcelona, Bilbao, Valladolid, Alicante, and Gijón), although for others, the arrival of the railways led to a period of decline (e.g. Santander). In certain cases, the railway companies had profound consequences on the way the labour markets operated. These were more intense in cities where the infrastructure was more complex, such as Madrid (Carballo et al. 2008), Barcelona, where there was an intense mobility of labour and goods linked to industrialization (Alcaide 2015), or in cities where it coincided with a communication hub (Valladolid, Saragossa). In these cases, the railway and the companies were essential in the modernization of some urban economies (Ortúñez 2011, 95). Finally, its outline conditioned urban morphology due to the positioning and layout of the roads, thus becoming one of the most powerful agents of urban transformation (De Terán 1997, 121). It also influenced the land values, due to the importance of the places where the stations and mechanical workshops were located, since the activity tended to concentrate in those sectors, seeking location or agglomeration economies linked to rail transport. Partly as a causal factor but also as a consequence of the socioeconomic evolution, the Spanish population experienced a slow growth. At the beginning of the century, it was still anchored in a pre-​transitional demographic regime (Pérez Moreda 1985). On the whole, between 1797 and 1860, the rhythm was unhurried since the annual growth rate was 0.34%. The years that followed until the Civil War (the period from 1860–​1936) would constitute a long period of transition. Some signs of demographic modernization were beginning to be glimpsed but their progress would be slow. By the middle of the century, progress had been poor. Not even the richest provinces had managed to transfer their material advantage to an improvement in demographic parameters, in particular mortality. Annual growth rates remained at 0.36% in 1860–​1877 and 0.31% in 1887–​1897, accelerating only slightly between 1877 and 1887 (0.54%). However, the rate increased slightly with the dawn of the twentieth century (0.70% in 1900–​1910 and 0.67% in 1910–​1920).3 Mortality, especially infant mortality, was substantially higher than in Europe (Reher and Sanz 2004; Nicolau 2010). Around 1860, the Early Childhood Mortality Rate (ECMR) was 222, far higher than in Finland (161), the Netherlands (150), France (144), Belgium (139), England and Wales (130), Sweden (110), Denmark (97), Norway (76), and close to that of Italy (231) (Ramiro-​Fariñas and Sanz-​Gimeno 2000, 65). The mortality crises began to abate but the old type of crisis did not disappear completely (Pérez Moreda and Collantes 2012, 34). In addition, economic fluctuations continued to have an impact. Fortunately, subsistence crises did not generate the peaks of mortality of the past during this period, although they did erupt at specific moments of the century, generating shortage, hunger, social conflicts, etc. On the other hand, within the Western European context, Spain entered the fertility transition late (Nadal 1984). However, its fertility levels were already reduced due to several factors: a high celibacy rate, an advanced marriage age, and the absence of an actual socioeconomic transformation that induced a change in fertility patterns. Very low natural growth rates ensued, even negative in most cities (Pérez Moreda and Reher 2003). The differential was reduced, as can be seen in the samples chosen in Table 15.3, 223

224

Jesús Mirás Araujo Table 15.3  Crude birth rates, crude death rates, and infant mortality: urban and rural Spain, 1860–​1920

1860 1887 1900 1910 1920

Crude birth rates (‰)

Crude death rates (‰)

Infant mortality (1q0)*

Spain

Urban

Spain

Urban

Rural

Spain

Urban

Rural

36.7 36.1 33.8 32.6 29.4

36.6 35.3 31.3 29.6 27.8

27.4 32.8 28.9 23.0 23.3

31.1 35.3 30.7 26.0 25.7

26.9 30.2 27.9 22.5 22.0

225.0** 255.0*** 204.4 149.3 165.0

199

168

200 169 162

181 150 151

Source: * Deaths under one year of age; ** 1858–​1862; *** 1878–​1882. Own elaboration based on Reher (1990), pp. 289, 293) and Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Spain’s natural movement of the population.

45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1858 1862 1866 1870 1874 1878 1882 1886 1890 1894 1898 1902 1906 1910 1914 1918 Crude birth rates

Crude death rates

Figure 15.1  Crude birth rates and crude death rates in Spain (‰), 1860–​1920. Source: Own elaboration based on data from Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Spain’s natural movement of the population.

which can be contrasted with the small distance between both variables in the country as a whole (Figure 15.1). Mortality was often higher than that of the rural environment and fertility was lower due to the presence of social groups which were more prone to celibacy. Thus, in urban Spain at the end of the century, the annual rate of natural growth was 0.02% in cities with over 20,000 inhabitants, as compared to 0.56% in the whole of the country (Reher et al. 1993, 81). It can be deduced that cities supported their demographic growth based on migratory contributions from rural areas (Pérez Moreda and Reher 2003, 122–​123). Until the 1860s, migration was barely significant, with nearby temporary or seasonal movements prevailing (Silvestre 2005). It was only in the largest cities (mainly Madrid) where there was marked migration, primarily to access greater employment opportunities and higher standards of living, 224

225

Urbanization in upheaval Table 15.4  Migratory balances and percentage of urban population by region, 1860–​1930

Migratory balances 1860–​1930

% of urban population 1860

% of urban population 1900

Madrid Basque Country Catalonia Cantabria Andalusia Murcia Extremadura Canary Islands Castile-​Leon Galicia Aragon Navarra La Rioja Valencia Balearic Islands Castile-​La Mancha Asturias

Madrid Andalusia Murcia Balearic Islands Valencia Catalonia Extremadura Castile-​La Mancha La Rioja Navarra Aragon Basque Country Cantabria Castile-​Leon Asturias Galicia Canary Islands

Madrid Andalusia Catalonia Murcia Valencia Balearic Islands Extremadura Basque Country Castile-​La Mancha La Rioja Canary Islands Cantabria Navarra Aragon Castile-​Leon Asturias Galicia

635,762 235,485 231,988 27,812 74,120 60,129 85,839 192,700 -​706,246 -​520,732 -​330,867 -​112,288 -​63,956 -​53,771 -​47,040 -​25,979 -​10,151

60.5% 39.1% 34.2% 32.2% 32.0% 27.8% 23.8% 19.0% 16.6% 13.7% 13.6% 13.5% 11.8% 7.4% 5.2% 5.2% -​

71.2% 44.4% 41.7% 39.6% 37.2% 33.7% 32.1% 29.2% 22.9% 21.2% 19.5% 19.2% 17.2% 15.9% 10.2% 9.4% 6.6%

Source: Own elaboration based on González Portilla, Hernando, and Urrutikoetxea (2017), p. 74 and population censuses. Cities of more than 5,000 inhabitants.

but also as a result of overpopulation in the countryside, successive confiscations, and periodic subsistence crises. However, with the beginning of industrialization, migratory flows increased (Silvestre 2005, 236), becoming the main cause for the readjustment of the urban system. The movements were essentially intra-​regional (with the exception of Madrid) and did not entail significant changes in the territorial distribution of the population. Between 1860 and 1930, eight regions experienced an increase in population, although with very different intensities. The remaining nine lost some of their population, although with notable differences between them. The provincial capitals and their surroundings, above all in Barcelona, Madrid, and the Ría de Bilbao, absorbed most of the positive migratory amount in 1860–​1930 (González Portilla et al. 2017, 73–​74). These areas coincide roughly with the regions that in the second half of the century showed higher and above all increasing percentages of urban population (Table 15.4), where (except for some singularities) the cities with large attraction areas were located (Table 15.5).

Spanish cities during the second industrialization (c.1890–​c.1920) The urban explosion in Europe occurred basically before the First World War. In most major European and American cities, there were profound transformations which became more acute from the end of the nineteenth century and, especially, during the inter-​war period (Lees and Hollen Lees 2007). In Spain the idea of ​​a sluggish society cannot be sustained as we approach the end of the 1800s. Periods such as that of the Restoration (1874–​1914) were judged pejoratively by historiography as the era of “Disaster” or “the crisis of the Restoration.” However, today the achievements of that era are more stressed, using more benevolent qualifiers such as 225

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Jesús Mirás Araujo Table 15.5  Provincial capitals with the highest annual growth rates, 1860–​1900

1860–​1887 Pontevedra Bilbao San Sebastián Huelva Ávila Valencia Madrid Oviedo Tarragona Vitoria Las Palmas Barcelona

7.32 6.76 3.92 3.17 2.17 2.17 2.16 1.90 1.77 1.77 1.70 1.61

1887–​1900 Las Palmas Barcelona Santa Cruz de Tenerife Bilbao Lugo Santander Almeria San Sebastián Alicante Valencia Logroño Castellón

8.81 7.35 7.29 4.93 2.70 2.37 2.36 2.32 2.04 1.93 1.81 1.44

Source: Own elaboration based on data from Instituto Nacional de Estadística, population censuses.

“regeneration” and “reform” which appreciate the changes that took place. If we link this with what happened after the First World War, we can have a more nuanced and complex vision. The whole of the period between the 1890s and the 1920s, with its shortcomings and irregularities, was presided over by more solid socioeconomic modernization than the previous phase. This led to a convergence with the urbanization patterns of developed countries (see Bairoch 1998, 200). The earlier transformations underwent acceleration after the trigger of the second industrialization and were later confirmed during the first third of the twentieth century. After the brief interruption when the colonies were lost, a quantitative change took place in Spain which was measurable through intense migratory flows, the growth of the country’s population, and the urban population and economic growth, etc. But it was also a qualitative transformation in the cities whereby a new social organization was sprouting (Otero 2017, 25), with Madrid at the top of this change (Rodríguez Martín, 2015). From a demographic point of view, there were no particularly notable changes, since the demographic transition would not begin until the inter-​war period (Reher 1999). However, the population growth was constant and somewhat more spirited from the 1880s, affecting the whole territory with the logical regional differences (Franch et al. 2013, 50–​53). In many cities, the old cycle was coming to an end. There were still specific episodes of mortality, such as the cholera epidemic of 1885 and there are isolated years of negative natural growth. However, since the 1890s and, above all, in the early years of the twentieth century, positive natural growth rates began to consolidate. But the smooth and parallel decline in fertility (with very heterogeneous territorial patterns) and mortality was not large enough to provoke a real demographic explosion. The reduction in mortality rested on the following factors:  improvements in living conditions favoured by health advances and reforms, social hygiene practices (linked to the nascent urban planning), the beginning of the providential intervention of public administrations, the provision of new urban facilities, the increase of salaries, or the consequent improvements in diet (Pérez Serrano 2009, 292; Salort 2013, 106). However, until the Civil War, urban mortality levels continued to be higher than rural ones, although the fight against death was more successful in cities (Reher 2001). 226

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Urbanization in upheaval Table 15.6  Growth of GDP and GDP per capita, 1850–​1935 (average yearly logarithmic rates)

1850–​1855 1855–​1866 1866–​1873 1873–​1883 1883–​1892

GDP

GDP per capita

2.6 1.0 3.2 1.1 0.8

2.1 0.4 2.9 0.6 0.6

1892–​1901 1901–​1913 1913–​1918 1918–​1929 1929–​1935

GDP

GDP per capita

1.3 1.2 0.3 3.9 0.0

0.7 0.5 -​0.6 3.1 -​1.5

Source: Prados (2017), p. 17.

From an economic point of view, the last decade of the nineteenth century still saw a slow economic growth which extended to the first years of the new century (Table 15.6). The years before the war witnessed a progressive recovery which would accelerate dramatically with the war cycle. The most outstanding factor was the outbreak of the second industrialization, which in Spain started around the 1890s, and which overlapped with the second energy transition. The latter took place in Spanish cities between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, when electricity progressively replaced steam and gas as a source of energy, power, and mechanical traction at an accelerated pace. The penetration rate was faster than that which had characterized previous innovations (Mirás 2017). Energy deficiencies were mitigated, facilitating sectoral diversification and an economic modernization which was particularly noticeable in the cities, and this helped progress in key infrastructures such as transport and communications (Otero 2007c). Similarly, other equipment was involved and this had a positive impact on the urban environment and was decisive for the tertiary sector (water supply, sewage system, etc.). As a result of socioeconomic transformations, the urban structure underwent significant changes, transforming the system inherited from the Ancient Régime. The phases of the main urban take-​off occurred in 1860–​1877 and in the 1910s and 1920s. However, if we consider the whole of the period from 1860 to 1920, we can see that this development was very unbalanced since it followed the lines of industrial growth. Setting aside Madrid, the coast most definitely took control. The greatest growth was recorded in the Basque Country, Catalonia, Asturias, and the dominance of the big cities became more acute (Table 15.2). Greater diversification of their economic structure and a more effective capacity for migratory attraction enhanced their growth. As can be seen in Table  15.7, the main destinations correspond to the most industrialized territories, whose migratory basins extended beyond the boundaries of their closest territories (Table 15.8). Conversely, small cities lost importance (Mikelarena 1996). The medium-​sized cities (in particular, provincial capitals) resisted thanks to specialization based on the tertiary sector. Therefore, a contrast is seen between large cities and small and medium cities, whose distance began to increase from the late nineteenth century onwards. The destiny of each centre was marked by its ability to respond to the events of this era and by previous structures and rhythms. The cities that experienced greater progress were those in which industrialization left its mark. It is in this group that we find, with the exception of Murcia, the small list of cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants around 1900.4 In some cases, the situation after the Spanish-​ American War (1898) was the starting point for a flow of capital that made a revitalization of 227

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Jesús Mirás Araujo Table 15.7  Main destinations of internal migration in Spain, 1877 and 1930

Provinces

1877 Population

Madrid Barcelona Álava Cádiz Biscay Valladolid Jaén Seville Saragossa Santander Navarra Guipúzcoa Spain

Provinces Born in another province (%)

594,194 836,887 93,538 429,206 189,954 247,458 423,025 506,812 400,587 235,299 304,184 167,207

45.49 19.56 16.35 15.09 13.79 13.18 12.55 11.93 11.41 9.78 9.24 7.99

16,631,869

7.74

1930 Population

Madrid Barcelona Biscay Guipúzcoa Álava Seville Valladolid

Spain

Born in another province (%)

1,383,951 1,800,638 485,205 302,329 104,176 805,252 301,571

46.84 35.98 24.91 19.99 18.86 15.27 13.87

23,563,867

11.97

Source: Silvestre (2001), p. 253. Table 15.8  Main migration basins in Spain around 1930

First destination

Origins

Madrid

Albacete, Ávila, Barcelona, Cáceres, Canary Islands, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Granada, Guadalajara, Jaén, León, Lugo, Orense, Oviedo, Palencia, Pontevedra, Salamanca, Santander, Segovia, Soria, Toledo,Valladolid, Biscay, Zamora Alicante, Almería, Balearic Islands, Castellón, Gerona, Huesca, Lérida, Madrid, Murcia, Tarragona, Teruel,Valencia, Saragossa Badajoz, Cádiz, Córdoba, Huelva Álava, Burgos, Guipúzcoa, Logroño

Barcelona Seville Biscay

Source: Silvestre (2006), p. 168.

the secondary sector possible. Although they did not manage to completely eliminate the inertia of tertiary activities, at first cities such as Bilbao or Barcelona and later others like Saragossa, Madrid, and even Valencia, or Seville, used industry as a springboard toward development. The urban growth of the second half of the nineteenth century meant that industries and workshops could spread and cope with the increase in urban demand. However, the element that explains the success or failure of the consolidation of a firm industrial sector will be its ability to supply a different demand from the local one (regional, national, and, above all, international). Geographically, the map of industrial cities did not undergo substantial transformations. The main centres were concentrated in the Cantabrian cornice (Basque Country, Asturias) and in the Levant (Catalonia, Valencia), as well as some points of Andalusia and Castilla-​León. In any case, most of these spaces were not strictly speaking industrial cities. On the contrary, the working population was concentrated in sectors of a markedly artisanal nature or in any case, in which the presence of some type of company or sector of certain importance stood 228

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out. Industry was never the dominant sector in any city. Barcelona is the main exception to this scenario as, according to the 1900 census, the percentage of the working population employed in the industry (35.96%) practically equalled that of the tertiary sector (36.40%). Although it was Bilbao which probably had a greater link between industry and urban growth. Madrid is a special case. Historically, the weight of its economy had rested in the tertiary sector. But at the end of the nineteenth century, it had acquired new functions which made it a much more complex city. There was a certain bipolarity between two different “economies” that coexisted in the urban space. On the one hand, the economy “of the city” and, on the other hand, the economy “of the capital.” The first was based on the more traditional elements of the tertiary sector, typical of a provincial capital (retail trade, domestic service, administrative services, hotels, etc.).These functions were superimposed on those of the liberal state capital. At the end of the century a new list was added, derived from its growing economic centrality: the hub of the state network of transport and communications, financial capital (“capital of the capital”). With these changes, the industrial function came about, whose growth was visible from the end of the century. Even so, before the World War, Madrid was more “industrious” than industrial as a city due to the high presence of traditional trades and craftsmanship, which would end up gradually disappearing in the twentieth century. Recent research confirms the existence of other models which were less successful than those of industrial cities but where there were significant changes in economic, demographic, social, cultural, or political terms. Even so, in all of them, elements that influenced the maintenance of a traditional profile survived. This is the case of the so-​called medium-​sized cities, especially those that were on track to become large provincial capitals. They are populations with a threshold of around 50,000–​100,000 inhabitants. Although in this group we find some cities in which industry had an important presence (Gijón, Vigo, Cartagena), at the beginning of the twentieth century, most of them, regardless of their position in urban hierarchy, were commercial sites (a function especially rooted in ports such as A Coruña, San Sebastián, Cádiz, etc.) and services (Oviedo, Murcia, Granada …). They relied on trade, domestic service, hospitality, and construction. In general, they acted as guiding cities of their rural hinterland economically, but also politically and socially. And, naturally, there was a marked predominance of activities linked to the provincial capital, complemented by the army and the clergy, which consolidated a traditional socio-​professional structure well into the twentieth century. Since the end of the nineteenth century in some cases and since the beginning of the twentieth in others, the emerging services (water supply, sewage system, sanitation, lighting, etc.) also found their place in these cities, although with some chronological differences in the small cities as compared to the large ones. According to the 1900 census, the tertiary sector was the dominant sector in thirty of the capitals. Most were located in the northern half of the country and a good number of them were located in the two Castillas. But, in general, the type of cities with a dominant tertiary profile were those located in the last places of the national urban hierarchy or, in any case, in intermediate locations. With the exception of cities with more complex structures (Madrid, Barcelona) and port cities, most were below the average and median of the total population of the capitals. Some of these cities experienced changes which were indications of weak industrialization, which continued in a feeble manner during the latter years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. This small increase rewarded these cities with a somewhat faster economic growth than the smaller and more backward cities. Thanks in part to that movement, they ended up becoming middle-​sized cities. In the small cities, there were no significant changes in their socioeconomic structures and, therefore, they always moved at a slower pace than the modernization of the more dynamic 229

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Jesús Mirás Araujo Table 15.9 Total immigrants received by all the Spanish provincial capitals, 1900–​1930

Number of immigrants 1901–​1910 1911–​1920 1921–​1930 1901–​1930

236,620 551,521 732,039 1,520,180

Source: Mikelarena (1996), p. 113.

areas. These cities failed to fully transform their economic base throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and were unsuccessful when adapting to industrialization. Consequently, they can be characterized by an excessive predominance of their tertiary functions of little sophistication, a high amount of trade and retail (above all, that destined to satisfy the basic needs of the population), and high employment in the administration sector (Delgado 1995, 24). However, this profile should not hide from us the fact that, with differing degrees of trauma, these cities also experienced a certain transformation of their economies, but the attempts at industrialization crystallized in setting up barely outlined workshops and industrial spaces.They were cities whose market area was limited to the strict local framework or, at most, the regional framework, with very little external competitiveness. In summary, three main patterns can be identified: (1) larger and more industrialized cities, although with a parallel development of subsidiary services for industry and equipment linked to the size of these cities; (2)  medium-​sized cities, with a high weight of the tertiary sector which was complemented with certain manufacturing development; (3) small cities, in which the services sector had “semi-​pathological” features, due to the excessive “atrophy” of employment related bureaucratic functions associated with the capital role. The great difference in the rhythms of urban growth is found in the different intensity of rural/​urban migration. The scale of the movement is significant since, as a whole, provincial capitals received more than a million and a half people in the first three decades of the century (Table 15.9). These migrations were more accentuated in the medium-​sized and larger cities due to the greater possibilities of employment, as a result of a greater diversification of their economic structures. The agrarian economy continued to determine the limits of urban development, so that the evolution of the agrarian base of the territories largely defined the process of urban development (Delgado 1995, 53). Thus, cities with a strong agrarian component grew in those cases where they could steer the productions of their respective hinterlands externally or toward the domestic market or when they acted as intermediaries in the importation of agricultural inputs or products. On the other hand, those located in less dynamic agrarian environments did not manage to progress with sufficient vitality. Therefore, the service sector experienced a semi-​pathological development, due to the excessive “atrophy” of employment toward bureaucratic functions associated with the role of capital.

Conclusions A phenomenon as complex as the urbanization process requires a multifaceted analysis that combines economic, social, cultural, and technical elements to reach reliable conclusions. The synthesis that has been presented has focused on the global characterization of the process, trying to link it, mainly, to the general economic evolution of Spain. 230

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A central idea is clear in the previous pages: undeniably there was a relevant urban development. Clearly, Spain did not have the same dynamism as the most economically developed nations but as we approach the end of the 1800s the rhythm of urban transformation accelerated in Spain. Cities became vectors of penetration of what some authors have called modernity, radiating innovations that eventually spread throughout the country. The growth process of the cities followed a path close to that traced by the socioeconomic development of the country. An eighteenth century in which Spain begins to miss the train of European urbanization was followed by a stormy start to the nineteenth century. The deadlock of the Ancient Régime, the political convulsions, and the difficult start of capitalism conditioned the urban take-​off. Once this stage is over, there is a long phase of transformation, with obstacles and stops and starts. These changes did not allow the full convergence of Spain with the standards of the most urbanized nations, although they did enable it in the first third of the twentieth century. Spain was a country with a level of urbanization comparable to that of its surroundings. Only some of the indicators that support this claim have been indicated. The important thing is that the changes show that nineteenth century society was moving toward modernization and that the voyage becomes increasingly solid toward the twentieth century. Among these factors, the following stand out: the new territorial organization implemented after the liberal revolution, the impact of the process of urban seizure, the outline of the new transport networks (in particular, the railway) or implementation of the first public utilities. As a causal factor, but also as a consequence of the transformations, a demographic flow began that would disrupt the functioning dynamics of the cities. The migratory country-​city movements of the second half of the century were the main factor with which to sustain urban growth, still stranded in pre-​transitional demographic parameters. This posed new challenges to urban management (which lack of space prevented us from analysing), which are also at the root of urban modernization at the end of the century. Finally, not all those involved in the process played a leading role. There is a clear dichotomy between the cities where industrialization and urban modernization processes took place and those that remained anchored in pre-​industrial structures. Only a few places experienced the large-​scale implantation of industrial activities, while most went their own way supported by tertiary activities. Those in which more sophisticated activities took root progressed at a better pace. Those that did not were stagnant and remained as cities of lower category. But all progressed to the beat of the general changes of Spanish society (the majority) or dragged the country toward other horizons (Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao).

Acknowledgments This work has been financed by the R&D Excellence Project of the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund, titled “La industria del gas en España: desarrollo y trayectorias regionales” (1842–​2008) [The Gas Industry in Spain: Development and Regional Trajectories (1842–​2008)], HAR2017-​82112-​P.

Notes 1 Llopis and González (2006) carry out a new estimate of the urbanization rate and consider that it is not enough to take only the population as reference (using as an urban threshold 5,000 or 10,000 inhabitants), but one must consider the occupational criterion of each nucleus. The presence of the “agrocities”, that is to say, nuclei where the dominant activity was the primary sector, pushes back the level of Spanish urbanization in comparison with that of Europe.

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Jesús Mirás Araujo 2 In Spain there were several confiscations:  those of Godoy (1798), Joseph I  (1809), Courts of Cádiz (1813), and that of the Liberal Triennial (1820–​1823). But the impact on the urban environment was more significant in the first two mentioned. 3 Instituto Nacional de Estadística, population censuses. 4 Only six cities: Madrid (539,835), Barcelona (533,000), Valencia (213,550), Seville (148,315), Malaga (130,109), and Murcia (111,539), to which Saragossa (99,118) and Bilbao (83.306) can be added.

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Urbanization in upheaval Mirás, Jesús. 2017. “La transición de los paradigmas energéticos en las ciudades españolas entre la Restauración y la Guerra Civil: del gas a la electricidad.” In Globalización, nacionalización y liberalización de la industria del gas en la Europa Latina (siglos XIX-​XXI), edited by Isabel Bartolomé, Mercedes Fernández-​Paradas, and Jesús Mirás, 193–​215. Madrid: Marcial Pons. Mojica, Laia, and Jordi Martí-​Henneberg. 2011. “Railways and population distribution: France, Spain and Portugal, 1870–​2000.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 42(1): 15–​28. Moliner, Antonio, coord. 2007. La guerra de la independencia en España (1808–​1814). Barcelona: Nabla. Moreno, Manuel. 2004. “La vida diaria en las ciudades españolas bajo la ocupación napoleónica.” In Conflicto y sociedad civil en la España napoleónica: actas de las Quintas Jornadas sobre la Batalla de Bailén y la España Contemporánea, edited by Francisco Acosta, 21–​45. Jaén: Universidad de Jaén. Nadal, Jordi. 1984. La población española (siglos XVI a XX). Barcelona: Ariel. Nicolau, Roser. 2010. “La mortalidad en España en los siglos XIX-​XX. Una comparación con Francia.” In Los niveles de vida en España y Francia (siglos XVIII a XX), edited by Gérard Chastagneret et al., 129–​145. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. Ortúñez, Pedro Pablo. 2011. “La Compañía de los Caminos de Hierro del Norte y Valladolid (c. 1850–​ 1936).” In Conocer Valladolid 2010. IV Curso de patrimonio cultural, edited by Real Academia de Bellas Artes de la Purísima Concepción, 87–​ 97. Valladolid:  Diputación de Valladolid, Ayuntamiento de Valladolid. Otero, Luis Enrique. 2007a. “Las ciudades en la España de la Restauración, 1868–​1939.” In España entre repúblicas 1868–​1839: Actas de las VII Jornadas de Castilla-​La Mancha sobre Investigación en Archivos. 27–​79. Guadalajara: Asociación de Amigos del Archivo Histórico Provincial de Castilla La Mancha. —​—​—​. 2007b. “Tradición y modernidad en la España urbana de la Restauración.” In Modernizar España. Proyectos de reforma y apertura internacional (1898–​1914), edited by Guadalupe Gómez-​Ferrer and Raquel Sánchez, 79–​118. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. —​—​—​. 2007c. “Las telecomunicaciones en la España contemporánea, 1855–​2000.” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 29: 119–​152. —​—​—​. 2017. “La sociedad urbana en España. Redes e influjos que impulsaron la modernidad, 1900–​ 1936.” In La sociedad urbana en España, 1900–​1936:  redes impulsoras de la modernidad, edited by Luis Enrique Otero and Rubén Pallol, 25–​69. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata. Oyón, José Luis. 1994. “Crecimiento de las ciudades.” In La sociedad urbana en la España contemporánea, edited by Francesc Bonamusa and Joan Serrallonga, 11–​ 21. Barcelona:  Asociación de Historia Contemporánea. Pallol, Rubén, and Rocío García Abad. 2017. “Introducción.” In Inmigrantes en la ciudad:  dinámicas demográficas, mercados de trabajo y desarrollo urbano en la España contemporánea, edited by Rubén Pallol and Rocío García Abad, 9–​13. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco. Pérez Moreda,Vicente. 1985.“La población española en el siglo XIX y el primer tercio del XX (Limitaciones y cronología de la modernización demográfica en España).” In La modernización económica de España 1830–​1930, edited by Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, 121–​146. Madrid: Alianza. Pérez Moreda, Vicente, and Fernando Collantes. 2012. Crisis y problemas demográficos en España desde el Antiguo Régimen hasta el presente. Madrid: Asociación Española de Historia Económica. Pérez Moreda,Vicente, and David Sven Reher. 2003.“Hacia una definición de la demografía urbana: España en 1787.” Revista de Demografía Histórica 21(1): 113–​140. Pérez Serrano, Julio. 2009. “La contribución de las ciudades a la modernización de España: marcos teóricos y líneas de investigación.” In Mundos de ayer. Investigaciones históricas contemporáneas del IX Congreso de la AHC, edited by María Encarna Nicolás and Carmen González, 279–​303. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia. Pinol, Jean Luc, and François Walter. (2011). Historia de la Europa urbana, vol. 4, La ciudad contemporánea hasta la Segunda Guerra Mundial. València: Universitat de Valéncia. Pons, Josep Maria. 2009. “Finanzas municipales y fiscalidad a mediados del siglo XIX. Un ejemplo de sus consecuencias sociales: Lleida, 1845–​1868.” In La modernización económica de los ayuntamientos: servicios públicos, finanzas y gobiernos municipales, edited by Luis González Ruiz and Juan Manuel Matés, 21–​48. Jaén: Universidad de Jaén. Prados, Leandro. 2017. Spanish Economic Growth, 1850–​2015. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ramiro-​Fariñas, Diego, and Alberto Sanz-​Gimeno. 2000. “Structural changes in childhood mortality in Spain, 1860–​1990.” International Journal of Population Geography 6: 61–​82. Reher, David Sven. 1986. “Desarrollo urbano y evolución de la población: España, 1787–​1930.” Revista de Historia Económica 4(1): 39–​66.

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Jesús Mirás Araujo —​—​—​. 1990. “Urbanization and demographic behavior in Spain, 1860–​1930.” In Urbanization in History. A Process of Dynamic Interactions, edited by Ad Van der Woude, Jan de Vries, and Akira Hayami, 282–​299. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 1994. “Ciudades, procesos de urbanización y sistemas urbanos en la Península Ibérica, 1550–​ 1991.” In Atlas Históricos de las ciudades europeas. I. Península Ibérica, edited by Manuel Guàrdia, Francisco Javier Monclús, and José Luis Oyón, 1–​29. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. —​—​—​. 1999. “Interacciones entre mortalidad y fecundidad durante la transición demográfica: un marco explicativo.” In vol. 1 of Doctor Jordi Nadal. La industrialización y el desarrollo económico de España, edited by Albert Carreras et al., 290–​303. Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona. —​—​—​. 2001. “In search of the ‘Urban Penalty’: exploring urban and rural mortality patterns in Spain during the demographic transition.” International Journal of Population Geography 7(2): 105–​127. Reher, David Sven, and Alberto Sanz. 2004. “Childhood mortality patterns in Spain before and during the Demographic Transition: In search of new dimensions.” In The Determinants of Infant and Child Mortality in Past European Populations, edited by Marco Breschi and Lucia Pozzi, 19–​42. Udine: Sides-​Forum. Reher, David Sven, Beatriz Nogueras, and María Nieves Pombo. 1993. España a la luz del Censo de 1887. Madrid: Instituto Nacional de Estadística. Ringrose, David R. 1998. “Historia urbana y urbanización en la España moderna.” Hispania 199: 489–​512. Rodríguez Martín, Nuria. 2015. La capital de un sueño. Madrid en el primer tercio del siglo XX, Madrid: Asociación de Historia Contemporánea –​Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales. Rojo, Ángel. 1977. “José Bonaparte (1808–​1813) y la legislación mercantil e industrial española.” Revista de Derecho Mercantil 143: 121–​182. Salort, Salvador. 2013. “Los inicios del municipio providencial en España como factor de modernización de las ciudades. Condiciones de vida, urbanismo, alimentación y salud en el modelo de la ciudad de Alacant/​Alicante (1860–​1923).” In Ciudad y modernización en España y México, edited by Miguel Ángel del Arco, Antonio Ortega, and Manuel Martínez, 103–​126. Granada: Universidad de Granada. Serrano, José María. 1998. “Crecimiento de la población urbana española y complejidad del modelo de organización de su red urbana. Interpretación de los cambios producidos durante los últimos decenios.” Papeles de Geografía 28: 145–​164. Silvestre, Javier. 2001. “Viajes de corta distancia. Una visión espacial de las migraciones interiores en España, 1877–​1930.” Revista de Historia Económica/​Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History 19(2): 247–​283. —​—​—​. 2005. “Internal migrations in Spain, 1877–​1930.” European Review of Economic History 9: 233–​265. —​—​—​. 2006. “Las migraciones interiores durante la modernización económica de España, 1860–​1930.” Cuadernos Económicos del ICE 70: 157–​178. Tafunell, Xavier. 2005. “Urbanización y vivienda.” In vol. 1 of Estadísticas históricas de España: siglo XIX-​XX, edited by Albert Carreras and Xavier Tafunell, 455–​499. Madrid: Fundación BBVA. Vilagrasa, Joan. 1998. “The study of urban form in Spain.” Urban Morphology 2(1): 35–​44.

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16 SPAIN AND THE VISUAL CULTURE OF SUFFERING Javier Moscoso

Introduction This work explores the relationship between two moments of national rupture that, in its own way, will mark a before and after in the history of Spain. On the one hand, the so-​called War of the French that appears, even today, as an exception in the context of Spanish national history. On the other, the crisis of the late nineteenth century that will mark an important part of the Spanish future, beginning with the way in which the so-​called Generación del 98 tried to shed some light on the moral and aesthetic values that configured national identity. The present chapter does not mean to be a contribution to the political history of Spain, but to the study of the cultural forms that made possible a tragic and somber vision of the country. At the same time, the pages that follow do not intend to discuss the moral or the doctrinal values of Spanish Catholicism, but the emotional and aesthetic device that was able to nourish the myth of the “black” Spain. The politics of pain, the position of the beholder with regard to the pain of others, has been highlighted in a large number of publications and specialized literature. The North American historian Keith Wailoo, for example, has suggested that many changes undertaken in the US administration during the second half of the twentieth century rest on the way in which diverse ideological factions faced the problem of pain (Wailoo 2014). More recently, Cathey Gere has explored the role played by utilitarian conceptions of pain in human experimentation from the eighteenth century to the Second World War (Gere 2017). In relation to the nineteenth century, many other scholars have linked the politics of pain to the position of the observer, especially with regard to the situation of exploited or marginalized groups (Abruzzo 2011; Bourke 2011; Moscoso 2014, 2015b). Pain studies have focused on the experience of illness, education, labor, and even birth pains. Despite their many differences, all these contributions seemed to have found a correlation between the understanding of harm and ideological preferences. In the Spanish case, the relation of mutual dependence between aesthetics and politics also feeds on the construction of a national identity (Rancière, 2011). The dichotomy of the two Spains, whose shadows reach our own times, sprang up especially in the early years of the twentieth century, but has much deeper roots. My argument will start with the painting of the so-​called Disasters of War, a series of drawings and engravings prepared by Goya at the end of the eighteenth century, and will 235

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continue with some examples of social paintings produced at the end of the nineteenth century. In both cases, these images were intended to portray the sufferings of contemporary life in times of political upheaval. While Goya’s drawings were produced between the armed conflict of the so-​called “Independence War” and the return to power of Fernando VII, Sorolla’s paintings were linked to the Bourbon Restoration that began after 1875. In both cases, the representation of human suffering produced a collateral debate on national identity and patriotic values. On the one hand, Spanish resistance to Napoléon’s troops served to configure the idea of a national character, in the spirit of a conflict forged in Goya’s drawings and paintings. On the other, Goya’s interest in the representation of current national characters was also a source of inspiration for many other artists of the late nineteenth century, including Sorolla, in whose social artworks critics acknowledged some rays of hope and Catholic compassion.

Goya’s Disasters and the objectivity of suffering The Desastres de la Guerra [Disasters of the War]—​whose full and original title was Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos [Fatal consequences of Spain’s bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic Caprichos]—​ have been studied by different specialists. The Spanish scholars Valeriano Bozal and Jesusa Vega, for example, have underlined the universal elements of these eighty-​three etchings produced by Goya between shortly before 1810 and 1820, especially in relation to the uncanny or the grotesque (Bozal 2011; Vega 2001). Some other historians have attempted to explain the Disasters within the personal circumstances of the painter’s life, and especially with regard to his political views. For Robert Hughes, for example, Goya’s work should be situated at the origins of war journalism (Hughes 2005). For Susan Sontag, his engravings oscillate between the incitement to watch, contained in the image, and the impossibility of action, represented by the text. According to this North American scholar, Goya’s Disasters combined elements of continuity with ancient forms of radical expression linked to the visual representation of cruelty, war, and misfortune (Sontag 2003). To underline this point, she quoted the books produced by Jacques Callot (1633) on seventeenth-​century religious wars, but the list could be very easily extended to, for example, the twenty-​nine engravings of The Theatre of the Cruelties, by Richard Verstegan, or any other publication about war and massacre produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Goya, who was 62 when the war broke out in Spain in 1808, had been for a quarter of a century official court painter of the Spanish sovereign, Charles IV. His personal circumstances, including his humble origins, could partly explain his political ambivalence. The afrancesados, explained Spanish historian Miguel Artola, were of two types: for reasons of conviction or for reasons of survival (Artola 2008). The young Aragonés, who had arrived in Madrid at the age of 28 to paint tapestries at the Royal Factory and had managed to climb up the meritocratic structure of the old regime step by step, perhaps promised loyalty to the French king, the brother of Napoleon, Joseph I, more for convenience than conviction. Be it as it may, it was around the turn of the century that Goya combined different official commissions with some other subjects, mainly drawings, related to popular subjects. Apart from the portraits produced for the Spanish nobility, his interests oscillated between a rather idealized depiction of the popular classes and a morbid curiosity for crime. Before the series of the Disasters, for example, he had painted six small canvases on the capture of the bandit known as “El Magarato” by the monk Pedro de Zaldivia. At the same time, he also worked on other subjects, especially his album of the Inquisition and on the images of the album about Spain (Album F). Some years earlier, 236

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between 1796 and 1800, he produced a series of eight small paintings that also contained scenes of a notorious brutality: rape, murder, and even cannibalism. These scenes of extreme cruelty were somehow completed with the series of the Disparates, published for the first time with the title of Proverbios, since they seem to reflect in a certain way the Spanish refranero (McDonald 2014). At the same time, he maintained, and even extended, his official commissions, mainly of portraits of the royal family, including his famous rendering of the family of Carlos IV, painted in 1800. In the series of the Disasters, scholars have distinguished three large groups (Carret Parrondo 2007; Harris 1964; Pérez Sánchez and Gallego 1995). The first, which would go from the second plate to number 47, would be more consistent with the initial commission, which Goya received from General Palafox, to go to Zaragoza and reflect the ruins of the city, with the intention of painting the glories of its inhabitants. And yet, instead of becoming a patriotic emblem, the drawings and the corresponding engravings turned into a much more general observation on the irrationality of the conflict. The second group, from plates 48 to 64, would focus on the representation of hunger and misery in Madrid. From number 65 to 80, the painter’s gaze concentrates on the repression of Fernando VII’s regime, with all the political implications of absolutism. In this last set, the artist did not hesitate to introduce imaginative and symbolic elements able to increase political denunciation. Broadly speaking, the three groups review the cartography of tragedy, from the cruelty of the armed conflict to the absolutist subjugation of rights and freedoms. In between, Goya echoes the most daily elements of a silent malice that, far from the celebration of military glory, affects the lower strata of the social scale. In some of the most telling examples, violence is addressed toward women or against children, as part of a suffocating climate of horror described and represented without sentimental concessions: children without mothers (plate 50), help that will not arrive on time (plate 52), cries in vain (plate 54), or useless charity (plate 59). In the context of a general climate of helplessness, nothing distinguishes the healthy from the sick (plate 57) or the dead from the living (plate 60). Far from serving as a foundation for patriotic feelings, the Disasters became a general reflection on human suffering (Figure 16.1). There are at least three rhetorical elements that play a pre-​eminent role in the series. First, the Disasters maintain a somewhat double structure, combining images and legends that confer a peculiar meaning on the plates. Beginning with the first, which has the significant title of “Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer” [“Sorry forebodings of what is going to happen”], these captions are not limited to illustrating the meaning of the image, but produce an effect of perplexity, amplifying the emotional effect. From a rhetorical point of view, the colour of these sentences, their ability to convey values and moral judgments, contrast with the coldness of the prints and their dispassionate representation of events, without artifices or adornments. In many cases, the problem does not lie in the moral condition of those who look on, but in their testimonial legitimacy.Throughout the whole series, there is an obvious tension with regard to the limits of vision and the moral implication of witnesses. But while some of the plates announce the impossibility of looking on (plate 26), there are many others in which truth has been obtained and revealed through the exercise of ascetic witnesses. “Yo lo vi” [“I saw it”], he wrote, for example, in plate 44. Though the presence of Goya in the battlefields has been called into question, there is at least one plate in which we could glimpse his figure emerging from the middle of the disaster, in picture 27 “Caridad” [“Charity”], in which the bodies, perhaps during the typhoid epidemic that ravages Zaragoza, are simply buried in a mass grave. One of the most emblematic plates, at this level of self-​referentiality, is titled “Nada. Ello dirá” [“Nothing, it says so”]: a plate in which a rotting corpse writes in a notebook just the word “nothing.” 237

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Figure 16.1  Desastres de la Guerra. Francisco de Goya, 1810–​15. Plate 27: “Caridad”. Source: © Museo del Prado.

Much more important than each of the works taken separately is the collective nature of the series, its repetitive and obsessive character. Like some others of his contemporaries, and more in particular, like the French painter Théodore Géricault, Goya’s work, though informed by aesthetic or political values, was the result of a certain form of vehement obsession. The fascination with repetition does increase the potentialities of the allegory, as Sontag suggested, or the presence of the uncanny, as Bozal claimed. If the Disasters could be read as a book, this is only due to the iterative nature of the reality described (Rocquet 2008, 225–​249).The stubborn reiteration of the same idea serves to hold a position that expresses a form of sympathy with all those who, whatever their political affiliation, have been wronged in their hopes and abandoned in their expectations. Unlike Verstegan’s book, which had been written “to bring out the tears from the eyes, the cries from the mouth, the sighs from the heart and the crying from the chest” (Verstegan [1587] 1995, 49–​50). Goya’s plates followed the brutal logic of the “come and see!” Their plates reflect the attentive and distant eye of the impartial spectator who rather than commiserate in front of others’ misfortune, forces us to look at the crudest and most discarnate result of wrongdoings and misbehaviors. His moral economy shows neither compassion nor hatred, but a third inter-​subjective value: denunciation. Adam Smith called this kind of passion “imaginary resentment,” an emotion that did not originate in our own body, but, at least in principle, in the body of others: “We feel that resentment which we imagine [the victim now dead] ought to feel … The horrors which are supposed to haunt the bed of the murderer, the ghosts which, superstition imagines, rise from their graves to demand vengeance upon those who brought them to an untimely end, all take their origin from this natural sympathy with the imaginary resentment of the slain” (Smith [1759] 1984, 71). Unlike a politics of pity, based on the immediate identification with the sufferers, or unlike the “politics of justice,” interested in 238

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Figure 16.2  Desastres de la Guerra. Francisco de Goya, 1810–​15. Plate 26: “No se puede mirar”. Source: © Museo del Prado.

the punishment of the perpetrator, Goya’s observation is not there to mourn or to judge, but to report. The observer’s expository capacity transcends his (subjective) emotion and explains his (objective) desire to provide a historical record. Against the logic of victimization or the heroic representation of patriotism, avoiding the empathic identification with the victims or the desire to punish the perpetrators, the gaze of the painter favored the representation of a visual space in which all agreements have been broken, all bodies have been violated, all isolated feelings have turned into collective stories of violence and grief. This ambivalence is not only political, but also cognitive. The painter sticks to the titanic effort of not giving anything to compassion or allowing himself a moment of hatred. The fixed idea transmitted by the plates recreates that vague universe in which neither the bodies nor the facts are idealized: “Enterrar y callar” [“Bury and shut up”], says the legend of plate 18. In these as in other cases of the series, the texts reflect the coldness of the merely true statements (Figure 16.2). In his detailed study of distant suffering, the French sociologist Luc Boltanski identified three expository forms that, with all their historical variations, serve to account for the spectacle of violence. The first two, he tells us, may take the form of accusation or philanthropy. The first, accusation, stems from the idea, as old as humanity itself, that it is easier to construct a moral system when an agreement is reached as to who is directly responsible for the evil being denounced. In this case, the observer not only looks on but also condemns. In the second, on the other hand, where sympathy toward benefactors is greater than hatred toward executioners, the action is directed toward philanthropy rather than toward revenge.There is a final possibility, however. In this third aesthetic form, observers cannot be drawn toward denouncement nor do they succumb to sentimentality. On the contrary, beholders keep their gaze steady in the face of horror and do not blink in the face of truth (Boltanski 1999, 116; Frazer 2010, 104): “Now 239

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what maintain contact or, to use an anachronistic term, an interface between aesthetic and politics, was nothing other than the idea of objectivity in the sense of perception without a particular perspective …” (Boltanski 1999, 124).

Social painting: ordinary life between sensationalism and the new aestheticism The representation of social issues also played a significant role in the configuration of the image of Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. Almost one hundred years after Goya’s Disasters, both visual culture and literature shared a common interest in the depiction of singular events without apparent historical significance. This rendering of everyday actions, embedded in the here and the now, turned artists into witnesses and writers into journalists. Far from trying to transmit moral values, linked to an idealization of romantic social types, artists sought to reflect their immediate reality devoid of rhetorical conventions. Following Goya’s footsteps, this depiction of ordinary life oscillated between sheer sensationalism and that particular genre that in nineteenth-​century Spain became known as costumbrismo. Unlike the exaltation of national deeds and heroic behaviors, artistic interest moved from the mere representation of the lower social classes, their manners, characters, and customs, to a notorious predilection for disease, poverty, prostitution, eviction, and misery. The painting of social sorrows, of the most sordid aspects and of the most disadvantaged people, became part of the new aestheticism.1 From a formal point of view, this representation of suffering was rooted in the French-​ inspired naturalism, which counted in the Spanish cultural milieu an equal number of defenders and critics. Among the first, Benito Pérez Galdós, and, especially, Emilia Pardo Bazán, defended a literature without romantic heroes, in which the social strata could be observed and described like the time-​trembling flesh of the anatomical gaze. The controversial countess published in 1882 a detailed discussion of the subject, under the suggestive title of La cuestión palpitante. This text, described as an attempt to popularize the ideas of Émile Zola, divided Spanish intelligentsia into two irreconcilable positions. While Menéndez Pelayo and José María de Pereda, for example, considered that art should exalt beauty and morality, many others were much more prone to defend a literature more interested in the advantages of the minuscule. After all, the depiction of historical facts without historical heroes was taken as a feature of the Spanish people, of its character and national identity. Galdós himself had already made clear that there was a possibility to write a different history of Spain, more focused on the story of its peoples than its rulers. Society as such, or the Spanish people in particular, could be “novelable,” that is to say: the subject of literature and of history. From this point of view, the so-​called historical painting was regarded as a genre artificially created by the Academies, a purely conventional art, without a natural base, and, therefore, called to lose its prestige when the pedantic causes that brought it to life would disappear (Contreras y López de Ayala 1940, 34).2 It was during the 1880s that most representative works of Émile Zola were translated into Spanish. It was in 1897 that the prolific Galdós, the same author who had combined in his Episodios nacionales the history and literature of the Spanish character, would deal with the living conditions of the most neglected and lower strata of society in his Misericordia. The press of the moment explained how Galdós had drawn the main lines of this novel from the unknown life of the poor. He had gone to look for the characters of the story “en las más inmundas casas de dormir, en las más repugnantes tascas, en los vertederos del barrio de las Injurias, allí donde no llegan la caridad ni la policía” [in the filthiest houses of sleep, in the more disgusting tascas, in the landfills of the District of Injuries, where charity and the police do not arrive] (Ortega Munilla 1897, 1). Some years later, in 1901, Pío Baroja would give to 240

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the press the volume of stories generically titled Vidas sombrías, a set of tales based on the living conditions of marginalized figures of the Basque Country. In 1904 came the first volume of the trilogy of La lucha por la vida. In the first of these novels, La busca, the narrator declared his intention of writing not only on happiness, but on misery; not only on splendor and luxury, but on misfortune and poverty (Baroja [1904] 2017, 226). In the prologue to his Episodios nacionales, Galdós had already pointed out how, faced with a history characterized by the marriages of kings and princes, of treaties and alliances, of military campaigns, it was necessary to remove from oblivion what constitutes the existence of peoples: “era forzoso pedir datos a los olvidados anales de las costumbres” [it was necessary to go back to the forgotten annals of customs] (Pérez Galdós [1885] 2008, vol. 1, 13). The forty-​six novels of the series became the first example of Spanish history from below, from the Battle of Trafalgar to the end of the following century. As in the case of Goya, the history of that Spanish character was the history of a disaster, a story to such an extent marked by unreason and irrationality that one of the characters of the work, Santiuste, would end up writing the history of Spain not how it was, but as it should have been (Alvárez Junco 2012, 573). The representation of the pain and suffering of popular classes had again very serious limitations. The main problem was to limit the consequences of natural determinism without falling into the idealization of personal or collective behaviors.The real difficulty was to occupy a middle ground that could avoid the idealized figures of the sainetes and the equally abhorrent taste for sensationalism, so keen to the popular classes. With regard to the latter, there were plenty of examples in Spanish literature that followed the popular preference for the macabre. Along with some authors interested in this form of “tremendismo,” like José Nogales or José Joaquín Domínguez, other more famous authors were also willing to cross the line, including Clarín in Los procesos de la mano negra, or even Azorín, whose articles on “La Andalucía trágica,” published in 1905 in the journal El Imparcial, brought to the foreground the unknown conditions of agrarian Spain, very much like Baroja had portrayed the life of working classes in the suburbs of Madrid, in La Busca, one year earlier (Sastre 2009, 227–​245). Despite these preferences for the depiction of poverty, naturalism was never meant to represent what rejects the senses or the mere repetition of ugly, vile, or miserable things. Pardo Bazán was convinced that French naturalism could be fully accepted once devoid of its more radical principles. The philosophical defense of the causal determination of human actions, for example, that seemed to call into question the boundaries of human freedom and individual responsibility, had to be rejected. After all, individual freedom could not be simply substituted by blind determinism (Pardo Bazán 1882, 16).Thus, while literature could serve to denounce the most selfish and bastard interests and instincts, it should not confuse the representation of reality with the approval of the most dismal aspects of the human condition. Without becoming mere entertainment, literature could not be reduced to representing “la perenne solemnidad y tristeza” [constant soberness and sadness] (Pardo Bazán [1881] 1971, 59). Unlike French naturalism, explained Pardo Bazán, Spanish realism had its origins in La Celestina and El Quijote, in Velázquez and, of course, in Goya. The same tensions came about in the field of the visual arts. The naturalism of Spanish painting at the end of the century formed part of a wider trend already well established in Europe (Lafuente Ferrari 1953, 510). To the lithographs of Paul Gavarni on the population of Paris, the representations of Alphonse Legros on vagabonds and beggars, we may always add the illustrations of Gustave Doré on the miserable life of the working classes, or the emblematic sculpture of Jules Desbois, on Misery (1892), or Paul Roger on hunger (1905). Nor was it, of course, an exclusively French genre. Quite the contrary, the painting of social intent was also felt in many other European countries. It has to be well understood, however, that the qualification 241

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of realistic art not only depended on the choice of the object, but on the position of the beholder. An artist, explained the art historian Linda Nochlin, was not realistic “because he painted a peasant with a hoe or a shepherdess with a lamb; his commitment was deeper: telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. … The word ‘sincerity’ became a realistic war cry” (Nochlin 1991, 29; 2018). Before settling in Madrid in 1890, Sorolla also tried to make his way through the historical genre. One of his first award-​winning works was precisely a large-​format canvas on the Independence War that earned him a second medal in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts. In the following edition, he returned with a religious subject: The burial of Christ. After the jury granted the first medal to a piece by José Jiménez de Aranda titled Una desgracia [A disgrace], it seemed clear that the taste had moved toward social issues. The critic Augusto Comas y Blanco explained how the vision of that scene, of a young woman accused of having killed the fruit of her loves, made a deep impression on Sorolla (Comás y Blanco 1893, 131–​138). Already installed in Madrid, déplacé, —​as he considered himself—​from his native Valencia, Sorolla would begin to address issues of social interest (Pons-​Sorolla 2005, 72–​137). His new themes led him to the world of anonymous events and current affairs, starting with the wonderful watercolor of 1890, El primer hijo [The first son].Two years later, the theme of social inspiration appears strongly in ¡Otra Margarita!, [Another Margarita!] (Figure 16.3). This painting, produced in fifteen days, represented a woman who, handcuffed, was transferred in a third-​class car to face justice, accused of infanticide. Apparently the painter had witnessed the scene during one of his trips from Valencia to Madrid (Pons Sorolla 2005, 83). Together with the effects of light and composition, which earned him the First Class Medal in

Figure 16.3  ¡Otra Margarita! (Another Marguerite!). Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, 1892. Oil on canvas (130.2 × 200 cm). Source: © Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Gift of Charles Nagel, Sr., 1894.

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the National Exhibition of 1892, the scene underlines the melancholic expression of the girl accused and the civil guards who keep her in custody. From Spain, the painting traveled to the Universal Exhibition in Chicago and was acquired by the Art Museum of the University of Washington, in St. Louis. Its title made reference to Goethe’s Margarita, who had also murdered her newborn child, establishing a line of continuity between the singular event and its idealized cultural form, between the crude description of reality and our emotional assessments (Díez y Barón, 2009, 215–​217). This explicit form of expressing perplexity was also employed in the title of Sorolla’s most emblematic work of the period. In ¡Y todavía dicen que el pescado es caro! from 1894, the title confronts the viewer with the profound discrepancy between the real and the moral economies (Figure 16.4). Since the monetary value of the merchandise for sale does not match the price paid by those who produce them, the catch of the day will always bear the macula of the unfair. Of clear social inspiration, the painting was awarded with the First Class Medal of Fine Arts, but also strong criticism for its content or rather, for its lack of transcendence. The art critic Augusto Comas y Blanco, for example, considered that these pictorial subjects missed the idealized forms of true art. Concentrated on the minuscule, the painter turned the exception into the norm and the disgrace of others into a show. The same kind of criticism took place in the case of ¡Triste herencia! [Sad inheritance!]. Sorolla himself explained in an interview published for the first time in The Times that the idea for the work had come to his mind working on the shore of the sea, when he saw a group of

Figure 16.4  “¡Y todavía dicen que el pescado es caro!” Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, 1894. Oil on canvas, 151.5 × 204 cm. Source: © Museo del Prado.

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crippled and helpless children:  “Inútil me parece decir que la presencia de estos niños me produjo penosísima impresión. No perdí momento, y pedí y obtuve del director del Hospital la necesaria autorización para trabajar sobre el terreno y copiar aquel cuadro del natural”3 (Díez and Barón 2009, 265).The painting, which at the beginning was going to be called Los hijos del placer [The children of pleasure], reflected a scene that was “todo verdad, pero triste” [all true, but sad].4 In the manner of the novels by Blasco Ibáñez, with whom the painter shared so many things and who was in fact responsible for the title of some of Sorolla’s most significant works, the difficulty was to look at social reality without falling into false sentimentalism or political denunciation. This “compassionate realism” was not romantic, but it continued the indications of the stereotyped forms of representing emotions, as they had been suggested by the great treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Contrary to Goya, whose appreciation of social calamity rested on an obsessive form of representation and almost maniac appreciation of truth, Sorolla’s paintings focused on a dignified form of compassion, in part because of the impression that many of these scenes produced on his own conscience. In relation to the hospital of San Juan de Dios, which inspired Triste Herencia, for example, he referred to those children as the saddest waste of society. The critique of an idealized representation of Spain vis-​à-​vis a real Spain became a constant from the 1890s to the first decades of the following century. The writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, for example, when comparing the paintings of Ignacio Zuloaga to those of Sorolla, argued that while the Basque painter depicted an unreal country, a nation of chulas, majos, and other types, Sorolla shared Zola’s naturalism (Tomás 2012, 24). Furthermore, while Zuloaga’s pessimism was directly linked to his vindication of a “black Spain,” Sorolla seemed to stand for hope and redemption. In 1913, he explained that, while in the previous decades “there was almost no book in which there was not a neurasthenic,” he felt optimistic about the future of the nation (Tomás 2012, 35). In their own way, his representations of the popular classes, perceived by the critics as the verification of national degeneration and the loss of moral values in favor of extremist ideas, had for him an entirely different meaning. He could have never thought that the same critique that he received for having been too attached to the dictates of nature would also accuse him of rendering a dulcified idea of Spain, as false as the stereotypes defended by the Romantics (Demange 2014, 130) The art historian Francisco Calvo Serraller has rightly explained how this game of oppositions that placed Zuloaga on one side and Sorolla on the other reflected the much deeper issue of Spanish national identity (Calvo Serraller 1998, 25). The polarization of the two Spains, initially suggested by Darío de Regoyos and later continued by many other writers and essayists, was not simply a way of understanding political cohesion, but an issue related to the position of the beholder with regard to the pain of others (Pérez de Ayala, 1927, 264–​265). For the philosopher Unamuno, for example, rector of the University of Salamanca, there was not a single Spain, but several: “La España vista y sentida por Sorolla, verbigracia, no es la vista y sentida por Zuloaga, como la España que mejor ha visto Blasco Ibáñez no es la de Baroja o la mía”5 (Unamuno [1926] 1976, 53). His, Unamuno’s, was the deep and gloomy Spain, the sad and melancholic country represented by the Basque painter. Even in the picture of ¡Triste Herencia! Unamuno sees a “tendency to health,” a redemption by the sea, a superficial and vain form of hope. And interestingly, real Spain, the one that in his view best reflected the tragic and Catholic feeling of existence, seemed typical of Zuloaga’s painting. While Sorolla’s art was rather typical of those who want to “vivir y no pensar” [live and not think] Zuloaga’s canvases expressed “lo austero y lo serio, lo católico de España” [the austere and serious, the Catholic of Spain] (Unamuno [1926] 1976, 57).

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Spanish Catholicism The history of nineteenth-​century Spain, and Spanish art, has been investigated from many and different perspectives (Portús 2002; Pérez Ledesma 1998). From the return of Ferdinand VII to the controversial figure of Alfonso XIII, Spanish politics was marked by the reiteration of debates, mostly unsuccessful, both on their own national identity and on the anchoring of the country’s character in the international concert. The anticlericalism showed by many afrancesados, the radical opposition to the doctrine and, most important, to the privileges of the Spanish Church, was a constant element in Spanish politics from the times of the war against Napoleon. And yet, even those in favor of a much more liberal regime were marked by a way of understanding pain and suffering pregnant with religious values. The idea of opposing a Catholic Spain to a secularized nation may be tempting, but, as far as the representations of pain are concerned, even the most disparate ideological positions seemed to stem from the same religious roots.The Catholic naturalism of Pardo Bazán, the compassionate realism of Joaquín Sorolla, as well as the idea of the ​​penitentiary justice of Concepción Arenal, owe much to a moral economy of piety not exempt from religious connotations. In the case of the fin-​de-​siècle culture that gave birth to the myth of the black Spain, Zuloaga’s painting came to represent an idea of Spain immersed in ultramontane Catholicism, but Sorolla was also embedded in a representation of pain inspired in hope and redemption. As far as the representation of human suffering is concerned, both the white and the black Spains resulted from a Catholic understanding of suffering. Furthermore, both ideas of Spain found their source of inspiration in that middle ground invented by Goya at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Strange as it may seem, religiosity here is not so much related to the (material) circumstances of those who suffer but to the (moral) conditions of those who look on. We have already seen how Goya’s rendering of the objectivity of suffering, as a secular form of the moral economy of cognition, was closely related to a new form of vehemence, a notorious passion that will populate early nineteenth-​century Europe (Moscoso 2017). The same obsession that, with the name of monomania, will corrupt the soul of the mentally ill, will also affect many other men and women who were willing to turn perseverance into the prelude to glory. The historian Philip Fisher has noticed how the new vehement passions were hardly distinguishable from what the illustrated philosopher Claude-​Adrien Helvétius described, in the middle of the eighteenth century, as “strong passions” (Fisher 2002). In both cases, what served to explain madness also accounted for all those glorious achievements that resulted from an irresponsible tenacity. By fixing our attention on the object of our desires, wrote Helvétius, passion makes us consider it under unknown aspects and, therefore, conceive and execute enterprises that seem absurd in the eyes of the crowd (Helvétius [1758] 1984, 320). In Spain, this form of vehemence was not exempt of religious connotations. On the contrary, the qualities required to serve as an objective witness were very much related to the logic of altruism and self-​denial that inspired Spanish Catholic practices.The representation of pain was only the counterpart of the pains of representation, a much larger agenda on the sufferings of the witness, who should remain faithful to his task without allowing the slight possibility of surrender. In the Spanish case, this dramatic behavior will find its source of inspiration in the interior of convents. It is well known that, in the manner of Alonso Quijano, who lost his mind reading books of chivalry, the nuns and pious of Spain’s Counter-​Reformation also discover their patterns of action in the pages of sacred texts and, more specifically, in the martyrologies and lives of saints. The Generación del 98, obsessed with this polarization between a Spain characterized

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by the search for a transcendent ideal and another Spain stuck to the demands of the present, failed to understand that the same obsessive passion crossed them both.The obsession of Alonso Quijano is not very different from the vehemence of Castilian beatas or the conquistador López de Aguirre. Their emotional drama, so different in objective, participates equally in a form of sacred vehemence, an unbridled passion in which all of them seem to play the role for which they believe they were born. Writing in 1945, in his Spain as a problem, Laín Entralgo identified, in effect, the national problem in the stagnant patriotic character that, without having understood the modernity of the north, despised the utopia of the south. This stubborn character of the Spanish mentality was not, however, only typical of the conservative factions. On the contrary, the secularization proposed by liberal Spain was also based on the same wicker: “Sí, muy a la española. Esa adscripción sin reservas de toda la persona a la utopía, ese empadronamiento del hombre entero en la ínsula soñada e irreal, ¿no son, por ventura, faenas caras al hombre español, sea auténtico o aberrante? Quijotismo, en fin de cuentas; quijotismo del bien real o del bien ilusorio”6 (Laín Entralgo 1949, 16).The theater of the world was not a Spanish invention, of course, but much of the myth of Spanish national identity was built upon this strange idea of perseverance without measure and blindness without purpose. In the Spanish case, obstinacy was always linked to two essential elements: first, the idea of honor and, not least, religious dogmatism, that is: the need to settle the faith on a rock of imperturbable appearance. The “holy vehemence,” of which so many examples can be found in Spanish religious practices during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was part of a national stereotype, of a cultural identity that was, by definition, enemy of change. At the end of eighteenth century in Spain, there is no better example of this vehement passion than the attitude of Juan Martín, who was allowed to adopt the nickname of his native town and came to be known as El empecinado. The life of this son of farmers, who in May 1808 left his native village of Aranda with two men, and who in September 1811 sent an army of 3,000, the same character that refused to surrender to the French even after having sacrificed most of his troops, served as a reference for one of the stories of Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios nacionales (Pérez Galdós [1874] 1993). His life contained all the elements expected in these reports:  from the predisposition to arms in his childhood to his many military and moral values. Described in all aspects as a great patriot, el empecinado does not simply refer to the historical hero or to the picturesque character included in Galdós’ novel. Under the form of this “holy Vehemence,” Spanish stubbornness, so much present in the romantic idealized figures of both literature and fiction, from don Quixote to Isabel de Castile, or from the conquistador to the bullfighter, played also a very significant role in the world of art. For while the influence of Goya in the black characters of Zuloaga cannot be denied, as Unamuno defended, the obsessive nature of his own sacrifice, willing to look on where others will surrender, is also full of sacrificial value. Spanish Catholicism does not simply affect the dogma, but a form of moral conduct able to sustain the position against all odds. Just as those women portrayed by Goya in the Disasters were able to forget about themselves, putting their lives at the service of the nation, so the artist must forget his own emotional and political position and recreate a referential space that could be considered objective. It is not charity or compassion, not even justice or indictment, but an obstinacy located in the context of the observational capacity. In the same vein, the kind of moral realism defended by Pardo Bazán does not depend so much on the denial of determinism, but on the sacred and moral determination of the beholder.

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Notes 1 Some exhibition catalogues have paid special attention to these issues. See, among others:  La mirada 1998a, Paisaje 1998b, La Huella 1998c, Sorolla 1998d. 2 “Tengo para mí que la llamada pintura histórica es un género artificialmente creado por las Academias, un arte puramente convencional, sin base natural, y, por lo tanto, llamado a perder su prestigio cuando desaparezcan las causas pedantescas que le han dado vida. … Así como toda la naturaleza es bella, todas las épocas de la historia son igualmente pintorescas, y la nuestra, con su paño negro, sus lanas grises y pardas, sus blusas y sus fracs, sus sedas y sus percales, no lo es menos que las anteriores. No nos cansamos de repetirles: pintad la época presente, pintad vuestra época, lo que veis, lo que sentís.” 3 “I cannot explain how much they impressed me. I did not lose time to get a permit from the Director of the Hospital to work on the ground and copy that scene from nature.” 4 “… Esa triste herencia es mi pesadilla y mis temores, representa el momento en que un hermano de San Juan de Dios ayuda a unos pobres niños tullidos a que se metan en el mar; todo él está lleno de niños desnudos (enfermos), el mar es de un azul oscurísimo de un día de agosto pesado y triste; todo al sol, pero como no hay más colores que el negro del traje del hermano y los tonos macilentos de carne floja y miserable, y el mar sin alegría, y la poca playa oscura por ser la arena mojada, todo verdad pero triste, temo se metan conmigo” (quoted in Exhibition Catalogue 2008, 268–​269). 5 “The Spain seen and felt by Sorolla is not the one viewed and felt by Zuloaga, as the Spain that Blasco Ibáñez has seen is not Baroja’s or mine.” 6 “Yes, this is very much the Spanish way. That unreserved ascription of the whole person to the utopia, that registration of the whole person in the dreamed and unreal island, are not, by chance, tasks that belong to the Spanish man, whether authentic or illusory? Quijotismo, after all; quijotismo of the real good or the imaginary kind.”

Works cited Abruzzo, Margaret. 2011. Polemical Pain, Slavery, Cruelty and the Rise of Contemporary Humanitarianism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Alvárez Junco, José. 2012. Mater Dolorosa. La idea de España en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Taurus. Artola, Miguel. 2008. Los afrancesados. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Baroja, Pío. [1904] 2017. La busca, edited by Juan María Marín Martínez. Madrid, Cátedra. Barón, Javier. 2008. “La pintura social en España.” In Arte, poder y sociedad en la España de los siglos XV a XX, edited by M. Cabañas Bravo, 401–​416. Madrid: CSIC. Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Bourke, Joanna. 2011. The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bozal,Valerano. 2011. Goya. Madrid: Antonio Machado. Calvo Serraller, Francisco. 1998. “Sorolla y Zuloaga: Luz y Sombra del drama moderno español.” In Sorolla, Zuloaga. Dos visiones para un cambio de siglo. Madrid: Fundación Cultural Mapfre. Carrret Parrondo, Juan. 2007. Goya. Estampas y Litografías. Barcelona: Electa. Comas y Blanco, Augusto. 1893. IV Centenario del descubrimiento de América. Exposición internacional de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 1892). Juicios críticos publicados en El Correo. Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Fortanet. Contreras y López de Ayala, Juan de. 1940. “La teoría de las artes plásticas en el siglo XIX.” In vol. 12 of Discursos Académicos, Discurso 50. Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Démange, Stéphanie. 2014. “¡A los pintores les ha dado por mojar el pincel en lágrimas! La pauvreté au miroir des Salons (Espagne, 1890–​1910).” PhD diss., Paris, Sorbonne. Díez, José Luis, and Javier Barón, eds. 2009. Joaquín Sorolla. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado. Entre dos siglos. España 1900. 2008. Madrid: Fundación MAPFRE. Fisher, Philip. 2002. Vehement Passions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frazer, Michael L. 2010. The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gere, Cathy. 2017. Pain, Pleasure and the Greater Good. From the Panopticon to the Skinner Box and Beyond. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

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Javier Moscoso Harris, Tomás, 1994. Goya. Engravings and Lithographs. 2 vols. Oxford: Bruno Cashier. Helvétius, Claude Adrien. [1758] 1984. De l’Esprit, Spanish edition by José Manuel Bermudo. Madrid: Editora Nacional. La huella del 98 en la pintura española contemporánea. 1998c. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1998. Hughes, Robert. 2005. Goya. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Joaquín Sorolla. 2009. Madrid: Museo del Prado. Lafuente Ferrari, Enrique. 1953. Breve historia de la pintura española. Madrid: Tecnos. Laín Entralgo, Pedro. 1949. España como problema. Madrid:  Escelier. Seminario de Problemas Hispanoaméricanos. McDonald, Mark. 2014. Disasters of War. London: The Folio Society. La mirada del 98. Arte y Literatura en la Edad de Plata. 1998. Madrid: Ministerio de Educación y Cultura. Moscoso, Javier. 2012. Pain. A Cultural History. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Moscoso, Javier. 2014. “Lingering and exquisite pains. Facing cancer in early modern Europe.” In Hurt Feelings. Pain and Emotions in Modern History, edited by Robert Boddice, 16–​35. Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan. Moscoso, Javier. 2015a. “Politics of pain:  a good subject for eminent amateurs.” Rúbrica de Historia Contemporánea 4(7): 67–​77. Moscoso, Javier. 2015b. “History of labor pain relief.” In Epidural Labor Analgesia, edited by Giorgio Capogna, 9–​61. London: Springer. Moscoso, Javier. 2017. Promesas Incumplidas: una historia política de las pasiones. Madrid: Taurus. Nochlin, Linda. 1991. El Realismo. Madrid: Alianza. Nochlin, Linda. 2018. Misère. The Visual Representation of Misery in the 19th century. London:  Thames & Hudson. Ortega Munilla, José. 1897. “Misericordia.” Los lunes de El Imparcial. Año XXXI. Madrid. Paisaje y figura del 98. 1998b. Madrid: Fundación Central Hispano. Pardo Bazán, Emilia, [1881] 1971. “Prefacio” to Viaje de Novios, edited by Mariano Baquero Goyanes. Barcelona: Labor. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. [1882] 1989. La cuestión palpitante. Critical Edition by José Manuel Herrán. Barcelona: Anthropos. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. [1886] 2016. Los pazos de Ulloa. Madrid: Cátedra. Pérez de Ayala, Francisco. 1927. “La España negra” (El Liberal, 30 de Abril). In Pequeños Ensayos, 264–​265. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Pérez Galdós, Benito. [1874] 1993. Juan Martín, el Empecinado. Vol. 3 of Episodios nacionales. Madrid: Aguilar. Pérez Galdós, Benito. [1885] 2008. “Segundo Prólogo a la edición ilustrada de 1885.” In La guerra de independencia, vol 1 of Episodios Nacionales, primera serie, 13. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Pérez Ledesma, Manuel. 1998. “Ciudadanía política y ciudadanía social. Los cambios del “Fin de siglo.” Studia histórica. Historia contemporánea 16: 35–​65. Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E., and Julián Gallego, 1995. Goya. The Complete Etchings and Lithographs. Munich and New York: Prestel. Pons-​Sorolla, Blanca. 2005. Joaquín Sorolla. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa. Portús, Javier. 2002. Ternura y melodrama: pinturas de escenas familiares en tiempos de Sorolla. Valencia: Museo del siglo XIX, Generalitat Valenciana. Rancière, Jacques. 2011. The Emantipated Spectator. New York: Verso Books. Rocquet, Claude-​Henri. 2008. Goya. Paris: Buchet Chastel. Sastre, Ravael. 2009.“La cuestión social en el espejo literario: proletariado urbano y novela realista española del siglo XIX.” Revista de Derecho Social 46: 227–​245. Smith, Adam. [1759] 1984. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books. Sorolla y Zuloaga. Dos visiones para un cambio de siglo. 1998d. Madrid: Fundación Cultural Mapfre Vida. Tomás, Facundo. 2012. Zuloaga y Sorolla, artistas en una edad de plata.Valencia: Generalitat valenciana. Unamuno, Miguel de. [1926] 1976. “De arte pictórica.” In En torno a las artes, 46–​63. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.

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17 RECREATING THE HOMELAND ABROAD Migrants, settlers, and Iberian identities in the Americas, 1870–​1920 Xosé M. Núñez Seixas The defense of the colonial order acted since the mid-​nineteenth century as a powerful factor of Spanish nation-​building, and as a unifying agent for the different local and regional identities within the metropolitan territory of the Spanish empire (Núñez Seixas 2015). Since the mid-​nineteenth century, the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico were increasingly regarded as an integrated part of the body of the nation, although subject to a special legislation that suspended many of the political rights for those living in the Caribbean islands. A good part of the metropolitan political and cultural elites, and even of the peninsular residents of Cuba and Puerto Rico—​the Philippines was another story—​saw no great contradiction in this (Fradera 2012, 2018; Martínez Antonio 2013). The maintenance of the colonial status quo in the Antilles was an objective shared by most political and social elites. Even Catalan regionalists since the 1870s turned to upholders of the continuity of colonial rule whenever the demand of home rule for Cuba and Puerto Rico was at stake in the Spanish parliament. This was also closely related to the issue of slavery in the Antilles, whose abolition was identified with colonial self-​government. Thus, the Catalan progressive liberal Víctor Balaguer, who became Minister of Overseas and Finance for some months in 1871–​1872, uphheld the “historic rights” of Catalonia to self-​government, but also the view that Spain had been recreated, including implicitly its linguistic and ethnic variety, in the Caribbean colonies, due to the transplanting of institutional uses but also of the mixture of races and origins. The “overseas Spain,” as a continuation of the variety of Spain’s provinces and regions, should find political accommodation within the Spanish nation (Coma i Güell 2008; Schmidt-​Nowara  2004). In fact, the recurrent debates between 1833 and 1895 around the bills of insular autonomy, and the inclusion of Cuba and Puerto Rico as “States” authorized to form part of the Spanish federal Republic (unlike the rest of the colonial territories) in the draft Constitution of 1873, showed that the regional question in metropolitan Spain and colonial self-​government were deeply intertwined. There was a line of continuity with the constitutional discussions of 1812, as well as with the legislative debates on the Special Laws for Cuba and Puerto Rico in the following decades. The question of what treatment to give to overseas Spain, those colonies that supposedly were not colonies, but territories juxtaposed with metropolitan Spain, thus

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developed into a broader issue: a touchstone for the concept of the territorial structure of the Spanish nation-​state during the second half of the nineteenth century (Fradera 2012).

Migrants into Spaniards? The Basques, the Catalans, and the Galicians occupied a very prominent place among the Spanish settlers and immigrants who had arrived in Latin America since the mid-​nineteenth century; it was the same case with the Canary Islanders in Cuba. Since their arrival, they participated in the mutual-​aid and recreational associations that were Spanish in nature. Cuba was an exception, because regional associationism was precocious there, due largely to the fact that the island was a Spanish colony until 1898, and that the need to set up Spanish centres had not become apparent to the same extent. However, there were elite clubs, such as the Casino Español, and the Spanish Volunteers militia recruited adherents from all regions, as well as Cubans, to fight the Cuban insurgents (Bizcarrondo and Elorza 2000; Elorza and Hernández Sandoica 1998). Groups of Basque, Catalan, and Galician emigrants provided a good part of the ruling elites of Spanish immigrant societies, including those in Cuba and Puerto Rico, which increasingly voiced Spanish nationalist slogans opposed to any home-​rule demands from local creoles. This also extended to other American territories, from New York to Buenos Aires. However, the fact that, unlike what occurred during the early modern period, most Spanish immigrants in the Americas came from the linguistic periphery of the former metropolis added some nuances to the expression of their sentiments of belonging to Spain. In the symbolic universe of the celebrations and the imaginaries promoted by Spanish migrant elites, a prominent place was always reserved for different regional ethnocultural expressions, without this being considered a contradictory component of Spanish national affirmations. One example is the various delegations of the Asociación Española de Socorros Mutuos (AESM, founded in 1857), in Buenos Aires. In the celebrations held by their diverse local branches to commemorate the Spanish patriotic dates, the folklore, the gastronomy, and the symbols of the diverse regions were deployed as an expression of Spain’s cultural diversity.The Basque-​Argentinian writer Francisco Grandmontagne evoked in 1899 a quarrel among Galician, Basque, and Asturian immigrants in a local assembly of the AESM in an Argentinian town. They argued over which musical instruments (bagpipes or txistus) should prevail in the Spanish celebration to be held days later. It was a creole, son of Spanish immigrants, who mediated amongst them and found a solution. He was also the only one who could speak good Castilian (Grandmontagne 1899). This also revealed a parallel phenomenon. Basque emigrants, Catalans, Galicians or settlers from other regions transferred their local or regional identity to America since the mid-​ nineteenth century; but this belonging was almost always pre-​political, and did not contradict their adherence to Spanish national identity. On the contrary, Spanish emigrants whose mother tongue was not Castilian—​in Argentina, for instance, they accounted for around 75 percent of Spanish immigrants in the last decades of the nineteenth century—​often saw their Spanish identity reinforced in the Americas. This was due to the Spanish indoctrination campaign developed by the leadership of Spanish migrant institutions and journals, as well as to the presence of a foreign other: they reacted against the more or less open hispanophobia of Argentinian, Mexican, or Cuban public opinion, which at some points became very visible and gave rise to symbolic incidents (García 1998; Pérez Vejo 2011). Many peasants with little articulated feeling of belonging to the Spanish nation became fiercely Spanish by being signaled as such by Americans (Duarte 1998, 2002, 2004).

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There were, however, notable differences among the various regional groups. First, there were very divergent degrees of knowledge of the Castilian language, which in many cases (particularly among Basques, but also among many Galicians) was rather passive than active. Many Spanish migrants learnt proper Spanish in the Americas. Moreover, the social prestige of all three ethnic groups in the host societies was very divergent. Basques were favored by the existence in South American and Mexican society of a positive ethnic stereotype that had roots in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Seen as good Catholics and honest people, this facilitated their acceptance into the middle classes of the host society. Catalans were also respected as merchants and bankers, though in some cases were also identified as social revolutionaries. Galician immigrants were mostly handicaped by a negative ethnic stereotype, which went back to the colonial period.Therefore, while the choice of a Basque identity for an immigrant meant greater chances of social integration and upward moblity, many Galician immmigrants trended to escape that ethnic label. Ethnicity was then used by migrant elites as an useful strategy to gain recognition in the eyes of the host society (Alvarez Gila 2005; Núñez Seixas 2013). The elites of the respective collectives of Iberian migrants were renewed from 1874, thanks to the arrival of successive layers of expatriates or émigrés that abandoned Spain after the failure of the First Spanish Republic (1873) and the final defeat of Carlism (1876). Some of them were Basque and Navarrese Carlists, many others were Federal republicans and even regionalists. Expatriates brought with them from Europe ideological influences of a more or less regionalist decentralizing tendency: the defense of the Fueros (collective territorial privileges) in the Basque case, and federalism in the case of the Galicians and Catalans. A  part of these new elites was also encouraged by the movements promoting the cultural and literary recovery of the regional languages of Catalonia and Galicia. With them came the publication of books in regional languages in Argentina or Cuba, as well as the literary contests in Galician and Catalan language. These political elites, who became ethnic leaders in the Americas, welcomed too the narratives that exalted the glorious deeds of their regions in the past (Núñez Seixas 2014, 145–​172). These narratives were not yet opposed to an overarching sense of Spanish identity founded on the idea of unity in variety. However, the new aspects of ethnocultural affirmation contributed to the introduction of tension in terms of the long-​term Spanish nationalist discourse. Several groups and magazines of Catalanist character made their appearance in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Cuba from the mid-​1870s. Some of them already had quite radical features, such as the journal La Gralla (Montevideo, 1885), the promoters of which established a specifically Catalanist association (Societat Catalana Rat Penat) and held the first Catalan literary contests in America (December 1887). Basque immigrants from Spain also developed some cultural affinity to French Basque immigrants, based on the fact that most of them were Basque speakers. In fact, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a shared association of Spanish and French Basques, the Euskal Etxea [Basque House], emerged in Buenos Aires. From the end of the nineteenth century, some traits emerged of a common identity discourse, which tended to group Basque immigrants from all “seven provinces” of the whole Basque Country into a shared community defined, above all, by having a common language. This stood in sharp contrast to parallel protonationalist discourses in the Spanish Basque Country since the 1890s, based on race and history (Alvarez Gila 2005, 2011). Regionalist and proto-​nationalist doctrines crafted in the periphery of metropolitan Spain found a quite positive reception among Basque, Catalan, and Galician migrants in the Americas. In part, those narratives, mainly based on history and language, took up a completely different function in the Americas, and were used by some immigrant elites for diverging purposes. In the case of Galicians, the vindication of the past and present glories of the history of Galicia 252

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served for a broader objective: the elevation of the social prestige of the whole of the immigrant community in the face of the shared feeling of being belittled by Latin American societies and of the rest of the Spanish immigrants. In the Basque case, fuerista and protonationalist narratives impinged upon the “superiority” and the inherent nobility of the natives of the Basque Country, thus contributing to enhancing their positive image, which was already present in Latin American societies. Nevertheless, these aspects were still far from leading to the denial of the Spanishness of the Basque Country, Galicia, or Catalonia.

The Cuban War of Independence and Iberian migrants The impact of the Cuban War of Independence of 1895–​1898 on the political evolution and the inner articulation of the Spanish migrant communities in the Americas gave rise to two types of reactions. On the one hand, in Cuba and Puerto Rico there was an extreme polarization of political positions between the immigrant elites and the Spanish settlers’ community in general. The pro-​independence attitudes, which sympathized with the Cuban insurgents, generated a much greater symbolic identification with their local homelands among some sectors of the Galician and Catalan immigrant elite, a part of which was also receptive to the possibility of the Spanish State granting a statute of colonial autonomy to Cuba and Puerto Rico. This might have marked the beginnings of regional self-​government for Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia.These positions, however, suffered a clear loss of legitimacy within the Spanish colony at the outbreak of the Spanish-​American War, and after the Spanish defeat in 1898 were dismasted. Among the Iberian and Canary Islander settlers, many supporters of political-​administrative decentralization, the adoption of federal self-​government, or the restoration of political privileges (Fueros) to their home territories could also be found at the metropolitan heart of the empire. However, their perspective tended to be very different when dealing with the prospect of autonomy for the overseas colonies.Their argument was twofold. On the one hand, as European and “civilized” peoples, Catalans or Galicians were supposed to deserve self-​government, while Cubans and Puerto Ricans were not. On the other, colonial autonomy would empower black people and former slaves. The continuity of the Spanish presence was regarded as a barrier to racial anarchy. Some of the most fierce opponents of Cuban autonomy at the end of the nineteenth century, such as the Galician journalist Enrique Novo or the Basque journal in Havana, Laurac-​Bat, saw no contradiction in advocating centralism in the Caribbean and decentralization in metropolitan Spain. In Novo’s view, while Cuban autonomism aimed at creating political spaces for favoring secession, Iberian regionalists based their claims upon authentic cultural differences (Novo García 1894; Abeledo 2002; Ugalde Zubiri 2012, 148–​149). Conversely, Cuban autonomists, as the case of their leader Antonio Govín showed, often oscillated between the temptation to imitate the incipient regionalisms of the Iberian Peninsula, forming parliamentary alliances with them and learning from their political and cultural strategies, and maintaining a prudential distance toward those who were perceived as mere standard bearers of local metropolitan peculiarities. For the Caribbean autonomists, Cuba’s own insularity would determine its national specificity, which they regarded as being self-​evident as a geographical reality, with no need for historical-​cultural arguments (Sappez 2016, 216–​221). In other cases, the stimulus of Cuban independence paved the way for an emulation of the Cuban example by those promoting their own national distinctiveness. It was no coincidence that, throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, several Catalan nationalist groups emerged on the island which favoured the cause of Catalan independence from Santiago de Cuba (1898, Centre Catalanista; 1907, Catalunya Grup Nacionalista Radical), Guantánamo (Bloc 253

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Nacionalista, 1911), and Camagüey (Casal Nacionalista) to Havana. Through the second decade of the twentieth century, Catalanists gradually seized control of some of the main mutual-​aid associations of the Catalan community in Cuba, particularly in the Centre Català (founded in 1882) of Havana from 1911, while the powerful Sociedad de Beneficencia de Naturales de Cataluña was in the hands of a pro-​Spanish middle-​class leadership (Roy 1988, 1999). The emerging symbolism of the minority Catalan independence movement was clearly influenced by Cuban models, as seen in the pro-​independence ensign (estelada), which imitated the Cuban flag. The Catalanist discourse on the island sought from the beginning to find a common genealogy with Cuban nationalism and to mold its historical and symbolic references to the patterns of Cuban nationalism (Crexell 1988). Similarly, at the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, Galicianist groups that remained active in Cuba were radicalized and adopted, to a large extent, pro-​independence attitudes which, through their symbology, imaginary, and discourse were closer to the Cuban insurrectionist model (exemplified by leaders such as José Martí or Carlos Manuel Céspedes) than that of Galician nationalism in Europe. Some Canary Islanders who imitated the Cuban example crafted a new nationalist doctrine, which regarded them as a nation. They founded in Havana a short-​lived Partido Nacionalista Canario in 1924, the first political party of that tendency in the history of the Canary Islands’ movement (Núñez Seixas 1992, 2014, 145–​146). In November 1897, the Spanish government granted Cuba and Puerto Rico two statutes of “colonial autonomy,” which recognized their existence as separate entities within the Spanish state, the constitution of bicameral parliaments, and an administrative council with broad powers. However, the provisional government established in December 1897 and the first elections, by male census suffrage, held in March–​April 1898, were late in arriving. The victory of the autonomists in those elections was pyrrhic and the intervention of the US in the Spanish-​Cuban conflict prevented autonomy from being implemented. On January 1, 1899, Spanish sovereignty over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines ceased to exist. In spite of this, colonial home rule constitutes a precedent for the later formulas of political accommodation of ethnonational diversity which were implemented in Spain in 1913–​1914, 1931–​1936 and 1978–​1980 (Cores Trasmonte 1984; Aguado Renedo 2002; Alonso Romero 2002, 110–​198).

A new impulse for Spanish nationalism in the diaspora It was not only autonomist and decentralising tendencies that arrived from overseas. The other extreme of the polarization was the accentuation of the Spanish national sentiment of a large part of the emigrant elites. Spanish nationalism, in its most radical, intransigent, and unitary form, was also born or at least strengthened in the Caribbean. It was there that it found a new direct expression as an interclass social movement, and in particular as a “unionism” structured upon battalions of volunteers, the Spanish Casino, and later the Constitutional Union party, showing its ability to mobilize during the Ten Years’ War (1868–​1878), as well as during the Little War [Guerra chiquita] of 1879–​1880. The Cuban rebels became a new “other” of Spanish nationalism, often characterized by racial phenotypes. They were seen as vulgar maroons, enemies of Catholicism and civilization, and were also the object of cruel caricatures in Catalan journals and even publications associated with Catalan federalist republicanism, such as La Campana de Gràcia (Stucki 2010). The demobilization of the battalions of pro-​Spanish volunteers, the rejection of Cuban nationalism’s Hispanophobe discourse, and the occupation of the island by the United States (now regarded as a new invader), introduced a renewed trend of Spanish nationalism through a narrative of national regeneration strongly influenced by the experience of the Cuban wars. 254

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“Integral” Spanish nationalism thus developed in a remarkable way amongst Spanish settlers in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. They had experienced an intense nationalist mobilization against the Cuban independence fighters and, to a lesser extent, against the Puerto Ricans. Although the Spanish nationalist mobilization in the Iberian territory ground to a standstill after the defeat by the United States in 1898, its remnants would be visible in the persistence of a strong “Cuban nostalgia” in twentieth-​century Spanish national culture: the lament for the loss of a jewel in the imperial crown without equal. Amongst those who remained in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the memory of this mobilization was kept alive for several decades, through distinctive ceremonies and celebrations in memory of the Spanishness of the islands. One example was the worship of the Spanish bicolor flag, sometimes shared by many Cubans as a symbol of Latin opposition to the new Northern American power. Another was the cult of the Spanish fallen soldiers during the war of 1895–​1898, which contrasted sharply with the frugality of politics of memory that were implemented in metropolitan Spain to mourn the dead for the empire in the overseas territories (Klein 2002, 190–​243). The return of demobilized soldiers, as well as of Spanish migrants who had prospered—​ the indianos—​in the Americas and of many supporters of the Caribbean islands’ Spanishness fed back into that nostalgia. Returning settlers, officials, and soldiers reinstated in metropolitan Spain became the backbone of a new “integral” nationalism. Spain had to become more “Spanish.” Its central postulate was simple, but effective:  in the future, the State should be uncompromising toward the territorial claims of the periphery. Otherwise, the Catalans would be the next to leave the national community, following the path opened up by the Cubans; and many others would follow them. The Spanish nation had to be regenerated and reinforced through the conversion of passive citizenship into a broad and disciplined social movement, as had been the volunteers of Cuba (Ucelay-​Da Cal 1997, 1999). Both in Argentina and in Uruguay, the intense nationalist mobilization amongst Spanish immigrants in 1895–​1898 also left behind some enduring traces. On the one hand, some federal republicans moderated their autonomist whims. Instead, they reformulated their discourse toward a new Spanish nationalism crafted on a positivist basis, and joined the republican elite which, as of 1903, was represented by organizations such as the Spanish Republican League (Liga Republicana Española, LRE) in Argentina. Several of them favoured the federalization of Spain on the basis of ethnocultural communities purportedly legitimized by a distinctive history and culture, yet they also remained faithful to Spanish patriotism. This was the case with the Galician pedagogue Ignacio Ares de Parga, or with the Catalan Martín Dedeu (Martín Dedeu 1919). Some others converted to a Spanish nationalist creed that tended toward the Jacobin and whose model was the French Republic or, in some aspects, Argentina itself (Duarte 2002, 2004). On the contrary, with the loss of international prestige in Spain after 1898 and the emergence, in Spain, of sub-​state nationalisms between 1901 and 1916, a part of the old Catalan and Galician republicans residing in America also adopted ethnonationalist tenets, and gradually changed their national loyalties toward the former “regions.” A good example of this was lawyer Antoni P. Aleu, arrived in Argentina in 1869, promoter of the regionalist magazine L’Aureneta (1876–​1890), who was welcomed in Barcelona by Catalanist elites as the main leader of the Catalans from Argentina (Duarte 1998; Fernández 2019, 169–​175). As much for the Galicians as for the Basques, the advent in the Americas of new elites supposed the contribution of new ideas coming from the metropolis.The arrival in the River Plate area of Basque immigrants already imbued with the new nationalist doctrine was recorded from 1903. They were, in particular, several militants from the first Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), such as Nemesio de Olariaga and the publisher, Sebastián Amorrortu, who already in 1904 founded a 255

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party branch in Buenos Aires, followed by another in Rosario seven years later. Several Basque priests who were sympathetic toward nationalism also arrived in the River Plate region and became highly influential within the immigrant community. Something similar happened in Havana in 1908, as well as in Uruguay, Mexico, and the United States (Ugalde Zubiri 1996; Alvarez Gila 2011). There were also some Catalanist activists who arrived in America as more or less voluntary exiles. This was the case with the Catalanist leader in Chile Josep Abril, forced to leave Catalonia in 1909; Hipòlit Nadal i Mallol and Pere Seras, who arrived in Argentina in 1911–​1913 to escape military conscription; Josep Lleonart, who presided over the Casal Català of Buenos Aires, and the writer and journalist Joan Torrendell, who arrived in 1911 in the River Plate. It was also the case of some Galician nationalists, such as the traveling salesman Ramiro Isla Couto or the journalist Eduardo Blanco-​Amor, who arrived in 1919 in the River Plate area (Fernández 2011, 2019, 129–​130; Nadal i Mallol 1928; Núñez Seixas 1992). Most of them were not proper exiles, but economic migrants who brought with them new ideas from their home country of origin. For them, the diffusion of ethnonationalism among the collectivities of their emigrated fellows in America was also a part of their strategy of ethnic leadership, in order to obtain the massive support of emigrants for nationalist agitation, shaping a “mobilized diaspora.” Their political strategy consisted of founding newspapers, attracting proselytes, and trying to gain access to the boards of the large mutualist associations, which in turn acted as the visible center of the immigrant groups. These ethnonationalist activists (mostly intellectuals, journalists, and liberal professionals), managed to obtain in Argentina and Uruguay the support of some sectors of the former Basque, Catalan, and Galician immigrant elites associated with economic success, who were won over to the new cause. The strategy to be followed was clear: to dispute power within the existing institutional framework of their respective immigrant communities, that is, within the immigrant mutual-​aid, charitable, and recreational associations. For a part of the intellectual elites in the Spanish community, once the support for republicanism or Carlism in the River Plate area had been exhausted, embracing the ethnonationalist ideal meant legitimizing a new leadership position and aspiring to recreate a new imagined community—​a different one from the overall Spanish identity. Thus, in various cities of Argentina Catalan mutual-​aid and recreational associations were founded under the direct influence of Catalanist leaders (Rosario, 1902; Mendoza, 1908). In Buenos Aires, the Casal Català was established in 1908 following a split from the older Centre Català (founded 1886). Following a similar pattern, the Casal Català was set up in Montevideo, as a split from the Catalan Center, some years later. A large part of the overseas Catalans therefore became firm supporters of Catalanism, both in terms of its political and cultural initiatives. For instance, in 1917–​1918, the Casal Català in Buenos Aires joined the campaign to support Catalan home rule promoted in Spain by the main Catalanist parties. Between 1916 and 1919, several initiatives emerged to establish federations of Catalan nationalist associations, both in Argentina and throughout South America (Castells 1986, 77–​80; Lucci 2009; Fernández 2019, 119–​160). Basque nationalists engaged in journalistic campaigning and seizing power of the Basque mutualist centers. This was the case of the Laurak Bat of Buenos Aires, founded in 1877, whose purpose was, amongst others, the conservation among the Basque immigrants of the love for the Fueros, which had been partly suppressed in 1876, as well as the Zazpirak Bat in Rosario, founded in 1912. After several vicissitudes, PNV’s sympathizers managed to gain access to the management of both institutions. Subsequently, they promoted from them a cultural and symbolic strategy of gradual detachment from Spanish identity. This was initially enacted through a war of flags—​they refused to raise the Spanish bicolor banner at the headquarters—​as well as a re-​ethnification of fiestas and public celebrations. However, ethnonationalists did not 256

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achieve full and permanent control of Basque institutions in the Americas until 1923, and never extended their influence to all of them (Álvarez Gila 2005). Galician nationalists attempted to do the same, although with poorer results. The Galicianist idea was born when the Galician elite of Buenos Aires was already integrated, to a large extent, into the heart of Spanish associations: thus, the majority of presidents of AESM between 1892 and 1918 were Galicians. From 1918, however, the Galicianists also used their influence through a new institution created through their efforts, the Casa de Galicia. They operated within an area of ​​preferential expansion amongst the dozens of small local and parish associations that proliferated in Argentina and Cuba from 1904, linked to the diffusion of the land-​reform movement in the Galician contryside and the diffusion of educational reform in their places of origin. The ruling elite of these associations was more modest in social origin than that of the large mutualist institutions, and their activities (the promotion of schools in Galicia, and the backing of agrarian associations in their birthplaces back in Galicia, as well as mutual aid) bore the mark of a political program that tended toward republicanism, secularism, and social reform. In 1925, therefore, some Galicianists joined the leadership of the main body that had been bringing together these micro-​territorial associations for four years: the Federación de Sociedades Gallegas of Argentina. The control of this organization was not, however, complete, and the nationalists had to fight with a faction of leaders from a more modest social background who leaned toward the left (Núñez Seixas 1992).

Iberian minority nationalisms, migrants, and Hispano-​Americanism The reaction of sub-​state nationalisms to emerging Hispano-​Americanism since 1900 was not always a complete rejection. They also attempted to search for ways of accommodation. Undoubtedly, the most problematic aspect to accept was the explicit cultural and linguistic component of the Hispano-​Americanist post-​imperial discourse, based on the exaltation of the universal role of the Spanish (Castilian) language and its transformation into the main cultural marker that acted as a link between the former imperial core and its emancipated offspring. For Spanish nationalism, the defense of the cultural community with Hispanic America had an internal glotto-​political reading, which consisted in the reaffirmation of the universal character of the Castilian language, and therefore its greater utility in comparison with other languages or ​​ “dialects.” The latter might be accepted on a diglossic level. Once the disputes about the canon of the Spanish language and the fear of its possible rupture by Latin American elites faded into the background from the beginning of the twentieth century, liberal and conservative Spanish nationalists saw in the transatlantic character of the Spanish language an explicit argument for superiority against the emergence and consolidation of linguistic concerns in the Iberian periphery (Sepúlveda 2005; Marchilhacy 2010; Núñez Seixas 2017). A similar reading of Spanish ethnolinguistic variety was also made by some Latin American intellectuals, who from the early twentieth century expressed their fear that the revitalization of Iberian minority languages would ​​ become a model for the new indigenist groupings in the New Continent. Both Francisco Grandmontagne and the Mexican writer Amado Nervo disdained the cultural and political claims of the Iberian periphery, which might endanger the international prestige of the Spanish language, indirectly favour the spread of English over the Americas, and question the linguistic policy of Latin American states in relation to native languages. In their view, the fate of Catalan or Galician should not be different from that of Guarani and Aymara (Ucelay-​Da Cal 2003, 645–​650, 704–​708). There were some exceptions, such as the Argentinian conservative writer Ricardo Rojas, who was sympathetic toward 257

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Galicianism and trusted that the future of Spain could only be based on the recognition of its ethno-​cultural diversity (Rojas 1938, 347–​352). Metropolitan elites of substate nationalisms in Spain tended to ignore Hispano-​Americanism. Their patterns of reference and political models were located in Europe, from Hungary to Ireland; anti-​colonial nationalisms, such as the South African Boers and the Indians, played a minor role in their worldview. Latin American republics were only interesting as examples of peoples who had freed themselves from the same oppressor state. Nevertheless, between 1895 and 1920 some intellectual and symbolic transfers also took place between the Hispanic America and the “peripheries” of the former imperial core (Núñez Seixas 2019, 155–​187). In particular, substate nationalists in the diaspora crafted some discursive strategies to detach themselves from Spanish colonial heritage, attempting to establish a shared genealogy with the nationalist narratives implemented by Latin American elites. To that end, they claimed a direct link with some leaders of American independence. Thus, both the strategy (for example, the adoption of a decentralized structure in the form of separatist clubs, in the manner of the Cuban Revolutionary Party) and the discourse promoted by the first Catalan and Galician nationalist groups acting in Cuba adopted some symbolic references to the narrative of Cuban nationalism. The Catalanist journals Fora Grillons! (1906) and Nova Catalunya (1908) published their first issue on October 10, a clear nod to the Grito de Yara [Cry of Yara] by Carlos Manuel Céspedes, a founding act of the Cuban independence movement. Other public ceremonies promoted by the Catalanist groups were now held on May 20, the day of Cuban independence. Amongst its own events, November 27 stood out in memory of the execution of seven Cuban students by the Spanish army during the Ten Years’ War. They appropriated the figure of the colonial officer who acted as defence attorney, the Valencian captain, Federico Capdevila, who was later honored by the Cuban republic and became the missing link between Catalanism and Cuban emancipation. Moreover, General Valeriano Weyler in Cuba was also seen as a repressor of Cubans and Catalans alike—​he also was military governor of Barcelona in 1909, as well as war minister of the Spanish government in 1905–​1907. The fact that Weyler and Joaquín Vara de Rey came from the Balearic Islands and were Catalan speakers was in this case conveniently ignored by Catalanists (Klein 2002, 250–​300; Bernal 2010). As in other Latin American countries, it was primarily a question of seeking our own amongst the Creole patriots. The Catalans therefore delved into the Catalan origins of several Latin American personalities, such as the Argentinian lineage of the Alsina or Batlle families in Uruguay (Monner Sans 1927). Galicians were interested in the Galician origins of the Argentine president Bernardino Rivadavia (Castro López 1910, 1919). Basque nationalists also searched the family trees of the Argentinian presidents Hipólito Irigoyen, Juan B. Alberdi, and Justo J. de Urquiza. However, it was more important to go back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and look for a shared genealogy with the Latin American liberators and the heroes of independence. Hence, minority nationalists in the Iberian periphery attempted to present themselves as heirs of the emancipatory work of the American liberators. The Basque nationalists were the most active in this section. In Mexico, the main figure was undoubtedly the Emperor Agustín de Iturbide, whose family was originally from northern Navarre; but there was also a place for the generals Francisco Xavier Mina, José Mariano de Abasolo, and Ignacio Allende. In Venezuela, the example of the independence hero Rafael José de Urdaneta stood out. Most notable was the case of Simón Bolivar, the most popular among Latin American liberators, whose family came from the province of Biscay (Ispizua 1914–​15, 1979). If there was no American liberator of Basque ancestry, there were always some Basque surnames among the first patriots who had joined the juntas and cabildos (assemblies) that proclaimed independence in 1810–​1812. 258

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Thus, the Basque-​Argentinian lawyer Tomás de Otaegui recalled that seventy-​two out of 209 voters in the open cabildo of Buenos in May 1810, as well as eight out of twenty-​nine signatories of Argentine’s Declaration of Independence (Tucumán, July 9, 1816)  also had Basque ancestors (Otaegui 1925, 56–​57, 309–​318). Some propagandists would proceed decades later to exhaustively exhume the names of the Basques, Catalans, or Galicians who took part in the Cuban War (1895–​1898) on the side of the Cuban independence fighters. However, only 1,361 Spaniards joined the Cuban Liberation Army, and most of them (up to 40 percent) were Canary Islanders.Very few Catalans, Basques, and Galicians joined the side of the Cuban fighters (Blanco Rodríguez 1996). In their advocacy work, these propagandists were also supported and justified, albeit in a more implicit than explicit manner, by some Latin American historians. This was the case of those who, like the Venezuelan, Aristides Rojas, were interested in demonstrating the noble qualities of the liberators and the Creoles, based on their Basque (or, at least, Northern Spanish) ancestry. They underlined the purported difference betweent those liberators and the inferior moral quality of conquerors, who came from Southern Spain, and were poorer and greedy (Rojas 2008; Hernández González 2003). The Argentinian politician Domingo F. Sarmiento wrote in 1883 that the distrust of the institutions of the Spanish crown felt by Basques was also transmitted to the Creoles, and that Basque love for direct democracy was also expressed in the open assemblies or cabildos that had proclaimed American independence (Sarmiento 1883, vol. 1, 46–​54). The aristocratic pride and love for independence that was proper to those Creoles of Basque ancestry had a continuity in their embracing the cause for independence. Latin American laws and constitutions also reflected indirectly the Basque heritage, as they expressed love for freedom and respect for premodern democracy. According to Tomás de Otaegui, the “gentlemanly and romantic” nature of the Argentine people was the result of a “spiritual union” of the “Basques’ love for liberty and the Spanish noble character [hidalguía]” (Otaegui 1925, 64–​65, 139–​169). It was not always a question of vindicating the Latin American liberators as forerunners of the peripheral Iberian nationalists. There was also a more moderate reading of the search for a shared genealogy, which sought to highlight Basque, Galician, or Catalan participation in the struggles for colonial emancipation, whilst at the same time mitigating the anti-​Spanish component of that enterprise. In that sense, some episodes of common struggle between Spaniards and Creoles against a shared enemy, and not necessarily the Spanish oppressor, took on a relevant role: for example, the participation of Galician, Basque (Biscayan), or Catalan regiments in the defense of Buenos Aires against the British invasions of 1806 (Monner Sans 1893; Castro López 1911). This episode was remembered from a strictly regionalist perspective, integrating it into a claim of Hispanic plurality from their different home areas.

Conclusions Spanish settlers and migrants in the Americas before and after 1898, particularly in countries such as Argentina and Uruguay, as well as in the colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico, developed a strong sense of national identity. While adapting themselves to the hostile environment conditioned by the anti-​Spanish nature of Latin American nationalisms and Cuban separatism, they also reproduced many of the internal tensions that emerged in metropolitan Spain. However, the reinforcement of regional and/​or ethnic identity amongst several Iberian groups of settlers and/​or migrants, particularly among Basques, Catalans, and Galicians, followed a parallel pace to that of their respective regionalist and/​or nationalist movements in their places of origin. They also attempted to adapt their discourses and strategies to the cultural and political 259

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environment of their host countries, and were to some extent influenced by Latin American nationalisms as well, particularly after 1898. Therefore, the narratives of migrant associations, their leaders, and periodicals before the end of the Spanish overseas empire oscillated between regionalized Spanish nationalism, radicalized versions of metropolitan regionalisms, and some examples of early ethnonationalist radicalization. All these discourses were complementary with the metropolitan identity discourses of emergent Iberian regionalisms, while at the same time tended to nuance prevailing views of Spanish identity in the “core” of the empire, rendering them more organic and putting a stronger emphasis on ethnic and regional diversity. However, the Cuban wars of independence had a strong influence on their evolution, and opened the path toward the increasing radicalization of some sectors and associations of the Basque, Catalan, and Galician immigrant communities, who at some points also became relevant for the development of the nationalist movements in their countries of origin. Their discourse and strategies was not a mere copy of their metropolitan models, but an adaptation to the dominant nationalist narratives that prevailed in their host societies. In this respect, migrants acted as transatlantic agents of cultural transfer between different nationalist narratives and collective imaginations between Europe and the Americas. By so doing, they contributed to a paradox:  colonial empires may act as powerful nation-​ builders in the metropolitan core, as they functioned as unifying factors of regional divisions. But colonial nationalisms in the distant periphery were also capable of generating the opposite effect, that of acting as nation-​destroyers, by creating in the core’s periphery an imitation effect.

Works cited Abeledo,Wilma. 2002. “La Guerra de independencia cubana en la prensa gallega de la isla a finales del siglo XIX.” In Yoel L.Vázquez, Memoria, 181–​206. Havana: Arte y Literatura. Aguado Renedo, César. 2002. “El primer precedente directo de los actuales Estatutos de Autonomía: las “Constituciones Autonómicas” de Cuba y Puerto Rico.” Historia Constitucional 3, 249-​255. Alonso Romero, Mª Paz. 2002. Cuba en la España liberal (1837–​1898):  Génesis y desarrollo del sistema autonómico. Madrid: CEPC. Álvarez Gila, Óscar. 2005.“Las nuevas Euskal Herrias americanas. Los vascos y las emigraciones ultramarinas (1825–​1950).” La crisis de la civilización de los vascos del Antiguo Régimen y estrategias de revolución liberal e industrial: 1789–​1876, edited by Joseba Agirreazkuenaga, 319–​391. San Sebastián: Lur. —​—​—​. 2011. “Desde el ‘solar patrio’ a la ‘nación naciente:’ Cultura, identidad y política en los centros en los centros vascos de América (1880–​1900).” Historia Social 70: 43–​61. Bernal Velázquez, Yonier. 2010. “España en Cuba, Federico Capdevila una página de honor y valentía.” Contribuciones a las Ciencias Sociales (Nov.). Bizcarrondo, Marta, and Antonio Elorza. 2000. Cuba/​ España. El dilema autonomista, 1878–​ 1898. Madrid: Colibrí. Blanco Rodríguez, Juan Andrés. 1996. “La actitud de Martí ante los españoles y la presencia de éstos en el Ejército Libertador Cubano.” In Antes del “Desastre”: Orígenes y antecedentes de la crisis del 98, edited by Juan P. Fusi and Antonio Niño, 211–​223. Madrid: Universidad Complutense. Cardozo Urcátegui, Alejandro. 2012. “La construcción de un Simón Bolívar vasco:  Del problema historiográfico a la construcción identitaria.” Vasconia 38: 479–​494. Castells,Víctor. 1986. Catalans d”Amèrica per l”independència, Barcelona: Pòrtic. Castro López, Manuel. 1910. Gallegos que ayudaron a la emancipación sudamericana. Buenos Aires: J. Estrach —​—​—​. 1911. El Tercio de Galicia en la defensa de Buenos Aires: Documentos inéditos. Buenos Aires: Ortega y Radaell. —​—​—​. 1919. La ascendencia de Ribadavia. Buenos Aires: Talleres Gráficos del Ministerio de Agricultura. Comas i Güell, Montserrat. 2008. Victor Balaguer i la identitat col.lectiva. Catarroja: Afers. Cores Trasmonte, Baldomero. 1984. “A Constitución de Cuba e Porto Rico, primeiro modelo autonómico español.” Estudios de Historia Social 28–​29: 407–​418. Crexell, Joan. 1988. Origen de la bandera independentista. Barcelona: El Llamp.

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Recreating the homeland abroad Dedeu, Martín. 1919. El catalanismo en acción: Fijando posiciones. Buenos Aires: Imprenta López. Duarte, Angel (1998), La República del Emigrante. La cultura política de los emigrantes españoles en Argentina (1875–​1910). Lleida: Milenio. —​—​—​. 2002. “Republicanos, emigrados y patriotas. Exilio y patriotismo español en la Argentina en el tránsito del siglo XIX al XX.” Ayer 47: 57–​80. —​—​—​. 2004. “España en la Argentina. Una reflexión sobre patriotismo español en el tránsito del siglo XIX al XX.” Illes i Imperis 7: 177–​99. Elorza, Antonio, and Elena Hernández Sandoica. 1998. La Guerra de Cuba (1895–​1898): Historia política de una derrota colonial. Madrid: Alianza. Fernández, Alejandro E. 2011. “Prédiques de Germanor: Las asociaciones catalanas de Buenos Aires y sus prácticas institucionales (1850–​1940).” Historia Social 70: 63–​80. —​—​—​. 2019. Los catalanes y Buenos Aires. Inmigración, asociaciones y prensa. Buenos Aires: Almaluz. Fradera, Josep M. 2012. “The empire, the nation, and the homelands: nineteenth century Spain’s national idea.” In Nation and Region:  Nation-​Building, Regional Identities and Separatism in Nineteenth-​Century Europe, edited by Joost Augusteijn and Eric Storm, 131–​148. Basingstoke: Palgrave. —​—​—​. 2018. The Imperial Nation. Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. García, Ignacio. 1998. “‘…Y a sus plantas rendido un león.’ Xenofobia antiespañola en Argentina, 1890–​ 1900.” Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos 13(39): 195–​221. Grandmontagne, Francisco. 1899. “Txistus y gaitas.” Caras y Caretas 24(6). Hernández González, Manuel. 2003. “El mito de lo vasco en la forja de la Venezuela colonial.” Letterature d’ America 23(95): 55–​79. Ispizua, Segundo de. 1914–​15, Historia de los vascos en el descubrimiento, conquista y civilización de América, Bilbao: n. publ., 2 vols. —​—​—​. [1918] 1979. Los vascos en América. Simón Bolívar. San Sebastián: Vascas. Klein, John M. 2002. “Spaniards and the Politics of Memory in Cuba, 1898–​1934.” PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin. Lucci, Marcela. 2009. “El activismo patriótico de los “catalanes de América” de Buenos Aires: Desde 1916 hasta el final del Casal Català.” PhD thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Marcilhacy, David. 2010. Raza Hispana. Hispanoamericanismo e imaginario nacional en la España de la Restauración. Madrid: CEPC. Martínez Antonio, Francisco J. 2013. “Von Spanien im Übersee zum Spanien in Afrika:  Über die Eigentümlichkeit des spanischen Imperiums im 19. Jahrhundert,” Mittelweg 36(6): 18–​35. Monner Sans, Ricardo. 1893. Los catalanes en la defensa y reconquista de Buenos Aires: Boceto histórico (1806–​ 1807). Buenos Aires: Juan Bonmatí. —​—​—​. 1927. Los catalanes en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Coni. Nadal i Mallol, Hipòlit. 1928. Articles de contraban, 1923–​1927. Buenos Aires: La Casa del Arte. Novo García, Enrique. 1894. Cuba y España: Réplica a juicios de Curros Enríquez sobre un libro de Montoro. Havana: n. ed. Núñez Seixas, Xosé M. 1992. O galeguismo en América, 1879–​1936. Sada-​A Coruña: Eds. do Castro. —​—​—​. 2013. Icônes littéraires et stéréotypes sociaux: L’image des immigrants galiciens en Argentine (1800–​1960). Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-​Comté. —​—​—​. 2014. Las patrias ausentes. Estudios sobre historia y memoria de las migraciones ibéricas (1830–​1960). Oviedo: Genueve. —​—​—​. 2015. “Nation-​building and regional integration: the case of the Spanish Empire (1700–​1914).” In Nationalizing Empires, edited by A. Miller and S. Berger, 195–​245. Budapest/​New York: CEU. —​—​—​. 2017. “The language(s) of the Spanish nation.” In Metaphors of Spain. Representations of Spanish National Identity in the 20th century, edited by Javier Moreno Luzón & Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, 142–​160. New York/​Oxford: Berghahn. —​—​—​. 2019. Patriotas transnacionales. Estudios sobre nacionalismos y transferencias culturales en el siglo XX. Madrid: Cátedra. Otaegui, Tomás de. 1925. Derecho de gentes argentino. Su generosidad. Influencia vasca en su constructividad. Irala. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu. Pérez Vejo, Tomás, ed. 2011. Enemigos íntimos. España, lo español y los españoles en la configuración nacional hispanoamericana, 1810–​1910. Mexico City: El Colegio de México. Rojas, Arístides. [1874] 2008. “El elemento vasco en la historia de Venezuela.” In Orígenes venezolanos, 350–​362 Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho.

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Xosé M. Núñez Seixas Rojas, Ricardo. 1938. Retablo español. Buenos Aires: Losada. Roy, Joaquim. 1988. Catalunya a Cuba. Barcelona: Barcino. —​—​—​. 1999. Josep Conangla i Fontanilles (Montblanc 1875-​l’Havana 1965). Patriarca del nacionalisme català a Cuba. Tarragona: El  Mèdol. Sappez, Dominique. 2016. Ciudadanía y autonomismo en Cuba. Antonio Govín (1847–​ 1914). Castelló: Universitat Jaume I. Sarmiento, Domingo F. 1883. Conflicto y armonías de las razas en América. 53 vols. Buenos Aires: D. Túñez. Schmidt-​ Nowara, Christopher. 2004. “‘La España ultramarina:’ colonialism and nation-​ building in nineteenth-​century Spain.” European History Quarterly 34(2): 191–​214. Sepúlveda, Isidro. 2005. El sueño de la madre patria. Hispanoamericanismo y nacionalismo. Madrid:  Marcial Pons-​Fundación Carolina. Stucki, Andreas. 2010. “¿Guerra entre hermanos en la Gran Antilla? La imagen del rebelde cubano (1868–​ 98).” In Los enemigos de España. Imagen del otro, conflictos bélicos y disputas nacionales (siglos XVI-​XX) edited by Xosé M. Núñez Seixas and Francisco Sevillano, 271–​294. Madrid: CEPC. Ucelay-​Da Cal, Enric. 1997. “Cuba y el despertar de los nacionalismos en la España peninsular,” Studia Historica/​Historia Contemporánea 15: 151–​192. —​—​—​. 1999. “Self-​fulfilling prophecies: propaganda and political models between Cuba, Spain and the United States.” Illes i Imperis 2: 191–​220. —​—​—​. 2003. El imperialismo catalán. Prat de la Riba, Cambó, D’Ors y la conquista moral de España. Barcelona: Edhasa. Ugalde Zubiri, Alexander. 1996. La Acción Exterior del Nacionalismo Vasco (1890–​1939): Historia, Pensamiento y Relaciones Internacionales. Oñati: Instituto Vasco de Administración Pública. —​—​—​. 2012. “El primer nacionalismo vasco ante la independencia de Cuba.” In Patria y Libertad. Los vascos y las guerras de independencia de Cuba (1868–​ 1898), edited by Alexander Ugalde, 187–​ 283. Tafalla: Txalaparta.

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18 RUINS OF CIVILIZATION The classics at the foundation of Iberian nationalisms Joan Ramon Resina

When the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns broke out in the late seventeenth century, the dispute it brought into the public light had been brewing for a long time.The classics had been ruling European aesthetics since their alleged rediscovery in the Renaissance. At that time, the flowering of neo-​paganism at the center of Western Christendom provoked the counterstroke of the Reformation, rending European culture for centuries to come. Ironically, the Reformation issued from the same overvaluation of origins that had inspired the Renaissance. Intrinsic to the latter was the idea that contemporary society was a degraded semblance of a pristine original. Because Christianity, unlike Judaism, believes in a final and complete revelation that has already occurred, truth must be found at its origin. The dogma of the incarnation was foundational not only in a metaphysical but also in a historical sense. The divine logos, the matrix of all meaning, had become human flesh. Everything that followed from this event was a gradual corruption of the original meaning. Consequently, the news of that unique encounter of spirit and matter, the gospel, acquired the status of revelation, competing with and sublating the revelation on Sinai. The present could gain access to the Christian revelation only to the extent that it cleared the ground of supervened customs and additions. Unlike rabbinical Judaism, where the interpretations of the law become part of the law, in a progressive complication and deferral of ultimate certainties, the Reformation was an exercise in simplification, rejecting centuries of exegetical argumentation, mere work of men, and returning to the pure waters of the original doctrine. The Pentecostal, that is, unmediated, relation to the Bible was the Reformation’s own version of the rebirth of antiquity. Such daring revolt against the established Church would not have been possible without a ubiquitous critique of religion. But to critique religion was tantamount to shaking the foundations of medieval society. Hence, the newfound admiration for antiquity produced revolutionary effects in nearly every sphere of human activity. For instance, in the theory of the state. In Machiavelli’s view, the state drew strength from the observation that passion for worldly glory and the horrific deeds to which it led were abetted by the Christian injunction to suffer evil. Yet, it was not religion per se but Christianity’s fostering of quietism that led to undesirable political consequences. Machiavelli considered the sway of religion over society positive when it fostered love of freedom, simplicity, and purity of manners, the essential elements of political virtue. Leo Strauss comments: “This assessment

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takes its origin not in political calculation but from profound sympathy with what is spontaneous, unsophisticated and genuine in the face of decadence and corruption” (1997, 49). Machiavelli saw these traits at their highest level of achievement in the history of the Roman Republic, which not only represented a deposit of wisdom but also an example relevant to his own time. He considered the present decadent and needful of virtù according to the Roman model. Ironically, as George Steiris remarks, Machiavelli was not aware that he was living in a Renaissance, nor was he, for that matter, aware that he was living in a province of a flourishing state (2010, 93). Believing in the cyclical shape of history, he endeavored to convince his contemporaries of the need to hasten the Renaissance by imitating the social and political discipline of the ancient Romans. Convinced that history would eventually complete the circle, he anticipated Giambattista Vico, who in his Scienza Nuova (1725) produced a theory of historical reruns or ricorsi, describing the rise and fall of peoples from barbarism to civilization and back to barbarism. As a popular reaction of early German nationalism against the imperial authority represented by the Catholic South, the Reformation also implied a non serviam to the classic ideals of the humanists. Since the fifteenth century, classicism undergirded Western culture, just as the Latin of the Catholic Church remained the vehicle of communication for an international cultured class. The counterfigure to Luther’s firebrand populism was Erasmus of Rotterdam’s humanism. Conflict between the classic and the vernacular cultures, between the idealized past and inadequate approximations to it in the present, runs through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intermingling in creative ways. Reverence for the Greco-​Roman world, and beyond it for its Egyptian matrix, not only defined the pan-​European attitudes of Winckelmann, Goethe, or Nietzsche, but was also hitched to various national projects and worked as a motive force in the revolutions that shook the continent after 1789. The preference for simplicity and spontaneity characteristic of the Renaissance critics of religion returned under a different guise in the Enlightenment’s critique of society. Rousseau’s belief in an age of innocence and natural harmony that had been corrupted by government and luxury was beholden to the Renaissance idea of virtue as the regaining of the simple purity of the origin. Cultural immediacy with nature was of course one of the great Romantic themes, from Wordsworth to Schiller. And Greece was the foremost example of a golden age of integration of culture with nature. In his influential treatise, On the Study of Greek Poetry (1797), Friedrich Schlegel presented Greek poetry as the only cultural production that fully merged the condition of natural perfection with that of being at the same time a social institution. “Only Greek poetry attained in its entirety that stage of culture characterized by autonomy; only in it was ideal beauty public” (2001, 54). In this passage, Schlegel claimed that Greek culture accomplished the utmost natural perfection in an unconscious, spontaneous manner before it became capable of self-​direction. Fate shaped the Greek not only into the utmost that a son of nature can be, but it also only withdrew its motherly care when Greek culture was independent and mature and did not require any more external assistance and guidance. (2001, 54) Schlegel was building on Herder’s idea of Greek organicism, an idea that could be transferred to other peoples in an approximative way, with the Greek model remaining the measure of perfection. “Herder’s Greece was above all organic—​in it, somehow, an entire culture had found its relation to nature, and kept that relation strongly, faithfully, and artistically. In Greece alone culture had unlocked the secrets of that great eighteenth century Mother Nature. Homer was 264

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the model for this profound naturalness, and all that was subsequently greatest in Greek literature bore the Homeric stamp” (Will 1964, 6). Holding the classics as the supreme synthesis of culture and nature set up an unachievable standard, entailing that every other national culture was by definition a complex of aspiration. Herder saw his own German culture, which would soon be impregnated with the Greek ideal by the German romantics, as pervaded by Roman culture, which represented a weaker, derivative strain of Greek organic strength. Herder’s naturalistic worldview “was based on a conception of a living, not mechanical, universe, in which all natural entities were animated by a force that individualized them and endowed them with a drive for self-​realization” (Hutchinson 2005, 47). Herder, who is often maligned as the father of modern nationalism, was far from assuming the superiority of his own culture. On the contrary, Germany was, from a cultural point of view, inherently inferior to the cosmopolitan ideal set up by ancient Greece. As a former Roman province, it owed its cultural foundation to a derivative classicism; thus, the inherent weakness of German culture could be ascribed to its romanization. From this historical accident, it was possible to infer that the country’s health did not consist in appropriating the Greek ideal but in finding the native source of its vitality. This step was taken by Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation. Following up on Herder’s view of language as the primary marker of nationality, Fichte argued that the neo-​Latin peoples, speaking derivative forms of a dead language, lacked the organic force and etymological clarity of a mother tongue. Whereas Germans speak “a language that has been alive ever since it first issued from the force of nature” (1968, 58–​59), the Latin nations, although themselves of Germanic origin, speak languages that move on the surface “but [are] dead at the root” (59). As an idealist, Fichte lay weight on the semantic, mental dimension of language, not its euphonic and rhythmic, i.e. physical traits. He insists: “we are speaking of the supersensuous part of the language and not immediately or directly of the sensuous part” (58). What Fichte predicated at the level of meaning, that is, the possibility of tapping into the semantic spring at the origin of language, became in the Spaniard José Ortega y Gasset a biological distinction. In his racial analysis of Iberian history, España Invertebrada, he argued that the Visigothic hordes that overran the Iberian Peninsula in the sixth century were Germans in decline (1957, vol. 3, 112, 117). Claiming that, for European nations, military subjugation was “el rasgo típico de su biología histórica” [the typical trait of their historical biology]1 (112), Ortega then attributed Spain’s cultural weakness to the erosion of authoritarianism among the Germanic conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula, on account of their previous romanization. Ortega’s debt to Fichte is clear, as is his misreading of Fichte’s democratic outlook. For Ortega the question of authority offered no problem: “Ahora bien, ¿quién debe mandar? La respuesta germánica es sencillísima: el que puede mandar” [Well then, who should command? The Germanic reply is quite simple: whoever is able to command] (115). He estimated the value of national cultures not by their comparative naturalness but by their martial character and the significance of their military exploits (58). Fichte would not have admitted such a crass assessment of cultural worth. His Addresses to the German Nation were delivered in Berlin under French occupation, when the Prussian army had been defeated and Germany humiliated. Under those conditions, his appeal to the nation could only have a popular character. Thus: “in Germany all culture has proceeded from the people” (1968, 88). And although ostensibly similar to Ortega’s remark that “en España lo ha hecho todo el ‘pueblo’, y lo que no ha hecho el ‘pueblo’ se ha quedado sin hacer” [in Spain the ‘people’ have done everything, and what the ‘people’ haven’t done has remained undone] (1957, vol. 3, 121), it conveys the opposite valuation of the popular in the national culture. Fichte’s populism, like Herder’s, was unmistakably democratic. The problem confronting him 265

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was similar to Ortega’s, namely his country’s cultural backwardness and political powerlessness in comparison to the puissance of other European nations. But whereas Ortega regretted the popular quality of Spanish life and the failure of the aristocracy to stem the rise of the middle class, seeing everywhere the triumph of a “chabacano aburguesamiento” [tawdry gentrification] (126), Fichte attributed the health of German culture to the burghers, “men belonging to the people” (89), who erected the towns, where “every branch of culture quickly developed into the fairest bloom” (89). His picture of an able civil society, wielding a horizontal, decentralized form of power throughout the German territories stood in direct contrast to Ortega’s vertical ideal of a “vertebrate,” centralized peninsular society. Ortega was convinced that the Iberian tendency to political disaggregation resulted from the particularism of “Mediterranean man,” who remained captive of the anachronistic ideal of the Greek city-​state. “Mediterranean man” was a thinly disguised reference to Catalan society and the allusion to Greece an obvious quip against Noucentisme, the culturally dominant movement in Catalonia at the time. Ortega’s plaidoyer for authority, along with his valuation of the military character over the commercial type—​another transparent allusion to Catalan industrialism—​set the scene for the coup d’état that General Primo de Rivera staged two years later with the King’s blessing to check the Catalan movement. Whereas Ortega attributed Spain’s problems to the weakness of its feudalism, i.e. a vertical structure of power, and to the persistence of the small state mentality in certain urban enclaves (an allusion to Eugeni d’Ors’ concept of “Catalonia-​city” as a polis), Fichte associated the flowering of German culture with the small scale of medieval cities and their commercial confederations. In fact, he located the golden age of German history not at the height of imperial or princely authority but in the Hanseatic period in which “the history of Germany, of German might, German enterprise and inventions, of German monuments and the German spirit … is nothing but the history of those cities” (1968, 89). It is not in Herder that one should seek the intellectual source of contentious nationalism, but in Fichte’s claim of superiority for German culture on the strength of its natural authenticity. Whereas Herder placed German culture on a lower rung on a cultural scale topped by Greece, Fichte was the first to propose an equivalence between the ancient and the modern paradigm with far-​reaching consequences. Martin Heidegger would later take up that equivalence in his alleged surmounting of Western metaphysics through the etymological rediscovery and translation of the intuition of Being formulated by the pre-​Socratics at the birth of philosophy. “If the intrinsic value of the German language is to be discussed,” said Fichte, “at the very least a language of equal rank, a language equally [original],2 as, for example, Greek, must enter the lists” (1968, 59). And Heidegger famously believed that German was, after Greek, the only philosophical language. In his going back to the origin of philosophy to capture the intuition of Being in statu nascens, an intuition deformed and occluded in its Latin transmission, it is possible to discern a modern iteration of Luther’s revolt against Rome. The essence of the Reformation was to restore the ethos of biblical times, suppressing the intervening centuries and reducing the value of commentary and dogma to naught. Luther’s translation of the Bible and his democratizing of interpretation by allowing for immediacy of revelation through the light of the Holy Spirit was a precedent to Heidegger’s annihilation of the metaphysical tradition in the name of the German language’s privileged access to Being. In Heidegger’s surmounting of humanism there is also an echo of the humanists’ return to the classics, a return that in his philosophy of Being took the form of an exhaustive digging into the German language to unveil the emergence of thought at its source. This enterprise would have been inconceivable without the assumption of philosophical equivalence between German and Greek. 266

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It is instructive to project such asymptotic approximations to the classics onto the formation of European states. The Renaissance corresponds to the flowering of the Italian city-​states and the struggle for power of an urban bourgeoisie that recognized no legitimacy beyond the manifestation of virtù. For Machiavelli, it was a personal skill acting as counterweight to fortuna or chance. For Guicciardini, it was the faculty of discerning and judging the specific import of an event. In both it was a personal talent that could be cultivated and improved. The quarrel of the ancients and the moderns exploded during the reign of Louis XIV, the period of France’s rise to European eminence after the Thirty Years’ War. It became a public affair in the wake of Mazarin’s design of the new world order by defining the principle of national sovereignty at the Treaty of Westphalia. As in Italy, the feeling of political strength pervaded the relation to the classic models, in the former case a rejection of the goddess Fortuna with assumption of personal responsibility for political events; in the latter, an aesthetic dispute about poetic norms disguising questions of state. The quarrel came to a head with the publication of Perrault’s Le siècle de Louis le Grand in 1687, the main argument of this work, namely the superiority of the writers of the Great Century, being an expression of the new heights of power achieved by the Sun King. In Germany, between Fichte’s patriotic speeches and Heidegger’s exaltation of the German language’s unique “house of Being,” occurred the rise of German nationalism, the deification of the Prussian state in Hegel’s philosophy, and its mystical hypostasis in the Third Reich. Along similar lines, it would be easy to show a relation between an education in the classics for nineteenth-​century British elites and the “burden” of empire. But what appears to be the historical norm among European states aspiring to hegemony looks more interesting when considered from the side of the exception.

Lightness of the classics in Spanish nationalism If the correlation we have suggested holds true, a weak engagement with the classics should signal declining or tepid imperial aspirations. If one turns to the Iberian Peninsula, one is struck by how small a footprint the classics have left in the general culture and in the political discourse of Spanish nationalism. It is true that, at the start of Castile’s imperial project in the Renaissance, its humanists claimed the status of a classic for their language. In the dedication of his Grammar of the Castilian Language to Queen Isabella of Castile, Antonio de Nebrija famously declared that language always was the partner of empire (“que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; et de tal manera lo siguió, que juntamente començaron, crecieron et florecieron, et después junta fue la caida de entrambos”) [that language was always the companion of empire; and it followed empire so closely that they began, flowered and grew together, and then fell together]. Nebrija, a scholar of classical antiquity, did not think it coincidental that the year he published his grammar was also the year when the Christian monarchy conquered Granada, the last enclave of Islamic rule in the Iberian Peninsula.The height of political power corresponded, in his view, to the perfection attained by the Castilian language: “Lo cual hezimos en el tiempo más oportuno que nunca fue hasta aquí, por estar ia nuestra lengua tanto en la cumbre, que más se puede temer el decendimiento della que esperar la subida” [which we have done at the best possible time up to now, because our language is already at its peak, such that it is more reasonable to fear that it may begin to decline than to expect it to continue to climb]. Nebrija published his grammar before news arrived of Columbus’ discovery of a new world. He had as yet no inkling of the future expansion of the Castilian empire and its language. The empire he had in mind was an emulation of the Roman, extending from the Near East, over Northern Africa, and throughout Europe, with Castilian as the new Latin. But unbeknown to him, America, not Europe or Africa, would ultimately bear out his theory of linguistic 267

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imperialism. Castilian did not replace any of the vernacular languages in Spain’s European possessions:  neither in the Netherlands, nor in Germany, France, or Italy was Castilian able to set foot or remain of cultural significance for any meaningful duration. Only much later, under pressure of compelling laws and considerable violence, was it able to establish itself in the Catalan-​speaking parts of the Iberian Peninsula and to consequentially replace the autochthonous language of Catalonia,Valencia, and Mallorca. In the prologue to his grammar, Nebrija recalls Queen Isabella’s question, what such a book could be good for, and then explains: el mui reverendo obispo de Ávila [Fray Hernando de Talavera] me arrebató la respuesta, i respondiendo por mi dixo que después que Vuestra Alteza metiesse debaxo de su iugo muchos pueblos bárbaros i naciones de peregrinas lenguas, i con el vencimiento aquéllos ternían necessidad de recebir las leies que el vencedor pone al vencido i con ellas nuestra lengua, entonces por este mi Arte podrían venir en el conocimiento della.3 By giving the colonized populations the laws of speech, his grammar would prepare them to receive the laws of their physical subjection. Never before had the logistics of spiritual domination been so clearly and purposefully expressed. Furthermore, Nebrija claimed that, by establishing the linguistic norm, he was ensuring the language’s uniformity and immutability for centuries to come. He was, in other words, guaranteeing its classicism: Por que si la queremos cotejar con la de oi a quinientos años, hallaremos tanta diferencia et diversidad cuanta puede ser maior entre dos lenguas. I por que mi pensamiento et gana siempre fue engrandecer las cosas de nuestra nación, … acordé ante todas las otras cosas reduzir en artificio este nuestro lenguaje castellano, para que lo que agora et de aquí adelante en él se escriviere pueda quedar en un tenor, et estender se en toda la duración de los tiempos que están por venir, como vemos que se ha hecho en la lengua griega et latina, las cuales por aver estado debax~o de arte, aun que sobre ellas an pasado muchos siglos, toda vía quedan en una uniformidad.4 One century later, in 1619, Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, historian of the court of Philip II, boasted that the emperor had been able to see the Castilian language “general y conocida en todo lo que alumbra el sol, llevada por las banderas españolas vencedoras, con invidia de la griega y la latina, que no se extendieron tanto” [spread and become known everywhere the sun touches, carried by the conquering Spanish flags, and envied by Greek and Latin, which never spread as far] (1876, vol. 1, 4). By right of conquest, Castilian had so far exceeded the example of the classic languages that it had replaced them as the language of international communication. Soon after this triumphalist proclamation, Castilian began to recede vis-​à-​vis French as the language of diplomacy and international culture, as the Spanish Empire began its decline. Coinciding with this downturn, the classics began to recede as a standard of emulation, and after the seventeenth century they virtually disappeared from Spain’s cultural horizon. Sure enough, Latin retained its prestige during the Baroque for so-​called culterano poets like Luis de Góngora, whose Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1613) is not only an ornate retelling of the Greek myth handed down by Ovid, but also a formal attempt (much criticized by his arch-​enemy Francisco de Quevedo) to rearrange the syntax of the vernacular according to the pattern of classical Latin. But this ornate and, one might say redundant, classicism had nothing to do with the admiration of spontaneity and natural standards of beauty commended by Renaissance 268

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humanists. Even the belated imitation of the poetic theme of ancient ruins by Rodrigo Caro, a priest, judge, and book censor with antiquarian interests, smacked of learning. It expressed more a proto-​nationalistic glorification of the country’s past than the ancient sentiment about the irreparable effect of time on human works. The first lines of “Canción a las ruinas de Itálica” (1595), the poem by which he is known to posterity, strike the nostalgic note of Renaissance poetry of ancient ruins: “Estos, Fabio, ¡ai dolor!, que ves aora /​campos de soledad, mustio collado, /​fueron un tiempo itálica famosa” [These, Fabio, oh pain!, that you see now /​solitary fields, gloomy hill, /​were once upon a time famous Italica (Roman colonial town in Southern Spain)] (2000, 137).5 But after boasting the greatness of Colonia Aelia Augusta Italica (a Roman settlement founded in 206 b c) and the figures of the emperors born there, Caro recalls Gerontius, legendary first-​century bishop of Italica and evangelizer of the Baetica, and asks the ruins to show him the saint’s burial place. The sepulcher is, alas, nowhere to be found, and the poem ends with the poet apostrophizing Italica: “Goza en las tuias sus reliquias bellas /​para invidia de el mundo i las estrellas” [Enjoy its beautiful relics through your own /​to the envy of the world and the stars] (161). Caro deploys for a new nationalistic purpose a topos familiar to Latin poets. Seneca, who is often cited by nationalist historians as a Spanish philosopher, reflects on the inevitability of destruction. In letter 91 of his Letters to Lucilius he wrote: “omnium istarum civitatium, quas nunc magnificas ac nobiles audis, vestigia quoque tempus eradet” [But of all those cities, of whose magnificence and grandeur you hear today, the very traces will be blotted out by time] (1970, 438–​439). The ruins or vestiges he talks about are not in his visual field but within the grasp of his imagination. He has recourse to this ancient topos mainly to impress on his friend the stoic endurance of fate and the wisdom of spurning the vanitas mundi. Not so Caro. He adopts the theme of ruins in order to distill essential value from the past, celebrating the city’s “beautiful” Christian relics enfolded in pagan relics. In his own day Italica was a nearby district of the buoyant city of Seville, and the lamentation for the demise of the pagan city was a pretext to synecdochally exalt the Christian grandeur of the site. The same desire to extol local history (“envy of the world and its stars”) led him to publish the treatise Antiguedades, y principado de la ilustrissima ciudad de Sevilla in 1634. In this work, Caro is again concerned to enhance the prestige, and possibly the political privilege, of Seville, where he was studying at the time of the poem’s composition and where he resided from 1627 till his death. En medio de aquellas lastimosas reliquias que a pesar de los dias aún todavía permanecen en el despoblado de la que oy llamamos Sevilla la Vieja, aún no están acabadas de sepultar sus grandezas, y en el silencio de aquel antiguo pueblo, al más divertido caminante da vozes desde aquellos siglos la fama de sus ilustres hijos, y pide para aquellas despedaçadas reliquias admiración y respeto, publicando que alli fueron las primeras cunas de Trajano, Adriano y el gran Theodosio.6 (Antigüedades, fol. 101v, cit. Del Campo 1957, 50, n. 1) Recalling that the ancient Roman settlement of Italica, the oldest part of modern Seville, was the birthplace of three Roman emperors, Caro implies that the city would be a fitting residence for a modern one. In 1634, Madrid had been the seat of the monarchy for only seventy-​ three years, and Seville was at the height of its splendor. Four years earlier, Pablo Espinosa de los Monteros, a priest and local historian like Caro, had published Segunda parte de la historia y grandezas de la ciudad de Sevilla. The first part had appeared in 1627, the year when Caro moved permanently to Seville. Thus, antiquarian interests merged at this time with the bid to become the empire’s seat by recalling that this and no other was the Hispanic birthplace of emperors. 269

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Use of antiquity as relic, that is, as vestiges of a still conspicuous virtue (let us recall Caro’s remark that “aún no están acabadas de sepultar sus grandezas” [its glories have yet to be buried]), anticipates the conservative recourse to classical antiquity by nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Spanish historians. For them it will not be a question of a model to be imitated or a utopia to strive for, but a form of genealogical insurance. Greek, and especially Roman, presence in the Iberian Peninsula are touted as proof of noble descent and to claim rank in world history. But now the case for national pedigree takes an irrational turn when, instead of the Roman past ennobling national history, it is the virtue latent in the Iberian territory that ennobles Roman culture and achievement. In Modesto Lafuente’s popular Historia General de España (1850–​ 1867), the most influential in the second half of the nineteenth century, the theme of a unique mission inscribed in the “unified” peninsula is taken for granted: “¿Quién no descubre en la situación geográfica de España la particular misión que está llamada a cumplir en el desarrollo del magnífico programa de la vida del mundo?” [Who does not find in Spain’s geographic location the particular mission that it is called to fulfill in developing the magnificent program of the life of the world?] (1869, vol. 1, 9). Far from offering proof of such geopolitical provision on the third day of creation, Lafuente calls on history as witness to its own teleology: “La historia confirmará los fines de esta física organización” [History will confirm the purpose of this physical organization] (vol. 1, 10). The logical circle is thus closed:  Spain’s geographic characteristics evince its historical mission, and national history proves the purpose of the country’s physical location. Lafuente’s belief in the geographic determination of Spanish history left its mark in Angel Ganivet’s peculiar understanding of that history as a deviation from the path pre-​inscribed in Spain’s peninsular form. In turn, Ganivet’s territorial mysticism would influence the writers of the Generation of ’98. Doubtless, it was this sense of territorial purposefulness that led Lafuente to assume a common nationality for the tribes that populated the peninsula before its romanization, and to see the entire land after the fall of Rome getting ready to become a nation endowed with its own “national” writers: “Pasado el primer aturdimiento y la universal turbación ocasionada por la inundación de los bárbaros, la España se preparaba a figurar como nación aparte, y comenzó a tener escritores propios”7 (1869, vol. 1, viii). Most striking, however, is Lafuente’s inversion of the source of prestige. According to him, Spain was capable of turning Rome’s negatives into positives. If Rome subjected Spain, Spain freed the world from Nero’s tyranny. Citing an anonymous Roman source, Lafuente asserts that Rome recognized Spain’s preeminence among all its provinces. The first foreign consul in Rome was a Spaniard, the first foreigner to receive the honors of triumph was also a Spaniard, and a Spaniard the first emperor of foreign origin. And not just one emperor, protests Lafuente, but up to three Roman emperors were Spaniards, and a fourth, Marcus Aurelius, came from a Spanish family. It is as if Spain wanted to shame Rome, says Lafuente, by providing it with virtuous emperors in exchange for the rapacious praetors and stingy governors that Rome had sent to Spain during the conquest (1869, vol. 1, 31). Culturally, Spain gave Rome “a literature,” trading the Virgil and Horace of Augustus’ age for the Lucan and Seneca of Nero’s time. Through these authors, Spanish literature placed the seal of its own native taste and even its own defects upon Latin literature, a privilege, boasts Lafuente, no other province enjoyed (vol 1, 31). The idea that Spanish authors ruled imperial Latin literature was taken up at the turn of the century by the more serious and erudite historian Rafael Altamira in his Historia de España y de la civilización española (1900–​1911). In the part devoted to the Roman domination of Spain, Altamira asserts: “Los literatos españoles llegaron a ejercer una verdadera tiranía en Roma, dominando el gusto público y transmitiendo su énfasis, su originalidad algo rara y la libertad de las reglas retóricas a que propendía”8 (1913, vol. 1, 145). Lafuente wrote at a time 270

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of steep decline of Spanish significance in all fields. His national apologetics and inflated self-​ importance, an exacerbated version of Caro’s plea for admiration and respect for past grandeur, required criteria of value different from the contemporary measure of influence among industrial European states. And so he launched the idea of the incommensurability of Spanish history, a topic destined for a successful carrier in Spanish scholarship to this very day: “la España [es] un pueblo singular que no puede ser juzgado por analogía” [Spain (is) a unique nation that cannot be judged by analogy] (vol. 1, 12). The idea that Spain had its own classics, because some of the Roman ones were actually Spanish, went virtually unchallenged in Spanish cultural history. If what made these writers classic was their Spanish origin, then the territorial imprint rather than the culture they had grown into accounted for their civilizational force. An exception to the Castilian precept of cultural uniformity was Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Spain’s foremost cultural historian in the nineteenth century. If the “liberal” Lafuente had written that “disunity” among “Spanish” tribes of common stock was fatal to their freedom, the conservative Menéndez y Pelayo associated Rome’s decadence with the uniformity exacted by the empire. The passage is worth quoting in extenso: Por lo mismo que el Imperio romano tendía providencialmente a la unidad, borraba, aun sin quererlo, las diferencias locales, acabando por inmolar la misma ciudad romana en aras del culto y difusión cosmopolita del numen de Roma. Así se explica la esterilidad y decadencia del arte en época de monstruosa unidad, cuando ya los gérmenes de cultura indígena que podía haber en las regiones sometidas a Roma habían sido violentamente ahogados por la universal señora, y a ella misma la debilitaba en fuerza interior lo que ganaba en extensión, cruzando y bastardeando de mil modos su raza, dilatando a otros pueblos los beneficios de sus instituciones, arrancándose, por decirlo así, del recinto sagrado de su urbs, y convirtiéndose en inmensa y confusa hospedería, abierta a todas las gentes.Todo el mundo era extranjero en Roma, sin tener a pesar de eso otra patria ninguna.Y lo que acontece con la nacionalidad política, viene a reflejarse en la nacionalidad literaria.9 (vol. 1, 198–​199) Menéndez y Pelayo challenged the idea that Hispano-​Roman authors imprinted Spanish traits on Roman literature. It was the latter that broadcast its aesthetic principles throughout the empire. Seneca, whom Menéndez y Pelayo did not rate very highly as a thinker, “ha sido uno de los principales educadores del mundo moderno, y especialmente de la raza española” [has been one of the principal educators of the modern world, and especially of the Spanish race] (vol. 1, 218). Despite the confusion of ethnological and sociological categories inherent in the reference to a Spanish race, this conservative scholar distinguished himself from his “liberal” contemporaries in detaching the alleged stoic traits of the Spanish character from any form of determinism. Not so Angel Ganivet, forerunner of the 1898 Generation, who in his Idearium Español (1896) posited the existence of a territorial spirit that Seneca, the essential Spanish philosopher, found already in place (1957, 10). Ganivet, who like Seneca was born in the Southern part of the Iberian Peninsula, employs the logic that Fredric Jameson calls “cognitive mapping” to infer the essential Spanishness of the Roman thinker (1991). A privilege, incidentally, denied to the Muslim occupants of the same region, notwithstanding that their name for the land, Al-​ Andalus, rather than the Roman name of Baetica, prevailed in modern history. This denial of eight centuries of Islamic presence and the obsession to account for Roman culture in terms of Spanish character, while turning Castile into the essence of Iberian history, explains Ganivet’s extravagant assertion that in the Middle Ages Seneca would have been born a Castilian (10). 271

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This is not the place to discuss the mystical conception of the land in the authors of the Generation of ’98.10 Suffice to mention the persistence of “cognitive mapping” in Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Spain’s most prestigious philologist of the twentieth century. In the prologue to the first volume of Historia de España, published in 1947, during the neo-​imperial phase of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, the regime’s foremost scholar included as visual aid a cultural map of the peninsula showing the two imperial peaks in Iberian history. One represents the “full cultural development” (“pleno desarrollo cultural”) of Roman “Spain;” the other the height of Castilian world domination. During both periods, the “distribution of forces and values” (“distribución de fuerzas y valores”), in other words, the cultural achievements, concentrate in the central and southern regions of the map, corresponding to the areas of Castilian cultural identity. Because this map overlaps (and in fact affirms) the cultural policy of the Falangist state, it obliterates the preeminence of the eastern province of Hispania Tarraconensis at the time of Caesar Augustus. And it says nothing about the Greek, and later Roman, commercial hub at Emporion on the Northern Catalan coast, where the first coins were struck on Iberian soil. Thus, at the crest of the Spanish policy of suppression of Catalan culture and history, Menéndez Pidal rationalized Franco’s neo-​imperial politics with his allocation of cultural values on the map. Adducing Castile’s “forces and values” as proof of its alleged superiority and justification of its dominance, he suggested a parallelism between the present and the previous historical “peaks.” Castile owed its supremacy to the power wielded over the other Iberian peoples. As stated previously by Ganivet and Lafuente, that supremacy is said to evince a spiritual unity based on vital energies and organic principles of abiding action and force (“esa unidad espiritual regida por principios orgánicos, ciertas energías vitales, perdurables en su acción y en su fuerza”) (Menéndez Pidal 1959, 117–​119).

Uses of archaeology In the foregoing examples, influential historians show a tendency to Hispanicize, or more precisely to Castilianize, the classics, inverting the European mode of appropriating them. In contrast, representatives of the turn-​of-​the-​century Catalan resurgence sought to appropriate the region’s Greco-​Roman past by reverting to the European pattern of emulation. Noucentisme, the aesthetic-​political movement promoted by Eugeni d’Ors, was a “back to the classics” affair. It transformed the interest of the Catalan renaissance in medieval ruins, a trend popularized in the paintings of Ramon Martí i Alsina (1826–​1894), into an interest in Greco-​Roman monuments. For the noucentistes, the ruins were not a reminder of tempora verti, the constant changes that time brings, but a guarantee of the permanence of a deep past. Noucentisme encouraged Catalans to rediscover their past through an archaeology of the present, physical whenever possible, cultural always, by means of a programmatic sounding of the tradition. The same spirit that, according to Alain Schnapp, inspired the Latin attitude to ruins, inspires the noucentista approach to the remnants of Greek and Roman monuments in Catalonia. “Elle [the ruin] ne se suffit pas à elle-​même, elle devient un outil pour explorer un passé imaginaire, qui est le fondement du présent” [The ruin is not just a ruin; it becomes a tool for exploring an imaginary past, which is the foundation of the present] (2015, 98). Roman ruins of consideration exist throughout Catalonia. Tarragona and nearby villages have significant sites, as does Barcelona, where portions of the ancient wall are visible in the old part of town and the remains of an old temple for the cult of Augustus can be seen in a small side street near City Hall. But it was not so much the Roman past, shared with other parts of the Iberian Peninsula, as the archaeological footprint of Greek colonization on its northeastern 272

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coast that excited the imagination of Catalan artists and intellectuals in the early years of the twentieth century. The aesthetic and ethical implications of the sentiment that Pau Guinart calls “Catalonia’s classic will,” meaning its “will to classicism,” found a powerful motif in the excavations of the archaeological site at Empúries from 1908 onwards.The impulse given by the archaeological work to Noucentisme’s “civilizing” politics is notorious. It suffices to compare the tone of the cultural “imperialism” of its leading figures with the sober study of the same ruins by Joaquim Botet i Sisó three decades earlier to grasp the change in Catalonia’s cultural and political atmosphere. In his Noticia Histórica y Arqueológica de la Antigua Ciudad de Emporion (1879), the 27-​year-​old archaeologist anticipated Noucentisme’s penchant for Greek civilization, submitting an explanation for the gradual decline of the first Greek settlement in the peninsula that recalls the decadence of medieval Catalan power: Superiores en cultura los griegos de Emporion a los rudos y belicosos romanos de la época de la conquista, conservaron por algún tiempo el prestigio y el influjo moral que por tales razones les correspondía; pero éste cesó por completo en tiempo de los emperadores, como lo demuestran el silencio de la historia, que sólo la menciona incidentalmente al tratar de las guerras de que fue teatro nuestra nación, los pocos objetos posteriores al siglo I de nuestra Era en ella hasta ahora encontrados, y el hecho de no haberse descubierto en sus ruinas, ni en sus inmediaciones, resto ni huella alguna de aquellos grandes monumentos, de aquellos edificios públicos que caracterizan la opulencia y esplendor de las ciudades en los tiempos de que tratamos. Tres siglos de decadencia y los recientes daños que probablemente recibiera cuando la entrada de los Cimbrios, debían haber agotado aquella vitalidad propia de sus épocas de brillo y esplendor, y Emporion debía carecer ya de fuerzas para sobrevivir a los nuevos y mayores contratiempos que la esperaban.11 (1979, 130) The parallelism implied in this picture of decadence also worked in reverse. If Emporion’s decline could be extrapolated to the decadence of the medieval Catalan polity, the “rediscovery” and excavation of Emporion could be associated with the resurgence of the Catalan nationality. Enric Prat de la Riba, Catalanism’s main theoretician and soon-​to-​be president of the Mancomunitat, Catalonia’s incipient regional government, considered that the historical area of the Catalan nation coincided with the range of Emporion’s influence within the limits of the ancient Iberian ethnos. In La nacionalitat catalana (1906), he writes: Encara que no constituís cap unitat política, la ciutat d’Empúries, amb la força d’atracció pròpia de les grans capitals, s’havia constituït en centre de nombroses comarques. Doncs bé, el rastre de la seva influència, l’ha trobat l’arqueologia quasi sempre dintre de les fronteres de l’etnos ibèrica, i en el primer tractat entre Roma i Cartago es fixa el límit sud de Roma i les seves aliades—​entre les quals hi havia Empúries—​a l’indret de Múrcia, límit sud de la llengua catalana.12 (2000, 156) 1906 was an important year for Empúries. Enric Morera composed an opera with libretto by Eduard Marquina with the title Emporium. Although not registered in the archive of the Liceu, Barcelona’s opera house, we know that the opera was performed on January 20, because Eugeni d’Ors used the opportunity to write one of his glosses on behalf of a return to classicism. “I de vegades penso que tot el sentit ideal d’una gesta redemptora de Catalunya podria reduir-​se avui 273

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a descobrir el Mediterrani. Descobrir el que hi ha de mediterrani en nosaltres, i afirmar-​ho de cara al món, i expandir l’obra imperial entre els homes”13 (1996, vol. 2, 31–​32). For d’Ors, as for Noucentisme in general, the quarrel between ancients and moderns took the form of a combat against romanticism. In a certain sense, it meant taking up intellectual arms against the moderns, by which d’Ors understood the nationalistic tradition inaugurated by Herder, and further back by Martin Luther, with his individual rebellion against Rome’s authority. D’Ors launched an ethical and political system against the subjectivist tendencies of the age. The call to rediscover the Mediterranean was one more attempt to revert to the purity of origins, in this case to an allegedly native austerity of customs and civic patriotism. D’Ors wished to limit the private sphere in favor of the public and encouraged the cultivation of the social virtues through discipline, which he associated with classicism. Tradition was the appropriate guide, since the Mediterranean spirit inhered in it, just as the foundations of ancient Emporion lay under a few feet of dirt deposited by the ages. Ironic in this affection for an imagined persistence of the Greek spirit is its correspondence to the German romantics’ aspiration to reincarnate Greek culture. D’Ors was, to a great extent, a romantic unaware of his romanticism. He was certainly no realist, but a metaphysician for whom external events were signs of occurrences in a transcendent realm of mind. But herein lay his difference from the romantics. Whereas for Herder and for Schlegel the classics were the happy synthesis of culture and nature, d’Ors pitted these two realms against each other. For him, it was either nature or culture, the city or the mountains, the nation or the state, freedom or authority, body or mind, each binary charged with antithetical moral values. At the rhetorical extremes of this binary thinking, a moment came when the choice lay open to parody. This became apparent when the former noucentista Manuel Brunet mocked the notion of enduring Greek traits in modern Catalonia. In 1925, Brunet published El meravellós desembarc dels grecs a Empúries, a parody of the arrival of the first Greek colonists on the Iberian Peninsula. In the preface, he states: “Els grecs foren, a l’Empordà, un simple incident. L’Empordà és quelcom més que un pretext sentimental de literats i historiaires. El record dels grecs fou un element que fa bonic i prou”14 (10).Years later, when Spain was a partner of the Third Reich and of fascist Italy, Brunet reissued this book in Spanish, adding El Ampurdán y los ampurdaneses (1943), a paean to his native region for the benefit of Spanish readers. In the preface to this supplement, he again satirized the noucentista infatuation with Catalonia’s Greco-​Roman past. In a conspicuous captatio benevolentiae of the new political establishment, he sharpened the parodic edge, adding an occasional anti-​Semitic quip in deference to the spirit of the times. Brunet, a conservative Catholic, had no problem, at this juncture, writing the following regarding the denizens of Empordà (151): No se atreven a decir que, racialmente, el Ampurdán es uno de los países del Mediterráneo donde hay menos gentuza. Muchas comarcas de este mar han de reconocer que han sido una casa de huéspedes donde se ha instalado todo el mundo. En el Ampurdán, país de paso, ha dormido todo el mundo, pero sólo ha sido un mesón. Los semitas de todas suertes—​fenicios, púnicos, árabes y judíos—​han sido unos trashumantes. En los períodos históricos, el aluvión es griego y romano. El Ampurdán puede decir en alta voz que es el país más helenizado y más romano de la Península Ibérica.15 This was tantamount to claiming for Empordà the very civilizational traits that the noucentistes had once claimed for Catalonia as a whole. But at this precise historical moment, it amounted to a claim of natural affinity with the imperial trappings of the New State. Brunet was not the first to exploit the ruins in this way. Since the turn of the century, archaeological evidence of 274

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the presence of Greek culture on the Catalan coast had been turned to political account. The ideological consequence of this application, and thus the meaning of the classics invoked, varied with the political outlook. Before the Spanish Civil War, Pere Bosch i Gimpera, director of the Archaeological Museum of Barcelona and of the department of archaeological excavations, traced the democratic sense in the life of Catalans to the interchange between the native Iberian tribes and the Greeks of Emporion (cit. in Guinart 2014, 36). In some ways, Noucentisme was not so much about correcting the romantic excesses of the Catalan renaissance as about building a romanticism of its own with the help of archaeology. A romanticism of the classics, which would crystallize in the 1920s in an ambitious editorial enterprise for translating the classics, the Collection Bernat Metge. This monumental task could be undertaken only with the patronage of Francesc Cambó, influential lawyer and politician, and a native of Empordà.With over 400 volumes to date, the Bernat Metge remains an editorial feat by any standards and one unparalleled in any other minority language. Launched at a time when Catalan literature was becoming standard by modern criteria, this project is inexplicable without the conviction among the cultured classes that, in d’Ors’ paradoxical formulation, it was necessary to rediscover the Mediterranean. That this conviction should have taken hold of the elites at the very moment when the Catalan renaissance had surmounted its tentative stage and was unfolding its creative potential was no coincidence. One year before the military coup that would temporarily halt this impulse, the Foundation Bernat Metge contributed mightily to grounding romantic mythmaking in respectable scholarship. What the late romantic poet Joan Maragall had tried to achieve with his somewhat Wagnerian poem El comte Arnau, the noucentistes carried out by filiating Catalonia to classical antiquity. Theirs was no less a myth than Maragall’s Faustian story of a restless soul seeking release from eternal suspension between heaven and earth. And if the classic filiation seemed, for a while, the opposite of a myth, this was because it was grounded on a concrete foundation of ruins and predicated on the hope of unifying the Catalan tradition by subsuming it under another tradition of universal scope. In Nietzsche’s words: “Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy creative natural power: only a horizon encircled by myths can unify an entire cultural movement” (1954, vol. 1, 125; translation mine). And unity was another name for what the noucentistes called the civilizing process, or in d’Ors’ more rhetorical phrase, the imperative of civility.

Notes 1 Translations of all Romance language quotations are by Linda Grabner, University of Pennsylvania. 2 I amend the translation by R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull, who translate “ursprünglich” as “primitive,” which does not adequately convey Fichte’s meaning. See Fichte 1978,  72. 3 “The right reverend Bishop of Ávila [Brother Hernando de Talavera] snatched the answer from me, and answering for me, said that after Your Highness brought under your yoke the many barbarian peoples and nations with outlandish languages, they would need to receive the laws that the conqueror [always] imposes on the conquered, and with them, our language. Thus, through my Art they could come to learn it.” 4 “Because if we want to compare it with what it will be in 500 years, we will find as much difference and diversity as you could ever find between two different languages. And because my idea and desire has always been to elevate the things of our nation, … I decided above all else to reduce the complexity and artifice of our Castilian language, so that anything now written in it and that may be written in the future may have the same meaning and be understood across time. We see this with Greek and Latin, which, having been standardized, although many centuries have passed, still maintain their uniformity.” 5 I cite from the third version of the poem, which is the one ordinarily reproduced.

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Joan Ramon Resina 6 “Amidst those pitiful relics that, despite the passage of time, still remain in the deserted region of what today we call Old Seville, its glories have yet to be buried. In the silence of that ancient town, the fame of its illustrious sons calls out from those long-​past centuries to the distracted traveler, requesting admiration and respect for those shattered relics, and announcing that here were the first cradles of Trajan, Hadrian, and great Theodosius.” 7 “After the initial bewilderment and universal disturbance caused by the flood of barbarians, Spain prepared to become an individual nation of its own, and began to have its own writers.” 8 “The Spanish literati came to exercise a true tyranny in Rome, dominating public tastes and transmitting their preferences, their somewhat odd originality, and the freedom from rhetorical rules to which they were prone.” 9 “The Roman empire’s providential tendency toward unity caused it to erase local differences, even when they did not mean to, thus eventually sacrificing the very city of Rome for the sake of the worship and cosmopolitan spread of the spirit of Rome. This explains the sterility and decadence of art in the era of monstrous unity, when the seeds of indigenous cultures that might have existed in Rome’s subjugated territories had been violently snuffed out by the universal lady. Rome herself was weakened internally with every territorial expansion, crossing and bastardizing her race in a thousand ways, extending the benefits of her institutions to other peoples, uprooting herself, so to speak, from the hallowed halls of her urbs, and becoming little more than a great, jumbled caravansary, open to all peoples. In Rome, everyone was a foreigner, while also having no other homeland. And what happens with political nationality comes to be reflected in literary nationality.” 10 I refer the reader to my essay, Resina 2001, 169–​186. 11 “The Greeks of Emporion, being culturally superior to the crass, warlike Romans at the time of the conquest, maintained for some time the prestige and moral influence that appertained to them on account of their superiority. But this ended completely during the reign of the emperors, as shown by the silence of history, which only mentions Emporion incidentally in discussing the wars fought on our soil, the few objects later than the first century of our Era that have been found here, and the fact that in its ruins or immediate surroundings there have been found no remains or signs of those great monuments, of those public buildings that characterized the opulence and splendor of cities during the time under discussion here. Three centuries of decadence, and the more recent damages that probably occurred during the period of the Cimbris’ arrival, must have exhausted that vitality so typical of its periods of brilliance and splendor, and Emporion must have already lost the strength to survive the new and greater problems that it was about to face.” 12 “Although it did not constitute a political unit, the city of Emporion, exerting the draw of any large capital, became the center of numerous counties. Archeological findings have almost always confirmed traces of its influence within the boundaries of the Iberian ethnicity. And in the first treaty between Rome and Carthage, the southern boundary of Rome and its allies—​among them Emporion—​is set in the area of Murcia, which is the southernmost limit of the Catalan language.” 13 “And sometimes I think that today the whole ideal sense of a redeeming exploit by Catalonia could simply consist of discovering the Mediterranean: discovering what there is of Mediterranean in us, declaring it to the world, and expanding the imperial project among men.” 14 “In the Empordà the Greeks were merely incidental. The Empordà is considerably more than just a sentimental pretext for the literati and historians. The memory of the Greeks is a decorative element and nothing more.” 15 “No one dares to say that racially the Empordà is one of the Mediterranean countries with the least rabble. Many regions bordering this sea must recognize that they have been a guesthouse where everyone has come to stay. Everyone has slept in the Empordà, a pass-​through country, but it has only been a place to sleep. Semites of every stripe—​Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Arabs, and Jews—​have migrated through. In historical times, the greatest influx has been Greek and Roman. The Empordà can proudly say it is the most Hellenized and the most Roman country in the Iberian Peninsula.”

Works cited Altamira y Crevea, Rafael. 1913. Historia de España y de la civilización española. 4  vols. 3rd edition. Barcelona: Herederos de Juan Gili. Botet i Sisó, Joaquim. [1879] 1979. Noticia histórica y arqueológica de la antigua ciudad de Emporion. Facsimile edition. Barcelona: Consorci d’Empúries.

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Ruins of civilization Brunet, Manuel. 1943. El maravilloso desembarco de los griegos en Ampurias. El Ampurdán y los ampurdaneses. Barcelona: Destino. —​—​—​. 1925. El meravellós desembarc dels grecs a Empúries. Barcelona: Edicions Diana. Cabrera de Córdoba, Luis. 1619. Filipe Segundo, Rey de España. 4 vols. Madrid: Aribau y Cª, 1876. Campo, Agustín del. 1957. “Problemas de la ‘Canción a Itálica’.” Revista de Filología Española 41(1): 47–​139. Caro, Rodrigo. 2000. Poesía castellana y latina e inscripciones originales, edited by Joaquín Pascual Barea. Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla. D’Ors, Eugeni. 1996. Glosari 1906–​1907.Vol. 2 of Obra Catalana d’Eugeni d’Ors, edited by Ed. Xavier Pla. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1968. Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R.  F. Jones and G.  H. Turnbull. New York: Harper & Row. —​—​—​. 1978. Reden an die Deutsche Nation. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Ganivet, Angel. [1896] 1957. Idearium español y El porvenir de España. Madrid: Espasa-​Calpe. Guinart i López, Pau. 2014. La voluntat clàssica de Catalunya. El paper del jaciment arqueològic d’Empúries en la construcció del nacionalisme català: Prat de la Riba, Eugeni d’Ors i el Noucentisme. Figueres: Brau. Hutchinson, John. 2005. Nations as Zones of Conflict. London: Sage. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 49–51. Lafuente, Modesto. 1869. Historia General de España. 30 vols. 2nd edition. Madrid: Dionisio Chaulie. Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. 1974. Historia de las ideas estéticas en España. 2 vols. 4th edition. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1959. Los españoles en la historia. Buenos Aires: Espasa-​Calpe. Nebrija, Antonio de. 1492. Gramática de la Lengua Castellana. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954. Die Geburt der Tragödie. Werke. 3 vols, vol. 1, 7–​134. Munich: Carl Hanser. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1957. España invertebrada. Vol. 3 of Obras completas, 35–​128. Madrid:  Revista de Occidente. Prat de la Riba, Enric. 2000. La nacionalitat catalana. Vol. 3 of Obra completa, edited by Albert Balcells and Josep Maria Ainaud de Lasarte, 117–​170. Barcelona: Proa. Resina, Joan Ramon. 2001. “A spectre is haunting Spain: the spirit of the land in the wake of the disaster.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 2(2): 169–​186. Schlegel, Friedrich. 2001. On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans. Stuart Barnett. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Schnapp, Alain. 2015. Ruines. Essai de perspective compare. Lyon: Les Presses du Réel/​Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. 1970. Epistulae Morales 2. Loeb Classical Library, trans. Richard M. Gummere. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steiris, George. 2010. “Machiavelli’s appreciation of Greek antiquity and the ideal of Renaissance”. In Renaissance? Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity in Europe, C. 1300-​C. 1550, edited by Alexander Lee, Pit Péporté, and Harry Schnitker, 81–​94. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Strauss, Leo. 1997. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago  Press. Will, Frederic. 1964. “Herder on classics and classicists.” Arion:  A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 3(2): 5–​27.

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19 Y AHORA SEREMOS ESPAÑOLES The uncertainties of Puerto Rican identity in the late Spanish Empire Wadda C. Ríos-​Font “Nation building” in nineteenth-​century Puerto Rico is a complex phenomenon that probes the nature of the relationship between culture and the state and simultaneously configures two nationalities out of a budding sense of Puerto Rican specificity and a lingering attachment to Spanish identity. It is the latter, rather anomalous, phenomenon that will be emphasized in this chapter. Two significant dates bracket the period. 1808, the year of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, triggered the liberal takeover of the absolutist monarchy that brought the advent of politics to Puerto Rico. It was then that, for the first time, a representative from an island that had always been ruled by despotic Spanish-​born Governor Generals was called to participate in metropolitan government—​initially as part of the Kingdom’s Governing Central Junta that took over for Ferdinand VII, and subsequently in the newly formed parliament, the Cortes. In 1898, after its defeat in the Spanish-​American War, Spain surrendered the island (together with Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam) to the United States, under whose sovereignty it remains to this day as a colonial “unincorporated territory.” The same period may be said to encompass the birth of Puerto Rican letters, for it was in 1806 that the first printing press arrived in the island (eighty-​two years later than in Cuba). It was a state monopoly used mainly to issue official documents as well as the government’s Gazeta de Puerto-​Rico. A second press was not imported until the 1820s, and throughout the century the number of private presses remained minimal. For the whole period the majority of publications were periodical, and it was thus mostly in journals that Puerto Rico’s first writers published short-​format pieces. The first book printed on the island already in 1806, the poetry collection Ocios de la juventud by Spanish-​born Juan Rodríguez Calderón (b. 1778), would only in 1812 be followed by a second, Quadernito de varias especies de coplas muy devotas by the Capuchin missionary Fray Manuel María de Sanlúcar (1781–​1851), also peninsular. Strict censorship always kept non-​governmental publications at a minimum, and the bulk of books read in the island were imported. Moreover, of the five works generally considered the earliest in Puerto Rican literature—​the Aguinaldos puertorriqueños of 1843 and 1846, the Álbum puertorriqueño of 1844, the Cancionero de Borinquén of 1846, and in 1849 El Gíbaro by Manuel A. Alonso (1822–​1889)—​the last three were published by island-​born students in Barcelona. This scenario complicates the question of what exactly constituted early Puerto Rican literature and its relation to the Spanish literary field. Nevertheless, by the end of the century there 278

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was an appreciable body of works written by authors born or long established in the island and reflecting its inhabitants’ circumstances and concerns. It is, then, paradoxical that the century seeing the emergence of both Puerto Rican politics and Puerto Rican print culture did not also beget a decisive independence movement like those of other Spanish-​American territories. There was, undeniably, a separatist current that manifested itself most visibly around the failed 1868 Grito de Lares. And the fierce repression exercised over it by the colonial government undoubtedly kept many potential supporters from working overtly toward that goal. Nevertheless, early nineteenth-​century material conditions also determined the island’s bifurcated nation-​building process. Most salient among these were the weakness of the class of “creole pioneers” (2006, 47) that according to Benedict Anderson underlay the formation of Latin American nations, and the pragmatic bent that island politicians adopted from the very start. Around 1776, Puerto Rico’s population hovered around 80,000. Its lack of mineral resources and its geographic location at the entrance of the Caribbean Sea made it more of a stopover point for Europeans sailing to the American continent than a colony proper. Its economy had long depended on the Mexican situado, an unreliable governmental subsidy that ceased entirely in 1810, upon Nueva España’s independence. Its funds were mostly funneled to the city of San Juan, resulting in a great development imbalance vis-​à-​vis the rest of the territory. Although it never rose to the level of rich Spanish American capitals, it did become the administrative center of a supremely autocratic colonial government. Governor-​Generals with absolute political, economic, and military authority (facultades omnímodas), always sent from the metropolis, famously attended to their own enrichment. Successive waves of bureaucrats also applied themselves to hacer las Américas, or amassing fortunes most took back to the peninsula. Those who stayed in the island maintained a strong allegiance to Spain, and late in the century would form the base of the Partido Incondicional Español. Meanwhile, outside San Juan the recurrent pattern of depopulation caused underutilization of the limited arable land available in a mountainous 9,000 km2 island. In order to jump-​start a plantation economy with coffee and sugar as the principal crops, the Real Cédula de Gracias of 1815 expanded on a similar 1778 measure to encourage the immigration of white foreigners (and sometimes freed slaves) willing to swear allegiance to King and Church. By 1827 the population had grown to around 300,000, largely due to the arrival of Irish, French, Corsican, Dutch, English, German, and Portuguese settlers fleeing from war, repression, or poverty in their countries of origin, as well as Spaniards fleeing wars of independence. Throughout the century, large numbers of Catalans and Mallorcans also arrived, generally establishing commercial enterprises. Many Canarian laborers immigrated due to the colonial government’s insistence, after the Haitian revolution, on always keeping the slave population below a certain level (it never exceeded 14 percent). Far from the commonplace conception of Puerto Rican culture as the exclusive product of miscegenation among only three groups—​native taínos, Spanish conquerors, and African slaves—​the island’s ethnicity is a product of the encounter of all these peoples. However, such substantial diversity did not, as might have been expected, weaken Spanish domination. Instead, the population coalesced around a notion of hispanidad that kept the island loyal to the metropolis. One explanation for this phenomenon might be that, although Spain encouraged immigration as a means toward development, it never relinquished social hegemony. Control of the economy was as strict as control of print production. No banking institutions existed through the last third of the century, so that planters had to mortgage harvests and land to Spanish merchants, to whom the 1815 decree, and later the 1829 Spanish Code of Commerce, also granted the monopoly on trade. Merchants further conditioned loans on other transactions 279

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(storage, transport, provisions), and could foreclose on plantations if debts remained unpaid. Few, however, did so, preferring to perpetuate their relationship to agriculturally knowledgeable landowners forever obligated to them. And if the economy made strange bedfellows of creole planters and peninsular merchants, that bond often became official through intermarriage. In this way, the enduring synergy between planters, merchants, and the colonial administration created a highly assimilated upper class whose sundry origins molded into a single national identity. Without a visible surviving indigenous community on the island—​although “extinction” is a relative term, indigenous males quickly succumbed to illness and enslavement and indigenous women procreated with Spaniards—​no competing national image appeared until the 1860s, when emerging pro-​independence intellectuals began turning to the taíno past to conceive of a native subject with a claim to its own ancestral territory and pondering how the African presence should transform Spanish dominance. Even then, the view of Puerto Ricans as American Spaniards would remain hegemonic.

Españoles americanos The social impulse toward assimilation had its parallel in Puerto Rico’s early political thought. In 1809, Ramón Power y Giralt (1775–​1813) was elected as the island’s envoy to the governing Junta and subsequently as first representative to the Cádiz Cortes. Historian Lidio Cruz Monclova indeed described Power as the first Puerto Rican (1962, 37): [A]‌quel distinguido y benemérito criollo que, con plena conciencia de las naturales y amorosas relaciones que ligan al hombre con el medio geográfico y humano que presta abrigo a su cuna, fué el primero, en dar el dulce nombre de patria a la tierra nativa; el primero en llamarse puertorriqueño; el primero en llamar compatriotas a sus coterráneos, los naturales de Puerto Rico; y, el primero, en inscribir en el naciente código de la puertorriqueñidad.1 The Delegate’s ideology was, however, more complex. His father was an Irish slave trader and sugar plantation owner and his mother Catalan; he had Basque ancestry as well. Power y Giralt studied in Spain and France, crossed three continents with the Spanish Navy, fought with Anglo-​Spanish royalist forces in the Siege of Toulon (1793), frequented pre-​Independence Venezuelan society as Captain on the Costa Firme mail fleet, and lent distinguished service in the 1809 Siege of Santo Domingo. His unique perspective was determined by his broad experience as a traveler. Power y Giralt’s ideas on nationality and government are best extrapolated from his interventions in Cádiz. He began his work armed with Instrucciones from the existing municipalities, most importantly San Juan and San Germán (the oldest and richest settlement outside the capital). While the San Juan instructions devoted significant attention to loosely ethnic concerns (arguing, for example, for the award of positions to natural-​born creoles, control of the African population, limitations on the entry of catalanes),2 they concentrated principally on material reforms that could bring the island to the development level of peninsular provinces. San Germán electors, on the other hand, began by establishing that the town’s adherence to the metropolis was conditional: esta Villa reconoce y se sujeta a dicha Suprema Junta Central ahora y en todo tiempo que gobierne en nombre de Nuestro muy Amado, Augusto y Dignísimo Rey el señor don Fernando Séptimo y su Dinastía; pero si por Disposición Divina (lo que Dios no 280

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permita) se destruyese ésta y perdiere la Península de España, quede independiente esta Isla.3 (Caro 1969, 123–​124) They called for the establishment of a Junta Provincial somewhat similar to the peninsular revolutionary juntas, but also endowed with a degree of administrative control over local affairs. Power y Giralt presented an oral “Exposición y peticiones” at the Cortes on April 7, 1811, and subsequently submitted to the Consejo de Regencia a written document titled “Peticiones que hace a S.A.S. el Consejo de Regencia de España e Indias el Diputado en Cortes por la isla de Puerto Rico para proporcionar el fomento de la agricultura, industria y comercio de aquella interesante y benemérita posesión.”4 In these documents, he sets aside both the references to population management in the San Juan instructions and the overt political claims made by San Germán, concentrating strictly on economic matters. To be sure, Power y Giralt attributed the island’s precarious situation directly to the colonial government’s mismanagement. In a letter to “His Majesty” (in reality to the members of the Junta Central) dated August 30, 1809, as he prepared to travel to the peninsula, the representative had noted that “Puerto Rico, Señor, está en un caso muy diverso que cualquier otra de las ricas posesiones Americanas” [Puerto Rico, Sir, is in a very different position from all other rich American possessions] (Power 1809). He described the island as so immersed “en la indigencia y obscuridad mas dolorosas” that “parecia estar segregado de la Monarquia Española” [in the most painful poverty and obscurity (that) it seemed to be separate from the Spanish monarchy]. The blame was to be placed unambiguously on “el egoísmo, la ambición de mando, y el temerario y despótico empeño en sostener los Gobernadores su opinión, o por mejor decir, el interés de mantener sus monopolios” [selfishness, desire for power, and the reckless and despotic drive of the Governors to maintain their opinion, or rather, their interest in maintaining their monopolies]. In his criticism, however, Power y Giralt distinguished categorically between the metropolis itself and corrupt colonial authorities on the island. After the Cortes’ inauguration he concentrated on requests related to sidestepping the latter in order to encourage economic growth. Power y Giralt’s loyalty to the metropolis was not unrestricted, nor was he necessarily against independence movements elsewhere in America. In the “Reflecciones del Diputado Don Ramón Power acerca del estado presente de la América y sobre las medidas que deben adoptarse” [Reflections of Representative don Ramón Power on the current state of America and the measures that should be adopted] and the “Voto del Diputado en Cortes por la Isla de Puerto Rico sobre la igualdad de representación que corresponde a las Américas” [Representative’s Vote in the Cortes on behalf of the Island of Puerto Rico regarding equal representation for the Americas] both of 1811, he criticizes the Cortes’ dismissal of American deputies’ demands for equal parliamentary representation. He presses for two specific actions: the immediate establishment of representational parity and the concession of a general amnesty to any and all who may have participated in upheavals that he will not yet describe as revolutionary:  “me abstendré Señor de mirar como una rebelión las ocurrencias de Caracas porque no me asisten los datos necesarios para graduarla de tal” [I will abstain, sir, from viewing the events in Caracas as a rebellion because I do not have the information necessary to class it as such] (Caro 1969, 145). The Representative places the blame for American insubordination squarely on Spain’s lack of responsiveness: “jamás el pueblo … se hubiera prestado a tan grandes innovaciones, si este mismo pueblo no hubiera estado gimiendo bajo la opresión y la tiranía” [the people never … would have lent themselves to such changes if these same people had not been groaning under the weight of oppression and tyranny] (144). Thus he not only conceives of secession as 281

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a legitimate option, but warns “que no es tan fácil como se piensa reducir a Caracas por medio de la fuerza” [that it is not as easy as one might think to subdue Caracas by force] (146). Nevertheless, Power y Giralt’s views on Puerto Rico’s way forward were very different. For him, the island’s potential progress depended on its geographical location and topographical makeup, especially its many natural harbors. These characteristics called for turning a territory that could never thrive on agriculture alone into a center of trade.Whereas neither San Juan nor San Germán had placed chief importance on the liberalization of commerce with foreign territories, Power y Giralt makes this the focus of the first five of the Exposición’s sixteen petitions. After censuring the lack of foresight that attempted to repress, rather than legalize and profit from, the inevitable business of contraband, his very first entreaty is que los Comerciantes así naturales y vecinos de la Isla de Puerto Rico, como los Españoles de la península y demás posesiones americanas residentes en ella, puedan comerciar activamente… con cualesquiera posesiones de la Gran Bretaña y demás Potencias amigas.5 (181) This item is followed by specifications regarding the kinds of trade to be allowed, collection of duties, and the outfitting of the island’s ports for the purpose. In making these recommendations, Power y Giralt points out that Spain should have allowed free trade with foreign powers “con la misma libertad con que se permitió por privilegio especial a la Isla de Trinidad de Barlovento” [with the same freedom that was granted by special privilege to the island of Trinidad de Barlovento] (169). It is quite revealing that the model to follow is neither Cuba nor any other continental American territory, but a small island where a Spanish Governor, José María Chacón y Sánchez de Soto (like Power y Giralt, a graduate of the Naval Academy at El Ferrol) had performed a veritable economic miracle before it fell to the British in 1797. Indeed, the Real Cédula decreed for Puerto Rico in 1815 closely followed in several of its parts the text of Trinidad’s population and commerce bill of 1783, which established free commerce and trading routes. Power y Giralt’s project to follow in Trinidad’s footsteps required continued access to the Spanish Merchant Marine, thus precluding any thought of independence. Just as significantly, Trinidad’s Royal Cedula fostered the peaceful coexistence of different races and ethnicities, welcoming to the island and granting land not only to white foreigners of myriad origins but to “Negros y Pardos Libres … en calidad de Colonos, y Cabezas de Familias” [Free Blacks and Brown-​Skinned People … as Colonists and Heads of Families] (1783, 3). The Puerto Rico imagined by Power y Giralt and inspired by the Trinidadian precedent would come closer to a contact zone as defined by Mary Louise Pratt—​“the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations” (1992, 6)—​than to the imagined community that according to Anderson gives rise to nations. The representative, who had ignored San Juan’s entreaties for population management, and who according to some accounts was an early abolitionist (Fernández Pascua 2012), did not imagine an ethnically unified community of Puerto Ricans. While he often invoked an archetypal (and white) “labrador” [farmer] whose afflictions necessitated aid from the fatherland (Caro 1969, 177), the sense of affection that sometimes reveals itself in his writings is not exactly to his fellow islanders as a cultural and spiritual unity, but specifically to the Puerto Rican soil: “entre todas las Antillas … la más feraz y salubre” [in all the Antilles … the most fertile and healthy] (165). Furthermore, he repeatedly uses the words posesión and colonia in a positive way, giving the latter a sense akin to the one it acquired in the 282

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late Roman period, as a thriving settlement existing in a relationship of mutual benefit, rather than subjugation, with the metropolis, and whose inhabitants enjoyed the advantages of citizenship. Power y Giralt was more concerned with making Puerto Rico a prosperous colony than with writing on the nascent code of puertorriqueñidad. Rather than following in the footsteps of Spanish-​American revolutionaries, Power y Giralt placed his bets on bypassing local colonial rule so that Puerto Rico could participate directly, as an equal province, in metropolitan government. As the first American representative to arrive in Spain and the Cortes’ first vice president, he was wholly committed to the constitutional project. His clear differentiation between país and patria betrayed an understanding of nationality as a social contract among equal citizens. It is in this context that one must understand his response to the proclamation of the 1812 Constitution: si algo puede dar a V. S. Y. una idea de la dignidad a que acaba de elevarse la Nación Española, son las sublimes palabras del ilustre obispo de Mallorca, que yo me complazco en repetir a ese Consejo. Ya somos libres y ahora indudablemente seremos españoles.6 (216, my emphasis) From the binary term españoles americanos,7 Puerto Ricans felt they lacked the first part, indeed the noun. Most of them would spend the rest of the century trying to attain it. To accompany the social assimilationism that grouped disparate ethnic groups under a common Spanish rubric, Power y Giralt inaugurated political asimilismo. Subsequent statesmen would follow in his footsteps. For example, in 1821 Demetrio O’Daly, Puerto Rican representative to the Cortes for most of the Constitutional Triennium, rejected on behalf of the local Diputación Provincial a proposal made by American parliamentaries that there be three sections of the Cortes in America. This move in fact refused political decentralization, which decades later would become a central demand of autonomismo. O’Daly wrote island authorities for advice on whether the island’s inhabitants “querían ser agregados a alguna [sección de las Cortes, o] si preferían que se crease una nueva para las islas de Puerto Rico, Cuba y Santo Domingo” [wanted to be added to some (section of the Cortes or) if they preferred that a new one be created for the islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Santo Domingo] (Cruz Monclova 1970 [1971], vol. 1, 116). He followed the Provincial Deputation’s response, stated in language reminiscent of Power y Giralt: como Puerto-​Rico, unido siempre á la madre patria, cada dia ha hecho mas palpable y fina su acrisolada lealtad, su fraternidad pura, y su decision por vivir unidos con sus hermanos, no puede quedar duda alguna de que ni le conviene ni le puede convenir depender… de otra legislatura que de la Peninsular.8 (Córdova 1821, 286) The Puerto Rican faith in a form of government that would abolish any metropolis/​colony duality, and with it the investment in Spanish nationality, were already well cemented.

Assimilationism, autonomism, possibilism Parliamentarism itself, of course, came to an abrupt halt at the end of the Triennium. When the Cortes did meet again after Fernando VII’s death, Puerto Ricans were stripped of their representation. The decree of April 18, 1836 stated that “no siendo posible aplicar la Constitucion que se adopte para la Península é islas adyacentes á las provincias Ultramarinas de América y 283

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Asia, serán éstas regidas y administradas por leyes especiales análogas á su respectiva situacion y circunstancias”9 (Información 1877, xix). Only after 1869 would partial Constitutional protections be restored and political parties legalized, dividing into two main ideological lines. One of these was the Partido Liberal Conservador, established in 1871 and a later renamed Español Sin Condiciones (also known as Incondicional Español). It was composed mostly of landowners and bureaucrats self-​professedly committed to the principles of Spanish sovereignty and authority (including the colonial governors’ facultades omnímodas). As Enric Ucelay DaCal has observed, it was in response to Cuban separatism’s growth that the Spanish Right, “condicionada por el miedo a la secesión, sin mayor iniciativa para acceder a la relevancia política que clamar airadamente en nombre de la unidad de la maltrecha patria” [conditioned by the fear of secession, without any more initiative to gain access to political relevance than to angrily cry out in the name of the unity of the battered motherland] (1997, 154), produced a counter-​revolutionary base that, seeking to preserve privileges it would lose with independence or, worse, annexation to the United States, defined itself through an identity discourse “sin paralelo … por entonces en la política peninsular” [unparalleled … in that era in peninsular politics] (173). The Puerto Rican offshoot of the Cuban Partido Incondicional Español (founded in 1868) adopted the latter’s rhetoric, although secessionist activity was both extremely limited and radically curtailed on the smaller island. As its 1880 program stated, “tiene por fin supremo … velar por la conservación de la integridad nacional” [it has as its ultimate goal … keeping watch over the preservation of national integrity] (qtd. in Cruz Monclova 1970 [1971], vol. 3, 542). The second ideological party line, reformismo, which grouped the majority of Puerto Rican voters, especially those in the liberal professions, was in turn divided into two subcurrents. Assimilationism—​the desire, as inaugurated in Power’s work, to be one more Spanish province with full rights—​was the platform of the Partido Liberal Reformista, founded in 1870 and hegemonic through the mid-​1880s. Its later outgrowth, autonomism—​the desire for self-​rule consistent with the colonies’ special needs but still within Spanish nationality—​organized itself around the Partido Autonomista, active from 1887 through 1898. Both subcurrents strove for broader local control of the economy through political liberalization and reform. Opposition between these main political lines was fierce. Unconditionals characterized Reformists as dangerous secessionists, and the government persecuted them as such. The latter paradoxically reacted by strengthening claims of fealty to Spain. Thus, in 1889, autonomist Francisco Mariano Quiñones wrote that “no pretendemos ni utopias, ni nada que sea contrario á la grandeza de España, nuestra madre-​patria … ni ideas de absorción de atribuciones que sólo competen al Estado, ni tendencia á querer aflojar el vínculo nacional”10 (1889, 59). This vicious circle resulted in the predominance of conservatism in Puerto Rican politics, if by conservatism one means a pro-​ Spanish stance. Despite the rivalry between self-​ described conservatives and liberals, their ranks overlapped through movement between both factions’ moderate wings. As historian Astrid Cubano-​Iguina has noted, Incondicionales “shared the views of creole intellectuals regarding free markets,” and liberals similarly made “common cause” with landowners “whose initiatives in developing the local economy they supported” (1998, 639). Throughout the 1870s the two parties repeatedly tried to establish conciliaciones, presenting common candidacies to local and national elections—​pacts were short-​lived as Unconditionals tended to sabotage Reformist candidates. Nevertheless, both currents were ultimately formed by the island’s elites, and common ground lay in their investment, even if for different reasons, in Spanish nationality. The underlying conservatism in Puerto Rican liberalism—​or at least its pragmatic possibilism—​ultimately manifested itself in the compromises reached in the 1890s in the interest of finally securing an Autonomy Charter. Despite reformism’s long republican tradition, under Luis Muñoz Rivera’s direction its leaders made a pact with Práxedes Mateo 284

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Sagasta’s Partido Liberal Fusionista, which supported the monarchy’s Restoration and took part in the corrupt turno pacífico.

Images of hispanorriqueño identity We shall return to Puerto Rican separatism, which was forced to operate clandestinely, its leaders in exile. For now, it is evident that throughout the nineteenth century those Puerto Ricans who had access to political participation maintained, if for quite varied reasons, a commitment to Spanish identity. Their conception of citizenship was more civic than ethnic, and rooted in an inexplicably enduring faith in Spain’s capacity to overcome centralism and share power. The question emerges of how this hispanidad, or hispanorriqueñidad, was lived daily, vis-​à-​vis Spain’s notoriously weak processes of nationalization, the contorted relationship between the repressed colony and the exploitative metropolis, and the gradual but undeniable growth of a distinct local culture. Perhaps one of the most revealing texts in this regard is Mis memorias: o Puerto Rico como lo encontré y cómo lo dejo by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826–​1882), published decades after the author’s death. Tapia, a playwright, poet, narrator, editor, and probably the first native Puerto Rican historian, is broadly considered the “patriarca de las letras puertorriqueñas” [patriarch of Puerto Rican letters] (Rosa-​Nieves and Melón 1970, 406). The text itself ignores no aspect of his personal and class experience. It recounts the story of his parents’ divergent origins and eventual separation, at the time both frequent occurrences and recurrent literary themes:  the peninsular officer literally could not stomach Puerto Rican food, whereas after trying to join him in Málaga his island wife’s fragility, “propia de su sexo” [typical of her sex] (Tapia 1996, 129), could not survive street clashes between absolutists and liberals. Extremely rich with seafaring imagery—​another constant in nineteenth-​century Puerto Rican literature, as the airplane became one hundred years later—​the memoirs go into great detail about Tapia’s two voyages to Spain, as a child (1835) and as an adult (1849–​1852). The latter trip resulted from a banishment sentence after a petty duel, yet afforded him the possibility not just of seeing his father and meeting his future wife, but doing groundbreaking historical research:  criminal punishment could ironically be of tremendous advantage to young men of insufficient resources. Tapia alludes repeatedly to his lifelong feeling of self-​division, already suggested in the subtitle’s characterization of the author as disembodied soul (spiritualism too was a frequent literary motif). At one point he wonders, as he sails back to Puerto Rico for the second time, which part of himself, “mi yo” or “mi sombra” [my self or my shadow] (149), remains in Spain. He also looks to Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo as the quintessential image for the Puerto Rican subject  (5–​6): Mi amor a ese pedazo de tierra tenía algo de fatídico y misterioso como el de Cuasimodo a la campana grande de Notre Dame de Paris, cuando abrazado a ella parecian hombre y campana convertirse en una cosa misma, en un solo cuerpo con dos almas o en un alma con dos cuerpos. Lo que pasa entre mi tierra y yo, no es menos singular y acaso mas extraño, jamás pudo verse amalgama de cosas más opuestas. En lo fisico hubiera preferido otro clima …; en lo humano, otra gente; y sin embargo… se mete dentro de mi alma.11 The Puerto Rican condition is, for Tapia, one of spatial disjunction as well as detached self-​ consciousness. Its ideal metaphor is a Romantic grotesque imbued with both solemn fatality and unavoidable humor. 285

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Among Tapia’s many rich anecdotes, perhaps a minor one about his childhood best gives a sense of the simultaneous connection and disconnection Puerto Ricans felt with regard to Spain (24–​25): Recuerdo haber visto una noche desde el balcón de mi citada casita… la iluminación de la Casa Consistorial, compuesta de vasitos de colores que aún brillan en mi fantasía… Para mí se representa aquella noche… como más hechicera que cuantas maravillas y portentos he visto descritos después en cuentos de hadas… Según deduzco de las fechas, celebrábase el nacimiento de Isabel II, en los días 31 de enero al 6 de febrero de 1831 … Mi madre envuelta en sedas y gasas … Mi padre… con el vistoso traje militar de aquel tiempo… debía parecer en cierto modo a mis ojos infantiles, algo así como un semidiós o ente sobrenatural … Quedéme en el balcón algo mohíno porque no me llevaron. Así es que, sordo a la voz de la criada negra, Amalia, y del asistente Erro, navarro de provincia y soldado viejo… hube de permanecer en el balcón bastante tiempo.12 Peninsular solemnities were obviously celebrated in Puerto Rico. However, for island residents—​ here opportunely incarnated in the adult narrating childhood experience—​such happenings, which often had serious bearing on their lives, also had the same fantastic quality as fairy tales. They were, in fact, the substance of myth, naturalizing a conceptual Spanishness based not only on a historical long-​ago, but on a geographical far-​away of Kings and Princesses. It is also quite telling that Tapia remembers himself looking through balcony railings, a once-​removed (and figuratively imprisoned) witness deprived of fully participating in the celebration along with the African servant and the Navarrese attendant. Among a diverse population defying all of the Old World’s categorizations, and between a beloved homeland and a chimerical fatherland, the author codifies his reality through in-​betweenness and detachment. As the mention of ethnic diversity in Mis memorias makes clear, however much Puerto Ricans insisted on their hispanidad, the issue of race inevitably became problematic. Partly projecting Cuban circumstances onto a different reality, and partly due to the nature of racial relations in Puerto Rico itself, one of the reasons the Spanish government hesitated to restore constitutional protection and parliamentary representation to Puerto Ricans was the fear of granting political participation to men of African descent through sufragio universal censitario (one should remember that the Real Cédula de Gracias had opened the door to black landowners and even slaveowners). Early in the reformist era, the response was to present the island’s widespread miscegenation as a productive process of blanqueamiento. At the 1866 Junta de información to which Overseas Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo called Caribbean representatives in order to consult them about what the long-​promised special laws should look like, Puerto Rican delegates undertook a curious two-​pronged attack. On the one hand, they insisted on the immediate abolition of slavery—​certainly out of virtue but also because they knew the much-​hated institution was at the root of the metropolis’ differential treatment of its island subjects. On the other hand, they attempted to alleviate metropolitan fears about the potential consequences of political reform by simultaneously boasting of a distinguished, property-​owning and professional “clase libre de color … [que] contribuye de un modo notable … á la produccion del país” [free colored class … (that) contributes significantly to the country’s production] (Información 1877, 143) and of a strong Spanish race destined to absorb all others (112, my emphases): La raza dominante en las Islas de Cuba y Puerto-​Rico, y que con el transcurso del tiempo tiene que absorver necesariamente á la que forma hoy… la poblacion 286

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esclava, se compone en su totalidad de españoles, hijos y descendientes de españoles peninsulares… De aquí se deduce que la aplicación de la justicia á las bases de su gobierno estrechará sin duda los vínculos de familia entre los españoles antillanos y peninsulares; y que bajo su imperio serán realmente españoles los cubanos y puerto-​riqueños.13 Literary authors began to imagine scenarios of racial harmony, or be critical of its lack. One of Tapia’s own best-​known works, for example, is La cuarterona (1867), the tragedy (pointedly set in Cuba, not Puerto Rico) of a quarteroon woman of light complexion who attracts the love of a white man and predictably succumbs to his family’s prejudice. Another example is the short story “La resurrección de un vivo” by Puerto Rican Cortes delegate Manuel Corchado y Juarbe, published in his 1873 spiritualist collection Historias de Ultra-​Tumba, in which a Spaniard who had raped one of his slaves recognizes his daughter, who goes on to marry a white man, founding a symbolic Puerto Rican genealogy. As I have argued elsewhere (Ríos-​Font 2013), the story is especially notable for its propagandistic use:  it was published while Corchado was still lobbying in parliament for the abolition of slavery and application to Puerto Ricans of the first two articles of the 1869 Constitution (both things granted in 1873). Once autonomism became dominant in the 1880s, Puerto Rican liberals interested in bolstering their local power sought to enlarge their electorate by integrating both the “clase libre de color” [free colored class] and a larger base of mixed-​race individuals. In consequence, one of the reforms they pursued was lowering the income and asset requirement for voting (although the political power of incondicionales was such that, even when this was finally achieved in the early 1890s, the threshold remained higher than in Cuba). It was at this stage, according to Astrid Cubano-​Iguina, that liberals “consciously and unconsciously attempted to integrate the native-​born inhabitants of the colony by constructing a single ethnic identity for the island” (1998, 635). Nonetheless, despite the fact that a number of liberal politicians and intellectuals themselves had recent African ancestry, they evidently had no intention of actually sharing power with subaltern classes. The newly imagined Puerto Rican identity was therefore still fundamentally white, and built on the longstanding idealization of the jíbaro peasant. It was, however, the beginning (if vacillating) of ethnic differentiation from Spanish peninsular culture. Unsurprisingly, the earliest departures from the españoles americanos model are to be found in the political and literary works of early separatists. Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827–​1898), a lead organizer of the 1868 Grito de Lares whose own wealthy father was forced to undergo a pureza de sangre process,14 was one of the first to start pointing toward an essential ethnic difference between Puerto Ricans and Spaniards. Although born in Puerto Rico to a family immigrated from Santo Domingo, Betances spent most of his life in France and did much of his work in support of Puerto Rican independence from various locations in the Caribbean: the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Saint Thomas. It is of note that he started out as a reformist, and his work toward independence does not originate in a feeling of national difference, but in disillusionment with Spain’s capacity to enact change. As Tapia remembers about Betances and his separatist colleague Segundo Ruiz Belvis (both exiled), todo esto lo hizo el despotismo colonial … [Si], menos llevados de su despecho, hubiesen esperado tiempos que se acercaban, habrían llegado a nuestros días dando muestras y provecho a su país por la verdadera y única senda que puede hacerlo mejorar y progresar.15 (1996, 142–​143). 287

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Like reformists in general, Betances considered slavery a key issue within the larger problem of Puerto Rico’s relationship to Spain. As he argued in an 1860s speech at the Port-​au-​Prince Masonic Lodge, it was a systemic evil that subsumed the entire social order, una espantosa escalera de Jacob … En el primer peldaño vemos la raza africana encadenada y destrozada por el látigo; en el medio, es el colono, cuyo orgullo está encadenado al trabajo ajeno por la debilidad y corrupción de su alma; en la cima vemos al déspota —​español o francés—​él mismo encadenado por la vigilancia que impone el despotismo.16 (2013, vol. 4, 114) The multilayered image establishes a three-​tiered structure in which class and race are inextricable and implies that, by sharing in the subordination of the African “raza,” colonos—​a noun referring to both the European-​born in America and creoles—​already constitute an ethnic group distinct from their continental counterparts. Unlike other reformists, however, Betances came to consider the solution to local problems impossible under the innately colonial Spanish state, even long after the 1873 abolition; by 1895, his manifesto “A los puertorriqueños” urged, “¿Qué esperan? … ¿Qué le piden a España? … ‘España no puede dar lo que no tiene’; y la España de hoy es la España de siempre” [What are you waiting for? What do you ask of Spain? ‘Spain can’t give what it doesn’t have’; and today’s Spain is the same old Spain] (2013, vol. 4, 110). The colonos could and should build new nations, and these should be multiracial as well as confederative: what he ultimately advocates is independence as a step toward an Antillean federation. Betances nevertheless stops short of conceiving ethnicity as the basis for a state. Furthermore, in imagining the genealogy of an independent Puerto Rico, he significantly turns to the taíno past rather than African heritage. His short story “Los dos indios: Episodio de la conquista de Borinquen” (originally published in French in 1857) is a sort of foundational fiction about a pair of noble natives courageously fighting the Spanish. At the end, despite the latter’s victory, the child who survives to represent the future is the son of one of the caciques and the beautiful daughter of the cruel Spanish commander. At the legend’s center is the familiar anguish over the hybrid and divided self, this time begotten by a traitorous yet irresistible love. Thus the warrior Toba laments that his brother Otuké “ya no podía defender la tierra de sus padres, él, que se entregaba a la hija de los españoles … ¡Borinquen! … ¡Tus hijos, esclavos, serán amigos de sus amos!” [could no longer defend the land of his fathers, he, who gave himself to the daughter of Spaniards … Borinquen! … Your sons, slaves, will be friends to their owners!] (2008, vol. 3, 152). A similar ambiguity appears in the work of prominent independentist intellectual Eugenio María de Hostos (1839–​1903), who like Betances left Puerto Rico as a child to study in Spain, and spent most of his life elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America. Hostos, also like Betances, began his political life as a reformist before turning to separatism. He too was horrified by the treatment of slaves, and advocated spiritedly for the practice’s eradication. In his 1873 (post-​abolition) essay “La abolición de la esclavitud en Puerto Rico” he deplores how freed slaves were still held to mandatory contracts, and criticizes the continued abuse of “esa raza … superior en virtudes a la nuestra” [that race … with virtues superior to ours] (1954, 299). Describing Puerto Rico’s free population, he distinguishes four groups, listed in this order: “criollos o nativos de la isla,”“extranjeros españoles,”“extranjeros americanos y europeos,” and “esclavos africanos y criollos” [Creoles or natives of the island, Spanish foreigners, American and European foreigners, and African and Creole slaves] (291). Again like Betances, Hostos clearly sets apart the European-​and island-​born. Nevertheless, he also places both groups at the 288

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top of post-​abolition social hierarchy: slaves, who by his own figures would have been third, after European and American “foreigners,” are significantly still mentioned last. In his work, the closeness between the two top tiers (and the social dominance of whites) will not be decisively undone. Once more like Betances, in imagining his own fiction of origins Hostos evokes the taíno past to validate Antilleans’ claim to their own territory. The protagonist of his fictional travelogue La peregrinación de Bayoán (published in Madrid in 1863) reverses Columbus’ voyage of discovery, restoring to each island its indigenous name. Bayoán furthermore expresses a sense of divided self in language reminiscent of Alejandro Tapia y Rivera: “Hay dos seres en mí: uno que se va, otro que viene: uno mas fuerte que otro; uno que invade, otro que resiste” [There are two beings within me: one that goes, another that comes; one stronger than the other; one that invades, another that resists] (1970, 150). He finds within himself traces of both the invader and the resister, and in moments of nostalgia, it is the white Puerto Rican peasant he eulogizes: “En el campo, los jíbaros me traen a la memoria las costumbres sencillas del pasado” [In the country, the jíbaros remind me of the simple customs of the past] (213). The narrative newly repeats the familiar combination of connection to and disappointment with Spain. Thus, Bayoán can at one point write: Que España nos dirija, no lo siento; pero que por nuestra debilidad nos prive del derecho de ser hijos, y en vez de, con nosotros, gobiernen nuestro país esos indiferentes que vienen y se van encogiéndose de hombros! … ¡Ah! pobre España, abre los ojos y ve.17 (215) Hostos shares Betances’s view of Spain as a spent power, but still imagines the relationship between insulars and peninsulars as enduring kinship. Although he too favors the independence of Puerto Rico as a necessary step toward a better political association, in principle Spaniards are not outside that potential new brotherhood: “yo sueño con la fraternidad de los pueblos de América y España” [I dream of brotherhood between the peoples of America and Spain] (217). In both authors’ imaginaries, as generally in nineteenth-​century Puerto Rican separatism, the drive toward independence stems neither from a categorical perception of ethnic difference nor from a mature sense of nationality.

Americanos españoles Outside the frame of separatism, belief in Puerto Rican hispanidad became the norm to such a degree that it would even dominate politics after the change of sovereignty. Two examples are revealing. The first is found in writer-​politician Federico Degetau (1862–​1914). The island-​ born son of a German-​English father and a Puerto Rican woman, like many of his contemporaries he was taken to Spain after his early education. As an adult Degetau, a lawyer, was another traveler:  he moved constantly between Puerto Rico and Spain, and built himself a house on the northern coast of France. A prominent member of the Autonomist Party, in 1896 he formed part of the commission of Puerto Ricans charged with striking the deal for the island’s autonomy. Degetau was elected Delegate to the Cortes only a few months before the US invasion of Puerto Rico, at which point his political action turned seamlessly to the new metropolis: in 1900 he was elected the island’s first Resident Commissioner in Washington, DC (this nonvoting delegate is still, to this day, its only representative in Congress). In a certain dejà vu with regard to the Spanish period, Degetau would (unsuccessfully) devote himself to trying 289

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to secure, first, official American citizenship eventually leading to full statehood, and second, a commitment on the part of the United States to extend full constitutional rights to Puerto Ricans. Lecturing in 1902 on “The Political Status of Porto Rico,” Degetau deployed an argument as curious as that of the 1866 Puerto Rican Delegates in Madrid. He contended that—​ unlike “savages or semi-​savage islands of the distant Asiatic seas” also annexed through the Treaty of Paris (7)—​Puerto Ricans were mature enough to participate in American democracy because they were Spaniards. By his account, their long political history began when “the new ideas of liberty and justice—​which produced the Declaration of Independence, [and] the Constitution of the United States …—​reached Spain in 1808” (10). At that point, “the representation of Porto Rico was also convened because… the Island was … an ‘essential and integral part of the Spanish Monarchy’ ” (my emphasis). That experience enabled later Puerto Ricans to understand, in turn, how “the Island is [now], in fact, an integral part of the American Union” (16, my emphasis). On that basis Degetau concludes that “the American flag can perhaps be lowered in the distant Philippines. It must be maintained in the neighboring island.” In the name of his compatriots, he asks Congress to “give us a chance, and we will prove to what extent we are able to perform our political duties.” In the Resident Commissioner’s scheme, nationality and citizenship are still chiefly civic rather than ethnic matters, but more interestingly, it was Puerto Ricans’ earlier status as ultramar Spaniards that qualified them to be (North) American. Thirty-​one years later Pedro Albizu Campos (1891–​1965), preeminent leader of the separatist Partido Nacionalista Puertorriqueño, would return to the notion of Spanish identity, this time to justify, not full annexation, but opposition to American rule. Precisely in his 1933 “Discurso del día de la Raza,” Albizu recreates the myth of Puerto Rican nationality as a mixture of indigenous and African blood around a structural, and absorbing, core of hispanidad. He recalls that “mi padre era vizcaíno y viene de la raza más pura de toda Europa” [my father was Basque and comes from the purest race in all of Europe] (1971, 195) and—​echoing once again the 1866 Delegates—​imagines that Spain seamlessly incorporated all the civilizations (or “races”) it encountered: “donde el español llegó, formó familia” [wherever a Spaniard went, he established a family] (203). He fantastically exalts a supposed era of equality in which “España no negó sus más altos blasones a ningún hombre, ni a ninguna mujer, fuese negro, fuese indio, o fuese blanco” [Spain did not deny its highest honors to any man, or to any woman, be they black, Indian or white]. And he locates the origin of that spirit, first, in “Isabel la Católica” (200), and then in “don Cristóbal Colón” (204). Although his discourse is pre-​Francoist, he places the Second Republic in that conservative historical line: “Y la República Española tampoco ha sido menos que la Corona española… Esa es la civilización de los grandes pueblos de la historia” [And nor has the Spanish Republic been less than the Spanish Crown … That is the civilization of the great races of history] (204). Like his nineteenth-​century separatist predecessors, Albizu too sees independence as a stage in a process of federative re-​association, yet now that progression points fully back toward peninsular origins: “la independencia de Puerto Rico, la confederación antillana, la unión panamericana y la hegemonía de los pueblos iberoamericanos” [the independence of Puerto Rico, the Antillean confederation, the pan-​American union, and the hegemony of the Ibero-​American peoples] (218).

National and political identity Through the complex processes barely outlined above, throughout the nineteenth century Puerto Ricans began to establish a distinct cultural identity without arriving at nationalism in the most basic sense described by Ernest Geller: that the national and the political unit should be congruent. An enduring sense of kinship with Spain reinforced by rigid colonial control, 290

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continued waves of immigration from the peninsula, and intermarriage between new arrivals and creoles; the notions of decentralization and federalism that were already present in Cádiz and late in the century prevailed among Catalans, who had become a significant presence on the island (with Barcelona as one of the leading destinations for students); the advantages that buying into hispanidad nevertheless offered to elites of diverse origins; the realities of island geography, which created cycles of population and depopulation as well as generations of travelers, exiles, split families, and an early diaspora; the enormous role of racial multiplicity and miscegenation in both forming the island population and circumscribing its political advancement; the experience of poverty and underdevelopment; the conviction that such a small territory did not offer the minimal conditions for an independent state—​all of these circumstances produced an environment in which nationality and the state were not essentially linked. The Puerto Rican political class developed a sense of difference from Spaniards, but this sense cannot be said to have taken them beyond understanding themselves as creoles and ultimately still colonists somehow linked to their European origin. At the same time, in what is perhaps a unique case in Spanish America, the variables mentioned engendered a pragmatic construction of nationality. Ethnic, cultural, racial identity could be variously construed and put to different political uses, and not necessarily in a cynical way. For the Puerto Rican political class, multiple allegiances were possible, even if the emergent literature often expressed this with images of self-​division or anxiety of origins. In the midst of the Age of Nations Puerto Rico emerged as somehow postnational. Luis Muñoz Marín, the governor who engineered the current Estado Libre Asociado, expressed it thus in 1959: “Esta experiencia puertorriqueña… demostraría… que cuando se sale del colonialismo se puede rebasar el nacionalismo, y alentaría la esperanza de que la mente humana domine por fin el poder grande y estrecho de la idea nacionalista”18 (Reina 2005, 190). Although his belief in having left colonialism behind would prove to be illusory, his observations on the disjunction between nationality and state in Puerto Rico were historically well-​informed. For nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century Puerto Ricans, identification with Spain was a multifunctional strategy. Two of its functions stand out as especially significant (though they are by no means the only ones). On the one hand, before the change of sovereignty the desire to become fully recognized Spaniards (which implicitly acknowledged not being so) generated a complex dynamic between ethnic and civic identifications, and partly established nationality not as an inherent trait but as a performance susceptible of being consciously deployed to achieve, or at least try to achieve, specific political ends. After the change of sovereignty, the false memory of having been Spaniards provided a coherent oppositional identity at various points in the development of the political relationship with the United States—​the first metropolis from which Puerto Ricans saw themselves as essentially different. Paradoxically, while to this day the repertoires constituting hispanorriqueño cultural identity have not provided a cogent notion of what it means to be Puerto Rican that can serve as the basis for a strong nation-​building process, they have nevertheless afforded great cultural cohesion at different points of political crisis.

Notes 1 “That distinguished, worthy Creole who, fully aware of the natural, loving relationships that tie men to the human and geographical environment that shelters their home, was the first to give the sweet name of motherland to his native land; the first to call himself Puerto Rican; the first to call his fellow Puerto Ricans compatriots; and the first to subscribe to the nascent code of Puerto Ricanness.” All Spanish quotations translated by Linda Grabner, University of Pennsylvania.

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Wadda C. Ríos-Font 2 The San Juan Cabildo members, most likely a mixture of descendants of early Spanish colonists and new arrivals sent to Puerto Rico as part of the governmental administration, appear to have seen Catalans (whose presence in America increased after Charles III’s 1778 Free Trade Decree) as rivals for local power. In their text they characterize the latter as greedy merchants, and criticize that their “especulaciones … degeneran de las mercantiles a la regatonería frecuentemente, advirtiéndose que… rara vez construyan [sic] fábricas, fomenten haciendas, ni tomen otro destino que la salida ó el transporte con el metálico que han granjeado” [ventures … often devolve from proper commercial practices to mere haggling, observing that they rarely build factories, develop real estate, or do anything more than take the cash they earn and emigrate or relocate elsewhere in the country] (Caro de Delgado 1969, 81–​82). 3 “[T]‌his town recognizes and abides by the aforementioned High Central Council now and as long as it governs in the name of our most beloved, august and worthy King, don Fernando XII and his dynasty; but if by Divine Will (may God not permit it) the dynasty should be destroyed and lose the Spanish Peninsula, this island will become independent.” 4 “Petitions made to SAS Council of Regents of Spain and the Indies by the Representative to the Cortes for the island of Puerto Rico to grant development of agriculture, industry and commerce to that interesting and worthy possession.” 5 “that businessmen, both natives and neighbors of the island of Puerto Rico and Spaniards of the peninsula and other American possessions, may actively do business … with any possessions of Great Britain and other friendly powers.” 6 “[I]‌f anything can give Your Highness an idea of the dignity to which the Spanish Nation has just been elevated, it is the sublime words of the illustrious Bishop of Majorca, which I am pleased to repeat to this Council. We are already free and now, undoubtedly, we will be Spanish.” 7 The term “españoles americanos” itself has a long history worthy of separate study. It circulated broadly throughout the Americas at least since the 1799 publication of Juan Pablo Viscardo’s Lettre aux espagnols americains, figured prominently in the Cádiz debates on parliamentary representation, and was broadly used by both Puerto Rican liberals and conservatives well into the nineteenth century. 8 “[S]‌ince Puerto Rico, always united with the motherland, each day has made its refined loyalty, its pure brotherhood, and its decision to live at one with its brothers stronger and more palpable; there can be no doubt that it is not to its benefit, nor can it be, to depend … on any other than the Peninsular legislature.” 9 “[It] not being possible to apply the Constitution that may be adopted for the Peninsula and adjacent islands to the overseas provinces of America and Asia, these will be governed and administrated by special laws analogous to their respective situations and circumstances.” 10 “[W]‌e do not aspire to utopias, or to anything that may be contrary to the greatness of Spain, our motherland … nor to ideas of absorption of attributions that belong to the State, nor to a tendency to want to loosen national ties.” 11 “My love for that piece of land was somewhat fateful and mysterious, like that of Quasimodo for the great bell of Notre Dame de Paris, when, embracing it, man and bell seemed to become a single object, a single body with two souls or one soul with two bodies. What happens between my land and me is no less unique and perhaps strange; a combination of two more different things has never been seen. Physically, I  would have preferred a different climate …; humanly, other people; and yet … it is rooted in my soul.” 12 “I remember one night, seeing from the balcony of my previously mentioned little house … the light of the Town Hall, made up of little colored cups that still shine in my imagination … For me, that night was … more enchanting than all the marvels and wonders I’ve seen described in fairy tales … From what I can deduce from the dates, they were celebrating the birth of Isabel II, from January 31 to February 6, 1831 … My mother was wrapped up in silks and gauzes … My father … in the flamboyant military uniform of that time … He must have seemed, to my childish eyes, something like a demigod or supernatural being … I stayed on the balcony, a little sad because they didn’t take me. So, deaf to the voice of the black maid, Amalia, and the assistant, Erro, a Navarrese and former soldier … I must have stayed on the balcony for quite some time.” 13 “The dominant race on the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and which with the passage of time must necessarily absorb what today makes up … the slave population, is entirely composed of Spaniards, [and] sons and descendants of peninsular Spaniards … Hence, it can be deduced that the application of laws to the foundations of their government will undoubtedly embrace family ties between Antillean

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Y ahora seremos españoles and peninsular Spaniards; and further, that under their empire Cubans and Puerto Ricans will actually be Spaniards.” 14 In 1838, as Betances’ older sister planned to marry, the parish priest revealed—​seemingly out of personal animosity—​that all of the family’s children were registered in the church’s libro de pardos, and the father undertook a two-​year long legal process to rectify their racial classification. Betances himself recalls that “sacáronle en cara á la familia la sangre africana—​que ningún Betances, que haya tenido sentido común, ha negado jamás. –​Sin embargo, entonces parece que fue preciso negarla ó que por estar en regla con la ley española, hubo de hacerse informacion de blancura de sangre, y de probarse, á los ojos de todos, que nosotros, gente prieta, éramos tan blancos como cualquier Pelayo y hasta cualquier irlandés, lo que quedó probado al fin según la ley que pone á media noche las doce del día” [they threw the family’s African blood in their face—​which no Betances who has had any common sense has ever denied. But then it seems that we had to deny it or that because it was in line with Spanish law, we had to give information on the whiteness of our blood and to prove publicly that we, dark-​skinned people, were as white as any northern Spaniard or even any Irishman, which was finally proven according to the law that says midnight is midday] (qtd. in Bonafoux 1901, 7). 15 “[A]‌ll this was done by colonial despotism … [If], less influenced by their anger, they had awaited the times to come, they would have come through to our time giving exhibitions and benefit to their country through the true and only path that can make it improve and progress.” 16 “[A]‌horrific Jacob’s ladder … On the first step we see the African race chained and destroyed by the whip; in the middle are the colonists, whose pride is chained to the work of others by the weakness and corruption of their souls; at the peak we see the despot—​Spanish or French—​who is himself chained by the vigilance that despotism imposes.” 17 “I do not regret that Spain controls us, but [rather], that due to our weakness it deprives us of the right to be sons, and instead of governing with us, we are governed by those indifferent individuals who come and go shrugging their shoulders! … Oh! Poor Spain, open your eyes and see.” 18 “This Puerto Rican experience … would show … that when colonialism is left behind, nationalism can be surpassed; and it would raise the hope that the human mind might finally conquer the great, narrow power of the nationalist idea.”

Works cited Albizu Campos, Pedro. [1933] 1971. “Discurso del Día de la Raza.” In La conciencia nacional puertorriqueña, edited by Manuel Maldonado-​Denis, 191–​218. San Juan: Compromiso. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd edition. New York: Verso. Betances, Ramón Emeterio. 2008. Obras completas, edited by Félix Ojeda Reyes and Paul Estrade. 4 vols. San Juan: Puerto. Bonafoux, Luis. 1901. Betances. Barcelona: Imprenta Modelo. Caro de Delgado, Aida, ed. 1969. Ramón Power y Giralt:  Diputado puertorriqueño a las Cortes Generales y Extraordinarias de España, 1810–​1812. San Juan: Printing by the author. Corbella, Jacint. 1993. “Els estudiants de medicina de Puerto Rico a Barcelona en el Segle XIX y el desenvolupament de la literatura borinquenya.” Gimbernat 19: 87–​96. Corchado y Juarbe, Manuel. 1873. Historias de Ultra-​Tumba. Madrid: J. M. Alcántara. Córdova, Pedro Tomás de. 1821. “[Respuesta de la Diputación Provincial.” Gazeta del Gobierno 72 (Sept.). Cruz Monclova, Lidio. 1962. “Ramón Power.” Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña 17: 37–​42. —​—​—​. 1970–​1971. Historia de Puerto Rico (Siglo XIX). 6th edition. 3 vols. Río Piedras: Universidad de Puerto Rico. —​—​—​. 2009.“The printed text in Puerto Rican culture.” Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico. https://​enciclopediapr. org/​en/​encyclopedia/​the-​printed-​text-​in-​puerto-​r ican-​culture/​. —​—​—​. 1998. “Political culture and male mass-​party formation in late-​nineteenth-​century Puerto Rico.” Hispanic American Historical Review 78: 631–​662. Degetau y González, Federico. 1886. El secreto de la domadora. El fondo del aljibe. Madrid: E. Teodoro. —​—​—​. 1902. The Political Status of Porto Rico. Washington, DC: Globe Printing Co. Even-​Zohar, Itamar.“The role of literature in the making of the nations of Europe: a socio-​semiotic examination.” Applied Semiotics/​Sémiotique Appliquée 1: 20–​30.

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Wadda C. Ríos-Font Fernández Pascua, Delfina. 2012. “Ramón Power: primer americano vicepresidente y presidente interino de las Cortes de Cádiz.” Revista hispanoamericana 2 (online). Fradera, Josep Maria. 2005. Colonias para después de un imperio. Barcelona: Bellaterra. Geller, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. González, José Luis. 1980. El país de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos. Río Piedras: Huracán. Hostos, Eugenio María de. 1954. España y América.Vol. 21 of Obras completas,edited by Eugenio Carlos de Hostos. Paris: [Ediciones literarias y artísticas]. —​—​—​. [1863] 1970. La peregrinación de Bayoán. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura. Información sobre reformas en Cuba y Puerto Rico celebrada en Madrid en 1866 y 67, por los representantes de ambas islas. 1877. 2nd edition. New York: Hallet y Breen. Martínez-​Fernández, Luis. 1994. Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–​1878. Athens, GA: University of Georgia. Mergal-​Llera,Ángel Manuel. 1944. Federico Degetau: Un orientador de su pueblo. New York: Hispanic Institute. Pagán, Bolívar. Procerato puertorriqueño del siglo XIX. San Juan: Editorial Campos, 1961. Pedreira, Antonio S. 1945. El año terrible del 87: Sus antecedentes y sus consecuencias. San Juan: Biblioteca de Autores Puertorriqueños. Power y Giralt, Ramón. 1809. Carta inédita. Archivo Histórico Nacional de España, Estado 57. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Quiñones, Francisco Mariano. 1889. Historia de los partidos Reformista y Conservador. Mayagüez: Tipografía Comercial. Real cédula de S.M. que contiene el reglamento para la poblacion y comercio de la isla de la Trinidad de Barlovento. 1783. Madrid: Impresor de Cámara de S. M. Reina Pérez, Pedro Ángel. 2005. Cavilando el fin del mundo: Apología y confesión en las Conferencias Godkin 1959 de Luis Muñoz Marín. [Río Piedras]: Álamo West Caribbean Publishing. Ríos-​Font, Wadda C. 2007. “The patriot as expatriate: travel and national identity in nineteenth-​century Puerto Rico.” Siglo Diecinueve 13: 37–​64. —​—​—​. 2011. “Ramón Power y Giralt, first delegate to the Cádiz Courts, and the origins of Puerto Rican national discourse.” In Culture Contacts and the Making of Cultures: Papers in Homage to Itamar Even-​Zohar, edited by Rakefet Sela-​Sheffy and Gideon Toury, 101–​130. Tel Aviv: Unit for Culture Research. —​—​—​. 2013. “Ultramar, Ultratumba:  spiritism, literature, and politics in nineteenth-​century Puerto Rico.” Paper presented at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Feb. 21; Also delivered at Columbia University, Feb. 21, 2014; Harvard University, April 1, 2014. —​—​—​. 2016.“The subject(s) of empire: political and literary representation in nineteenth-​century Puerto Rico.” Lecture presented at University of Cambridge, UK, Nov. 30. Rosa-​Nieves, Cesáreo, and Esther M. Melón. 1970. Biografías puertorriqueñas:  Perfil histórico de un pueblo. Sharon, CT: Troutman Press. Scarano, Francisco A. 1996. “The Jíbaro masquerade and the subaltern politics of creole identity formation in Puerto Rico, 1745–​1823.” American Historical Review 101(5): 1398–​1431. Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro. 1867. La cuarterona: Drama original en tres actos. Madrid: T. Fortanet. —​—​—​. [1928] 1996. Mis memorias, o Puerto Rico cómo lo encontré y como lo dejo. Río Piedras: Edil. Ucelay DaCal, Enric. 1997. “Cuba y el despertar de los nacionalismos en la España peninsular.” Studia Historica. Historia contemporánea 15: 151–​192.

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20 THE LEGACIES OF ATLANTIC SLAVERY IN NINETEENTH-​ CENTURY SPAIN Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla

In its first article, the first Spanish constitutional text (the Constitution of Cádiz, approved in March 1812) explicitly defined the Spanish nation as “la reunión de todos los españoles de ambos hemisferios” [the reunion of all Spaniards in both hemispheres]. From its first expression, therefore, the liberal Spanish imaginary considered the Spanish nation as a subject that incorporated not only the Spaniards of Europe but also those of America. Hence, the presence of American representatives in the Spanish parliaments is well known, both in those that met in Cádiz (between 1810 and 1814)  and in those that met during the Liberal Triennium (Chust 1993). It is no coincidence, for example, that the one who signed Fernando VII’s disqualification as King of Spain, in the middle of the military conflict against the Holy Alliance’s invading troops, was Tomás Gener, representative of Havana and President of the Court in 1823. It is equally well known that the complex process of the crisis of the Ancien Régime and the construction of a liberal nation-​state in Spain in the first half of the nineteenth century paralleled the process of independence of the Spanish possessions in continental America (Fradera 2015). Hence, at the death of Fernando VII in 1833, of that vast empire where the sun never set, little remained under Spanish dominion except for a collection of islands and archipelagos scattered throughout the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico), along the African coast (Fernando Poo, Corisco, Annobon, Elobey, …), around the China Sea (the Philippines), and around the Pacific Ocean (the Mariana Islands, the Caroline Islands, and Palau). It is true that, in some of the possessions of that diminished empire, there was no effective Spanish presence and the metropolitan dominion over them was merely formal (as would be demonstrated, for example, in 1885 when the German Empire planted its flag in the Caroline Islands, openly challenging Spain). But it is no less true that, after the imperial crisis of 1810 to 1826, Spain still maintained control over a rich colony like Cuba, the largest of the Antilles islands, for nearly all of the nineteenth century. It was not just a case, by any means, of one more colony: as William Clarence-​Smith (1991, 72)  defined it, during the nineteenth century the island of Cuba was “probably the richest colony in the world,” a colony that was held under Spanish rule until 1898, when sovereignty was ceded to the United States in the first episode of imperial redistribution recorded in imperial times. Thus, the diminished importance of Spain in those days (we could say, of nineteenth-​century European Spain), both on the international economic plane and in political 295

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relations between the different states and empires of the era, combined with the relative importance of Cuba, characterized a peculiar relation between metropolis and colony throughout the century. I do not share the categorical assessment made by Manuel Moreno Fraginals (1995) in his day, when he asserted that during the nineteenth century Spain acted only as the political metropolis of Cuba, but not as its economic metropolis. Nevertheless, I think it is necessary to emphasize that the complex relations between one territory and the other certainly exceeded the narrow analytical frame of a mere or classic metropolis–​colony relationship. I will illustrate this with three examples. (1)  In contrast to what had happened in other European possessions in the Antilles (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-​ Domingue (Haiti), Barbados, Jamaica, and so on) or in the Greater Caribbean (Dutch Guyana), the growth of the plantation economy in Cuba was not due to the investment of capital from its European metropolis (i.e. Spain), but was rather a process fueled by the investment of capital previously accumulated from the island economy itself. A process toward a plantation-​style economy was strongly evident after the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–​1763), and even more so after 1791, due to the slave revolt that occurred on French Saint-​Domingue. (2) The first attempts to apply the steam engine to production activities were made in Cuba and not in Spain: in 1797 a steam engine bought in Great Britain and installed in the Havanan factory Seybabo began operating. Peninsular Spain would have to wait thirty-​six more years, until 1833, to see the first steam engine put to work in a factory (it was in Barcelona on the initiative of the firm Bonaplata, Rull,Vilaregut & Company). And (3) the first railroad was built in Cuba (Havana to Güines in 1837) before Spain (Barcelona to Mataró in 1848). There is no other case of a railroad being built first in a colony rather than in its respective metropolis. Furthermore, that first Cuban railroad inaugurated in 1837 was also the first railroad in all of Latin America (Zanetti and García 1987). It should not be forgotten, on the other hand, that the first president of the first Spanish railroad line, the prime mover of the above-​mentioned Barcelona–​Mataró line, was a businessman whose wealth came from Cuba, Miguel Biada Buñol. Spain’s control over the rich, dynamic colony of Cuba during the nineteenth century was ultimately a reality that entailed various factors. In this chapter I will concentrate on only one of these elements: the analysis of the phenomenon of slavery on the island (and by extension, slave trafficking on the largest of the Antilles), and above all, the various implications this had for nineteenth-​century Spanish history. First, however, I want to briefly outline other vectors of that odd relationship between Cuba and Spain in the nineteenth century. I would like to note, as did Louis A. Pérez Jr. (1983), that the complex Spain–​Cuba relationship should be analyzed beyond that bilateral axis, in a wider frame of imperial rivalries, incorporating the agenda and interests of other imperial powers in the region, such as Great Britain, France, and the United States. It is on the plane of imperial rivalries where the importance of this rich colony takes on a greater dimension. I would also like to emphasize that Spain’s colonial control over Cuba (and also over Puerto Rico) was a fact that colored Spanish politics with regard to the independent Hispanic American republics that had arisen after the disintegration of its continental empire in America. Some American republics systematically distrusted a Spain that continued to be a colonial power in their hemisphere, a Spain that still maintained neo-​imperial dreams, with which it aspired to reconstitute its former imperial reign over the American hemisphere. A definitely minor episode like the re-​entry of Santo Domingo into the fold of the “mother country,” which occurred in 1861, served to feed such dreams. Some certainly ridiculous enterprises had the same effect, such as the plan to conquer the Peruvian Chincha Islands, and the bombing of the ports of Callao (Peru) and Valparaíso (Chile) in 1866 by a squadron of the Spanish Army in the so-​called War of the Pacific (Inarejos 2010; Jacobson 2012). 296

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The island of Cuba played an essential role in the impetus and maintenance of those neo-​ imperial projects, especially in those aimed toward the American hemisphere. Havana was the point of departure, in 1862, of the Spanish troops that General Juan Prim y Prats led (in a joint operation with France and Great Britain), when some military troops invaded Mexico and quickly took control of Veracruz, whose tax revenues they stole before aborting that operation and returning to Havana. It was, of course, Cuba’s revenues that had to pay for the costly war that took place on Dominican soil from 1863 to 1865, which ended with the definitive independence of that former Spanish colony, barely four years after its reincorporation into Spanish sovereignty. It should not be forgotten that, after the independence of the continental Hispanic American republics, the Cuban treasury not only was completely self-​sufficient, but it could also bear the cost of that kind of neo-​imperial military operation, maintain the collection of diplomatic legations that Spain had on the American continent, and send, year after year, all its fiscal surplus to Spain. In other words, the colonial domination of Cuba not only implied no expenditure for the metropolitan taxpayer, but served to alleviate the fiscal shortages of the Spanish treasury (Rodrigo 2008). The Cuban fiscal surplus served to feed the metropolitan treasury’s negative balance; in addition, the balance of business relations between Cuba and Spain was decidedly favorable for the metropolis. On the Spanish side, the balance of trade with Cuba always closed at a surplus, which allowed the metropolis, as Jordi Maluquer de Motes (1974) showed, to maintain loss-​making commercial relations with other countries (like France and Great Britain, for example). In his words, “el efecto definitivamente más característico del comercio colonial [español fue] el efecto equilibrador de su desequilibrio, su función de amortiguador del déficit crónico de las transacciones con el extranjero”1 (336). In all respects, Spain’s colonial dominion over the wealthy island of Cuba became a direct source of benefits for the metropolis, in a true colonial income that globally benefitted the Spanish administration and society (Rodrigo 2008). And so it continued until Spain lost control of the island in 1898 (Piqueras 1998). In short, for Spain the island of Cuba was much more than a colony, so much so that the history of Spain during the nineteenth century cannot be understood in all its complexity without taking into account the weight of Cuban reality. Thus, the creation, for example, of hispanism, starting in 1898 (that is, after the end of Spanish sovereignty over Cuba), “no fue un redescubrimiento desesperado de América, sino una manifestación de la imaginación nacional [española] siempre definida en términos de imperio”2 (Schmidt-​Nowara 2006, 331). In other words, as I have said elsewhere, during the nineteenth century the boundary between (Spanish) imperial history and (Spanish) national history was unclear, to the point of making it difficult to distinguish between defense of the empire and defense of the nation. The diminishing island empire played an essential role in the nineteenth century in the construction of the Spanish identity and its national symbols; that is, in the construction of the “idea de España” [idea of Spain] (Rodrigo 2009) per se. It is precisely in this context that the importance of slavery on the island, and the slave trade to it must be analyzed, and especially the effects on and legacies for Spain that both phenomena had in that historical moment.

The sugar/​slave binomial in Cuba The main driver of Cuban wealth in the nineteenth century was the cultivation of sugar cane, a cultivation based on the exploitation of African slave labor. Although during the first half of the eighteenth century there had been a significant increase in both the number of sugar cane plantations (called factories) on the island and the volume of sugar they produced, the true 297

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inflexion point came as of 1762–​1763, following the eleven-​month occupation of Havana by the British army. After this occupation, the number of factories in Cuba grew year after year at a greater rate than in the preceding lustrums; likewise, the production of sugar cane and its derivatives. However, it was the Haitian revolution in August 1791 that indirectly motivated the large-​scale cultivation of sugar on the island. In fact, the French colony was the primary sugar producer of the world at that time. A revolt started by some slaves who decided to fight for their freedom in French Sainte-​Domingue meant, in the short term, a significant increase in sugar prices in international markets, which resulted in an increase in profits for the sugar plantation owners (also in Cuba) and an incentive for the entry into the game of new sugar producers. In the long run, this uprising also allowed for that shortfall caused in the international markets by the convulsed French colony to be covered in large part by Cuba. In this way, between 1790 and 1830 the economy of Cuba developed into a plantation-​based system of production hinging on the binomial sugar/​slavery (Moreno Fraginals 1978), a process that affected especially the Havanan plain, but also extended to other regions, such as Matanzas (Bergad 1990). It also developed its own dynamic in some other Cuban regions, apart from the expansion of sugar cane seen in Havana; for instance, in the valley of factories from the property of Trinidad (Chaviano 2014). By 1830 Cuba had become the primary sugar producer in the world, a fact that held true over subsequent decades. Its market power was such that, during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Cuban producers had the ability to fix the price of sugar in international markets. That growth in the production of sugar cane and its derivatives had been based on the development of new factories, the increase in their size and productive capacity, and the modernization of their technology. Cuba became, in fact, a territory where that “second slavery” which Dale W. Tomich (2018) has so much discussed was intensely lived; a slavery compatible with the impulse of the most modern scientific and agronomic knowledge, applied directly to growing sugar cane (Fernández Prieto 2016). Feeding the expansion of this plantation economy required the labor, in Cuba, of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, a phenomenon that completely and in a very short time changed the social milieu of the island. All the available information confirms this reality. The enormous Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TASTD), for example, cites 109,288 as the number of Africans unloaded in Cuba between 1762 and 1807 (in other words, between the year the British occupied Havana and the year when the Parliament in London outlawed the slave trade). However, other calculations based on Cuban documentary sources set the number even higher, up to 152,548 slaves brought to Cuba in the same period (Piqueras and Vidal 2018). The difference can be explained by the fact that the numbers offered in the database must be understood as the lowest threshold of (officially documented) slaves arriving on American soil from Africa. A significant number of enslaved Africans who came to Cuba during that time did not come directly from the African continent, but from other places in the Caribbean, for instance British Jamaica. And, as noted above, the Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database only documents transatlantic voyages. Be that as it may, for more than a century, in fact, from 1762 until the last African slave debarked on the island in 1867, the volume of slaves coming to Cuba was considerable (Murray 1990). Regarding its legality, the slave trade to Cuba can be divided into two major stages. In the first stage, which ran through 1820, we are facing legal activity. After that date, however, the slave trade to Cuba became illegal, more or less clandestine, and pursued by the British Royal Navy. However, the fact that the United Kingdom and Spain had signed a bilateral treaty in September 1817 declaring this trade illegal (completely as of 1820) does not mean, by a long shot, that new slaves would quit coming to the island. On the contrary, the high demand for labor in the cities, and above all in the fields, of Cuba resulted in the arrival on the island of 298

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several hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children from Africa, brought against their will by thousands of illegal expeditions.

The illegal trade of enslaved Africans in Cuba If we take as a point of reference the data available in the Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database, we learn that a total of at least 547,288 African men, women and children were unloaded in secret between 1821 and 1867 at some point along the Cuban coasts to be sold as slaves. I am insistent on the fact that this statistic should be taken as the minimum number of all the African people who came to the island between those dates, always against their will, and thus surely the number of slaves unloaded in Cuba must have been much higher. However, this statistic offers a certain order of magnitude regarding the relevance of the phenomenon, the significance of an activity that, despite its illegality, continued to be practiced for almost half a century. Despite the prohibition against the trade, Cuba continued to need more and more bodies to work the sugar cane fields, and the slave traffickers were able to keep providing them, scoffing at the intense pursuit by British officials and sailors of the slave-​trading ships. In fact, the British Armada’s persecution of the slave trade in Cuba forced the traders and the businesses that maintained this activity to seek strategies to minimize their risks. We are speaking of some profound changes seen as of 1820, and particularly after 1835, after the signing of a new treaty between Spain and Great Britain. As Manuel Barcia and Effie Kesidou (2018) have explained, there were three main lines of adaptation that were successfully adopted by the slave traders and the concomitant businesses in Cuba: (1) the creation of an international network of agents that facilitated a notable reduction in transaction costs; (2) the diversification of their activities as a way of minimizing the eventual risks of their illegal African trade (for instance, more than 140,000 Chinese coolies would be imported to Cuba as of 1847); and (3) the introduction of technological innovations on ships used for the transatlantic slave trade: basically, they increased the capacity of these sailing ships, and some ships, built mostly in North American shipyards, were constructed to be increasingly faster and lighter. I would like to add that it should not be forgotten that, in the final years of the 1850s and throughout the 1860s, the largest slave traders were able to incorporate into their “odious business” modern steamships (Quevedo, Cicerón, François I, City of Norfolk, Noc d’Aquí, etc.), one of which was able to bring to the island, in a single expedition, up to 1,850 African men, women, and children to be sold as slaves. There is no doubt that, from a business point of view, the companies that participated in this illegal Cuban slave trafficking were tremendously modern businesses, children of the capitalist spirit that infused the Atlantic trade in those middle decades of the nineteenth century. In fact, once the shipment of new slaves to Brazil was terminated in 1851, Cuba became the only American territory where enslaved Africans continued to be brought. And so it was until 1867. In those last years, both the slave trade and its financing continued internationally. And if illegal slave trafficking in Cuba managed to survive (when it had already disappeared from the rest of the American hemisphere), it was because of the ability of the businessmen who financed the expeditions to the African coast to adapt their patterns of investment in a repressive context, and especially because of their ability to move their capital by following global trade circuits (Harris 2016). The undeniable modernity of the businesses dedicated to Cuba’s illegal slave trade was one of the most notable factors of the phenomenon we are analyzing. But it was not the only one. In general terms, I would like to highlight three other equally pertinent key ideas, one of which has already been mentioned: (1) Cuba’s illegal slave trade was a completely transnational activity, 299

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the analysis of which exceeds a narrow national framework; (2) an illegal activity that lasted for almost fifty years, during which time more than 540,000 Africans were brought to Cuba against their will, required the involvement of thousands upon thousands of participants, each located on one of the many links of the long chain that connected, through the trafficking of people, the African interior with the Cuban sugar fields; and (3) what made it possible to secretly unload such a large number of enslaved Africans was a generalized corruption, a phenomenon that affected the Spanish colonial officials on the island in particular, but which also involved officials and military men on the Peninsula, and even consular representatives of other states (Portuguese, Danish, etc.), both in Cuba and in Spain. Another order of magnitude of the reach of the phenomenon is shown by the high number of armed expeditions “to the coasts of Africa” to load Africans and sell them as slaves in Cuba after its illegalization. How many expeditions are we talking about? According to the Trans-​ Atlantic Slave Trade Database, there were at least 1,108 expeditions that managed to unload their human cargo on the island between 1819 and 1845. To this number should be added the expeditions that were caught by the British Navy on the high seas. We know that in those two years, the Anglo-​Spanish Joint Tribunal of Sierra Leone prosecuted a total of 244 ships (Arnalte 2002). According to these statistics, in the first twenty-​six years of the illegal Cuban slave trade only about 18 percent of the slave ships that sailed for the island were intercepted by the British Armada, while the remaining 82 percent were able to avoid their pursuit. On the other hand, and according to the same database, between 1846 and 1866, 335 more expeditions from Africa arrived in Havana. In those last twenty-​one years, the percentage of captures by the Royal Navy grew to about 40 percent of the total expeditions (about 220).The sum of all these data, in short, indicates that there must have been some 1,900 expeditions raised to go in search of slaves in Africa and then bring them to Cuba, after the first treaty signed in September 1817 went into effect. This number does not take into account the expeditions that were neither captured nor appear in the Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database, the number of which is unknown. Be that as it may, we are learning more and more things about the different links of the transatlantic trade. We know, for example, about the intense activity of many Spaniards who operated in the numerous trading posts spread along the African coasts, charged with storing the slaves to later load them in the ships that would bring them to Cuba (Nerín Abad 2015). And although we don’t yet have for the Cuban slave trade a book like Marcus Rediker’s (2007), in which he describes the English slave ships of the eighteenth century, we are learning more and more details about the involvement of many sailors (and in particular Spanish sailors) in this activity. For example, we have biographies of some captains of nineteenth-​century Spanish slavers, useful for documenting the importance of the captain on slave ships, without whom the slave trade would not have been possible, legal or not (Rodrigo 2017a); we understand in detail specific slave expeditions, some of which were captured by the British, although others were not (Rovira 1984; Sust 2016, 2017); we also have monographic analyses of Spanish sailors, and more generally, of the seamen involved in the Cuban slave trade (Moreno Rico 2017; Rodrigo 2017b); and we also know in detail how certain slave networks worked, woven between both sides of the Atlantic, like the one run by the Zangroniz family (Barcia 2016). These are all diverse analyses, most of them published in recent years, that have allowed us to better understand the daily activity of the slaving ships and their different agents (ship owners, captains and officials, sailors, traders, etc.). And moving from Africa and the Atlantic Ocean to Cuban soil, we also know how the “dense networks on land” that facilitated those more than 1,400 clandestine shipments operated in Cuba. These networks made possible the arrival of those several hundreds of thousands of African slaves to be sold in that Spanish colony. We know of some networks that, as Carmen Barcia said, “estaban integradas por un sinnúmero de 300

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individuos, muchos de ellos paupérrimos y necesitados: pescadores, prácticos de mar y tierra; campesinos” [were made up of innumerable individuals, many of them needy paupers:  fishermen, pilots of land and sea; rural peasants], but also Alcaldes de Mar; administradores de ingenios; mayorales; cabos de ronda; militares de diverso rango; Alcaldes pedáneos; capitanes y Tenientes Gobernadores de Partido; funcionarios públicos que se encargaban de falsificar documentos y testigos que encubrían a sus protectores e, incluso, curas de pueblos.3 (Barcia Zequeira 2017, 54) In other words, it seems quite clear that the number of people who were involved in the illegal slave trade in one way or another, both in Spain and in Africa, or aboard the ships or even in Cuba itself, was extremely high. Because of all of this, and beyond the visible figures involved in the trade (ship owners or captains of expeditions “to the coast of Africa”), the illegal slave trade to the big island of the Greater Antilles involved thousands and thousands of people, many of them Spanish. Individuals involved, whether as investors, insurers, or expedition doctors, or as officials or sailors of the slave ships, or even as employees or administrators of the trading posts in Africa or receivers of the “landed contraband” in Cuba, or (corrupt) officials who facilitated this illegal activity, often receiving bribes for their complicity: all of them, through their salaries, their commissions, the insurance premiums they charged, bribes received, or through their participation in the earnings generated by those expeditions, saw part of the profits of the illegal slave trade in Cuba. In short, our understanding of this trade allows us to draw a picture of a transnational activity, run by modern, dynamic businesses thoroughly imbued with the capitalist spirit of the time. And they also tell us of an activity that involved thousands and thousands of individuals (both in Cuba and in Africa, and, of course, in Spain itself); of an activity that was possible thanks to the widespread corruption, whether through action or through failure to fulfill their functions, of many public officials (mostly Spanish peninsulars) at different levels of the administration, mostly in Cuba but also in Spain. Without the involvement of so many people, without those corrupt practices, and without the investment of the necessary capital by those who financed and insured those risky voyages, it would not have been possible to bring more than half a million Africans to be sold as slaves in Cuba, to feed the island’s booming economy.

Spain’s role in the illegal slave trade At this point, it is necessary to highlight two significant elements: the last Africans to disembark as slaves somewhere in the American hemisphere did it in a Spanish colony (Cuba) in 1867; and the last European country to abolish slavery in its American colonies was, precisely, Spain (which opted to continue the institution until 1873 in Puerto Rico and 1886 in Cuba). Only one American country—​Brazil—​continued slavery two years longer than Spain, until it chose to abolish it in 1888. In other words, the Spanish case stands out in comparative European history for the very late appearance of its abolitionist processes: even after no slaves were arriving any more in any other American territory (not even Brazil, as of 1851), enslaved Africans continued to be brought to the Spanish colony of Cuba; and after all the European powers that held colonial domains in the American hemisphere had abolished slavery (Great Britain in 1833; France in 1848; Holland in 1863), and even when slavery had officially disappeared from the South in the United States (in 1865), the only European country capable of maintaining the validity and legality of the institution of slavery in its American colonies was Spain. 301

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Moret’s Law or the Freedom of Wombs Law was not approved, in fact, until 1870; the law that ended the slavery of human beings in Puerto Rico was passed three years later, in 1873; and the law that did the same for Cuba was not enacted until 1880. However, this latter law established a body (the Board of Trustees) with the aim of dragging out for several more years, until 1886, the legitimacy and legality of slave labor, under another name. Beyond the undeniable defense of slavery that was developed throughout the nineteenth century by Cuban landowners and businessmen, it must be borne in mind that keeping slavery on the island until 1886 was the result of some decisions that are entirely attributable to the political leaders of peninsular Spain. It was the peninsular representatives who chose to extend the legitimacy of slavery to such a late date. Furthermore, it is worth keeping in mind that, between 1837 and 1879, there was no sitting representative of Cuba in the Spanish parliament. In other words, the conscious decision to keep slavery in Puerto Rico and Cuba (in a context in which all other European powers had agreed to abolish it) was made by peninsular Spanish legislators. In that same context, it is worth reflecting, although briefly, on the legacies that the tardy abolition of the slave trade in Cuba had for peninsular Spain. I will do this, to conclude, on three different levels: (1) the role played by some Spanish ports as points of departure for slave ships; (2) the lack of a collective memory regarding this phenomenon; and (3) the commitment of relevant Spanish businessmen both to the trade and to the exploitation of slave labor, in Cuba and in Puerto Rico. During the almost fifty years of the illegal trade of African slaves in Cuba (1817–​1867), most of the expeditions mounted to the coasts of Africa debarked from Cuban ports. In short, they were round-​trip expeditions, Cuba–​Africa–​Cuba. Even so, a still undetermined number of expeditions was mounted from ports in peninsular Spain. Based on the data available in the Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Lizbeth Chaviano (2018) has made a preliminary calculation of the slave-​trading voyages that departed from any European port between 1820 and 1866. According to her initial analysis, in the decade of the 1820s, the twenty-​three ships that set sail from any Spanish port represented barely 5.5 percent of the 416 ships outfitted for slave trading that debarked from any European port. That would put Spain in third place among the European countries whose ports provisioned ships for the African slave trade, very far behind France (with 341 registered ships, or 82 percent of the total) and Portugal (with fifty slavers, or 12 percent of the total). Those percentages changed drastically as of 1830: 50 percent of the ships outfitted for the slave trade from any European port from then until 1866 were handled in a Spanish port. From these and other data, Chaviano (2018) analyzed the role that Cádiz alone played in the African slave trade, during both its legal phase (1789–​1819) and its illegal phase (1820–​1866). Her calculations show that Cádiz was, during that entire period, “el más importante de los puertos españoles de la península” [the most important of the Spanish ports of the peninsula] tied to the African slave trade with Cuba. Although she also adds: [L]‌a participación de Cádiz en la trata durante el siglo XIX fue muy diversa ya que no se limitó a su condición de puerto de paso o de arribada de las embarcaciones negreras, sino que funcionó, además, como base donde completar sus avituallamientos, tripulaciones o centro de operaciones comerciales de importantes sociedades y compañías gaditanas que operaban más allá del hinterland gaditano.4 (Chaviano 2018) In that sense, we are also aware of the dedication to this activity of important Gaditano businessmen and commercial enterprises, such as Miguel López, Felipe Victorio, the brothers José 302

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and Fernando Abarzuza, Manuel Lloret, F.  H.  de Bustamante and Company, the Viuda de Portilla Company, and especially the firm of Antonio Vinent Vives (Rorigo 2018). And, what is more important, thanks to the work of Carmen Cózar (2018), we understand in detail the commitment to the slave trade of the most notable Gaditano businessman of the second third of the nineteenth century, Pedro Martínez Pérez de Terán. Cádiz was, effectively, the peninsular port with the strongest ties to the slave trade, but it wasn’t the only one. According to the Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database, at least eighteen ships left the port of Santander for Africa between 1817 and 1823; two more Africa-​bound ships set sail from Bilbao, both in 1818; and from La Coruña, at least, the brigantine Mulato set sail in 1817.The port of Barcelona merits special mention, since (according to the same source) fifteen ships departed from there for Africa from 1828 to 1861. I would like to note again, however, that those statistics should be taken as the lowest threshold. Any analysis made, with any degree of depth and detail, has emphasized that the Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database has not been able to gather information on all the ships that worked the Atlantic slave trade. Chaviano herself, for example, has indicated this, in comparing the information available in that database with information found in a local periodical publication, the Vigía de Cádiz. While the former source only cites eleven ships outfitted in the port of Barcelona between 1789 and 1819, in the Vigía de Cádiz information is given on fifty-​three ships (i.e. forty-​two more ships) during that same time (2018). Without claiming to be exhaustive, I can add that there were other expeditions prepared in other Spanish ports that are likewise not reported in this database: for example, the voyages of the brigantines Medea and Jacinta, which we know were provisioned in Bilbao in 1817; also, the trips of the slavers Rita (1817), Unión (1817), Piedad (1818), and Amable Joaquín (1819), all outfitted in Santander. In the case of Barcelona, we know that there were at least eight other voyages that do not appear in the database: two brigantines and a frigate provisioned in 1817, one brigantine and one frigate in 1819, one sailing ship and one felucca in 1828, and one schooner in 1829. Be that as it may, although we may not have definitive data, it seems clear that there were more expeditions outfitted in Spanish ports than had been thought up until very recently, which is a phenomenon that merits greater understanding and especially documentation. However, in contrast to what has occurred in the main European ports that participated in the Atlantic slave trade, there is no kind of memorial in any Spanish port or city that acknowledges their involvement in this activity. There is not in Cádiz, Barcelona, Santander, Bilbao, La Coruña, or Santa Cruz de Tenerife anything like the museums, memorials, or commemorative statues that can be found, for example, in Liverpool, Bristol, Nantes, and even Bordeaux. And one more notable peculiarity of the Spanish case (especially if we look at it in the wider European context) is the absence of a politics of memory about the phenomenon of Spanish involvement in slave trafficking or about the persistence of the very institution of slavery (legal in the peninsula itself until 1837, and in the colonies until 1886). In Spain there is barely a collective memory, as there are no memorial places nor politics of memory, regarding the participation of Spaniards in the African slave trade. It is not my intent here to explain the whys of these lacks, but I would like to suggest an idea, a hypothesis, about one of the factors that could help to explain that phenomenon: a segment of present-​day Spanish economic and political elites have their roots both in the world of the African slave trade and in the exploitation of slave labor in Cuba or Puerto Rico, elites who still feel uncomfortable remembering this fact. I  have already discussed, in other works, the involvement of some important Spanish businessmen specifically in the slave trade (Rodrigo 2013). Many of them were given noble titles in their day. On the other hand, we should also not forget the importance of the return migration to the peninsula of many businessmen who 303

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earned their wealth in Cuba. I  am referring here to the so-​called indianos, many of whom accumulated their wealth in the nineteenth century precisely thanks to the Atlantic slave trade or the Cuban slave complex (or both). The very existence and definition of a word that is difficult to translate to other languages, indiano, “dicho de una persona que vuelve rica de América” [said of a person who returns from America wealthy], reveals the importance of an essentially Spanish phenomenon tied in large part to the sphere of the Spanish colonies in the Antilles, and which lasted throughout the nineteenth century. And it is true that a notable segment of the nineteenth-​century Spanish elite were, as Ángel Bahamonde and José Cayuela (1992) defined it, truly Hispano-​Cuban elites. It is no coincidence, then, that the view that Spanish literature and culture have produced and continue to produce of the figure of the slave trafficker projects an artificially sweetened image of them. Furthermore, in some cases, the novels written about slave traders have attempted to humanize them and even to seek their absolution (Surwillo 2013).

Acknowledgment This work is part of research project MINECO/​FEDER HAR 2015-​67365P.

Notes 1 “the most definitively characteristic effect of [Spanish] colonial commerce [was] the balancing effect of its imbalance, its function of buffering the chronic deficit of its foreign transaction.” 2 “was not a desperate rediscovery of America, but a manifestation of the [Spanish] national imagination always defined in terms of the empire.” 3 “Water Bailiffs; factory administrators; tax collectors; corporals of the guard; military men of various ranks; district mayors; District Governor captains and lieutenants; public officials in charge of falsifying documents, and witnesses who covered for their protectors, and even village priests.” 4 “The participation of Cádiz in the slave trade during the nineteenth century was quite diverse, since it was not limited to being a waypoint or point of arrival for slaving ships, but also functioned as a base for provisioning and manning the ships, or a center of commercial operations for important Cádiz societies and companies that operated beyond the Gaditano hinterland.”

Works cited Arnalte Barrera, Arturo. 2002. El tribunal mixto anglo-​español de Sierra Leona (1819–​1874). PhD diss. Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Bahamonde, Ángel, and José Cayuela. 1992. Hacer las Américas. Las élites coloniales españolas en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Alianza. Barcia Paz, Manuel. 2016. “Fully capable of any iniquity: the Atlantic human trafficking network of the Zangroniz family.” The Americas 73(3): 303–​324. Barcia, Manuel, and Effie Kesidou. 2018. “Innovation and entrepreneurship as strategies for success among Cuban-​based firms in the late years of the transatlantic slave trade.” Business History 60(4): 542–​561. Barcia Zequeira, and María del Carmen (coord.). 2017. Una sociedad distinta: espacios del comercio negrero en el occidente de Cuba (1836–​1866). Havana: Editorial UH. Bergad, Laird W. 1990. Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chaviano Pérez, Lizbeth. 2014. Trinidad. Una historia económica basada en el azúcar (1754–​1848). Barcelona: Bellaterra. Chaviano Pérez, Lizbeth. 2018. “Cádiz, capital de la trata negrera (1789–​1866).” In Cádiz y el tráfico de esclavos. De la legalidad a la clandestinidad, edited by Martín Rodrigo and María del Carmen Cózar, 163–​193. Madrid: Silex. Chust Calero, Manuel. 1993. La cuestión americana en las Cortes de Cádiz (1808–​1814).Valencia: PUV.

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The legacies of Atlantic slavery Clarence-​Smith, William G. 1991. “The economic dynamics of Spanish colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Itinerario 15(1): 71–​90. Cózar Navarro, María del Carmen. 2018. “Entre Cádiz y La Habana. Pedro Martínez y Compañía: la gran casa de comercio de esclavos en el reinado de Isabel II.” In Cádiz y el tráfico de esclavos. De la legalidad a la clandestinidad, edited by Martín Rodrigo and María del Carmen Cózar, 229–​262. Madrid: Silex. Fernández Prieto, Leida. 2016. “Mapping the global and local archipelago of scientific tropical sugar. Agriculture, knowledge and practice, 1790–​1880. In Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–​1850, edited by Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood, 181–​198. Pittsburgh, PA:  University of Pittsburgh Press. Fradera, Josep Maria. 2015. La Nación Imperial (1750–​1918). Barcelona: Edhasa. Harris, John A. E. 2016: “Circuits of wealth, circuits of sorrow: financing the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the age of suppression, 1850–​1866.” Journal of Global History 11: 409–​429. Inarejos Muñoz, Juan Antonio. 2010. Intervenciones coloniales y nacionalismo español. Madrid: Silex. Jacobson, Stephen. 2012. “Imperial ambitions in an era of decline: micromilitarism and the eclipse of the Spanish empire, 1858–​1923.” In Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline, edited by Alfred McCoy and Josep M. Fradera, 74–​81. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsinn Press. Maluquer de Motes, Jordi. 1974. “El mercado colonial antillano en el 19th century.” In Agricultura, comercio colonial y crecimiento económico en la Spain contemporánea, edited by Gabriel Tortella and Jordi Nadal, 322–​ 357, Barcelona: Ariel. Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. 1978. El Ingenio. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. 1995. Cuba/​Spain Spain/​Cuba Historia Común. Barcelona: Crítica. Moreno Rico, Javier. 2017. “Hombres y barcos del comercio negrero en Spain (1789–​1870).” Drassana 25: 66–​89. Murray, David R. 1990. Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nerín Abad, Gustau. 2015. Traficants d’ànimes. Els negrers espanyols a l’Àfrica. Barcelona: Pòrtic. Perez, Louis A. Jr. 1983. Cuba between Empires (1878–​1902). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Piqueras Arenas, José Antonio. 1998. “La renta colonial cubana en vísperas del 98.” Tiempos de América 2: 47–​69. Piqueras, José Antonio, and Emma D.Vidal. 2018. “Los británicos en el comercio de esclavos de Cuba.” In Cádiz y el tráfico de esclavos. De la legalidad a la clandestinidad, edited by Martín Rodrigo and María del Carmen Cózar, 71–​107. Madrid: Silex. Rediker, Marcus. 2007. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking Press. Rodrigo y Alharilla, Martín. 2008. “¿Más costes que beneficios? La España liberal y la perla de las Antillas.” In De Tartessos a Manila. Siete estudios coloniales y poscoloniales, edited by Gloria Cano and Ana Delgado, 119–​151.Valencia: PUV. Rodrigo y Alharilla, Martín. 2009. “Cataluña y el colonialismo español (1868–​1899).” In Estado y periferias en la Spain del siglo XIX. Nuevos enfoques, edited by Salvador Calatayud, Jesús Millán, and María Cruz Romedo, 315–​356.Valencia: PUV. Rodrigo y Alharilla, Martín. 2013. “The Spanish merchants and the slave trade. From legality to illegality, 1814–​1870.” In Slavery and Anti-​Slavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, edited by Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-​Nowara, 176–​199. New York: Berghahn Books. Rodrigo y Alharilla, Martín. 2017a. “Cuatro capitanes negreros catalanes en tiempos de la trata ilegal: José Carbó, Pedro Manegat, Gaspar Roig y Esteban Gatell.” In Negreros y esclavos. Barcelona y la esclavitud atlántica (ss. XVI-​XIX), edited by Martín Rodrigo and Lizbeth Chaviano, 101–​130. Barcelona: Icaria. Rodrigo y Alharilla, Martín. 2017b. “Víctimas y verdugos a la vez: los marineros españoles y la trata ilegal (1845–​1866).” Drassana 25: 112–​132. Rodrigo y Alharilla, Martín, and Lizbeth J. Chaviano Pérez, eds. 2017. Negreros y esclavos. Barcelona y la esclavitud atlántica (ss. XVI-​XIX). Barcelona: Icaria. Rodrigo y Alharilla, Martín, and María del Carmen Cózar Navarro, eds. 2018. Cádiz y el tráfico de esclavos. De la legalidad a la clandestinidad. Madrid: Silex. Rovira i Fors, Josep. 1984. “El bergantí negrer Tellus.” L’Avenç 75: 52–​55. Schmidt-​Nowara, Christopher. 2006. “Repensando ‘redescubrir América’:  Cuba y la conquista en las historias nacionales españolas.” In Cuba, de colonia a República, edited by Martín Rodrigo, 321–​331. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Surwillo, Lisa. 2013. Monsters by Trade. Slave Traffickers in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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21 WOMEN IN NINETEENTH-​ CENTURY PAINTINGS An imaginary album of daily life Teresa-​M.  Sala Discovering the beauty of small things, which varies from moment to moment in some place in the history of what goes on every day, invites us to think about how different artists learned to express it on canvas. Because, although it may seem strange, the quotidian is more unknown than the exceptional, which is why it is disregarded, and even becomes invisible to our awareness. However, “lo cotidiano son los actos diarios, pero sobre todo el hecho de que se encadenan formando un todo” [the quotidian are daily actions, but mostly the fact that they join to form a whole] (Lefebvre 1981, 9). Hence, occurrences offer us the possibility of seeing new ways of sensing time, ways in which we cannot fail to distinguish the viewpoints adopted, given that in the very act of examining a painting, a meaning is always produced. As a result, the events, the occurrences themselves are not as important as the interpretations that connect them. The main purpose of this chapter is to theorize through images, analyzing episodes related to the pictorial representation of women and some concepts related to daily life in the second half of the nineteenth century. I start from a phenomenology committed to the world of emotions, a topic explored years ago by authors such as Baudrillard (1969) and Barthes (1977) and which is enjoying a resurgence today. I will discuss select moments of everyday life, which make up a history of culture, often inexpressible in terms of structure, but rather in terms of a lived, felt experience (Febvre 1941). Along the way, we will be enlightened by the ideas of the theorist Walter Benjamin, whose micrological, fragmentary analytical method is quite pertinent. It utilizes metaphorical categories and images that reveal what would otherwise remain hidden or forgotten, and it leads us to an inspection of the common and quotidian that also serves to explain wider phenomena. His essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (published in German in 1935) inspired the first episode of the BBC television series Ways of Seeing (1972), directed by John Berger, which would later be published in book form. Thus, in putting together the imaginary album that I have reconstituted, the essays of Benjamin and Berger have served as guiding beacons. In composing the repertoire of images, we will also find works of a few women painters who ceased to be simply spectators, although, generally speaking, women are the object of representation more often than the artistic subject (de Diego 2009). In addition, inevitably, in analyzing these representations, we do not know how they themselves saw them or lived them (Perrot 1999).

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Although I  will not specifically study the literary themes that have been transposed to canvas—​ sometimes on purpose, others more coincidentally—​ there is no doubt that they became an important source of artistic inspiration.

Realism and the emancipation of secular genres Since the end of the eighteenth century, in opposition to history painting, which was considered the “great genre,” and works with mythological or religious themes, the expression genre painting has referred to pictures that show aspects of daily or intimate life. However, according to Hegel, as early as the seventeenth century Dutch painting had achieved a kind of “fusión total de lo profano y lo cotidiano” [complete fusion of the secular and the quotidian] (Todorov 1997).The main objective of the Flemish painters was determined by the idea of mapping the world that surrounded them just as it was, subject to a supposedly faithful representation of the things that existed. For the first time, the everyday life of anonymous beings and plain, ordinary objects (Poche 1997) were shown as the main theme and organizing principle of the portrait. Expressions and activities, like reading a letter, drinking wine, or peeling onions, became the center of compositions that previously had featured monarchs and gods. In the nineteenth century, the great discoverer and promoter of this style of painting was Étienne Joseph Théophile Thoré (1807–​1869), lawyer, journalist, debater, and political activist, who under the pseudonym “Bürger” (citizen) recuperated the figure of Vermeer. The dialogue established between eighteenth-​century sensibility and the Dutch paintings denotes a clear interest in domesticity, and is understood as a true “elogio de lo cotidiano” [praise of the everyday] (Todorov 1997). However, throughout the nineteenth century, academic and official trends continued to promote the cultivation of the historical genre, which was painted on huge canvases. Thus, for example, the Aragonese painter Francisco Pradilla began his academic career thanks to the portrait Juana la loca ante el cadáver de su esposo [Queen Joanna the Mad] in the Prado Museum, earning first prize in the National Exposition of Madrid in 1878, and later was awarded prizes in Paris,Vienna, and Berlin. On the other hand, certain sectors of bourgeois taste connected with Romantic costumbrismo, which dealt with sentimental or folkloric themes (wenches, loose women, and bullfighters), examples of common local color. This trend became the fashion during the reign of the so-​ called tableautin de casacones (or costumbrismo) of Marià Fortuny and his followers until the arrival, around midcentury, of Realism.This new style shows scenes very different from mannerism and a vision of ideal beauty, in favor of a natural beauty.Various groups clamored for this change of aesthetic register, and numerous authors defended the observation and examination of modern customs as an instrument for achieving what they considered an authentic representation or faithful reflection of the world around them. Thus, in 1870 the novelist Benito Pérez Galdós asserted, “pintad la época presente, pintad vuestra época; lo que veis, lo que os rodea, lo que sentís” [paint the present time, paint your time; what you see, what surrounds you, what you feel] (689). And as the art critic Antonio García Llansó noted, “los cambios que se han operado … han producido otra manifestación: la pintura de género. Ésta reviste verdadero interés para el arte moderno”1 (1889, 234). Realism and Naturalism prioritize the description of contemporary customs, the representation of an observed reality, with a broad field of representation, both thematically and in terms of intentions. In the field of the arts, it was Gustave Courbet who introduced themes of everyday life in large-​format paintings. The painting Entierro en Ornans [Burial in Ornans], presented in the Paris Salon in 1850, caused a huge scandal because it questioned the hierarchy of genres by detailing a village funeral as if it were a great historical event.The most relevant aspect is not the transcendent theme of death or the presence of the deceased, but the fact that nobody in particular is ennobled 308

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or idealized; the portrait of a group of people who are socially irrelevant and the layout of the scene situate the spectator as a participant in the very reality that is portrayed. As Courbet also intended in the unfortunately missing painting Los picapedreros [The Stonecutters], Jean-​François Millet does with Las espigadoras [The Reapers], where he captures the harshness of the women’s work under the blazing country sun. Other Realist artists distinguished themselves by showing the common classes in daily tasks in their private lives or in the world of work; everyday scenes that genre painting would treat as a visual inspection and inventory of a universe that coincided with the birth of photography (Brooks 2005). Undoubtedly, this new technical device would change ways of seeing and describing. It was Honoré de Balzac who proposed “daguerrotipar la realidad” [daguerreotyping reality] with words, something that Courbet did with paintbrushes, painting landscapes, fruits, animals, flowers, and above all, flesh (Reyero 2009). It is in the genre of the female nude where he breaks, without any kind of moralist veil, with academic conventions. In this sense, the 1855 Universal Exposition in Paris and the alternative of the Pavilion of the Rejected marked the division between official art and independent or avant-​garde art. One of Courbet’s followers, who began the Realist movement on the Spanish artistic scene, was the Catalan painter Ramon Martí Alsina (1826–​1894). From a very young age he was attracted to showing unromanticized daily life, in an expansive but unequal oeuvre. He painted several urban panoramas of Barcelona and Paris, understanding how to capture the urban landscape in great detail: the atmosphere of the street on market day or when it snowed. He broke with traditional canons by portraying his son informally, and more masterfully in La siesta [The Nap], in which he showed us the pleasant sleep of his patron and friend Joan Anton Nicolau Bujons. And with respect to female nudes, he portrayed real, unidealized women. One of the artists who shows bits and pieces of the day in progress with no attempt at local color is Simó Gómez (1845–​1880). In Mujer pensativa (c.1874) [Pensive Woman], he portrays the exact moment when the woman finishes reading a letter. One of the details that catches the attention is how the light seems to burst from the woman’s dress as she sits in a reflective pose that leads us to imagine the effect the letter has caused. The emergence of Realism in Spain manifested in various ways. It is worth highlighting the work of the Valencian painter Antonio Fillol (1879–​1930). In the painting A ese! (Agarreulo) [That one! Grab him!], he presents a scene that takes place in the neighborhood of Carmen de Valencia, the artist’s birthplace and where he was living when he painted it in 1894. He attempts to portray a graphic testimony of the street where a crime has just occurred. We see how different people belonging to different social classes react to the occurrence.The thief does not appear in the scene—​being, in cinematographic language, off-​camera—​since the moment chosen by the painter is the result of his action. In contrast, in another painted story, he also portrays class differences between a boy who works in a shoemaker’s shop shown beside a girl in the doorway protected by an adult woman (Alcaide and Pérez Rojas 2015). Displaying a marked documentary interest, Fillol paints La reprimenda [The Scolding], in which he portrays a young girl crying because her bird has escaped from its cage, while her mother scolds her. Both cases are chronicles of the life of the common people.

Social Realism: women at work, at home, and in the street Some of the artists who followed in the Realist wake of Martí Alsina produced scenes of Social Realism that began to dominate in the competitions of the time, with the goal of moving the spectator. Painting, as in literature, would pass through spaces of pain, intimacy, confusion, with themes like family disgrace, overcrowding, misery, illness, and prostitution, side by side with melodrama, the dramatic expression of sentimentalism, and common compassion. 309

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Figure 21.1  La nena obrera. Joan Planella, c.1882–​5. Oil on canvas, 67 × 54.7 cm. Source: © Museu d’Història de Catalunya.

One of the great themes in Realist painting of the nineteenth century is the bourgeois working woman. As a testimony to the industrial reality of the time, the painting La nena obrera [The Working Girl] by Joan Planella i Rodríguez (1849–​1910)2 embodies the harsh living conditions of the working class (Fig. 21.1). The original title under which the work participated in the Parés Art Gallery in 1884 and in competitions was the biblical quote Y dijo Dios: Ganarás el pan con el sudor de tu rostro [And God said: you will earn your daily bread by the sweat of your brow] (Genesis 3.19). Several interpretations can be made regarding the title the work has had over time. La nena obrera explicitly indicates the class identity, while the biblical reference alludes to work as a punishment for all of humanity after being expelled from Paradise. It is very revealing that in a working-​class source from the era it is indicated that one should modificar la obra de la naturaleza en todo concepto, para que rinda más utilidades; y aplicar, en fin, a todo trabajo la mecánica, por grosero o delicado que sea, hasta que resulte falsa aquella máxima divina que dice: ganarás el pan con el sudor de tu rostro.3 (Los verdaderos progresos 1874, 317) 310

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And finally, one of the two versions of the work was acquired by the Parés Art Gallery as La tejedora [The Weaver], a title that refers to the activity but not to membership in any particular social class. This juxtaposition of titles is highly significant, as it is determined by the relation of the girl to the job and to society. Although we do not know the intention of the author, it is obvious that the painting movingly portrays the situation of child exploitation, which was still occurring even after the law that obligatorily limited the work of children passed in 1873. Need obliged many families to send their children to factories, and the situation was even more serious in the case of young girls, who were sent to work much earlier, removing them from school, particularly if they were the elder daughters. This situation is what Planella presents, with a compositional pathos in which the emotional state experienced upon viewing the image, with its childish presence, is one of shock. The fragile figure of the young girl working freezes the repetitive gesture of the rhythmic movement made by the shuttle, and condenses the action between the protagonist, who appears in the foreground, and the attentive gaze of the operator, who watches in the background. The observer participates in the slice of reality shown, which can be interpreted from different viewpoints: as a critique or even as praise of what is painted; that is, confirming that it was something that deserved to be painted. Undoubtedly, the essential characteristic of this painting is that it affirms the beauty of what it shows. Thus, when the spectator enters into the painter’s field of view, the latter obliges the former to enter the picture, assigning them a privileged place for looking. In the moment shown in the image, with a certain fondness for reality, the spectator participates in the pause of the automatic movement of one part of the process performed on the power loom. This type of loom was the first to employ a mechanical system that significantly increased productivity, allowing the fabrication of much wider bolts of cloth by only one worker. The work was exhibited in the Palace of Fine Arts during the 1888 Universal Exposition in Barcelona. In 1902, at the Parés Art Gallery exhibition, Joan Brull stressed in his critique (239): [E]‌l asunto no podía ser más sencillo: una niña anémica trabajando en un telar, pintada sencillamente. Ninguna novedad de técnica, nada de romper moldes; y no obstante aquel cuadro tan pequeño fue creciendo … [D]espués siguió su marcha triunfal por diversas Exposiciones de Europa y acabó por venderse en Chicago a un precio extraordinario.4 Mechanization had facilitated the exit of lower-​class women from the home and their massive entry into the industrial labor market, but this did not mean their liberation, nor their promotion (Perrot 1999). The desire to capture on canvas slices of women’s work, following the modern aesthetic ideals of Naturalism, led Santiago Rusiñol to paint the interior of a Fábrica textil [Textile Factory] (1889). In contrast to Planella’s close-​up painting, this one reflects a wide-​ angle view of the factory space filled with women, executed, according to the critic, “con suma sinceridad y verdad de ambiente” [with extreme sincerity and truth about the milieu] (Miquel i Badia 1890, 12.597). Genre painting, which moves us closer to housework or to activity in the workplace, was successfully cultivated by painters like Manuel Cusí (1857–​1919). In Junto a la estufa or El amor de la lumbre [Beside the Stove or Love of the Fire] (1896), time is stopped in the moment when a young girl sits on a rush chair in front of a stove. The scene focuses on the habitual motion of someone who is cold and warms their hands by the fire. The moment captured takes place in a small interior space where we can see, behind an open door in the background, a workshop with picture frames. By the same author, Doradoras [Gilders] (1891) shows a workshop where 311

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Figure 21.2  Doradoras. Manuel Cusí, c.1891. Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 59 cm. Source: © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

a group of women apply gold leaf on the surface of a wooden or plaster frame, a job that adds value and beauty to decorative objects (Fig. 21.2). In furniture and decorating workshops it was common to find women who did tapestry work, embroidery, and decorative trimmings. Among the work of Andalusian painter Manuel García “Hispaleto,” who cultivated costumbrista genre scenes, we find an Obrador de modistas [Modistes’Workshop] (1878) with three women sewing around a table, in an atmosphere of artful refinement inspired by Fortuny. In contrast, in Sin labor [Jobless] (1890) by the Majorcan painter Francisco Maura (1857–​1931), we see the sad situation of an unemployed woman (Fig. 21.3). Backlit by the window and in a somber interior, she is displayed to the observer leaning on a sewing machine. This is a recurrent theme, that of the multitude of women who worked as seamstresses,5 so-​called “needleworkers,” which was one of the most exploited sectors. Also, most women who earned a living as prostitutes came from the lowest social classes. As Mary Nash describes (1983, 29), many nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century thinkers considered prostitution to be a social institution that acted as a security valve for bourgeois marriage, based on a double standard. Clearly, this biased, patriarchal viewpoint only takes into account the man’s sexual satisfaction. The painter Édouard Manet portrayed it as such in Naná, a title inspired in the female protagonist of Zola’s novel. The prostitute gazes distractedly at the spectator as she applies her makeup before the mirror. At the edge of the canvas, only half visible, we 312

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Figure 21.3  Sin labor. Francisco Maura, 1890. Oil on canvas, 250 × 170 cm. Source: © Museo del Prado.

see the client who prefigures Count Muffat impatiently awaiting her.The work was rejected by the Paris Salon in 1877 as too thematically provocative, in addition to being inappropriate both in format and in its impressionistic style. Manet exhibited it anyway, in the shop window of the art dealer Giroux, to the consequent indignation of the public. They reacted as much to the theme as to the fact that the artist’s model was a young actress who was known to be the Prince of Orange’s lover. The picture displays a “boudoir scene,” which explicitly reveals the intimacy of a private situation that the painter has decided to make public. The connections between literature and painting are confirmed by other well-​ known examples: “Los naturalistas literatos pretenden que sus obras sean verdaderos análisis sociológicos, y pretenden llevar su influencia al terreno psíquico y fisiológico con el fin de investigar lo que el hombre es, sus vicios, pasiones, estímulos, móviles, etc.” 6 (Andrade 1896, 66). And through painting they interpret the most sordid aspects of society, the reflection of an often hidden world. Sometimes, they show themes that satisfy the morbid curiosity of bourgeois society, which delights in the pictorial description of what it classified as “bad morals”; the splendors and miseries7 of a city that engenders images of women who work by day and prostitute themselves by night. The particular attention artists paid to the theme of prostitution, which at that 313

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Figure 21.4  La bestia humana. Antonio Fillol, 1897. Oil on canvas, 190 × 280 cm. Source: © Museo del Prado.

time was called a “necessary evil” to slake men’s passions, was developed in its social, artistic dimension. The phenomenon takes on multiple faces and artistic representations that simultaneously mix scrupulous observation with indiscretion and the fantasies of male artists. Thus, the prostitutes who practice their craft clandestinely constitute a part of the male imaginary. But behind the evocation of pleasures are hidden their miserable lives. The public exhibition of prostitution draws opposing viewpoints. Thus, for example, the French Naturalist painter Pascal Dagnan Bouveret immortalizes in La lavandera [The Washerwoman] a working woman who also works as a prostitute, while Henri de Toulouse-​ Lautrec in Inspección médica [Medical Exam] (1894) portrays the medical examination that prostitutes had to regularly receive to protect their clients from the risk of infection from any venereal disease. In Spain there are paintings that stand out on this theme, such as Trata de blancas [White Slave Trade] (1894) by Joaquín Sorolla (1863–​1923). The moment captured by the painter, as the work’s title suggests, carries a highly melodramatic, moralistic tone. A group of prostitutes appears accompanied by a woman in black who watches them. The veiled allusion to prostitution caused a public scandal, and it was criticized for being indecent. However, in La bestia humana [The Human Beast] (1897), the painter Antonio Fillol even more powerfully denounced human exploitation, the drama of prostitution, and personal degradation (Fig. 21.4). From the literary reference to Zola, the topic is shown with no concessions, which led the jury of the National Exhibition to deny him recompense on moral grounds. Undoubtedly, this reveals a hypocrisy and indignation that drew a reaction from the public. The decisive moment displayed in the painting is set in a soulless room where prostitution is practiced, with the customer lighting a cigarette and a young woman dressed in black (probably a widow) clearly 314

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suffering, sobbing while the older madam prods her to perform her duty. This is the commentary that appeared in a magazine when it was presented at the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris: Los dramas íntimos, las luchas y desdichas que sostiene y afligen a la sociedad moderna y cuanto impresiona y aviva el sentimiento, hallan en el genial pintor valenciano inspirado intérprete. Atento a la misión que debe llenar el artista contemporáneo, ensalza o flagela, por medio de la representación de cuadros o escenas, lo que merece aplauso o acerba censura. Muestra de ello su hermoso y disentido lienzo titulado La bestia humana, de carácter determinadamente zolista:  que le valió el aplauso de los inteligentes y una merecida recompensa.8 (La Ilustración Artística 1900). As a social painter, Fillol reacts radically to injustices, the defenselessness of women and the voracity of men. He is able to transmit ideas and express life and the soul of reality (Alcaide and Pérez Rojas 2015, 140). One of the most unusual works of Spanish social painting is El sátiro [The Satyr] (1906), censored as immoral, offensive to decency and decorum. It shows a police lineup of men accused of raping a young girl, a theme that was taboo at the time. The title takes the name of the mythological creature satyr to suggest the uncontrollable desires of the savage corrupter of minors. We see how the peasant grandfather protects his young granddaughter in the lineup, which takes place at the Torres de Serranos in Valencia. The expression of the abused youngster and of the grandfather who points out the rapist among the prisoners that are paraded past them, before the watchful eyes of the bailiffs, causes a strong impact on the viewer. There can be no doubt that, with this work, Fillol is openly denouncing crime and injustice. Another theme addressed with a moralizing tone is adultery. The violation of conjugal fidelity is a sin against the sacrament of matrimony and appears frequently in literature and painting. The prevailing discourse of social stability and female submission sanctions models of conduct that would attempt to undermine the established bourgeois social order. Toward the end of the century, female adultery was punished as a crime against honesty. An illustration by Enrique Pérez Escrich titled La mujer adúltera [The Adulteress] (1872) shows a hospital for women with syphilis. Likewise, the drawing and poster Sífilis [Syphilis] by Ramon Casas, done for the Syphilitics’ Hospital of Dr. Abreu’s clinic in the Bonanova district, represents this feared illness (Fig. 21.5). He portrayed the image of a decadent whore with her shawl falling off her shoulder, a gaunt face, and the flaming hair of a femme fatale, who holds a white flower—​a symbol of purity—​in one hand, while hiding a serpent—​a symbol of sin—​in the other behind her back. This kind of advertising must have had a huge impact on the streets of the city. However, the youngest generation of artists, like Ramon Pichot and Pablo Picasso, would openly show the inside of bordellos and the peddling of flesh. A subgenre of Social Realism, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s and 1890s, was that of hospital paintings with clinical themes. Along these lines, Enrique Paternina (1866–​1910), in his most famous work, La visita de la madre al hospital [Mother Visiting the Hospital] (1891), which is now in the Prado Museum, shows a mother visiting her daughter in the hospital, accompanied by a nun and another little girl, who might well be the ailing girl’s sister. Following this same aesthetic and thematic trend, Luis Jiménez Aranda (1845–​1928), in Una sala de hospital durante la visita del médico [A Hospital Room during the Doctor’s Visit] (1889) paints a scene with pedagogical overtones, where a sick child receives medical attention from the attending physician during 315

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Figure 21.5  Sífilis. Ramon Casas, 1900. Poster, 80 × 34.3 cm. Source: © Col·lecció Marc Martí.

rounds, while a circle of medical students pays close attention. The intent of such works was to show that medical advances have come to all social classes, in a profession dominated by men. It is well known that Pablo Ruiz Picasso, in the picture Ciencia y Caridad [Science and Charity] (1897), counterposes the figures of the doctor and the nun, to represent the curing of the body and of the soul, essential facets for the complete treatment of the sick woman. The work is framed in a type of social realism that, as we have indicated, predominated at that time in the conservative academic circles of the official exhibitions of fine arts. On the other hand, in 1899, the Royal Academy of San Fernando proposed the theme of La família del anarquista el día de su ejecución [The Anarchist’s Family on the Day of His Execution] as an obligatory and exemplary topic for applications for the scholarship to study in Rome. The 316

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idea was to criminalize the militant anarchist and even show his wife as his first victim. Two of Sorolla’s disciples approached the theme in very different ways. For his part, Eduardo Chicharro (1873–​1949) placed the anarchist’s family inside a humble loft. Judging by the tools and books seen there, it is probably the home of someone who works in the field of graphic arts. With the expressions and gestures of the characters, the painter manages to communicate a highly dramatic scene. Manuel Benedito (1875–​1963), on the other hand, shows a heart-​wrenching farewell scene. In the background he places the three men of the family, the despairing grandfather who holds his grandson in his arms while leaning on the shoulder of his convicted son, who is gazing at his wife crying inconsolably with her daughter clinging to her skirts. The woman is also surrounded by other people: the priest is highlighted placing a shawl around her shoulders as if he would like to console her. If we analyze other images that deal with the same theme, we realize the exemplary objective they aim for, as we see in José Bermejo Sobera’s (1879–​1962) La familia del anarquista [The Anarchist’s Family]. In this case, we see a set of exchanged glances, between the grandfather and the priest, who is looking at the angry young boy, while the mother cries with a baby in her arms. We find only one exception that approaches the topic from the anarchist’s viewpoint, the work Con la conciencia tranquila [With a Clear Conscience] (1897) by Julio Romero de Torres (1874–​1930). Within the critical line of social realism, the meaning of the painting’s title together with the portrayal of the authorities—​the judge and the police—​do not imply an attack on the accused’s dignity during the search of his home. In general, the successful Realist and Naturalist, whether of rural or urban themes, avoided socially conflictive topics or those with radical implications (Weisberg 2010). Even so, as we have seen, these types of scenes were like a kind of aesthetic manifesto of an art that sought a fusion with life, of artists that understood the need to be contemporary.

Figures and scenes of the bourgeois woman One of the painters who enjoyed great prestige at midcentury was Raimundo de Madrazo (1841–​ 1920). He painted excellently executed portraits, primarily of the aristocratic world: marchionesses, countesses, and even Queen Isabel II of Spain, posed for him and became models of elegance. Through portraiture we can discover the fashions for a wide range of occasions (the church, the beach, to go to shows, house dresses, etc.). The taste for luxury and the observance of rigidly established etiquette required a certain kind of dress to be worn for each activity (walking dresses, ball dresses, visiting dresses, party dresses). In this context, how the daily life of women was represented is not neutral ground, and the topics dealt with in paintings show stereotypes, express appearances, and bring us closer to a set of habits. Social usages and customs, like sharing a table, reading to oneself, social visits, tea time, games, prayers, tasks, personal hygiene, nap time, or strolls in the garden … These are innumerable bits and pieces of the quotidian performed in the private sphere (Ariès and Duby 1991) that do not always have to be happy. Painters like Francesc Masriera (1842–​1902), Francesc Miralles (1848–​1901), and Romà Ribera (1849–​1935) deal with these themes using bourgeois women as protagonists, dressed to fit the occasion.They attend leisure activities, as seen in Masriera’s painting Fatigada! [Exhausted!], in which a lady in a beautiful dress reclines on an armchair covered by a white bearskin. Other favored motifs are entering the opera house and masked balls. Ribera triumphed in this pictorial genre, where ladies and gentlemen showed off their elegance, making up a kind of select gallery of “las buenas familias de Barcelona” [the best families of Barcelona] (McDonogh 1989). During that period of luxury and splendor, displayed by the modistes who established the foundations of the fashion industry, women seduced (while also suffering) with the bustles and crinolines of 317

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feminine attire. The Burgos painter T. de la Puebla, in De prueba [The Fitting] (1878) illustrates a visit to the modiste, who checks the measurements of a young lady’s dress under the watchful eye of her mother. The triumph of the bourgeois view of the family—​the basic unit of an ordered, stable society—​is a metaphor and at the same time a political symbol. In Spain, the Law of 1893 had as its purpose to derive industrial society from the family: “la imagen de la familia se fue consolidando de tal manera que toda la industria nacional adquirió la apariencia de una inmensa familia” [the image of the family was being strengthened in such a way that all national industry took on the appearance of an immense family] (McDonogh 1989, 71). And the private domain par excellence is the home, seen as the incarnation of hierarchy, which is not only a physical space, but also a moral terrain and a kind of theatre of memory. The study of the domestic sphere and bourgeois privacy has a relative unity in the way of life and ways of living (Eleb and Debarre 1995). Structuring life around the public/​private axis also corresponds to a distribution of gender roles: the outside world belongs to men, while the role of mother under the authority of the pater familias falls to women in the home. Family portraits were a good example of the parameters of the new bourgeois morality. In the sanctuary of family life, the mother was in charge of the children’s education, but especially of domestic chores (“ángel del hogar” [angel of the home]). With the aim of capturing feminine rites and gestures, such as their tasks (weaving, spinning, cutting, sewing, embroidery, crochet, knitting), some works focus their attention on details such as women and girls sewing, watching each other, reading, etc. In Una niña haciendo media [Girl Knitting a Sock] (1890), Joan Brull focuses us on the gaze of a little girl bent over her work. Her face and her hands are, simultaneously, a piece of what we look at. Likewise, Francesc Gimeno developed a series of women knitting socks or sewing, who were typically mother and daughter. That transmission of female roles would endure throughout time. This is explicitly shown by Ramon Borrell in La primera faena [The First Chore] (1907), in which a daughter learns to sew from her mother, an image that carries the intention of instructing on the role and social position of women. Modern painters like Ramon Casas portray domestic scenes that have to do with the tasks that women of well-​to-​do families perform: his sisters Elisa and Montserrat sewing on the back patio of the family home at 11 Nou de Sant Francesc Street (in the old quarter of Barcelona), or the painting titled Los dos de los trabajos [Both of the Jobs], in which a woman seated in a rocking chair is sewing and reading at the same time. Elisa also appears playing the piano, as was customary in the education of women of bourgeois families. The private daily rites of women’s hygiene were also a popular theme among painters in the 1870s and 1880s. The conventional association of women with mirrors, which was often used as a symbol of vanity, served to encourage women to treat themselves as spectacles (Berger 1974). We see this dramatically portrayed in Poniéndose el sombrero [Putting on Her Hat] (1882), by the Sevillian painter Manuel Cabral, or, again, as if we were spying through a keyhole, in scenes of toilette that allow for the viewing of naked female bodies. Beyond mere appearance, women with long hair offer sensual attributes to delight men. The Valencian luminarist painter Cecilio Pla also paints genre scenes that focus the attention on the play of light and luminous reflections in Mujeres entre cortinas [Women Among the Curtains]. With the aim of capturing body language, Casas paints women opening and closing doors, or drawing a bath, which allows us to appreciate in a kind of sequence how one woman prepares the bathtub, while another one, already nude, is just about to enter the bath, and in another picture a beautiful woman appears half-​naked and backlit, which also serves to display the latest model of water heater, which not every home of the time possessed (Fig. 21.6). 318

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Figure 21.6  Abans del bany. Ramon Casas, 1894. Oil on canvas, 12.5 × 60 cm. Source: © Museu de Montserrat. Gift of Josep Sala Ardiz.

The life stages of women, that is, childhood, puberty, youth, maturity, and old age, are tied to marital status; i.e., married woman, widow, or spinster. In genre paintings two favorite themes that stand out are maternity and childcare. Joaquín Sorolla luminously portrays in Madre [Mother] (1895) this intimate relationship as a tender demonstration of affection. Private spaces, like the bedroom, are described expressively in counterpoint to spaces of sociability for visiting, where guests take tea or converse. The history of a house is a succession of inside figures. And to travel through the private routes, we must observe the domestic universe projected, constructed, distributed, represented, narrated, imagined, dreamt, or lived. In these interior spaces, a special section is reserved for images of women reading, which allows us to travel a metaphorical path through the history of reading, which was ignited intensely in the eighteenth century.Thanks to access to books, many women gained new knowledge. During the nineteenth century they would be the main readers of novels, a literary genre that often became a way of experiencing a life they could not live. One of the most frequent painted motifs was reading to oneself, the very image of solitary concentration and enjoyment, because reading allowed one to play with space and time, an ambivalent activity that reinforces order and bourgeois morality while simultaneously questioning it. With regard to the painted readers, we find two different registers, which have to do with the kind of reading and attitude. On one hand, there is the lectio divina or prayerful reading, which is done in silence with a receptive, reflective attitude toward the word of God, which leads to meditation, prayer, and 319

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contemplation. Painters like Josep Llimona, who dedicated his art to the service of the Catholic Church, and served in the Artistic Circle of St Luke, show these women readers with a missal or a prayerbook, in a devout or holy pose. Often we see them beside a window through which a church can be seen in the background, which serves to orient us to the reading material, because the holy scriptures make up a part of the private life of a good Christian woman. This silent reading also appears in a painting by Lluïsa Vidal, La nena del gatet negre [The Girl with the Black Kitten] (1903). The correspondences between the standing girl, who is concentrating on her book, and a black cat wrap the scene in a certain mystery. It is relevant that the girl portrayed appears, we could almost say, to be actively reading. A special commentary is warranted for a reading shared by two women (Fig. 21.7), painted by the artist Sebastià Junyent (1865–​1908) with the title Clorosis [Chlorosis] (c.1899). The title of the work already points to an interpretation of the image based on a pathology, which was named by Varandal in 1615 and derives from the Greek chloros = greenish yellow, known as a “enfermedad verde de las mujeres” [green illness of women]. One of the most common symptoms was pallid skin, which took on a yellowish-​g reen coloration (colors that are significantly used by the artist in the painting). This psychological disorder was related to the myth of virginity, and to repressed desires and emotions. It was thought to be a chronic

Figure 21.7  Clorosis. Sebastià Junyent, c.1899. Oil on canvas, 99.5 × 77.5 cm. Source: © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

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illness that affected only virgin women, which was why it was also known as “enfermedad de la virgen” or “mal de amor” [virgin’s illness or lovesickness]. A large majority of doctors shared the belief that the unrequited sexual desires of single women caused chlorosis, and to cure it some doctors advised marriage as a solution, since sexual relations stimulated the genitals. It was also thought that masturbation was another possible cause of the illness. Throughout the nineteenth century the study of chlorosis intensified, and medical discourse encouraged the social construction of an imaginary illness, as Juan L. Carrillo (2007) explains. The neurologist Jean Martin Charcot became famous at the time for his work on hysteria, which was considered a psychological disorder that included a broad range of neurotic symptoms, among them chlorosis. The cure through hypnosis that Charcot introduced was a great advancement, considering that some of the usual treatments included electric shocks, cold showers, inserting tubes in the rectum, and even removing the ovaries. The University of Paris has a painting done by Pierre André Brouillet in 1887 that shows the Salpêtrière Asylum during a female patient’s “hysterical fit,” which illustrates this symptomatology. Between 1897 and 1903, dates that coincide with Junyent’s painting, there was an increase in publications about chlorosis. The image portrayed in the painting is, in some way, an indication of the degree of popularization and assimilation that it had experienced in the collective imaginary. However, these two chlorotic young women absorbed in reading do not seem to fit the model that literary tradition had established as pale, delicate, sensitive and languid, inspiring pity, as well as being an object of desire by men, who could cure them and redeem them through marriage. These women more nearly resemble Emma Bovary, who, according to some female authors, is an emblematic figure of this type of pathology (Adler-​Bollmann 2006, 17). These melancholy reading ladies represent feminine subjectivity and can be interpreted as figures of resistance, where even the pathological is a salutary lesson. In essence, women and books are the history of a secret affinity, which infects and multiplies. According to the customs of the period, female painters should paint flowers, a genre considered appropriate for women, as Pepita Teixidor did with great skill. In contrast, Lluïsa Vidal (1876–​1918) had a more cosmopolitan artistic trajectory. She travelled to Paris, where she studied in the Julian Academy and with the painter Eugène Carrière. Desirous of escaping social restrictions, she affirms with her palette her status as a female painter in her Autorretrato [Self-​Portrait] (1899) (Fig. 21.8). The most respected critic of the time considered her “la única pintora que ha producido el actual movimiento artístico de Catalunya” [the only female painter the current artistic movement of Catalunya has produced], but he adds, “tiene innegables facultades, con una amplitud y una fuerza más propia del temperamento de un hombre que de una señorita”9 (Casellas 1903). The recent rediscovery of Vidal has considered her the female painter of the Modernist period, the only one who earned a certain professional status. In contrast to her contemporary, Pepita Teixidor, she specialized in portraits, intimate genre scenes, and some outdoor landscapes. Her work is a succession of moments, full of love and tenderness, in which the main protagonists are her sisters, her family circle, and her childhood. These comments published in a newspaper can be considered a symptom of some of the changes that were to come: Dos hermosas damas han invadido el actual turno de la exposición en el Salón Parés. Pepita Teixidor y Lluïsa Vidal son dos artistas de pincel, ventajosamente conocidas por sus bellas obras de arte. … Quizás estas damas artistas rompan la apatía de los artistas varones que no salen de su ostracismo o de su nimiedad.10 (El Diluvio 1909) 321

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Figure. 21.8  Autoretrat. Lluïsa Vidal, c.1899. Oil on canvas, 36 × 27 cm. Source: © Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

In these pages we have traveled through a selection of painted images that represent different registers of daily life in which women were portrayed in genre paintings in contrast to the great genre of official painting. Following the lines of the Realist movement and the Naturalist aesthetic, some artists chose the critical views of so-​called Social Realism, while others sought exemplary or bathetic morality in melodramatic settings. On the other hand, anecdotalism triumphed as the Impressionist movement captured fleeting moments of daily occurrences, so that the impressions of modern life would be like the story of any given day that also includes the story of the world and of society (Lefebvre 1974).

Notes 1 “The changes that have taken place … have produced another manifestation: the genre painting. This shows true interest in modern art.” 2 Two versions exist, the first done in 1882 and held in a private collection; the second is a replica painted between 1884 and 1885, and currently in the Catalan Museum of History (Bejarano 2018). 3 “modify the work of nature in every respect, to make it more useful; and ultimately, apply mechanics to every job, no matter how crude or delicate it might be, until that highest divine maxim, You will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow, is proven false.” 4 “The matter couldn’t be any simpler: an anemic young girl working at a loom, simply painted. No technical novelty, no breaking of molds; and nevertheless, that small painting was growing … Later it made its triumphant march through different Expositions across Europe and ended up being sold in Chicago for an extraordinary price.”

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Women in nineteenth-century paintings 5 La Grisette and Nana by Zola were passionate, melancholy women, a mix of smiles and tears that often hid the dark drama of survival in the city of Paris, which was increasingly difficult. It is worth noting that the term “grisette” in French designates a thick fabric, which, with a certain metonymy, Zola uses to refer to a woman of modest means dressed in this fabric. 6 “The educated Naturalists want their works to be true sociological analyses, and they attempt to bring their influence to psychological and physiological terrains for the purpose of investigating what man is, his vices, passions, interests, motivations, etc.” 7 In the Musée d’Orsay an exposition was held in 2015 with the title Esplendores y miserias: imágenes de la prostitución 1850–​1910. 8 “The intimate dramas, the struggles and misfortunes that he shows and that afflict modern society, and how much he affects and sharpens the emotions, reveal the brilliant Valencian painter to be an inspired artist. Attentive to the mission that the contemporary artist must fulfill, he praises or flogs, through the representation of pictures or scenes, what is deserving of applause or bitter censure. Proof of this is his beautiful but controversial canvas titled The Human Beast, which shows a decided influence from Zola: which earned him the applause of intelligent people and well-​deserved recompense.” 9 “she has undeniable skills, with a breadth and strength of temperament more often to be found in a man than in a young lady.” 10 “Two beautiful ladies have invaded the current round of exhibition in the Parés Art Gallery. Pepita Teixidor and Lluïsa Vidal are two lady painters, profitably known for their lovely works of art. … Perhaps these lady artists will break the apathy of male artists who will not abandon their ostracism or their trivialities.”

Works cited Adler, Laure, and Stefan Bollmann. 2006. Les femmes qui lisent sont dangereuses. Paris: Flammarion. Alcaide, J. L., and F. J. Pérez Rojas. 2015. Antonio Fillol (1870–​1930). Naturalismo radical y Modernismo. Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Valencia. Andrade, Benito Mariano. 1896. La antropología criminal y la novela naturalista. Madrid:  Sucesores de Rivadeneyra. Ariès, Philippe, and George Duby (eds). 1991. La Revolución Francesa y el asentamiento de la sociedad burguesa. Historia de la vida privada, vol. 7. Madrid: Taurus. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Fragmentos para un discurso amoroso. Madrid: Siglo XXI. Baudrillard, Jean. 1969. El sistema de los objetos. México: Siglo XXI. Bejarano Veiga, Juan C. 2018.“El museu presenta … La nena obrera (c.1885) de Joan Planella i Rodríguez.” Museu d’Història de Catalunya. Accessed December 22, 2018. www.mhcat.cat/​col_​leccio/​el_​museu_​ presenta/​la_​nena_​obrera. Berger, John. 1974. Maneras de ver. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. Brooks, Peter. 2005. Realist Vision. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press. Brull, Joan. 1902. “Sala Parés.” Joventut (10 April): 239. Carrillo, Juan. L. 2007.“Medicina versus mujer o la construcción social de una enfermedad imaginaria. El discurso médico sobre la clorosis.” Revista de Historia Contemporáncea (Universidad del País Vasco) 34: 259–​282. Casellas, Raimon. 1903. “Saló Parés. Exposició Ll.Vidal.” La Veu de Catalunya (28 October). De Certeau, Michel. 1980. L’Invention du Quotidien, 10–​18. Vol. 1 of Arts de Faire. Paris: Union générale d’éditions. Diego, Estrella de. 2009. La mujer y la pintura del siglo XIX español. Madrid: Ensayos Arte Cátedra. “Editorial.” 1909. El Diluvio (7 May): 1–​2. Eleb, Monique, and Anne Debarre. 1995. L’invention de l’habitation moderne. Paris 1880–​1914. Paris: Hazan. Febvre, Lucien. 1941. “La sensibilité et l’histoire:  Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois?” Paris: Annales d’histoire sociale. García Llansó, Antonio. 1889. “Román Ribera y la escuela pictórica moderna.” La Ilustración (15 September): 463. “Editorial.” 1900. La Ilustración Artística (30 April). Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos. Lefebvre, Henri. 1981. De la modernité au modernisme (Pour une métaphilosophie du quotidien).Vol. 3 de Critique de la vie quotidiene. Paris: L’Arche.

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Teresa-M. Sala McDonogh, Gary Wray. 1989. Las buenas familias de Barcelona. Barcelona: Omega. Miquel i Badia, Francisco.1890. Diario de Barcelona (23 October): 12.597. Nash, Mary. 1983. Mujer, familia y trabajo en España (1857–​1936). Barcelona: Anthropos. Pérez Galdós, Benito. 2004 [1884]. “Artículo-​carta.” Prosa crítica, 689. Madrid: Espasa-​Calpe. Perrot, Michelle. 1999. Les femmes ou le silence de l’histoire. Paris: Flammarion. Poche, Daniel. 1997. Histoires des choses banales. Paris: Fayard. Reyero, Carlos. 2009. Desvestidas. El cuerpo y la forma real. Madrid: Alianza. Todorov, Tzevetan. 1997. Éloge du quotidien. Essai sur la peinture hollandaise du XVIIè siècle. Paris: Seuil. “Los verdaderos progresos.” 1874. La Revista Social 80 (29 February): 317. Weisberg, Gabriel. 2010. Beyond Impressionism: Naturalist Painting, Photography, Theatre and Cinema, 1875–​ 1918. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum.

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22 THEATRE SPACES IN BARCELONA, 1800–​1 850 Gabriel Sansano

My work attempts to delve into the characteristics of different playhouses or theatrical spaces that existed in Barcelona that were supported and frequented by the emerging artisan middle class. With this in mind, I propose, on one hand, to outline the theatre context that explains the Teatre Principal’s1 hegemony during the first third of the century, and in parallel, show how this theatre coexisted with different amateur spaces. I will also explore in detail two sites, the Teatre dels Gegants and the Teatre Nou, attempts to create professional spaces catering to emerging social classes distinct from those of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. In the process, I will contextualize the social, political, and economic evolution of Barcelona society, which was the driving force of social change; in particular, I will focus on political change, especially in relation to the Liberal Revolution. I am interested in particular spaces in a city that experienced very significant demographic growth between 1790 and 1850 (Fàbregas 1975, 20–​22). Although statistics differ from source to source, we can safely say that by 1800, the city had well over 100,000 inhabitants; but with the War of Independence (1808–​1814), the Liberal Triennium (1920–​1923), and certain circumstances related to public health (e.g. the yellow fever outbreak of 1821), the population then dropped, and by 1826, it barely topped the level it had reached at the start of the century. Even so, by 1848 Barcelona had more than 173,000 people, and by 1857, more than 190,000 (López Guallar 1997, 3; 2004, 69–​71). Although it is true that in 1821 the city began to spread towards the neighbouring town of Gracia, it was a demographic expansion that was concentrated within the city walls and in its suburbs until 1854, since the walls did not begin to come down until that year. This circumstance led to a very high population density, while at the same time the pace of life and social relations in the city changed and accelerated, “became industrialized” (with the foundation of large industries and financial entities, constant immigration, etc.). Such a concentrated degree of humanity and the new labour relations demanded leisure spaces that, since at least the last third of the previous century, had been growing and diversifying significantly.

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Teatre de Santa Creu and theatrical spaces up to 1835 As is well known, theatrical activity was subject to operation by monopoly. Since the latter third of the sixteenth century, theatrical performances were privately managed by the administrators of the charity hospitals of every major city that applied for the privilege. In Barcelona, through a right granted by Felipe II (1579), the administrators of the Santa Creu Hospital applied for and received a licence to build a playhouse (the Teatre de Santa Creu), which, well into the nineteenth century, and in the face of competition from other spaces, came to be called the Teatre Principal.Thus, as of 1599, they had an enclosed building designed for the public and for acting companies, and thanks to their monopoly, they had the authority to permit—​or not—​ performances in any other space in the city, and to demand a fee (Artís 1938, 62–​63; Suero Roca 1987, vol. 1, 29–​44). Despite the control exercised by hospital administrators over plays all across the city, it is not difficult to find evidence pointing to the existence of regular performances in various buildings, streets, and plazas. Perhaps the oldest notice of these shows comes to us from Rafael d’Amat, Baron of Maldà, in his Calaix de sastre (1769–​1819), on which Francesc Curet (1935) relied heavily in his historical study of Catalan theatres. Curet, based on Maldà’s testimony accompanied by the meagre press of the period (the first years of the Diario de Barcelona, founded in 1792), notes the stable existence of some twenty stages, which were organized into three categories: (a) the theatre of aristocrats, gentlemen, and the wealthy bourgeoisie; (b) the theatre of the artisan class; and (c)  plays in schools and religious convents (57–​88). García Espuche (2009) also makes note of it, in his map of eighteenth-​century ball courts (where games similar to racquetball or handball were played), when he points out that some of these were used for diverse shows or entertainments (47 et passim). A notice from 23 March 1783 confirms it: “Calle Escudillers, en una casa que llaman del Juego de Pelota de Pagés se representan casi diariamente comedias de santos y pasages de la sagrada escritura por una compañía de titiriteros”2 (Ms. 344). It must be concluded that these shows were for the lower classes. Already by the end of the eighteenth century, these informal or subaltern shows clearly caused a decrease in income for the Teatre de Santa Creu and, faced with the different types of competition that arose, the hospital exercised its privilege, to the point of obtaining a royal order on 19 March 1790 that prohibited presenting plays in private homes, and holding dances or other entertainments in private or unoccupied spaces such as empty apartments or warehouses (Artís 1938, 544; Suero Roca 1987, vol. 1, 43–​44). Given this royal order, it is worth emphasizing two aspects:  first, the playhouse had burned down in October 1787, and during its reconstruction, a nearby warehouse had been refurbished as a smaller theatre space. Second, the hospital administrators (from religious orders, or people subject to them) used rental contracts to supervise the repertoire chosen by the manager, and censored the staging of the different plays, dances, etc. It is evident that this control limited the updating of theatrical tastes. Aviñoa reminds us: “a través del escenario la ciudad entra en contacto con lo foráneo y, en cierta manera, se regenera culturalmente gracias a ello; poca vida podría tener un teatro que solo se nutriera de sus propias fuerzas”3 (1990, 139). Likewise, it is worth considering that the minimal capacity and conservative (and often repetitive) nature of the playlists encouraged the creation of alternative, generally more domestic, spaces. Finally, although the testimony of Arthur Young (1787, 67)  has frequently been cited to show the coexistence of different social classes in this theatre, the fact is that the lower classes (artisanal first, and incipient middle class later) had seen the gradual reduction of the areas they were assigned to in the theatre (unpaid benches or parterres, standing-​room-​only areas in front 326

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of the stage) over the first third of the nineteenth century (Artís 1938, 167), and they sought alternatives in other private or semiprivate spaces, of a type more in line with their tastes or economic means. Everything leads to the conclusion that, as of 1800, these alternative theatre spaces became “permanent.” Thus, in addition to the spaces belonging to the guilds or associations, there were also habitual sites on Tripó Alley, on Plaça Sant Just, on Jonqueres Street in a place called a “salón de variedades” [variety hall], in the Templars Palace (also called the Palau), on Sant Oleguer Street, Mercaders Street, and in the Can Clavell warehouse on Plaça dels Gegants, as well as some others, not to mention the “portable theatres” based in peoples’ homes. These were practices and spaces that grew especially after 1820, and in them masked balls during Carnival alternated with academies and variety shows (kites, ventriloquists, sleight of hand, nativity scenes, etc.) (Amades 1933). The most regularly used sites were the one on Jonqueres Street and the one on Tripó Alley. The latter was a place of business that is repeatedly mentioned after the start of the nineteenth century, about which we have only the vaguest of notices that almost always reflect a very poor, vulgar opinion of the place: Estava situat al tercer pis (…) L’escenari era permanent, i el que en diríem sala d’espectacles contenia cinc llotges i bancs per al públic. Era el lloc preferit pels capellans i religiosos que no creien decorós asistir al Teatre públic (…), es veu que hi actuava tothom que volia llogar-​lo, sense distinció de clases i d’estaments.4 (Curet 1935, 94–​95) This progression of spaces could be considered the first attacks against the hospital’s monopoly or exclusivity, which it continued to include in the Teatre’s rental contracts and to defend against any interference. As is well known, after the Constitution of 1812, Decree 262 of 8 June 1813 established freedom of industry in Spain, which, although brief, was reinstated in 1820 and definitively in 1836. The end of the guilds and the freedom of profession and of commerce granted, by extension, to any person the right to open a new theatre or put on shows away from the Teatre de Santa Creu. In spite of everything, the hospital continued to defend its privileges before all possible parties: the City Council, the military governor, the Captain General, and even the King. For its administrators, given the fluctuations in the application of regulations regarding freedom of industry, nothing had changed with regard to its exclusivity, which now had nothing to do with monopoly rights, but rather, with the public utility that its privileges generated for the hospital’s patients (Artís 1938, 554). While this 1813 law is important for our discussion here, the royal decrees signed by the reigning queen on 23 and 30 November 1833 are no less so (Gazeta de Madrid, 28 November, 10 December, respectively). The former put an end to the mourning period for the king’s death (which occurred on 29 September), and the reopening of theatres and other public entertainments was authorized. With the latter, the delegates to each province’s Ministry of Development were named (both the positions and the provincial division were newly created) and were instructed in their functions, detailed in an addendum. Chapter 14 relates to “Theatres and Shows”: 57. Los teatros exigen con urgencia un arreglo que los saque de la situación deplorable en que se encuentran. … los Subdelegados de Fomento harán lo que puedan para mejorar el de sus provincias respectivas, a lo menos en lo relativo a las piezas que se representen, ya que sea imposible hacerlo en cuanto a la ejecución, puesto que apenas hay entre sus actores uno u otro que posea los elementos primeros de su arte … animar 327

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á los literatos de su territorio a enriquecer la escena provincial con composiciones que la varíen y amenicen, que estimulen la aplicación y favorezcan la concurrencia.5 (Nieva 1835, 381) There are two regulations whose relevance for the royals is difficult to understand, if we forget that the first Carlist civil war had begun a few weeks earlier, in October. The Delegates of Development acquired very specific functions pertaining to serving the rights of the future Queen Isabel II, and the theatre had to be protected, encouraged, and subordinated to the needs of liberal, or Isabeline, ideals, as well as serving as an amusement and social decompression for the population in times of war. As much as or more than freedom of industry, this decree (and its later developments) was the wall into which the hospital crashed in its demands for the protection of its monopoly. The new political climate favoured the appearance of new playhouses and new theatrical producers (sometimes the actors themselves).

Theatrical scene and political scene, 1808–​1835 But the subordination of the theatre to the political scene went back several years. Perhaps never before war against the French had the theatre been used, with such intensity, as a weapon of political propaganda by one faction against another. Beginning with this conflict, the stage, along with the printed page, became the customary space from which to rally one’s supporters and attack one’s opponents. The dramatic pamphlets that, in the beginning, served to combat a “foreign” enemy (the French), were later promoted to attack the supporters or detractors of the Constitution, of Carlos María Isidro, of the Regency, or of the rights of succession of Fernando VII’s daughter. Studies compiled by Caldera (1991) offer evidence of this. In this volume, Francisco Lafarga presents a catalogue of Spanish political theatre between 1805 and 1840 that includes 315 plays (167–​251), and among 205 titles that he locates and ties together, some twenty are printed in Barcelona. If we consult the listings created by Suero Roca (1987–​ 1997), many of the works catalogued by Lafarga appear on this list as being presented in the Teatre de Santa Creu. As Pere Anguera notes: “La consolidació del diàlegs o converses com a eina de divulgació política es produí a Catalunya durant la guerra del Francès, i la dels sainets en el Trienni Liberal”6 (2004, 9). With respect to Barcelona, this assessment is interesting because it helps us better understand the liberals’ interest in the stage, in celebratory spaces, and spaces of sociability in general. As Anguera highlights, they lacked religious supporters who might spread liberal ideals from the pulpit (as their opponents most certainly did), and “En dominar les ciutats, els liberals tingueren més a l’abast la possibilitat d’encarregar textos, formar companyies per representar-​ los i impulsar-​ne, si obtenien un èxit notable, l’edició”7 (2004, 10). The theatre thus became an urban foxhole from which to combat absolutism. This relatively new, and in the beginning completely urban, political, and propagandistic facet would successively receive de facto “supervision” during the various periods of confrontation that could be civil or, as of 1822, clearly ominous: by the local magistrate at one time, and later by the Delegates of Development; but in all cases, by the political leader of the time (Quintana 2016). In this context outlined by Anguera, we find some other studies on the Liberal Triennium in Barcelona to be quite pertinent, especially those that analyse the projection of liberal ideology specifically onto the urban sphere (Roca Vernet 2013), its parties and celebrations from the space of the City Council, to popularize and entrench the liberal symbology and liturgy (Roca Vernet 2016). In this sense, the role of the town councils and their immediate superiors was decisive in promoting a resignification and popularization of the new liberal values and referents. This 328

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more short-​lived impulse would be apparent during the Liberal Triennium, and would become more consistent and determined as of 1833, during María Cristina’s Regency. Thus, as well as the customary calendar of plays (Carnival, Easter, the eighth day of Corpus Christi, Christmas celebrations, etc.), there was a special insistence on organizing ad hoc parties on dates significant for liberalism: 19 March (passage of the Constitution of 1812), 24 September (convening of the Courts of Cádiz), 13 July, etc. As Roca Vernet notes: la popularidad de las fiestas cívicas durante la Revolución Liberal se fundamentó en la acción de los consistorios municipales de estimular mecanismos y gestualidades de la alegría aprendidos cuando los ciudadanos eran súbditos del monarca y reinterpretados en los nuevos ceremoniales liberals.8 (2016, 74) Among the various initiatives to stimulate civic gestures, we can see a clear example in the area of dancing during Carnival or at masked balls, which were quite popular in Barcelona in those days. Although it is true that these celebrations and festivals had been deeply rooted in the culture since the eighteenth century (Curet 1935; Artís 1938; Aisa 2011), it is no less true that the liberal authorities placed a special emphasis on them, and a proselytizing permissiveness to attract the support of heterogeneous social sectors. In this regard, we must mention the animated dances at Antonio Nadal’s warehouse, also known as “La Patacada,” at which the bourgeoisie rubbed elbows with the artisan classes (Artigues, Caballé; Tatjer 2013, 67; Roca Vernet 2016, 77 and 80). The numerous extant applications to hold private dances and soirees, in the homes and warehouses of different social sectors, confirms this.

Teatre de Santa Creu ~ Teatre dels Gegants, 1820–​1821 Among the various attempts to establish a new, more or less stable public theatre during the Triennium are included the initiatives of some actors such as Agustín Llopis and Felipe Blanco (Artís 1938, 547; Suero Roca 1987, vol. 1, 38–​41). But the only one that seems to have endured is the so-​called Teatre dels Gegants. This was located in the “Can Clavell” warehouse, in Plaça dels Gegants (behind the city hall). In fact, Suero Roca discusses in detail the tempestuous relationship between the Teatre de Santa Creu and the Gegants, both in the chapter dedicated to theatre’s exclusivity (vol. 1, 38–​40) and when she analyses the former’s business conduct between 1820 and 1830 (vol. 1, 173–​177). This researcher notes that there were not any very great differences between the show schedules of the two theatres, although there certainly were between the conditions of a true theatre and a more or less repurposed warehouse (40). The Teatre dels Gegants opened for business on 19 October 1820 (Suero Roca 1987, vol. 1, 38, n. 29). On the 18th, the Diario de Barcelona announced: “La compañía Dramática Española [sic], dará principio á sus funciones mañana jueves; los señores ó señoras que quieran abonarse acudirán al Teatro Plaza de los Gigantes, almacén de Clavell.”9 The initiative began with a cast of actors, led by the actress María Antonia Perales. This space had every intention of offering a full season, which was why the aforementioned subscriptions were offered and the warehouse had been renovated with a general entrance, loges, and balconies. A cursory reading of the two listings (of the Teatre de Santa Creu and Teatre dels Gegants) allows us to confirm some details. As Suero Roca had already noted, the general nature of the titles staged was similar (late Baroque works, melodramas, translations …), with the more complex ones in the theatre building and those requiring less staging in the small one (or in both). The two spaces also shared a taste for one-​act farces. What did differentiate the established 329

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theatre was its ability to stage operas and other musical plays (it had some musical directors on its staff), while the newer theatre never dared anything more complex than some ditties or duets. On the other hand, the Teatre dels Gegants was characterized by its schedule of daily dances (boleros in various styles—​zorongo, la Tirana, la Marica—​fandangos, etc.), which the Teatre de Santa Creu copied. Even so, the Gegants company led an ephemeral, hit-​or-​miss existence, and in mid-​1821, it closed its doors and the property was auctioned off (Suero Roca 1987, vol. 1, 173–​177). Its brief existence appears to have been basically dictated by two aspects. The first was its status as a warehouse converted into a modest theatre with limited capacities (for both stage and audience), which consequently limited its economic possibilities.The second was the odd alliance of interests between the hospital administrators, the director of the theatre, and the City Council, which closely monitored the Teatre dels Gegants, despite the fact that Perales’ company had been blessed with a kind of approval or tolerance on the part of the Captain General (Suero Roca 1987, vol. 1, 40). It was a difference of opinion between the higher authority and the municipal one that was difficult to understand. It is true that, since the second half of the eighteenth century, the city government had shown interest in supervising the city theatre, in making itself visible as a representative authority, an attitude that had cost it more than a few run-​ins with the Santa Creu Hospital administrators (and at times with the Captain General himself).With the arrival of the Liberal Triennium, faced with freedom of industry and the repeated applications to open new theatres, the City Council submitted an application to allow these, should they be tolerated, to always have the necessary municipal authorization. Perhaps all of this might justify the confluence of interests between the hospital administrators, the theatre’s director, and the City Council. On the other hand, when the Teatre dels Gegants opened its doors, it announced itself as “the National Theatre of Giants Plaza.” In other words, the Spanish company acted in the Santa Cruz, but the Gegants was a “National Theatre.” Given the modest condition of the site, could the appellation “national” be understood as supporting the Liberal Revolution’s cause? If this were so, one might think that, from its opening day, on one hand it devoted itself to the liberal cause, and on the other, and no less importantly, it set itself apart from the Teatre de Santa Creu (which came to be called the Teatre Principal), traditionally a forum for the aristocracy and with a decidedly conservative bent. Something of this must have been the case (or the political circumstances of the country were changing), because two weeks later, on 6 November, the theatre’s Spanish company (which was called this to differentiate it from the Italian company or the opera) was announced as “the national dramatic society.” And three weeks later (26 November), the Principal, which offered two shows that day, stated in the first show’s programme that after the comedy: “se cantará la canción patriótica del Trágala” [the patriotic song Trágala will be sung”), and in the second show’s programme: “En el intermedio los primeros actores de la sociedad dramática nacional recitarán unas poesías análogas á las actuales circunstancias, y en seguida cantarán el himno patriótico de Libertad, libertad sacrosanta.”10 The dramatic company, which had continued with its designation of “Spanish,” as of that day would come to be called national. The following day, the theatre repeated the formula of the patriotic songs. On the 28th, the Teatre dels Gegants, after the comedy, announced that “patriotic folk songs will be sung.” Perhaps by pulling on this thread and with a broader analysis, we can come to understand the difference between the two authorities (municipal and Captain General), without forgetting that other, personal interests might also exist. As Anguera noted, the liberals used the theatre for their objective of popularizing the liberal cause and, in general, facilitated the opening of new spaces, but this, at least in Barcelona, ran up against the reluctance of the City Council to open new halls that it did not control. In 330

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view of the projected subscriptions for the new Teatre dels Gegants’ season, we must infer that it was frequented by more modest classes, which were also undoubtedly ideologically diverse. Furthermore, we must not forget that in these years, theatre and music, that is, staged music, went increasingly hand in hand, and the theatrical fever that spread rapidly had as its epicentre musical theatre or opera. And it is also here where the company’s business resided. Without being able to offer these kinds of shows, and under the strict control of the municipality, the future of the Teatre dels Gegants was quite uncertain, as we have seen. Very likely, in part, as a consequence of the closing of this small theatre and the political climate, during the Liberal Triennium domestic plays continued in several places around the city (warehouses or apartments rented for the purpose, or private homes) and in other small, nearby towns, frequented by spectators from a wide range of social classes, who tried to gain spaces of sociability. This expansion was cut short by the prohibition decreed by the Captain General during the Ominous Decade (Artís 1933, 35–​37). After 1832, the control over these kinds of places and plays was relaxed, and amateur plays flourished on their usual stages (Artís 1933, 38–​39), until the publication of the ruling queen’s orders of December 1834, through which theatre plays were promoted.

The free use of the theatre, 1836–​1850 Some months earlier, in July 1835, during the civil war, a bullanga, or riot, had occurred which ended (with some rather amusing episodes, such as the burning of the Bonaplata Steam Factory) in attacks on several religious establishments around the city and their subsequent burning, which damaged or outright destroyed them. This same year, regulations were passed to suppress the religious orders, a process that culminated the following year with Mendizábal’s state confiscation of church-​owned properties. As a consequence of the logistical needs arising from the ongoing civil war, some of the previous Church holdings—​Convent de la Mercè, the Convent de Trinitaris Descalços, Convent del Carme, Convent de Montsió, etc.—​were used as offices for military administration and barracks for the national militia. It was due to the troops’ desire to have some form of leisure (with the excuse of collecting resources for their daily needs and those of the displaced population) that some officers who commanded the battalions quartered there applied for authorization to perform plays and other small shows in these spaces.These demands were met with suspicion by the Santa Cruz Theatre, although in some places they managed to develop a degree of activity worth reviewing: one of these was the former Convent del Carme, where an amateur company came to perform starting in June 1837. Its shows were announced in the Diario de Barcelona: “A beneficio de los actores de la compañía se repetirá hoy el drama gigantesco dividido en 8 cuadros, titulado: Margarita de Borgoña; y dará fin con un dúo cantado por la Sra. Ferrer y D. Fernando Martorell”11 (3 July 1837). The following year, the building became the property of the City Council. The other building was the former Convent de la Mercè:  “Hoy se ejecutará el drama romántico en 5 actos y 3 cuadros, titulado: Catalina Howard, y para su lucimiento se ha procurado todo lo posible en el aparato escénico y trajes de los actores, según permiten las circunstancias de este teatro”12 (7 July 1837).The variety of scenes and acts gives us the idea that they were staging more than just minor plays. One space after another was closed that same year on orders from the Teatre Principal’s director, who feared the competition from these amateur theatres (Artís 1938, 549–​550; Radigales i Babí 1998, 27–​29). This “persecution” signals both the fact that the leading theatre was losing its audience, and that these provisional theatres were attractive to numerous social strata. But the only project that prospered and grew was the one promoted by the Sociedad del Liceo Filodramático, located in the former Convent de Montsió and operated 331

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by a large group of businessmen and financiers. It must be remembered that some sectors of the bourgeoisie had attempted to manage and modernize, and even buy, the Principal (Artís 1938; Suero Roca 1987). In the face of the failure of these successive attempts, and taking advantage of the regulations previously referred to, the Liceu Filodramàtic was founded; its success fluctuated in its early years, and before taking the step of constructing a new, modern theatre building on the field of the former Trinitarian Convent, in la Rambla, it attempted to set up shop on the grounds of the former Capuchin Convent. The inauguration of the new Gran Teatre del Liceu entailed the acknowledgement of the bourgeoisie as the hegemonic class in the city, and a triumph over the Santa Creu or Teatre Principal, which was traditionally dominated by the aristocracy. As Fradera says, L’evolució del Liceu dins de la vida de la ciutat fou la plasmació més evident de la importància del teatre com a centre de sociabilitat burgesa, i, també, com a plataforma d’ostentació de la seva supremacia recentment adquirida. Les dimensions del nou teatre del Liceu ho exemplificaven a bastament davant de la ciutat, que es passejava i transitava pel seu eix principal, la Rambla. (…) El teatre [Liceu], doncs, acomplia funcions precises:  cap endins, reforçava el sentit de jerarquia intraburgesa i de clase respecte d’altres grups socials i professionals; cap enfora, denotava la jerarquia de classes envers la ciutat sencera.13 (1997, 334–​335) The history of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, its evolution, and its fully bourgeois nature are well studied (Artís 1947; Radigales i Babí 1998b, among others), and I will not go into further detail on those matters here. As had also happened with the Liceu, some of these other new spaces were promoted by a diverse group of societies (not always bourgeois) that were continually popping up, all with their respective, heterogeneous goals (Artís 1933, 44–​51). These spaces either had their own stages from the start, or they rented one for their activities. A few of these theatres became fairly well known towards the end of the 1840s, given their impact at the time, such as the Odeón Theatre, the Olimpo Theatre, the Barcelona Circus, etc. (Madoz 1846, vol. 3, 539; Balaguer 1865, vol. 2, 37; Fàbregas 1975). Of all of these, I would like to focus on a theatre that I consider relevant to the city’s middle classes, set in another former convent: the Teatre Nou.

The new Capuchin theatre or Teatre Nou, 1843–​1848 During the Liberal Revolution, the public plaza represented the “expresión del espacio cívico, fue un lugar de encuentro fundamentado en la igualdad de derechos y de la libertad formal de los ciudadanos, y devino el espacio de mediación entre la sociedad y el Estado”14 (Roca Vernet 2013, 11–​12). Hence, one of the most ambitious urban projects during the Liberal Triennium was the creation of a great civic space in which to celebrate liberal ideals and honour the memory of national heroes, one more proof of the new conception of the city. In addition to two other plazas that received significant reforms, the Plaça del Palau and that of Sant Jaume (Roca Vernet 2013), the idea was developed of a broad, open plaza that, once the Santa Madrona de Montjuïc Capuchin Convent was removed, would cut across la Rambla and would be a great urban space for the liberal city. During the Triennium, the Cortes had expropriated and ceded to the City Council the entire convent, and various urban projects were considered for the use of its site; they even began the process of its demolition (Sola Morales 1985, 1108–​1111). With the restoration of 332

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absolute monarchy, in 1824 the convent was reconstructed and returned to the Church, erasing all signs of the reformists. Although the rebellion of 1835 did not directly affect the Capuchins, in 1836 (as a consequence of the suppression of the religious orders) the convent was abandoned and the City Council restarted plans to open a public porticoed plaza on the site. But during these years, devotion to the theatre, and especially to musical theatre, dominated everything, so the plan of building an urban open space alternated with that of building a great theatre on the site, as an alternative to the Principal. In December 1840, the constitutional City Council opted for the construction of a “teatro y un grande salón de baile” [theatre and a large ballroom], and invited both the presentation of plans and “proposiciones de todos los sujetos que quieran tomar por empresa la construcción del teatro y salón de baile á tenor del plano que se hubiere aprobado.”15 At the same time, it was common for the place to host troupes of tightrope walkers and circus shows etc. and it had its own amateur company that performed in the circus. Given its possibilities for staging, once it was deconsecrated, the space dedicated to the shows was the church itself. The council’s invitation received no response at all, and on 23 March 1841, through the Diario de Barcelona, they invited “los artistas nacionales á tomar parte en el concurso” [the national actors to take part in the contest] according to the criteria that were set: the new amphitheatre should be a new construction, with a capacity of 3,500 people, and should have all the standard ancillary spaces (storerooms, dressing rooms, a café, etc.), a spacious stage, and a great hall for dances and concerts. Various proposals were submitted; that of the architect Josep Oriol Mestres Esplugas, which incorporated all the spaces required by the City Council (see Fig. 22.1), gives us an idea of the ambition of the project, which was never carried out. Due to the lack of resources and the political instability of the period (1840–​1843)—​ especially the progressivist popular revolt known as Jamancia (1843)—​the competition remained unfulfilled. In this situation, and with the goal of meeting the demand for theatre, the Council decided to rent the “theatre” for three years, and in 1843, after some more significant construction jobs to adapt it to theatrical use, the theatre would reach a capacity of 1,600 seats (Solà

Figure 22.1  Planta general de un teatro … proyecto presentado por el arquitecto Josep Oriol Mestres Esplugas, 1842. Source: © Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona (AHCB 06575).

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Morales and López de Guereña 1982, 6). Called the Teatre Nou, it opened its doors on 16 April 1843, performed its last show on 30 April 1848, and on 10 July of that year, its final demolition began to make way for the present-​day Plaça Reial. The granting of three seasons for the site thus extended to five. No doubt the best description of the Teatre Nou is Raffaella Perrone’s (2011, 39–​43), who also repeats Madoz’s (1846, vol. 3, 539) testimony: La forma de la platea es bastante defectuosa, compuesta de una figura de herradura prolongada de 51 pies, 9 pulgadas españolas el diámetro menor, y el mayor de 78 pies. Hay 3 pisos de palcos (con anfiteatro en el primero), cazuela, sin faltar a cada piso buenas piezas de desahogo, particularmente en el primero que cuenta un hermoso café adornado con todo el lujo de que es susceptible, y bastante para la concurrencia del indicado teatro. No carece en todos los pisos de cómodas y aseadas letrinas á la inglesa, y colocadas en puntos bastante ventilados.16 The Gran Teatre del Liceu was inaugurated on 4 April 1847, and began to take its place as the only model of operatic theatre in the city. At the same time, over the last year and a half, the Teatre Nou company had begun to suffer economically, the theatre had visibly declined, and its debts were mounting (Radigales Babí 1998a, 167–​168). The Principal and the Liceu, which were also suffering some difficulties, left little room for a third company if it did not already have sufficient resources (or a devoted public with resources). All in all, we are inclined to think that possibly, during the moderate decade, the interests of the Teatre Principal and the Liceu in eliminating competition converged with those of the City Council, which was susceptible to pressure from them and from the Teatre Nou’s creditors (Balaguer 1865, vol. 2, 211; Solà Morales and López de Guereña 1982, 6–​10; Radigales Babí 1998a, 162–​163). Along these lines, the council took advantage of the Nou’s irregular season to carry out the former’s plans for urban reform: to close the Teatre Nou and open a large public space. It is possible that the success of the new Liceu received some help from municipal decision-​ making (connivance). From here, it is easy to trace the steps followed in the demolition of the Nou, the call for the competition for plans (2 May 1848), and the construction of the Plaça Reial. As Perrone notes, it was at this time that la Rambla was established as an urban social and entertainment artery (2011, 35–​50), a space for the new bourgeoisie, defined by the Teatre Principal and the Gran Teatre del Liceu, with the new Plaça Reial as the great urban (and bourgeois) plaza. Although its disappearance and obscurity are almost total, the Teatre Nou deserves to be valued for at least two reasons. The first was already underscored by José Subirà (1946, vol. 2, 25–​28) when he noted that operatic productions in Barcelona, with the rivalry between the two theatres, increased notably during the 1844 to 1846 seasons. In the first season: El Teatro Nuevo prodiga las óperas y el Principal necesita esmerarse en la interpretación de las suyas, a la vez que imprimir un movimiento renovador al repertorio. … En el año 1845–​1846 ambos coliseos, en beneficiosa competencia, dan gran variedad de repertorio.17 The operatic activity of the Teatre Nou was significant, a fact emphasized by Aviñoa (1990) many years later, and by Radigales Babí (1998a, 168–​181), who both placed great value on this musical activity, at least, during those two seasons. In other words, the Nou became serious competition for the Principal and claimed its place in the city as an alternative stage. 334

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The second reason, perhaps lesser known, goes back to the proto-​history of the (Capuchin) Teatre Nou, characterized, at least between 1841 and 1843, by an eclectic listing: pieces by Vélez de Guevara (Del Rey abajo, ninguno), by García Gutiérrez (El trovador), and by Zorrilla (El puñal del godo), together with some translation from French (Lord Ladvenant), but especially pantomimic dances or other short pieces or brief pastorals. In the context of such a heterogeneous repertoire, the incipient Catalan scene found a receptive stage that held scheduled shows with a certain regularity. In the playlists for those years we find some bilingual titles by the most popular Catalan playwrights of the first half of the century: Josep Robrenyo (1780–​1838) and Francesc Renart y Arús (1783–​1853). The former wrote plays about unrest that had to do with the immediate civil war and liberal political propaganda:  Lo hermano Buñol, El padre Carnot en Guimerà, and Mosén Anton en las montañas de Monseny. The latter offered very well-​known costumbrista titles: Titó y Doña Paca, La casa de despesas, La Layeta de Sant Just, etc. These are plays that, together with others by Manuel Andrés Igual (Sala Valldaura 2000), Ignasi Plana, and other lesser-​known playwrights, make up the first “repertoire” of bilingual and Catalan costumbrista farces in the first half of the nineteenth century. Hence, the Teatre Nou should occupy a unique position in the birth of the Catalan stage (and its audience) during the 1800s. Finally, we should not forget that the history of the Teatre Nou has almost always been tied to that of the Liceu, and to a lesser degree, to that of the Principal. I think that a thorough study of the companies and the playlists of the Teatre Nou still needs to be done. I believe an ad hoc analysis could perhaps provide a complementary interpretation that would help to better understand the evolution of theatre in those years.

Conclusions As we have observed, the existence of private theatrical spaces in the city of Barcelona was stable and constant, at least from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth. From the late eighteenth-​century domestic plays or shadow puppet shows to plays at the Teatre Nou, from recreational societies and the creation and consolidation of new theatres (especially with the demolition of the walls that enclosed the city and the new plans for expansion towards the neighboring municipalities), there was a wide range of options that continued to arise or supplement one another. Although it might seem that the amphitheatres of the Santa Creu, and partially, the Gran Teatre del Liceu were the predominant ones, we must say that spaces outside the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie proliferated in the heart of the old city in particular, due to demographic pressure from some age brackets (primarily boys and younger men), who demanded spaces where they could spend their leisure time, centred particularly on theatrical activity. The Santa Creu belonged to the aristocracy, between the conservatism and obsolescence of the playlists, changes in the public’s tastes, and the reduction in space (benches) assigned to the lower classes; hence, the Liceu was born, ex novo, as a space for the new merchant and industrial bourgeoisie. Furthermore, the use of the boards as a political sounding board encouraged the liberals (first) and the Carlists (later) to use the stage in their attempts to stir unrest and the defence of their ideals, especially in the cities, which were dominated by liberals. Urban reforms also contributed to this, driven by the liberal revolution, which promoted, to varying degrees, the ability of various spaces to be used by some amateur groups for very diverse activities, especially after the 1830s, with the proliferation of various societies and spaces of sociability impelled by not always overlapping political sensibilities. The incipient middle class, and especially the artisan class, sought and generated alternative spaces that were particular to their social milieu and their tastes.The new hegemonic class, allied 335

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with the declining aristocracy and the new authorities, were marginalizing the new spaces of these initiatives. Romantic sensibilities regarding the stage, and regarding music, contributed significantly to the search for alternatives. It is obvious that the Santa Creu or Teatre Principal always maintained the pressure to preserve its privileges, and attained its objectives, or at least limited the competition until 1835 (or until December of 1834, according to the decree we have seen). The Teatre dels Gegants (1820), the theatres in the former Carme and Mercè Convents, and, to a large degree the Teatre Nou (Capuchin) (1841–​1848) fell victim to the schemes of the Principal and to the interests of the new bourgeois class.The appearance of a liberal bourgeoisie and the passion for the musical stage, driving forces behind the Liceu Filodramàtic, ended up changing the course of the situation, fostering, together with social, economic, and political evolution, a change in tastes and the birth of many other theatres that were very active starting in the 1850s. Thus, as Fradera (1997, 335) reminds us, it would not be until the end of this period that we have been examining that, with the bourgeoisie’s hegemony and their influence on the State’s resources, we could speak of a certain consolidation of a liberal public sphere.

Acknowledgements I’m grateful to these academics, Manuel Jorba, Jordi Roca Vernet, Jesús Millán, Elisa Martí-​ López, and Frederic Barberà, for their generosity and kindness in their comments during the writing-​up of this chapter which, no doubt, has contributed to improve its outcome.

Notes 1 I have applied linguistic consistency by means of systematically providing the Catalan names referring to theatres and other urban place names, even if the Castilian equivalent appears in some documents used. English translation has also been provided when deemed appropiate. 2 “Escudillers Street, in a house they call the Pagès Ball Game, there are holy plays and passages from the sacred scriptures performed almost daily by a company of puppeteers.” 3 “through the stage, the city comes into contact with the foreign, and in some way is culturally regenerated because of it; a theatre that relied only on its own strengths could not survive very long.” 4 “It was on the third floor … The stage was fixed, and what we would call the house had five loges and benches for the public. It was the preferred place for the clergy and other religious who did not think it seemly to attend a public Theatre …, it seems that everyone who wanted to attend was acting, regardless of social class or status.” 5 “57. The theatres urgently demand an agreement that removes them from the deplorable situation in which they find themselves. … The Deputy Delegates of Development will do what they can to improve that of their respective provinces, at least with regard to the plays that are shown, since it may be impossible to do anything about the quality of acting, given that among the actors, there may be only one or two who have the barest knowledge of their art … by encouraging the men of letters in their territory to enrich the provincial stage with compositions that vary and enliven it, that stimulate dedication to the stage and encourage attendance.” 6 “the consolidation of dialogue or conversation as a tool of political dissemination took place in Catalonia during the Peninsular War, and that of farces [for the same purpose] during the Liberal Triennium.” 7 “Since they dominated the cities, the liberals had a greater ability to commission works, from companies to perform them, and if they enjoyed considerable success, to have them printed.” 8 “the popularity of the civic celebrations during the Liberal Revolution was based on the action of the town councils in stimulating mechanisms and gestures of happiness learned when the citizens were subjects of the monarch and reinterpreted for the new liberal celebrations.” 9 “the Spanish Dramatic company [sic] will present its first show tomorrow, Thursday; ladies and gentlemen who wish to subscribe may come to the Giants Plaza Theatre, Clavell warehouse.” 10 “In the intermission, the leading actors of the national dramatic society will recite some poetry pertinent to current circumstances, and following that they will sing the patriotic anthem Libertad, libertad

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Theater spaces in Barcelona, 1800–1850 sacrosanta.” Revolutionary anthem written by Ubariso, nom de plume used by Bonaventura Carles Aribau, which was also included in the play La libertad restaurada by Ubariso [Aribau], Martilo [Larios de Medrano], Lopecio [Ramon López-​Soler] and Selta Rustega [Francesc Altés i Casals], first staged at the Teatre Principal on 2 May 1820 and published that same year by the “Imprenta Constitucional de [Juan] Dorca.” 11 “To raise funds for the company’s actors, the epic drama in eight scenes titled Margaret of Burgundy will be repeated, followed by a duet sung by Mrs. Ferrer and don Fernando Martorell.” 12 “Today Catalina Howard, the romantic drama in five acts and three scenes, will be performed, and to enhance its splendor, everything possible has been obtained in the way of scenery and costuming, to the extent permitted by this theatre’s budget.” 13 “The evolution of the Liceu within life in the city was the most evident expression of the importance of theater as a center of bourgeois sociability, and also as a platform to exhibit its recently acquired supremacy. The dimensions of the Liceu’s new theater were visible to any inhabitant of the city who traversed its main axis, La Rambla. ... The theater [the Liceu] thus fulfilled two particular functions: internally, it reinforced the sense of intrabourgeois and class hierarchy with respect to other social and professional groups; externally, it indicated class hierarchy towards the city as a whole.” 14 “expression of civic space, it was a meeting place founded on equal rights and the formal liberty of the citizens, and became the mediation space between society and the State.” 15 “propositions from all subjects who might take on the construction of the theatre and ballroom based on whichever plan is ultimately approved.” 16 “The shape of the main floor is quite flawed, shaped like an elongated horseshoe 51 feet, 9 inches (Spanish measures) in diameter at the narrowest part, and 78 feet at the widest. There are three levels of loges (with the amphitheatre on the first level) and the ‘gods’ [the highest-​level gallery]. Each level has nice retiring rooms, particularly on the first floor, which has a beautiful café decorated quite luxuriously, and [commodious] enough to accommodate the number of attendees of this theatre. There is no lack on any of the levels of buffets and clean privies À l’anglaise, located in well-​ventilated areas.” 17 “The Teatre Nou was lavish with operas, and the Principal needed to put much more effort into their performances, while also adding a more modern direction to the repertoire. … In the 1845–​1846 year, both amphitheatres, in beneficial competition, offered great variety in their repertoires.”

Works cited Aisa, Ferran. 2011. Barcelona balla. Dels salons aristocràtics a les sales de concerts. Barcelona:  Editorial Base/​ Ajuntament de Barcelona. Amades, Joan. [1933] 2004. Titelles i ombres xineses. Tarragona: Edicions del Mèdol. Anguera, Pere. 2004. “Estudi Introductori.” In Josep Robrenyo, Teatre Català, edited by Albert Mestres, vol. 1, 9–​36. Tarragona: Arola Editors. Artigues, Jaume, Francesc Caballé, and Mercè Tatjer. 2013. El llegat fabril al nucli antic de Barcelona. Cens de fàbriques i edificis actuals de Ciutat Vella amb activitat industrial entre el segle XVIII i principis del XX. Barcelona: Museu d’Història de Barcelona/​Ajuntament de Barcelona. Artís i Balaguer, Josep. 1933. “El teatre d’aficionats a Catalunya.” Chap.  1 in Tres conferències sobre teatre retrospectiu. Barcelona: Publicacions de la Institució del Teatre. Artís i Balaguer, Josep. [1938] 2020. Tres segles de teatre barceloní -​(‘El Principal`, a través dels anys), edited by Gabriel Sansano. Lleida: Punctum-​Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona. Aviñoa, Xosé. 1990. “Aquel año de 1845.” Anuario musical 45: 133–​188. Balaguer,Víctor. [1865–​1866] 1982. Las calles de Barcelona. 2 vols. Madrid: Monterrey Ediciones. Barón de Serrahí, 1783. Carta, 27 Marzo, Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 344, fol. 122r. Caldera, Ermanno, ed. 1991. Theatre político spagnolo del primo Ottocento. Rome: Bulzoni Editore. Curet, Francesc. 1935. Teatres particulars a Barcelona en el segle XVIIIè. Barcelona: Institució del Teatre. Fàbregas, Xavier. 1975. Les formes de diversió en la societat catalana romàntica. Barcelona:  Curial, Edicions Catalanes. Fradera, Josep Maria. 1997. “La cultura de la burgesia emergent.” In La gran transformació 1790–​1860. Vol. 6 of Història Política, Societat i Cultura dels Països Catalans, edited by Borja de Riquer, 320–​335. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana. García Espuche, Albert. 2009. “Una ciutat de trinquets i jugadors.” In Jocs, trinquets i jugadors. Barcelona 1700, 21–​103. Barcelona: Museu d’Història de Barcelona.

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Gabriel Sansano López Guallar, Pilar. 1993.“Evolució demográfica.” In El desplegament de la ciutat manufacturera (1714–​1833). Vol. 5 of Història de Barcelona, edited by Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, 109–​166. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana. López Guallar, Pilar. 1997. “El crecimiento de Barcelona y el proceso de formación de los criterios demográficos modernos, 1717–​1897.” In L’articulació social de la Barcelona contemporània, edited by J. Roca Albert, 3–​12. Barcelona: Institut Municipal d’Història-​Editorial Proa. López Guallar, Pilar. 2004. “Naturales e inmigrantes en Barcelona a mediados del siglo XIX.” Barcelona. Quaderns d’Història 11: 69–​92. Nieva, Josef María de. 1835. Decretos de la reina nuestra señora doña Isabel II, dados en su real nombre por su augusta madre la reina gobernadora, y reales órdenes, resoluciones y reglamentos generales expedidos por las secretarias del Despacho Universal, vol. 19. Desde 1o. de enero hasta fin de diciembre de 1834 . Madrid: Imprenta Real. Pascual Madoz. 1846. Diccionario Geográfico-​Estadístico-​Histórico de España y sus posesiones de Ultramar, vol. 3. Madrid: Establecimiento Literario-​Tipográfico de P. Madoz y L. Sagasti. Perrone, Rafaella. 2011. “Espacio teatral y escenario urbano. Barcelona entre 1840 y 1923.” PhD diss. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Quintana i Segalà, Joan-​Xavier. 2016. “Notes per a una historia política del teatre de Catalunya (1765–​ 1849).” Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics 27: 261–​302. Radigales i Babí, Jaume. 1998a. “Representacions operístiques a Barcelona (1837–​1852). L’eclosió teatral a partir de la premsa. L’evolució del gust en el públic del segle XIX. Nous valors de la lírica a partir de la crítica.” Ph D diss. Universitat de Barcelona. Radigales i Babí, Jaume. 1998b. Els orígens del Gran Teatre del Liceu. Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat. Roca Vernet, Jordi. 2013. “Las plazas y la representación de la nación liberal, Barcelona 1820–​1857.” In España Res publica. Nacionalización española e identidades en conflicto (siglo XIX y XX), edited by Pere Gabriel, Jordi Pomés, and Francisco de Paula Fernández, 11–​23. Granada: Editorial Comares. Roca Vernet, Jordi. 2016. “Fiestas cívicas en la revolución liberal: entusiasmo y popularidad del regimen.” In “Los rostros confrontados de la España liberal,” special issue Historia social 86: 71–​90. Sala Valldaura, Josep Maria. 1999. Cartellera del Teatre de Barcelona (1790–​1799). Barcelona: Curial, Edicions Catalanes/​Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat. Sala Valldaura, Josep Maria. 2000. El Theatre en Barcelona: entre la Ilustración y el Romanticismo. Lleida: Editorial Milenio. Solà Morales, Ignacio. 1985. La Plaza Real de Barcelona, vol. 2 of Urbanismo e Historia Urbana en el Mundo Hispano, edited by Antonio Bonet Correa, 1105–​1123. Madrid: Universidad Complutense. Solà-​Morales, Ignasi de, and Arantza López de Guereña Calderón. 1982. La plaça Reial de Barcelona. De la Utilidad y Ornato Público a la Reforma Urbana. Barcelona: Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona. Subirà, José. 1946. La ópera en los Theatres de Barcelona, vol. 2. Barcelona: Ediciones de la Librería Millà. Suero Roca, Maria Teresa. 1987–​1997. El teatre representat a Barcelona de 1800 a 1830. 4 vols. Barcelona: Institut del Teatre. Young, Arthur. [1787] 1993. Viatge a Catalunya. Trans. and edited by Ramon Boixareu. Tremp: Garsineu Edicions.

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23 EDUCATION AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SPANISH STATE From the Constitution of Cadiz to the creation of the Ministry of Public Education (1812–​1900) Mario Santana and Antonio Pérez García The nation-​state and the education of the citizenry A hallmark of the advent of modernity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—​if not always in actual fact, at least as a goal for numerous projects for change in political life—​is the transformation of subjects into citizens, so those who had lived under the Ancien Régime subject to the dictates of the monarchy’s absolute power would finally achieve the right to participate (and would feel called upon to do so, if only to a limited degree) in the liberal State’s system of government. The notion of “citizen” was founded on the individual’s identification with the nation, the new political subject on which the legitimation of the emerging political configurations were articulated. This implied at least two actions: inculcating in inhabitants subject to State jurisdiction the belief that they were members of a solidary political community (the people become nation), and giving them the necessary preparation to function within the new dynamics imposed by the capitalist apparatus. As the transition to liberal states progressed, geared toward development of the economy and ruled by a constitution founded on an imagined popular will, one of the fundamental challenges was the formation of productive citizens. Education was key to this process, since to become a citizen one had to be nationalized and instructed. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from the European monarchies (1759 in Portugal, 1762 in France, 1767 in Spain), Enlightenment intellectuals became focused on the question of State control over means of instruction. As Louis-​René de Caradeuc de la Chatolais proposed in his Essai d’Éducation Nationale (1763), the primary objective of public instruction should be both the moral education of citizens and the training of individuals to perform work that is useful to the nation and thus to contribute to the prosperity of society in general (La Chatolais 1763, 5). 339

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As Juan M. Fernández Soria has noted, although the factors that make education a State requirement are diverse (intellectual, political, economic, moral, national, social, etc.), for liberalism, its function in promoting liberty as a regulating principle of political life was key: El liberalismo decimonónico comparte con la Ilustración su fe en la educación como portadora de libertad y, en consecuencia, como garante del Estado y de las recién estrenadas libertades políticas. De ahí que los liberales de entonces consideren que la educación es una cuestión del Estado, quien venía obligado a hacerla efectiva si quería sobrevivir no sólo como Estado ni sólo como democracia, sino también, en otros casos, como nación, lo que explica el nacimiento y desarrollo de los sistemas educativos nacionales en Europa.1 (Fernández Soria 2002, 9–​10) In turn, during the eighteenth century, and especially after the French Revolution, the idea began to spread that public education (as opposed to private religious education) was not only a necessity, an instrument of nation-​state building, but also a right: in contrast to other declarations (such as England’s Bill of Rights or similar proclamations that arose from colonial territories), both the 1791 French Constitution and the 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens speak for the first time of the State’s obligation to establish “una instrucción pública y gratuita” [free public education] (Martínez de Pisón 2013, 188). As the awareness of the importance of education grew, the attempts at State intervention in a sector that until then had been dedicated to the training of a minority of the population—​“una educación de élite solamente destinada para la aristocracia o la burguesía y que abandonaba a su suerte a los hijos de la clase trabajadora” [an elite education destined only for the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie and which abandoned to their fate the children of the working class]—​generated a series of conflicts with the powerful religious groups that until then had controlled institutions of learning (Martínez de Pisón 2013, 188–​189). The nineteenth century in Spain saw a series of reforms aimed at introducing a capitalist economy and society (although with a predominance of the agricultural sector, as a consequence of delayed and slowly developing industrialization) and at implementing State forms based on liberalism (although in an elitist and hardly democratic form). The deployment of these transformations, however, encountered numerous obstacles; notable among these was the chronic absence of consensus among the country’s elites regarding key elements for the national construction of the State.This explains, among other factors, why the desire for change had little effect on cultural and educational aspects, which—​beyond theoretical political discourse—​were considered irrelevant for the reigning model of generating wealth, as well as for the construction of an imagined community around civic values, given the hegemony of religious thought. It was with the 1812 Constitution of Cadiz that the desire of the political classes to proceed with the “conversión del Estado en educador” [making the State an educator] (Fernández García 2010, 63) unequivocally materialized. Throughout the nineteenth century, they continued to build the foundations of the Spanish school system, understood as an institution necessary for the facilitation of national progress through the individual and social promotion of the citizenry. On one hand, standardized education as a tool of instruction should contribute to the ability of the State’s population to adapt, through appropriate training, to the changes and demands of economic and technological development. Hence, it was a necessary instrument for situating individuals within the system of production and for offering them access to opportunities for social advancement. On the other hand, as a mechanism for socialization, school should provide the foundations of an awareness of citizenship geared toward understanding the meaning of 340

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belonging to a national community, based on the identification of those traits that supposedly characterize this community, while also differentiating it from other nations. This fact would be key in developing nationalism driven by liberal ideals, given the necessity of involving and preparing the populace for the process of building the new State through political participation. Already, throughout the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment’s influence had led to the creation of Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País [Economic Societies of Friends of the Country] in different provinces of the kingdom, with the goal of promoting initiatives that would contribute to economic development. Some of the Economic Societies promoted the creation of professional training and development centers related to modernizing agriculture and industry. Carlos IV’s monarchy, however, curbed the Economic Societies and the development of Enlightenment educational ideas and initiatives. The government considered these to be possible vehicles of transmission of ideas that had given rise to the French Revolution; hence, its distrust of and difficulties with the idea of the cultural and educational advancement of the lower classes. Even so, it must be noted that, in the final years of Carlos IV’s reign, his favorite advisor, Manuel Godoy, managed to convince him to allow the creation in Madrid of the Pestalozziano Royal Military Institute (Real Instituto Pestalozziano, 1805) for the training of future military commanders and officials of the State’s top management, as an educational institution that sought to overcome the teaching methods promoted by the Catholic Church. It closed soon after, in 1808, nullifying any social impact it may have had (Sureda 1994). Thus, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, school-​based education in Spain was barely developed. Only a few municipalities and some parishes and charitable institutions maintained their own primary schools, while the wealthiest classes typically opted for private tutors to educate their children, and the universities, under the control of the Church, maintained their status quo of medieval Scholastic educational paradigms. Between primary schools and universities were found the precursors of secondary schools in the so-​called escuelas de latinidad [Latin schools], normally included under and administered from the university sphere. Most of the Spanish population remained immersed in illiteracy and ignorance. The War of Independence opened an era characterized not only by the struggle against French occupation, but also by the prominence, in the political and military command of the resistance against Napoleon’s army, of individuals and groups opposed to the Ancien Régime. These would see in the power vacuum of the era’s opening moments an opportunity to change the existing traditional order, creating new laws and institutions that would facilitate the construction of a State inspired by liberal ideals. The formation of Provincial or revolutionary Councils, and of the representative Cortes (Parliament) in Cadiz, was the organic expression of that new power during the war. There, they would debate and approve the future legal framework that the Spanish monarchy would have to follow once the war ended. The Cortes’ principal achievement was the Constitution of 1812, which established Spain’s (nominal) identity as a nation of citizens free and equal before the law, granted the right to participate in government through the election of their representatives. This Constitution acknowledges the importance of school-​based education and the need to regulate it, with the ultimate aim of educating and preparing the citizenry for political participation and contribution to the country’s progress. Article IX, “De la Instrucción Pública” [On public education], outlines the principles that should govern education for the constituents:  the widespread establishment throughout the national territory of “escuelas de primeras letras, en las que se enseñará a los niños a leer, escribir y contar, y el catecismo de la religión católica, que comprenderá también una breve exposición de las obligaciones civiles” [primary schools, in which boys will be taught to read, write, and add, the catechism of the Catholic faith, and will also include a brief introduction to civil obligations] (art. 366); the more limited creation of universities and other centers of 341

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mid-​level learning (art. 367); uniformity of education, with a common curriculum throughout the kingdom (art. 368); governmental control through a General Education Office (art. 369); the legislative authority of the Cortes (art. 370); and freedom of beliefs and of the press (art. 371). A year after the approval of the Constitution in Cadiz, in March 1813, by order of the Cortes, a Public Education Committee was constituted (consisting of Manuel José Quintana, Martín González de Navas, José Vargas y Ponce, Eugenio Tapia, Diego Clemencín, and Ramón de la Cuadra) with the mission of writing a framework bill for developing a Law of Public Education.

State education projects: from the Public Education Committee Report (1813) to the General Curriculum (1845) The Committee’s report—​whose immediate predecessor was the “Bases para la formación de un plan de instrucción pública” [Frameworks for Developing a Public Education Curriculum], a plan drafted by Jovellanos in 1809 with which the report showed significant overlap—​was released in September 1813 and, directly inspired by Condorcet, is widely acknowledged as “el acto fundador en el diseño de un sistema nacional de educación en España” [the founding act that designed a national education system in Spain] (Guereña 2013, 14). Also known as the Quintana Report, the document presents the master plan for designing Spanish public education. Although it never came to pass, it did manage to outline the conceptual framework within which all later proposals would be developed. For the authors of the report, education was companion to freedom. The possibility of public education was the result of a “Constitución que ha restituido al pensamiento su libertad, a la verdad sus derechos” [Constitution that has restored freedom of thought, and the rights of truth], but this new reality imposed the need to educate the collective will of the nation to avoid the distortion of this newly conquered liberty by the misconduct of individual wills: La Nación ha recobrado […] el ejercicio de su voluntad, condenada tantos siglos hacia la nulidad y el silencio, [pero] si esta voluntad no se mantiene recta e ilustrada, si su acción no se dirige constantemente hacia […] la utilidad común, [el resultado] sería para nosotros un azote igual o más funesto que las otras plagas que nos afligen.2 (Quintana [1813] 2013, 182) Education, then, was not meant to serve the individual, but the society within which citizens must fulfill their designated role based on their usefulness to the collective body (183): enseñándonos cuáles son nuestros derechos, nos manifiesta las obligaciones que debemos cumplir […] y señalando de este modo el puesto que debemos ocupar en la sociedad, ella hace que las fuerzas particulares concurran con su acción a aumentar la fuerza común, en vez de servir a debilitarla con su divergencia o con su oposición.3 Under the influence of the previous century’s enlightened thinking regarding education, the report articulates the general foundations of the system: instruction should be universal (“debe extenderse a todos los ciudadanos” [it should be offered to all citizens]), general (“debe abrazar el sistema entero de los conocimientos humanos” [it should embrace the entire system of human knowledge]), uniform (“el plan de enseñanza pública debe ser uniforme en todos los estudios” [the public education curriculum must be uniform across all subjects]), public (in the sense of being open to everyone: “que no se dé a puertas cerradas ni se limite sólo a los alumnos que 342

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se alistan para instruirse y ganar curso” [that instruction not be given behind closed doors nor be limited only to those students who are enrolled in the course]), free of charge (since the State cannot deny anyone access to the knowledge that is required for “el ejercicio de los derechos de ciudadano” [the exercising of the rights of citizenship]), and freely offered (“si la instrucción es un beneficio común a cuya utilidad todos tienen un derecho, todos deben tenerle también de concurrir a comunicarla” [if education is a common benefit which everyone has the right to take advantage of, everyone should also have the right to take part in imparting it] (183–​186; see also Araque Hontangas 2013, 54–​56). The principle of freedom of education opened the door to the participation of private initiatives (i.e. the Church), a point of friction not only for relations between the liberal State and the Catholic Church, but also between the two arms (moderates and progressives) of Spanish liberalism itself (Viñao 1994, 48; Martínez de Pisón 2013, 206). The Quintana Report outlined a system divided into three stages. Primary education was proposed as obligatory for all boys and would concentrate on teaching the fundamentals of reading, writing, arithmetic, religious dogma, and the “principales derechos y obligaciones como ciudadano” [primary rights and obligations of citizenship] (187). Evidence of the limited, exclusive conception of the supposed universality of citizenship, however, is found in the fact that its obligatoriness did not extend to girls: following Jovellanos, for whom the objective of the education of girls was “formar buenas y virtuosas madres de familia” [to train good, virtuous mothers], the authors of the report asserted that, “al contrario de la instrucción de los hombres, que conviene sea pública, la de las mujeres debe ser privada y doméstica” [as opposed to education for men, which it is advisable to make public, education for women should be private and domestic] (214). Secondary education—​“una verdadera innovación” [a true innovation] (Viñao 1994, 46)—​would have as its objective the necessary training in liberal professions, and for this purpose they proposed the creation of “universidades de provincia” [provincial universities] that would combat “el desprecio que se tenía por los verdaderos conocimientos, por aquellas ciencias y artes que hacen la gloria y la riqueza del entendimiento humano y de las naciones civilizadas” [the disdain held for true knowledge, for those sciences and arts that constitute the glory and richness of human understanding and of civilized nations] (191). Finally, tertiary education, which “comprende aquellos estudios que son absolutamente necesarios para los diferentes estados de la vida civil” [includes those studies that are absolutely necessary for the different conditions of civil life], belonged to the highest class and—​in contrast to the more extensive reach of primary and secondary instruction—​was more restricted: proposals were put forward to limit the number of universities in the Peninsula to nine (one more in the Canary Islands) and to create a single central university dedicated not to merely transmitting knowledge, but to exercising the “lujo de saber” [luxury of knowledge] and the “conservación y perfección de la enseñanza en los establecimientos esparcidos por las provincias” [preservation and perfection of education in the establishments scattered throughout the provinces] (203–​204). The report also contained proposals for training and hiring teachers, school inspections, financing the system, and creating a National Academy in Madrid that would serve to unite the various schools that already existed, to elevate the “ilustración nacional” [enlightenment of the nation] to the level of the “mundo civilizado” [civilized world] (210). It is worth highlighting three basic principles that supported the report’s education plan. The first was the concept of nation, which, having been formally included in the Constitution of Cadiz in relation to the definition of sovereignty or the origin of political power, appeared several times in the text to justify the decisions proposed for establishing the educational system. Regulating public education to make it available to all individuals constituting the nation was considered an act of patriotism, since it contributed to pursuing the good of the 343

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national community. But in the face of an idealized view of the nation as “la reunión de todos los españoles de ambos hemisferios” [the gathering of all Spaniards of both hemispheres] (Constitution of Cadiz, art. 1), the question of voting and political representation introduced a distinction between the members of the nation (Spaniards) and those with the ability to vote (citizens), in which issues of gender, race, and social status played a role in refusing the rights of citizenship to certain sectors of the national community (Fernández García 2010, 49–​54). The second principle was the imposition of a centralized control by the State, which was presented as a guarantee for disseminating public education throughout the territory, and as a defense against the undue influence of other agents, such as the Catholic Church, in schools and educational institutions. For this, the State was granted the power to regulate the system of entrance exams for teachers at the three educational stages; to write and approve educational laws, plans, and regulations, as well as textbooks; to name inspectors; to establish the number and residence of the universities, colleges, and private schools at the tertiary level of education, as well as the secondary level (provincial universities); and lastly, together with local governments and provincial councils, to guarantee the necessary financing for the functioning of the system.4 Such hierarchical control is not merely administrative, but also points to the establishment of a centralized epistemological authority that is revealed throughout the report in the supposed superiority of the center and the disrepute of the periphery—​“los malos hábitos de pronunciación y frase … propios de la provincia” [the bad habits of pronunciation and phrasing … typical of the provinces] (188)—​the insistence on making the kingdom’s capital a “centro de luces y modelo de enseñanza” [center of enlightenment and model of education] (210) that would shower its knowledge on the rest of the State to “difundir desde el centro hasta las extremidades el buen gusto y la perfección de los métodos” [disseminate from the center to the borders the good taste and perfection of the methods] (190), or the mandate that “las oposiciones a todas las cátedras del reino se hagan en Madrid” [the public examinations for all the professorships of the kingdom shall be taken in Madrid] (206). In this way, the model of territorial hierarchization—​ which, according to Germà Bel, and in imitation of the French centralist model, characterized the design of the Spanish State’s infrastructure policies from the early eighteenth century (Bel 2010, 29)—​was applied to the educational system. The third principle is the imposition of a single “native” language (Castilian) as the language of instruction throughout the territory of the Spanish monarchy and at all educational levels (except for some university-​level studies such as theology). Linguistic unity was thus presented as a key instrument for education, since—​together with doctrinal and methodological unity—​it must contribute to guaranteeing the uniformity of the system. We will return shortly to this aspect, which—​along with the limitation of the rights to citizenship and territorial hierarchization—​constitutes another index of the restrictive articulation of national identity. The Quintana Report was the foundation of Spanish liberalism’s primary education bill: the Dictamen y Proyecto de Decreto sobre el arreglo general de la Enseñanza Pública [Ruling and Proposed Decree on the General Arrangement of Public Education] (1814). But the return of Fernando VII to the throne at the end of the War of Independence and the measures he took, starting in May 1814, to reestablish absolute monarchy, persecuting liberalism’s supporters and invalidating the legislative work of the Cortes of Cadiz, put an end to the liberals’ education plans, returning to the conceptions held by the Ancien Régime. Neither the King nor his ministers were interested in extending or promoting education, and as before, the Church would again monopolize the few existing initiatives. And yet, both the Quintana Report and the later Ruling of 1814 established the foundations of liberal thought with respect to the future organization of the Spanish public education system.This became clear when, during the short liberal 344

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parenthesis of the Constitutional Triennium (1820–​1823), the elected Cortes approved in 1821 the Reglamento General de Instrucción Pública [General Regulation of Public Education] based on the 1814 plan. Also, based on the same plan, the General Studies Office was created, with Quintana as its president. Political instability and the return to absolute monarchy, beginning another round of persecution and repression of liberalism, voided the Regulation and the work of the General Office, and the Church once again placed all matters pertaining to education under its strict control. It was during Isabel II’s reign (1833–​1868) that the legal and institutional foundations that made up Spain’s liberal State were definitively consolidated, and with it, the regulation of a public education system. The beginnings of this process, however, were turbulent as a result of the continual political confrontations between the different liberal factions in Spain (represented by the Moderate Party and the Progressive Party), the infrequent stability of the governments, and ecclesiastical pressure to guarantee the Church’s presence in education, among other factors. In 1834 the General Education Office was again reconvened, again presided over by Quintana, and in addition to the same functions it was given in 1821, was configured as an advisory body for the initiatives taken by successive governments until 1857, to attempt, with little success, to regulate education. Different elements would be suggested in the various initiatives and propositions for laws that, little by little, would clarify and specify the basic ideas accepted by the liberal mentality of the era. The first of the initiatives taken was in 1836, with the General Plan for Public Education, also called the Duke of Rivas’ Plan, since he was the progressive politician who was the Minister of Interior when it was passed. It had almost no effect, since it was repealed shortly after passing. The proposals presented by the Plan included the division of primary education in two phases: elementary and high school; the regulation of private education; the creation of a Central Teachers School in Madrid for teacher training; and the possibility, as proposed by the Councils, of creating provincial teaching schools and establishing rules for entering the teaching profession at each of the educational levels; the division, also in two stages, of secondary education; and the creation of provincial, district, and municipal Commissions of Public Education, with the aim of assisting education in every territorial jurisdiction. In July 1838, with the ministry headed by Joaquín José de Muro, Marquis of Someruelos, the Provisional Plan for Primary Education was approved, and then passed into law, followed in November by a Regulation for Elementary Primary Education. Basically, the “Someruelos Law” repeated what had already been established for primary education by the Duke of Rivas Plan, but in line with the more conservative side of Spanish liberalism (the “moderates”), it emphasized the more restrictive, exclusive traits of the educational model: in contrast to the earlier plan, it questioned offering all primary education free of charge by proposing that only those who could pay for it should be able to access high primary (essentially middle school) education, and the State would pay only for those students without means “siempre que hayan sobresalido en los exámenes de las escuelas elementales y anuncien talento y aptitud” [as long as they have excelled in the elementary school exams and show talent and aptitude]. The number the State would pay for would be capped at a tenth of the number of paying, matriculated students in that level. This effectively reserved the high school level for the middle and upper classes. Someruelos also tried, unsuccessfully, to pass another bill for secondary and tertiary education, which, as in the case of the Primary Education Plan, basically followed the guidelines of the Duke of Rivas Plan. The organization of these secondary and tertiary stages would have to wait for the Curriculum for Secondary Education Institutes in October 1843. In particular, it awaited the General Curriculum, the so-​called Pidal Plan, which was passed in September 1845 with 345

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the ranking of Royal Decree. Liberal writer and politician Antonio Gil de Zárate’s participation in the drafting of this bill must be emphasized, since he designed the guidelines to follow. In this Plan, the presence of the study of Latin alongside that of the “national language” was regulated, as well as religious education, in accord with the governing Moderate Party’s views, which favored maintaining the Catholic Church’s privileged position in education. Secondary education remained divided into two stages: elementary (five years) and high, which was divided in turn between the study of science and letters. The subjects to be studied in the different university majors were established; a consulting Public Education Council dependent on the Government was created; and instructions for financing the schools and selecting and naming the faculty were established. The aspiration to establish a law that would regulate the whole of the public education system, covering all educational levels, had scarcely come about until then, as we have seen, with little legislation passed, and what there was only covered the different levels piecemeal, isolating each level. During the Progressive Biennium (1854–​1856), educational matters passed into the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Development, and in 1855, the minister Manuel Alonso Martínez unsuccessfully attempted to present a bill for a General Law for All Education, which was not even debated due to the political conflicts of the time. However, some of its characteristics would find their way into the Moyano Law of 1857 which, in contrast to the Pidal Plan, sought to extend primary education to all citizens and increase access to secondary studies, and these would no longer be seen merely as preparation for university, thus broadening the nature of elementary studies.

Instituting a system: from the Public Education Law (“Moyano Law”) of 1857 to the Ministry of Public Education (1900) The Public Education Law was first preceded by a Foundational Law (July 1857) in which the government was authorized to draft and pass the more comprehensive law. This was passed on September 9, 1857 at the behest of the Minister of Development, lawyer and professor Claudio Moyano Samaniego. It sought to establish the organization and regulation of the Spanish education system at all levels. Although it was not an innovative text, given that it followed the characteristics that had been established by the various bills and proposals developed up until then, starting with the Quintana Report of 1813, its importance lay in the fact that its basic organizational model would last until 1970. In accord with the predominance of conservative liberalism throughout the second third of the nineteenth century, the Moyano Law was flawed by obstacles to implementing a system of obligatory and free education (the extension of which remained limited to elementary-​level primary education), restrictions on entering the secondary level of education (conceived with a certain minority elitism, and reserved exclusively for those who could afford it), gender discrimination, privileges given to the Church (which, besides controlling everything relating to religious and moral education in public schools, gained the power to review and revise textbooks for the other subjects to make sure they did not conflict with Christian doctrine, and the authority to oversee and supervise the moral and religious conduct of the faculty), and lastly, the strong centralism of the administration and governing of the school system. That such a design could last until nearly the end of the Franco dictatorship indicates the persistent inability or reticence of the Spanish State to transform the nation-​building paradigm imposed by the conservative hegemony throughout the nineteenth century. The final years of Isabel II’s reign would see an important offensive launched by the Church to further broaden its ideological control of the knowledge transmitted at every educational 346

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level, especially when, in the 1870s, it perceived the influence of Krausist ideas in the work of figures such as the philosopher and pedagogue Julián Sanz del Río. These Krausists were condemned by the clergy, whose demands, together with more conservative sectors like the neo-​Catholics, would unleash reprisals in the university against ideologically critical and more progressive faculty members. The measures taken by Minister Manuel Orovio exemplify these reprisals, which included prohibiting all teaching that was critical of or contrary to the Catholic Church, the monarchy, or the government, and which led to the firing of republican-​leaning professors like Nicolás Salmerón and Emilio Castelar, among others. The short duration of each of the successive governments during the Revolutionary Sexennium (1868–​1874) and the constant political conflict of that period scarcely allowed for reform in the progressive, democratic sense held by some of the political parties that gained power. Despite this, it is worth highlighting the initial decrees of the new Minister of Development, Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla, such as that of October 21, 1868, which repealed the previous rulings limiting freedom of teaching, and decreased the role of the Church. Also important was the passage of the October 28, 1868 decree that reorganized secondary education and the schools of Philosophy and Letters, Sciences, Pharmacy, Medicine, Law, and Theology. The same decree also sought to broaden the reach of secondary education by eliminating its division into two periods, and reducing the presence of Latin and subjects related to religious education. These proposals were rationalized based on the idea of an enlightened citizen: Tiempo es ya de que la enseñanza pública satisfaga las necesidades de la vida moderna y tenga por principal objeto no formar sólo latinos y retóricos, sino ciudadanos ilustrados, que conozcan su patria en las diversas manifestaciones de la vida nacional […]. Esta educación ilustrada, amplia, libre y con carácter práctico, es en todas partes el más sólido fundamento de la verdadera libertad.5 (Ministerio de Fomento 1868, n.p.) General Martínez Campos’s coup d’etat in Sagunto on December 29, 1874 would open the way to a new era that would involve not only the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy to the throne, but also the return to more conservative conceptions of liberalism—​among them, some that had shaped the public education system. The return of Manuel Orovio to the Ministry of Development meant that the first decisions of the new government of Antonio Cánovas’s Conservative Party related to education led to the restitution of rules that prevented the faculty from questioning, in their classes, the Catholic religion and its morality, the monarchy, or the new political regime. This would lead to protests at the universities and the consequent adoption of repressive measures, removing some professors from their posts. These measures would not be repealed until 1881, with the rise to power of the Liberal Party. The debate on the freedom of teaching in the early years of the Restoration and government restrictions on this freedom and on innovative pedagogical ideas affected the Krausist movement. In 1875, at the instigation of the pedagogue and philosopher Francisco Giner de los Ríos and other professors sanctioned by the Ministry, such as Gumersindo Azcárate, Bartolomé Cossío, and Nicolás Salmerón, the Institución Libre de Enseñanza [Institution of Educational Freedom] was born. This was an attempt to create an alternative educational space to official schools. The conflict begun in that moment between the educational model defended by Catholic conservatism and the innovative, scientific model of the Institution would be constant until the outbreak of the Civil War. The alternation in power during the final third of the 347

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nineteenth century between the two dynastic parties (conservative and liberal) barely impacted the public education system established in 1857, nor would government interest improve in financing and spreading education to all of Spanish society. The end of the nineteenth century in Spain was marked by crisis, the Disaster of ’98, which revealed the country’s structural backwardness in all regards. Given the situation, intellectuals and parts of the political class both from the field of dynastic parties and from the republican, socialist opposition began a public debate in which the desire for rapid reforms was expressed, with the aim of overcoming economic and social backwardness. This gave rise to the regenerationist movement. The emergence of nationalist and regionalist movements also revealed the weakness of the processes of a collective common identity (Riquer 1994, 98). For the survival and consolidation of the nation-​state, it continued to be necessary to have an efficient educational policy, extending education to the entire population and raising their level of knowledge and training. That this was a prime objective and of utmost importance is shown in that, with the Royal Decree of April 18, 1900, the administration of education was definitively removed from the Ministry of Development, and for the first time in Spain, the Ministry of Public Education and Fine Arts was created, thus giving education its own area of competency within the government.

Citizenship, civilization, and language The intimate relation between education and citizenship explains why educational policy was an area of intense and polemical government activity in the nineteenth century. As we have seen, throughout the first half of the century (up to 1857, when the Moyano Law was the model that was finally adopted), a good number of laws and educational plans were proposed, and each change of government brought with it an ideological shift that had to find expression in an educational project. The fluctuations in educational policy in the first half of the nineteenth century, intimately tied to ideological disagreements over citizenship and national identity, prefigured those that would take place in the democracy of post-​Franco Spain, a period in which ten organic laws of education have been passed to date.6 The disagreements over education (which reflect both the lack of consensus over the construction of a collective identity and ideological reservations regarding public education and the absence of political will to devote the necessary resources to it) contributed to the deficiencies in the process of nationalizing the Spanish people, as Juan Linz (1973), Borja de Riquer (1994), and José Álvarez Junco (2001, 533–​565) have analyzed in detail. Evidence of the failure of Spanish educational policy during the nineteenth century was the persistence of illiteracy: in 1860, of more than 15.5 million inhabitants, less than 20% (about 2.5 million men, and 700,000 women) knew how to read and write; meanwhile, 75% (5 million men and 7 million women) were illiterate. Half a century later, in 1900, 33% of the population was literate, but 64% remained illiterate (de Gabriel 1997, 202). In contrast, around 1900, illiteracy in Germany and Great Britain was estimated at 5% of the population; in France, around 17%; and in Italy, 50%. The political violence that marked the country’s path throughout the century and the eventual hegemony of a conservative liberalism in the Restoration government determined the restrictive nature of the public education system and the infrequent application of the different plans passed by the State to develop it. The deficient liberalization of the political system left most Spaniards deprived of the benefits of citizenship and participation in political life. Furthermore, the existing ideological differences within nineteenth-​century Spanish liberalism contributed to this with respect to fundamental questions such as the very concept of nation, the notion of sovereignty or the 348

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origin of power, and thus, the admittance to or restriction from political participation by the citizenry. Neither the educational system nor national symbols (flag, anthem, monuments, national holidays, etc.) would come to function as cohesive elements among the citizens (Álvarez Junco 2001, 544–​563). If, for the early liberals of the Cortes of Cadiz, the growth of public education was “una clave para la democratización política” [key to political democratization], in the hands of conservatives and moderates, education became an almost exclusive instrument for social advancement for “los hijos de las clases propietarias —​alrededor de un dos por ciento de los jóvenes varones” [the sons of the landed classes—​around 2% of young men] (Boyd 2013, 446). And in the face of a political power incapable or unwilling to confront the Catholic Church—​which, being more interested in indoctrinating believers than in producing citizens, “tenía una veta, no ya antiliberal, sino antiestatal” [had not only an antiliberal, but also an anti-​state streak] (Álvarez Junco 2001, 548–​549)—​the latter would maintain its privileged control over an education that was far from serving the public interest. Proof of such collusion between Church and State is the fact that, as Riquer notes, “entre 1850 y 1890 el total del presupuesto dedicado a la Iglesia, ‘Culto y Clero’, fue muy similar al de las obras públicas y cinco veces superior al de enseñanza” [between 1850 and 1890, the total budget allotted to the Church, ‘Worship and Clergy’, was very similar to that allotted to public works, and five times higher than the education budget] (Riquer 1994, 105). In the same way that schools and the educational system never came to function in the construction and socialization of a national consciousness as they did in other European countries where liberal transformations were taking place, it is possible to tie the difficulties of the slow process of Spanish modernization and industrialization to the limited diffusion of school-​based education throughout the century. But just because educational nationalization was inadequate does not mean that it was not able to impose and naturalize many of its ideological principles. Álvarez Junco has noted that, despite its problems,“el esfuerzo nacionalizador del XIX se llevó a cabo” [the nationalizing effort of the nineteenth century was realized] and “el Estado ha subsistido” [the State has survived”] (2001, 565). From this perspective, and focusing on the field of public education, it is worth noting that, although all of the principles and standards formulated by Quintana in 1813—​ universality, freedom of cost, freedom of thought—​would be challenged by the vicissitudes of ideological and political struggles, there are at least two notable exceptions: the need to create a uniform educational system for the entire national territory, and the imposition of Spanish as the language of education, which was key to the homogenization of this system. Although “la administración fue incapaz de llevar a cabo una política lingüística que convirtiera el castellano en lengua común de todos los españoles” [the administration was unable to establish a language policy that would make Castilian the common language of all Spaniards] (Álvarez Junco 2001, 550), what it did consolidate throughout the century—​and, like the State itself, what survived despite its deficiencies—​was the conviction that Spanish was the only language that gave access to citizenship and learning. From the moment the Jesuits were expelled by royal decree on February 27, 1767 and the Bourbon monarchy began to mobilize to take charge of education, the desire to legislate the official language of instruction became clear (Moreno Fernández 2005, 176). Linguistic unity of the peninsular and American territories of the Spanish Crown—​and the consequent suppression of any other language that existed there—​was one of Carlos III’s legislative priorities (Lüdtke 1989), and although the Cortes of Cadiz did not specifically legislate on the matter, “la unidad de la lengua y la política lingüística unitaria se deduce de los principios de la Constitución, sobre todo de la soberanía nacional y del concepto de nación española”7 (Lüdtke 2015, 138).The Quintana Report made those principles explicit in postulating that the unity of 349

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language of instruction contributes to guaranteeing the uniformity of the nationalizing system. That that language should be Castilian was justified by its identification as the supposed sole and native language of all Spaniards: Debe pues ser una la doctrina en nuestras escuelas, y unos los métodos de su enseñanza, a que es consiguiente que sea también una lengua que se enseñe, y que esta sea la lengua castellana. […] Los pueblos sabios de la antigüedad no usaron de otra lengua que la propia para la instrucción: lo mismo han hecho, y con gran ventaja, muchas de las naciones en la Europa moderna. La lengua nativa es el instrumento más fácil y más a propósito para comunicar uno sus ideas, para percibir las de los otros, para distinguirlas, determinarlas y compararlas.8 ([1813] 2013, 184–​185) The exclusive consideration of Castilian as the only native language of Spain and the consequent marginalization of all the others used by the members of the nation on both sides of the Atlantic make it the unavoidable and obligatory vehicle for accessing and practicing citizenship. It must be remembered that the Constitution of 1812 made “saber leer y escribir” [knowing how to read and write] a requirement to enjoy the “ejercicio de los derechos de ciudadano” [exercising of the rights of citizenship] (art. 25.6). It is not easy to decipher the sociolinguistic situation in Spain at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with regard to both the use of other languages and the homogeneity of the Spanish language itself.9 We know that during the eighteenth century “los únicos beneficiarios de la educación primaria y secundaria en España eran los nobles, los burgueses y los clérigos, … nadie más tenía acceso a un conocimiento amplio de la lengua [y]‌casi el 90% de la población era rural”10 (Moreno Fernández 2005, 175, 184). Furthermore, although there was an administrative and public domain where it was essential to use Spanish, in significant swaths of Spanish territory, parallel to that public sphere, there existed another reality where “les múltiples transaccions de la vida quotidiana” [the multiple transactions of daily life] (Marfany 2017, 292) were carried out in another language. Diglossia, not the existence of an imaginary common native language, was the linguistic reality of the members of the nation. The fact that Spanish was not the mother tongue of all Spaniards and that establishing it as the only language of instruction implied clear symbolic violence does not necessarily imply that this would cause a widespread rejection of its imposition as a national language. Already by the end of the eighteenth century, according to Marfany, Castilian was considered the language of educated people, and its acceptance as such was consistent with the linguistic nationalism practiced by intellectuals in both the center and the periphery of the State, and with the internalization of an imperial language policy that had naturalized a diglossic reality in which Spanish was, by the end of the eighteenth century, the language of written communication and of social advancement (Marfany 2017, 107, 276). Núñez Seixas even asserts that languages were not a cause of political dispute during most of the nineteenth century: “en la medida en que [las demás lenguas y dialectos] no eran objeto de reivindicación como lenguas de cultura y de conformación de una esfera pública específica, tampoco constituían un gran problema hasta finales del Ochocientos. La enseñanza en castellano apenas era motivo de discusión antes de 1900”11 (2013, 246). But that does not mean that Castilian did not have to battle with those other languages when it came to imposing a uniform public education system, and there were numerous testimonies about the difficulty of carrying out instruction in a single language.

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Núñez Seixas indicates that, although “el idioma a enseñar era únicamente en castellano, … en varios textos legales se insistía en que los maestros se debían hacer entender en otras lenguas si era necesario”12 (2013, 246). While González Ollé asserts that at the end of the nineteenth century “el tema lingüístico no despertaba el mínimo interés entre los políticos contemporáneos” [the subject of language did not arouse the least interest among contemporary politicians], that supposed lack of interest is belied when he simultaneously makes reference to an 1896 parliamentary debate in which a representative (the Carlist Manuel Polo) declared, “se hace imposible la enseñanza en ciertas regiones … porque los niños hasta los 12 años ignoran el castellano” [teaching has become impossible in certain regions … because children as old as 12 do not know Castilian] (1985, 354, 351). If the Quintana Report naturalizes the idea that Castilian should be the Spanish language—​ the native language, the one used for instruction, and therefore, the language of citizenship—​the aspiration to also make it the language of knowledge is no less relevant. In the face of those who “pretenden que los estudios mayores o de facultad no pueden hacerse dignamente sino en latín” [claim that advanced or specialized studies can only be properly studied in Latin], and given the evidence that in fact what exists is “ese guirigay bárbaro llamado latín de escuelas” [that barbarous gibberish of schoolboy Latin], the report argued that the knowledges devoted to God and justice deserved to be treated “en la alta, grave y majestuosa lengua española” [in the high, serious, majestic Spanish language]. In this way, “el idioma español ganaría infinitamente en ello, puesto que a las demás dotes de majestad, color y armonía que todos le confiesan, añadirá la exactitud y el carácter científico, que en concepto de muchos no ha adquirido todavía”13 (Quintana [1813] 2013, 185).14 Liberal constitutionalism, therefore, attempted to implement a language policy with a double objective:  on one hand, to impose Castilian as the language of the nation and of citizenship, in accord with the goal of centralizing and uniformizing society (Castilian as opposed to the other languages of the Spanish people). On the other hand, it sought to elevate Castilian to the category of language of knowledge and civilization, which implied waging a battle against ecclesiastical control of education and knowledge (Spanish as opposed to Latin). Eventually, the failure of education also meant the failure of linguistic nationalization: the “eficacia pedagógica” [pedagogical efficacy] (Álvarez Junco 2001, 549) obligated the renunciation of education in the official language in those territories where the native language was different, and “la realidad fue que a finales del siglo XIX persistía el uso masivo hablado, y en menor medida incluso escrito, de las lenguas propias … no sólo no habían desaparecido las lenguas y las culturas llamadas ‘regionales’, sino que incluso se había producido una significativa reacción”15 in favor of their revival (Riquer 1994, 109–​110; emphasis in original). All this opened the way, at the turn of the century, for the other peninsular languages (and especially Catalan) to become instruments of mobilization for alternative collective identities (Balcells 2013, 468). The history of the attempts to construct an educational system in nineteenth-​century Spain is largely a history of failure.The presence of violence as a weapon against progressive liberalism and republicanism; the lack of consensus about the nation and its past among the elites with access to power; the inability to articulate a common project for the future that could simultaneously acknowledge political, cultural, and linguistic diversity; and the complicity of the various governments with the Catholic Church as well as entrenched forms of patronage and clientelism (caciquismo) are all factors that undermined liberalism’s timid nationalizing plans. And that failure makes clear some of the difficulties that even today continue to haunt the articulation of citizenship and its rights in contemporary Spain.

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Notes 1 “Nineteenth-​century liberalism shares with the Enlightenment its faith in education as a bearer of liberty and, consequently, as a guarantee of the State and of newly debuted political liberties; hence the liberal conviction of the era that education was a State matter. If the State wanted to survive not only as a democracy, but also, in other cases, as a nation, it was obligated to make education effective. This explains the birth and development of Europe’s national education systems.” 2 “The nation has recovered … its free will, condemned for so many centuries to nonexistence and silence, [but] if this will is not kept honorable and enlightened, if its action is not constantly directed toward … the common good, [the result] would be, for us, a scourge that is just as bad or even worse than the other plagues that afflict us.” 3 “by teaching us our rights, we are shown the obligations we must fulfill … and in this way indicating the position we should hold in society, it causes private efforts to coincide with its action to increase the common effort, instead of weakening it through difference or opposition.” 4 For this, two state-​run organizations would have to be created: the previously mentioned National Academy and the General Education Office (Dirección General de Estudios), whose members would be named by the Government. Their purpose was to produce reports and advise on the improvement of national public education, supervise the organization of the system, and perform inspections. 5 “It is long past time that public education satisfy the necessities of modern life and have as its primary objective the training not only of Latinists and rhetoricians, but of enlightened citizens who understand their homeland in the diverse manifestations of national life … This enlightened education, broad, free, and eminently practical, is in all places the most solid foundation of true liberty.” 6 Of these, five—​LODE (1985), LOU (2001), LOCFP (2002), LOE (2006), and LOMCE (2013)—​have been implemented (Berengueras and Vera 2015, 10). 7 “linguistic unity and a unifying language policy can be deduced from the principles of the Constitution, in particular that of national sovereignty and the concept of a Spanish nation.” 8 “Thus, the doctrine in our schools must be unified, as should be the methods of its teaching, from which it follows that only one language should be taught, and this language should be Castilian. … The wise people of antiquity did not use any language other than their own for instruction: many of the nations of modern Europe have done the same, to great effect. One’s native language is the easiest and most appropriate instrument for communicating one’s ideas, to understand those of others, to distinguish them, establish them, and compare them.” In his defense of the native language as a language of instruction, Quintana followed a principle that was common throughout Europe, and had already been brought to Spain by Jovellanos some years before (in 1809) in his “Bases para la formación de un plan general de instrucción pública” [Foundations for formulating a general plan for public education] (Araque Hontangas 2013, 55). According to Jovellanos, “siendo la lengua nativa el instrumento natural, así para la enunciación de las ideas propias como para la percepción de las ajenas, en ninguna otra lengua podrán los maestros exponer más clara y distintamente su doctrina, y en ninguna la podrán percibir y entender mejor los discípulos” [the native language being one’s natural instrument, both for expressing [one’s own] ideas and for understanding those of others, in no other language will teachers be able to more clearly and distinctly expound their lessons, and in no other will their pupils be able to better perceive and understand] (1809). For Jovellanos, as for Quintana, the native language of all Spaniards was Castilian. 9 Moreno Fernández asserts that “en la España de principios del XIX, de una población de unos 12 millones de habitantes, probablemente más del 80% conocía y usaba el español” [in early nineteenth-​ century Spain, out of a population of some 12 million inhabitants, probably more than 80% knew and used Spanish] (Moreno Fernández 2005, 173), but this estimate, as its own author admits, is tentative and does not have a solid empirical foundation (González Ollé 1993, 135). 10 “the only beneficiaries of primary and secondary education in Spain were the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the clergy, … no one else had access to a full knowledge of the language, [and] almost 90% of the population was rural.” 11 “to the extent that [the other languages and dialects] were not claimed to be languages of culture or of the conformation of a specific public sphere, they also did not constitute a great problem until the end of the 1800s. Education in Castilian was hardly even a reason for disagreement before 1900.” 12 “the only language of instruction was Castilian, … several legal texts insisted that teachers had to make themselves understood in other languages if it were necessary.”

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Education and citizenship 13 “the Spanish language would gain infinitely from it, since to the other gifts of majesty, color, and harmony that everyone concedes to it would be added the precision and scientific status which according to many it has not yet acquired.” 14 Jovellanos expressed a similar concern with making Castilian a language of knowledge and science: “para levantar nuestra lengua a toda su perfección y restituirla a su dignidad y derechos, la Junta examinará si será conveniente adoptarla en nuestros estudios generales y en todo instituto de educación como único instrumento para comunicar la enseñanza de todas las ciencias, así como para todos los ejercicios de discusión, argumentación, disertación o conferencia; con lo cual podrá ser algún día depósito de todos los conocimientos científicos que la nación adquiera, y será más fácil su adquisición a los que se dediquen a estudiarlos” [to raise our language to its full perfection and restore its dignity and rights, the Committee will examine whether it is advisable to adopt it in our general studies and in every educational institution as the only instrument for teaching all sciences, as well as for all exercises of discussion, argumentation, discourse, and speeches; so that it will someday be a repository for all scientific knowledge acquired by the nation, and it will be easier for everyone who studies this knowledge to understand it] (1809). Quintana would again show his interest in the future of the Spanish language in his 1814 speech to the Royal Spanish Academy, “Riesgos y abusos a que está expuesta la lengua castellana en la activa y nueva carrera que se le presenta por delante” [Risks and abuses to which the Castilian language is exposed in the new, active journey before it]. 15 “the reality was that by the end of the nineteenth century, the massive use of native languages for speaking, and to a lesser degree for writing, continued … not only had the so-​called ‘regional’ languages and cultures not disappeared, but a significant reaction had been aroused.”

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24 THE YUCATAN CHANNEL AND THE LIMITS OF “SPAIN” IN THE MID-​N INETEENTH CENTURY Lisa Surwillo

La isla de Cuba representa hoy para la España moderna mucho mas de lo que representaban para nuestros mayores todas las posesiones del continente americano.1 (Minister of State Saturnino Calderón Collantes to Capitan General Francisco Serrano) The nineteenth-​century Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico were the site of multiple and overlapping contested national identities: Santo Domingo, the Yucatan Peninsula, Texas, Puerto Rico, and Cuba all explored changing status either to become or cease being independent republics, occupied territories, Spanish colonies, and US states. Within this dynamic context, Spain was determined to retain control of the lucrative and geopolitically strategic islands of Puerto Rico and Cuba and tested the limits of its own conception as a nation in relation to the lands and waters of these maritime zones. Beyond territorial determinations, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and other smaller bodies of water are key to addressing the concept of Spain in the nineteenth century. In the same missive from 1859 cited above, Madrid instructed Capitan General of Cuba, Francisco Serrano, to halt the illegal slave trade from Africa to the island, in order to prevent violation of Spanish sovereignty on the 120 mile (200 km)-​wide Yucatan Channel, considered vital to the Spanish hold on the Antilles. The instructions are emblematic of the implications of the diplomatic policy of “integridad nacional” [national integrity] and the dissonance between official policy and prevailing unsanctioned practices. Although he was charged with guaranteeing the retention of Cuba, Serrano, like most other Captains General, did not halt the trade and completed his tenure enriched by bribes from slave traffickers. Through the 1860s, the illegal transatlantic slave trade brought 10,000 bozales annually to Cuba where many Spaniards deemed slave labor necessary to sustain the island’s sugar economy. The persistent infringement of Anglo-​Hispano anti-​slave trade treaties prompted British cruisers to patrol the African and Cuban coasts to intercept slavers. Ever suspicious of their rivals’ motives, in the mid-​century, Madrid saw British patrollers’ and North American ships’ presence in the Yucatan Channel, off the Samaná Peninsula and other “vías interoceánicas en Centro América” [interoceanic routes in Central America] as an indication of London’s and Washington’s larger imperial designs and empowered its leaders in Cuba to challenge “toda tentativa que tenga por objeto poner en peligro directo o indirectamente la dominacion de España en esos mares” [every attempt to directly or indirectly

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endanger Spain’s domination in those seas] (Calderón Collantes 1859). Forced labor in Cuba was a cornerstone of Spain’s economic policy but, in the face of an imminent end to the Atlantic slave trade and to avoid British patrols of what it considered its national waters, Spain encouraged alternative labor schemes. The following pages examine the concept of Spain in the mid-​nineteenth century in terms of a national discourse that centered around Cuba and a colonial policy that emphasized control of maritime zones. During the dozen years of open trafficking of Maya from the Yucatan Peninsula to Cuba, Spanish statements revealed how fictions of the nation were articulated, with attention to identity, the past, patriotic sentiment, race, and the meaning of the Atlantic. This chapter considers three instances in the overseas policies regarding “Spain” that were folded into national discourse: first, the language formulated at the inauguration of the traffic in Yucatan Maya in 1848; second, the Spanish response to British attempts to suppress the trade in Maya in 1853; and, third, the poet José Zorrilla’s description of his role in legitimizing the trade as a patriotic enterprise in 1859. This chapter shares the premise that, “we cannot understand the history of any one locale around or within the Atlantic without appreciating how that locale was connected to and transformed by people in other places around the Atlantic basin” (Games and Rothman 2007, xv). Modern Spain as a peninsular, European construct, grew from its overseas dimension. The attempts at territorial enclosure of a single Spain on the Iberian Peninsula in the nineteenth century was developed in tandem with the diplomatic fictions of Spanish nationalism deployed on the other side of the “Mar océano” [ocean]. Spain in the mid-​century is an elastic term rather than a single signified. It was open to negotiation as much as the naming and limits of the Atlantic were. In essence they meant whatever was necessary to hold Cuba. Debating the cultural meanings of the fraught spaces of Mérida,Veracruz, Western Cuba, and the Yucatan Channel—​ anything but an aqueous void—​Spain’s rich archive of fantastical diplomatic documents offer a unique view into the contested definition of Spain and Spanishness that was elaborated on the backs of forced Maya migrants to Cuba where they labored alongside Africans, Chinese, and Canary Islanders.2

War in the Yucatan Peninsula The first Maya trafficked to Havana from the Yucatan Peninsula were prisoners of war from the Guerra de Castas (1847–​1901), a war of Maya resistance against European and Creole modes of progress. Maya leaders battled the Creoles who previously had armed them. In the late 1830s, two Creole factions began to pact with the Maya to advance their internecine war over the future of the Yucatan state. Maya leaders initially agreed to participate in the Creole war in exchange for a long-​desired reduction in religious taxes. Later they negotiated for further concessions in land and civil and religious contributions, in exchange for supporting the Yucatan Republic against Santa Anna during the Mexican invasion of the peninsula (Ancona 1889, 10–​11). The central government of Mexico prevailed. The Creole government later revoked the rights that the Native Americans had demanded, attempted to disarm them, and, finally, arrested them indiscriminately for conspiring against the state. In 1847, Indigenous and Mestizo communities, under the leadership of Cecilio Chi, parted ways with the Creoles and advanced their own program against colonization, igniting what is known as the Caste War (González Navarro 1968, 14).The fractious Yucatan Creoles set aside their differences and joined forces to put down what they deemed an uprising. Yucatan President Santiago Mendez solicited—​and was refused—​ assistance from or even annexation to the Capitan General of Cuba, the Congress of the United States, and the Admiral of Jamaica (even as British in Belize armed the Maya and outfitted 356

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the Caste War that fed the protested trade in Maya families: Jaulin 1972, 75) before turning to Mexico, their final option. On August 17, 1848, Mexico officially claimed sovereignty over the Yucatan Peninsula, but Maya retained control of half of the territory and remained at war until 1901. On November 6, 1848,Yucatan governor Miguel Barbachano decreed that all Maya rebels were to be expelled (Menéndez 1923, 22). The decision to mandate expulsion in lieu of capital punishment was not simply expedient, it was profitable.3 Maya prisoners of war were sold under the guise of contracted labor to Hispano-​Cubans. More broadly, the capitalized exile was a tactic of violence and intimidation, for not only captured soldiers were sold. Rather, the local government launched a veritable extermination campaign of all Maya, leading some to argue that the trade in Maya constituted an ethnic cleansing (Álvarez Cuartero 2012, 202). Alarmed at the political instability in the region, Benito Juárez sent Juan Suárez y Navarro to the Yucatan to investigate. The emissary explained that, almost immediately, exile according to martial law had devolved into coordinated razzias designed to seize and sell native people. Eventually, private traders dispensed entirely with the pretense of exiling armed rebels and openly embarked for Havana with unarmed Native families and orphans, raising the profit of the sale of a single contract from 25 to 200 pesos (Dumond 1997, 117). Caricaturist Mariano Guzmán satirized the supposed nobility of Yucatan society that had spared the lives of rebels (see Fig. 24.1) as a maternal figure marked by gluttony and vicious luxury. In fact, the “Indieros” included men such as Tito Vicino (Bavarian consul in Havana) and Antonio Juan Parejo, and firms such as Goicuría y Hno., and Zangronis y Hnos. (Estrade 1994, 99). Yucatan Creoles generally approved of the illicit trade but on May 6, 1861 Benito Juarez officially ordered its cessation. Paul Estrade notes with some suspicion that the Yucatan

Figure 24.1  Indiera. Mariano Guzmán, 1860. Source: La Burla 20 (Mérida, 4 November 1860). Reproduced in Menéndez 1923, 242. Public domain.

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elite’s turn against the trade coincided with new labor demands in the cultivation of henequén (or agave) into which the indigenous were swiftly incorporated and exploited (104). Individual traders enriched themselves by trafficking Maya, but also, some of the profits were reinvested in the Caste War: Barbachano used the revenue of 8,375 pesos from the first groups of trafficked persons in 1849 to finance the transport of troops (Reed 2001, 142). One Yucatan trader, Gerardo Tizon, obtained a Cuban loan of 30,000 pesos and 500 rifles for the Yucatan government (with a 1 percent kickback for himself) on the condition that the Yucatan government repay the loan in Maya laborers (Reed 2001, 221). Estimates of the numbers of Maya who were brought to Cuba, either with or without legal approval from Spanish and Yucatan authorities, range from less than 1,000 to ten times that number. What is undisputed is that Simón Peón, an influential landowner in Uxmal and Chetulix, was the first to propose the systematic importation of Native Americans from the Yucatan (García Álvarez 1993, 571). He designed the scheme for consideration by the Comisión de Población Blanca in Havana that in 1844 had offered a reward to anyone who could outfit a sugar mill entirely with white labor; Peón’s plan featured trafficked Maya as such laborers (“Expediente,” fol. 115). Havana rejected Peón’s proposal, primarily for financial reasons, but the question of the race and identity of the Yucatan Maya remained open. Four years later, Capitan General Federico Roncali (the Conde de Alcoy) authorized the trade in labor contracts of expelled rebel Maya into Spanish lands and waters and outlined their working conditions once in Cuba. Strikingly, he dismissed the issues of race and rights as topics only “para discutir en una reunión de gentes de letras,” for “cualquiera verá que este elemento de población pertenece á la llamada clase de color y que no puede ser considerada de otra manera”4 (“Expediente,” fols 27–​28). Furthermore, he defined “los indios Yucatecos” [the Yucatec Indians] through a triangulation of the past that avoided any mention of their ethnic identity. Rather, as “Indios procedentes de países que en otros tiempos formaron parte del territorio español” [Indians from countries that were formerly part of Spanish territory] (“Expediente,” fol. 13), the Maya are first and foremost “Indios”—​a homogenizing term that had historically “constituted difference based on unequal power relations” (Van Deusen 2015, 11)—​and assigned them to a space-​time of Spanish sovereignty outside of historical periodization. Roncali consequently suggested that their presence in Spanish Cuba was entirely legitimate. In correspondence to the Minister of Government in Madrid, the Conde de Alcoy extended this configuration of Spain through the prism of the past by positing a static profile of Native Americans, shockingly devoid of any acknowledgment of their diversity or humanity: “Así era el Yndio de la conquista cuando acababa de descubrirse el nuevo mundo y así es ahora sin que haya modificado su índole el trascurso de mas de 300 años” [This was how the Conquest-​era Indian was when the new world was first discovered, and this is how he is now, with no changes in his nature in more than 300 years] (“Expediente,” fol. 17). The Captain General explained the absence or “estinción” [extinction] of Native peoples in Cuba and Puerto Rico not as the result of extermination (an accusation he considered false and harmful to Spain) but rather as an earlier instance of free movement: “los hombres imparciales atribuyen la falta de Yndios en las Yslas á su emigración á los continentes que es lo mas natural” [impartial men attribute the lack of Indians in the Islands to their emigration to the continents, which is to be expected] (“Expediente,” fol. 28). Assertions of free movement and continued willful national sentiment shaped the fantastical assertion of an indigenous acceptance of Spain in the past and a parallel pro-​Spanish patriotism in the present. Spanish law regarding Native Americans was extensive, but in mid-​nineteenth-​century discussions of the Maya trafficked to Cuba, Spanish correspondence referred implicitly to the Constitution of 1812 and explicitly to the 1609 Laws of Indias. Article 5 of the first Spanish 358

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constitution recognized all free men born and residing in Spanish domains, including non-​ enslaved Black men, as Spanish. (Citizenship, however, was reserved for Native Americans and Europeans, although Afro-​descendants could attain citizenship through “la puerta de la virtud y del merecimiento” [the door of virtue and merit].) Crucially, in 1812 patriotism became an obligation of all Spaniards, as elaborated in Article 6: “El amor de la patria es una de las principales obligaciones de todos los Españoles” [Love of the motherland is one of the primary obligations of all Spaniards]. To be sure, Spain had no intention of inviting trafficked Maya to participate in political life, but the required love for patria informed the tortured logic that presupposed that Native Americans who had been considered Spanish in a different spatial-​ temporal imagination would in fact choose to exercise a love for patria and elect to return to Spain (i.e. Spanish Cuba). An extreme love of Spain explains the supposedly voluntary character of the labor contracts that could not, accordingly, be equated with slavery. Consideration of Native Americans’ will was a fiction of convenience for Spanish designs on the Yucatan Channel and its presence in the Caribbean. In anticipation of the British accusations of enslavement and traffic, Spain formulated a conceptual bridge across the Yucatan Channel, allowing the movement of subjects from one part of the world to another, without leaving “Spain.” The peninsula and the island were united by historical Spanish sovereignty actualized by a supposed desire by their residents to be subject to the Spanish Crown. Volition of belonging is also a cornerstone of the wider phenomenon of nationalism and part of the mid-​nineteenth-​century liberal ethos that valued willful self-​making (Ahmed 2014, 15).5 However, the same distinction had precluded Spanishness to Africans and their descendants in 1812. Whereas trafficked Africans were unambiguously enslaved, in the 1840s and 1850s, Spain presupposed feelings of attachment to Spain that prompted the contracted Maya to leave Yucatan and travel in Spanish waters, on Spanish ships to Cuba, in order to return to “Spain.” This kind of popular longing constituted an impassioned performance of the cultural rhetoric of nationalism. The Maya did not participate voluntarily in these historically based declarations of nationalism; nevertheless, they were cast as protagonists of a nationalist drama rehearsing ideas developing in Iberia. Representative of the corresponding neo-​ imperial fantasy in the public sphere were statements such as the following newspaper article, important in spite of its significant admission of the exploitative conditions the Maya (here called “yucatecos” emphasizing geography over ethnicity or community) were subjected to upon their arrival in Cuba: Los yucatecos, que como todos los indígenas de América, conservan con cierto fanatismo la memoria tradicional de los privilegios que disfrutaban bajo la protección de los monarcas españoles, se prestaban voluntariamente y de buen grado a venir a Cuba, y se hubieran prestado aun más gustosamente si el interés particular fuese menos egoísta, y si las empresas que tomaron a su cargo este negocio se hubieran mostrado más generosas con ellos en las condiciones bajo las cuales los contrataron.6 (“Crónica extranjera” 1856, 184) The Spanish argued, tautologically, that they followed their own laws (specifically the Ley 18, tit. 13, lib. 6 of the Rec. de Indias) prohibiting the transfer of indigenous people and therefore were not engaged in slavery. Extending the claim that “son de su naturaleza libres como los mismos españoles” [they are free by nature, like Spaniards themselves], the Havana press reasoned that the Yucatan Maya were free individuals who could not be prevented from emigrating (“Crónica,” 184). That is, the trafficked laborers were free persons choosing to travel to Cuba and choosing to contract themselves, thus the British were violating their own cherished concept of free 359

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circulation through their threatened interference in the Yucatan Channel. Somewhere between Roncali and Peón’s positions on the matter, Maya whiteness was theoretical, not phenotypical. These men and women were, according to the Spaniards’ logic, acting as white by electing to travel to Spanish Cuba. Moreover, their supposed desire for “Spain” articulated a cultural nationalism that confirmed Cuba as Spain. The implementation of these concepts into the realities of forced migration and labor depended upon what Evelyn Powell Jennings has called an “imperial knowledge” shared by various Spanish officials who, in spite of individual differences, understood race, labor, and slavery in similar ways (Jennings 2010, 210).The Spanish justification for the trafficking of Maya people to Cuba also demonstrates the degree to which the leading men of state in nineteenth-​ century Spain recognized the malleability of “Spain” as a political construct conceptualized through the historical interpretation of place. Spain attempted to out-​maneuver both Mexico and Great Britain in the Yucatan.7 The Mexican Parliament and diplomatic corps vociferously protested the purchase and exploitation of Maya, now Mexican citizens, in Spanish Cuba (González Navarro 1968, 26). As Súarez y Navarro acknowledged to Benito Juárez, in response to the President’s concern over Mexico’s ability to suppress the trade, “Sin la intervention de los buques de guerra ingleses, que recorren las aguas de Cuba, y que por su procsimidad a Yucatán puede hacer estensiva su vigilancia hacia sus costas nada podrá conseguirse”8 (Suárez y Navarro 1993, 190). The politician was referring to Mexico’s lack of “medios para hacerlo” [means to do it] in the 1860s but his observations on Mexican naval interventions were also valid for the previous decade. Indeed, five years after Roncali authorized the trade in Maya labor contracts, Great Britain intervened. In 1853, the British in Belize arrested and tried Juan Bautista Anduze for the crime of trafficking kidnapped indigenous people from Yucatan to Cuba “in breach of the Slave Trade Abolition Act.” On June 10, 1853 the Superintendent in Belize informed the Naval Commander in Chief in Bermuda that “John Baptiste Anduze and Carlos Carillo” had been arrested off the Isla Mujeres aboard the Spanish well-​boat (vivero) Alerta with “30 men and 3 girls, Indians belongin[g]‌to Yucatán.” The thirty-​three trafficked persons were “to be delivered to one Francisco M.  Torrens, the owner of the vessel” who had agreed to purchase them at the rates of: Males from 16 to 20 years $25.00 each Males between 12 and 16 years $17.00 Male children under 12 years $8.00 Women from 16 to 20 years $17.00 Girls below 16 years $8.00 (Archives 1935, 167–​168) The British Consul in Belize, John Crawford (Consul in Havana), and various Mexican diplomats, including Buenaventura Vivó (Mexican Consul in Havana) also denounced the influential Catalan financier and slave trader Francisco Marty Torrens (Francesc Martí i Torrents) for his involvement in the Alerta. Few in Havana would have doubted the veracity of the accusations, as Marty was known to have trafficked Maya families since 1847 and Native Americans from the Yucatan Peninsula worked on his plantation and at his Tacón theater in Havana. Officially, he held exclusive fishing rights off the coast of Isla Mugeres and Cozumel, granted by the Cuban and Yucatan governments (Suárez y Navarro 1993, 167; García Álvarez 1993, 38–​40). Politics and capitalism joined forces to make these waters Marty’s commercial domain within which his fishing enterprise provided cover for his ventures in the intertwined illicit trade in Africans and the Spanish-​approved trade in labor-​contracted Yucatan Maya. Informed of the interdependence 360

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of all forms of human trafficking, Suárez y Navarro further advised President Juárez that the protection of Maya from traffic necessitated a ban on outfitting ships for the Atlantic slave trade in Yucatan ports. He reported “Yo he sido testigo de haber sido acogidos y protegidos en dicho puerto [Campeche] algunos buques y un vapor que de toda notariedad pertenecian a la carrera de África. El interés y la codicia ocasionan este mal”9 (Suárez y Navarro 1993, 184). Marty was a powerful figure in Havana and invoked his numerous titles as assurance of his diplomatic immunity from British prosecution (“Expediente,” fols 43–​45). A  letter from the Havana Mayor, Juan Pedro de Espinosa, to Capitan General Valentín Cañedo makes clear that some Cubans eventually agreed with the British and the Mexicans, even though just six weeks before Espinosa disingenuously had claimed that he did not even know who Francisco M. Torrens was. Los sirvientes á que se alude, nunca han sido asalariados, á no ser que por tales se entiendan unos infelices Yndios conducidos por fuerza y amarrados á Ysla de Mugeres, desde donde han venido en los viveros de D. Francisco Marty al carenero de Casa Blanco. ¿Y sabe Vuestra Excelencia cual há sido el Salario que han disfrutado? El de una peseta sencilla, que sencilla habia de ser y pagada en Domingo para mayor burla para los pobres asalariados! Asi lo declaran ellos mismos bajo la santidad del juramento que nunca quebrantan los Yndios segun nos dice el Señor Marty con imparcial franqueza. […] Trátase, Escmo Sor, de poner en claro la ecsistencia de un tráfico inmoral y reprobado, denunciado hace tiempo por la opinion pública y ultimamente por el Sr. Consul Mejicano que se há presentado á VE pidiendo amparo y libertad para sus compatriotas de Yucatan.10 (“Expediente,” fols 49–​50) Although the mayor of Havana found the trade in Maya immoral and illegal, the Spanish government in Madrid backed Marty, insisting that English agents were intervening under “pretestos de todas luces frívolas é injustificantes” [obviously frivolous and unjustifiable pretexts] (“Comunicaciones”). On October 12, 1853 the President of the Spanish government wrote to the British Chargé d’Affairs in Madrid to defend Marty’s actions as compliant with Spanish law, similar to British imperial policy, and an entirely domestic labor issue. Luis José Sartorius compared the movement of laborers from Yucatan to Cuba as equivalent to the British “legítimo derecho de importar en las posesiones ultramarinas inglesas, negros africanos en clase de colonos estableciendo en el regimen interior para el manejo de ellos, que ha juzgado conveniente sin que Gobierno alguno estrangero haya pensado mezclarse ni indirectamente en una cuestión interna de la Gran Bretaña”11 (“Expediente,” fol. 94). In addition to Sartorius’ flagrant disregard for the violations of forced migration, the comparison would have been valid only if the Yucatan Peninsula were still part of the Spanish Empire in 1853. In this and other internal documents and diplomatic correspondence about the trafficked Maya, Spain continued to invoke the definitive phrase: “indios procedentes de países que en otros tiempos formaron parte del territorio español” [Indians from countries that were formerly part of Spanish territory]. The reference to territoriality asserted a neo-​imperial, Hispanist claim to influence over all lands presently and formerly under its rule. Once again they alleged that the Maya were not trafficked but instead desired a return to the empire and that the British and Mexican attempts to prevent their move to Cuba were, in fact, an infraction on the right of Maya to movement as free persons. British involvement reframed the question of the transportation of the Maya in terms of an infraction of the Anglo-​Spanish treaties that abolished the transatlantic slave trade 361

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in 1817 and 1835. That is, was the transversal of the roughly 125 miles of the Yucatan Channel between Cabo San Antonio and Cabo Catoche the crossing of internal (Spanish) waters or the high seas (Molenaar 2015, 254)? In terms of maritime nomenclature, was the Yucatan Channel already part of Atlantic waters that witnessed human traffic? Or did the practice of human trafficking render it Atlantic? Defending Anduze and Marty, Capitan General Valentín Cañedo noted that the treaty of 1835 only addressed “esclavos procedentes de África” [slaves from Africa] and argued that British consul John Crawford was “interpretando a su modo el referido tratado” [taking liberties in his interpretation of the treaty in question], exceeding the boundaries of his role as commercial agent of the British state (Calderón de la Barca 1853). Spain purported to carry out labor practices on a domestic plane, moving free laborers without negotiating international treaties or entering into an open Atlantic where, under the vigilance of the British, it could be regulated as slavery.The ploy had worked before and had been put to the test recently in the famous Amistad case in which Spanish slave traders presented the human cargo in Cuba as having embarked not from the African coast, but rather another Spanish port, for such inter-​colonial traffic was permissible under Anglo-​Spanish law and did not require incursion into the space deemed “the Atlantic” by the British (Zeuske 2015). Juan Bautista Anduze and Carlos Carillo were found guilty of “Fitting out, &c. a vessel in order to deal, &c. in persons intended to be dealt with as Slaves, &c.” and sentenced for four and three years’ hard labor respectively (Archives 1935, 168). Anduze later admitted that he “entrapped, plundered and sold into slavery” these thirty-​three people. The archive does not document their life stories, but the British Consul in Havana did record the names of several of these men and women, including José Cosí, Juan Pacheco, José Pat, Dolores Batam, and Tomás Batam (“Expediente,” fol. 43v). Correspondence between British officers in Belize and Jamaica expressed their satisfaction with the “steps taken for the suppression of Slave Traffic and Kidnapping of the Indians of Yucatán” (Archives 1935, 170). While existing records do not tell us what happened to the persons trafficked aboard the Alerta, twenty-​one of the thirty-​six (Spain acknowledged three more individuals than the British did) stolen persons were returned to the Yucatan, another six had already left by the time the government intervened, five had died, one left for Spain and another three remained in Cuba as agricultural workers (“Expediente,” fol. 89). In theory, Marty stopped trading Maya after this scandal. A month later, the new Capitan General Pezuela nulled the Conde de Alcoy’s Reglamento of 1849.

The Atlantic Martin Lewis reminds us that geographical distinctions are “as much intellectual constructs as they are given features of the natural world” (1999, 188). The geographer further underscores that before the modern period, seas and oceans were understood “as segments of water situated off of an eponymous area of land, rather than, as modern geography has it, distinct bodies of water partially separated from other waters by intervening lands” (199). In such a configuration, still favored by Spain in the mid-​century, the Yucatan Channel was related to the Yucatan Peninsula rather than a body of water partially separated from the rest of the Atlantic. In an area where international borders were in flux, the names and meanings of bodies of water were of great significance. Spain kept the Atlantic, subject to British vigilance, at a remove from the Western Caribbean, where Spanish practices of colonization could still occur. The historicizing frame binding labor and land exemplifies the importance of space-​time to cultural geography, as Doreen Massey has theorized.

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The description, definition and identification of a place is thus always inevitably an intervention not only into geography but also, at least implicitly, into the (re)telling of the historical constitution of the present. It is another move in the continuing struggle over the delineation and characterization of space-​time. (1995, 190) The importation of Maya from the Yucatan Peninsula, under the cover of contracted labor, pushed the theoretical distinctions between slavery and free labor, black and white, and colony and political independence to new limits. The forced migration of Maya from Campeche, Sisal, and Mérida invites a reconsideration of the meaning of both “Spain” and “the Atlantic.” Infusing human narrative into place-​names, Lewis advocates for understanding “oceans not as physical units but rather as spaces of human activity” identified and defined by how we choose to act in them (1999, 204). A nomenclature based on human activity (forced mobility and labor) reveals a notion of “Spain” unbound by land mass or chronology, girded, rather, by nostalgia for its sovereignty in which the Spanish Yucatan Channel is an extension of the Yucatan Peninsula, a source of indentured, unfree labor, outside of the modern high seas of the Atlantic, patrolled by the British. The government in Madrid was explicit on this matter: “Si los cruceros ingleses o angloamericanos pretendiese [sic] perseguir el tráfico en las aguas jurisdiccionales de la isla de Cuba,VE hará respetar la integridad del territorio repeliendo la fuerza con la fuerza, si fuere necesario”12 (Calderón Collantes 1859). The attention to waterways and national sovereignty was not limited to diplomatic correspondence. José María de la Torre’s widely circulated Mapa de Cuba visually shaped understanding of the interrelated nature of the lands and waters around Spain’s most valuable possession. The Cádiz Meridian remains the pole of reference to measure the distance of these peripheral lands from Iberia, the Atlantic begins beyond the Bahamas and the Leeward Islands, and the Caribbean, Colon, or Antillean Sea is decidedly separate from the Atlantic. De la Torre’s map underwent several editions that visually emphasized Castilian maritime predominance in numerous ways. The 1850 version incorporated an earlier map from 1837 (see Fig. 24.2) that traced the routes Columbus undertook on his first, second, and fourth voyages in the waters

Figure 24.2  Mapa de la isla de Cuba. José María de la Torre, 1850. Source: © Biblioteca Nacional de España.

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around Cuba. In most of the published versions, the various channels and waterways are charted in detail, although the waters west of Cuba, between Cabo Catoche and Cabo San Antonio bear no name at all. The Yucatan is rendered one point in an array of lands and waters exploited in nineteenth-​century capitalist globalization and a training ground for thinking about what the very idea of “modern Spain” meant.

Zorrilla The famous Spanish playwright and poet José Zorrilla did not produce a major literary work during the eleven years he spent in Mexico (1855–​66), but his presence was felt in other ways. In her analysis of his México y los mexicanos, an influential tome of literary criticism, Christina Karageorgou-​Bastea underscores Zorrilla’s argument that Mexican literature flourished under Spanish influence—​apparently the influence that Zorrilla himself represented. Karageorgou-​ Bastea finds references to Mexico’s colonial past in Zorrilla’s work through the frame of an “exoticismo orientalista [que] restablece el lazo que la independencia ha roto: vuelve México visible, por incorporarlo en el sistema del imaginario peninsular decimonónico y poscolonial”13 (2009, 168). The proto-​Hispanist view of culture reconnects the old “Nueva España” with Spain through Zorrilla’s intervention. Similarly, José Emilio Pacheco (2001) affirms that “[e]‌n México, antes de la aparición de Bécquer, [Zorrilla] es el modelo absoluto de nuestros poetas. Todo el romanticismo hispanoamericano deriva de Zorrilla” [In Mexico, before Bécquer’s appearance on the scene, [Zorilla] was the ultimate model for our poets. All Spanish American Romanticism derives from Zorilla]. Pacheco also identifies Zorrilla as pivotal to the relations between Spain and Mexico and introduces the argument that Zorrilla used his identity as the emblematic Spanish poet for political gains with the Mexican creole oligarchy who “vio en él un instrumento para afianzar la españolidad católica mexicana en contra del ascenso liberal y la preponderancia angloamericana y luterana” [saw in him an instrument for strengthening Mexican Catholic Spanishness against the rise of liberalism and the prevalence of Anglo-​ American Lutheranism]. Zorrilla was not just a passive tool of the elite; Pacheco conjectures that he was actively “implicado en la ayuda del capitán general de Cuba a la causa conservadora [in Mexico]” [involved in (obtaining) the aid of Cuba’s Captain General for the conservative cause (in Mexico)] (2001). It is in this context that Zorrilla bears the standard of Spanish cultural hegemony in terms of an imperial nostalgia that viewed the Yucatan Channel as sovereign waters between two Spanish territories, not as a space open to British interpretations of slavery. Zorrilla arrived in Mexico with the intention to monetize his fame as a Spanish poet. He sailed for America from France where numerous well-​positioned Spaniards had provided him with letters of credit and introduction (Zorrilla 2001, 305, 315). The Mexican Bartolomé Muriel, established in Paris, was the first to suggest that Zorrilla could parlay his fame into wealth and influence; the poet came to realize “que con mi nombre y las cartas no necesitaría más en Méjico para hacer allí mi fortuna” [that with my name and the letters, I would need nothing more in Mexico to make my fortune there] (315). Once in Mexico City, Zorrilla became part of the Spanish coterie, mixing political and literary concerns, alongside the Conde de la Cortina, Anselmo de la Portilla, Miguel Álvarez, Federico Bello, and Manuel Madrid (352). Their interests were vast and interrelated. For example, Portilla and Bello ran “un periódico mantendor de los intereses españoles” [a periodical that upheld Spanish interests] in Mexico paid for by Cortina (after the Spanish authorities in Cuba declined to provide a subvention [“Sobre”]). Zorrilla’s editorial representative Cipriano de las Cagigas was particularly well-​ connected in Hispano-​Mexican society. His brother had been the Duke of Montpensier’s secretary and Cagigas himself was a friend and agent of President Santana. 364

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In his memoirs from 1880, Zorrilla performed the disinterested Romantic artist and claimed ignorance of the world of politics and business in which he moved, but his actions during his years in Mexico demonstrate that he was deeply implicated in political intrigue and financial schemes that benefitted Spain’s diplomatic and economic concerns and himself, personally. Zorrilla’s new friends proposed projects to help him capitalize on his fame. For example, Portilla suggested he author a book favorable to Mexico; more informally, Zorrilla hosted a literary salon convened to facilitate conversations about Spain’s financial interests in Mexico between the Spanish envoy Miguel Álvarez and Mexican ministers (Zorrilla 2001, 416). In the most lucrative and least labor-​intensive scheme, Cagigas promised to make Zorrilla rich in Cuba “si yo le daba mis poderes” [if I lent him my talents] (376). The plan consisted of Anselmo de la Portilla’s marketing, Cagigas’s financial negotiations, and Zorrilla’s nominal association with the project in Cuba. Specifically (438–​439), Mientras yo daba seis lecturas, que por tres mil duros tenía apalabradas en el Liceo, [Cagigas] prepararía la introducción en Cuba de una colonia de trabajadores yucatecos asalariados, para lo cual debía yo más adelante adquirir el beneplácito de quien correspondía en la Isla, adquiriendo él los buques y el capital necesarios. … Cagigas llevaba tratada, hecha y concluida toda la parte de estos dos negocios en NY, en Yucatán y en México, faltándole sólo su arreglo en Cuba; tenía en su cartera un crédito de setenta mil pesos, y con noventa mil decía él, sonriendo muy satisfecho, que empezaba a rodar el carro. Escuché yo todo aquel doble proyecto suyo, sin comprender qué parte pudieran tener en él mis versos para ofrecerme la cuarta parte de la respetable cantidad en que, después de planteados, los tenía traspasados o vendidos a dos casas de gran crédito comercial … —​Usted no sabe lo que vale su nombre—​me dijo con su flemática tranquilidad habitual—​. Déjese usted guiar.14 Zorrilla proceeded to engage in a lively and visible social life in Havana where he was feted by, among others, Capitan General José de la Concha and José Ramón Bethancourt, President of the Liceo. José Santana, son of the ex-​president of the Mexican Republic, provided Zorrilla and Cagigas with a furnished apartment (440) where “en las tres piezas de aquel alojamiento, emprendimos, Cagigas sus gestiones en el negocio, y yo el trabajo de mis lecturas, aplazadas para fin de la quincena” [in the three rooms of that lodging, we set in motion, Cagigas his arrangements for the business, and I the preparation of my readings, postponed until the end of the fortnight] (441). Side by side, art and finance pacted to promote Spanish interests in the Caribbean by making the trade in Maya openly acceptable, a volte-​face from the views Espinosa had asserted five years before during the Alerta scandal. Shortly after their arrival in 1858, Cagigas died of yellow fever and Zorrilla announced his return to Mexico, at which point his objectives were realized: Captain General Concha and his associates named Zorrilla “su agente en México” [their agent in Mexico] and authorized him to “plantear allí la empresa que Cagigas había concebido, me abrieron crédito para cimentarla, y subviniendo a todos mis gastos” [propose there the business that Cagigas had planned, (and) extended me the credit to establish it, paying all my expenses] (470). (Recent scholarship questions Portilla’s involvement in the trafficking of Yucatán Maya: Bono López 2003, 241–​2.) Even without Cagigas, Zorrilla succeeded as the poetic representative of Spain and a private citizen, in performing the patriotism of trading in Maya from the Yucatan.Yet, ever the dramatist, Zorrilla did not execute the venture and he remained pure performance of Spanish hegemony. 365

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Conclusion Ángel Loureiro has argued that Spanish discourse about Latin America was fundamental to the development of Spanish nationalism (2003, 65). This chapter follows this line of inquiry by returning to the crucial mid-​nineteenth century and the contested national spaces in the Western Caribbean. Cuba was central to Spanish identity and its economy during the nineteenth century, with labor demands shaping international policy and culminating in the frenzied calls for integridad nacional during wars of independence. Beyond the islands, in 1865 Calderón Collantes’s policies underscored the control of Spanish waters as explicitly integral to the nation. Maritime zones reflect scientific, literary, and political bases for conceptualizing our world and how we choose to act in it. In attempting to keep Cuba and the waters around it Spanish rather than Atlantic, Madrid articulated fictions of the nation in terms of race, longing, and will. The Maya from the Yucatan Peninsula forced to migrate to Cuba were unwittingly placed in a fundamental role in the narrative of national identity in modern Spain, whose cornerstone was control of the Western Caribbean.

Notes 1 “Today the island of Cuba represents for modern Spain much more than what all the possessions of the American continent represented for earlier generations.” All translations by Linda Grabner, University of Pennsylvania. 2 All alternative labor projects were similar to slavery (Scott 1985, 101) and some of the same traffickers worked with multiple populations. For example, the same Anduze discussed below also brought Canary Islanders to Cuba who then vociferously complained of their exploitation. 3 See e.g. Comprobante 22 “Acereto vende los indios al español D. Miguel Pou” [Acereto sells Indians to Spaniard D. Miguel Pou] (Suárez y Navarro 1993, 332–​333) for the notarized contract signed by the Yucatán government outlining the details of the sale and the funds provided for the Guerra de Castas. See Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán, Fondo Poder Ejecutivo, Sección Gobernación, caja 59, 62 for correspondence between the government of Yucatán and the casa de contratación de los Goicuría requesting authorization to sell labor contracts to Havana, out of Valladolid “de algunos individuos de la clase de recogidos en el campo enemigo” [of some individuals of the group captured in enemy camp]. 4 “[T]‌o be discussed in a meeting of writers and philosophers [for] anyone can see that this element of the population belongs to the so-​called colored class and cannot be considered otherwise.” 5 See the “Introduction” of Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects for an overview of the concept of will and willfulness in terms of liberalism. 6 “The Yucatecs, who like all American indigenes, somewhat fanatically preserve their traditional memory of the privileges they enjoyed under the protection of the Spanish monarchs, freely and willingly agreed to come to Cuba. They would have agreed even more enthusiastically if private interests had been less selfish, and if the companies that undertook this business had been more generous with them in terms of the conditions under which they hired them.” 7 Documents from the 1840s are held in Mexican archive of Foreign Relations. I express my deepest thanks to Professor Brian DeLay in helping me locate these items. 8 “Without the intervention of the English warships, which ply the waters of Cuba, and which, because of their proximity to Yucatán, can extend their reach to the coasts of this region, nothing can be done.” 9 “I have witnessed some ships and a steamship, which obviously belonged to the African run, being welcomed and protected in that port [Campeche]. Self-​interest and greed cause this evil.” 10 “The servants alluded to have never received a salary, unless by ‘servants’ you mean some wretched Indians brought, tied up and against their will, to Isla Mujeres, from where they were brought in through don Francisco Marty’s well-​boats to Blanco House’s dry dock. And does Your Excellency know what salary they enjoyed? A single peseta, just one, paid on Sunday, to add insult to injury to the poor salaried men! That’s what they call themselves under oath, which the Indians never break, according to what Mr. Marty tells us with unbiased honesty. …

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Yucatan Channel and limits of “Spain” Your Excellency, this has to do with revealing the existence of an immoral, damned traffic, condemned long since by public opinion and more recently by the Mexican Counselor who has come before Your Excellency to ask for protection and freedom for his compatriots of the Yucatan.” 11 “[L]‌egitimate right to import African Blacks into English overseas possessions as colonists by establishing domestic policies for managing them. Since this then makes it a domestic issue of Great Britain, it was deemed appropriate that no foreign government would think to get involved, even indirectly.” 12 “If the English or Anglo-​American frigates should attempt to pursue trafficking in the territorial waters around Cuba,Your Excellency will enforce the territorial boundaries by force, if necessary.” 13 “Orientalist exoticism [that] re-​establishes the tie that independence had broken: Mexico becomes visible by incorporating it into the system of the peninsular nineteenth-​century postcolonial imaginary.” 14 “While I  gave six readings, for which he had made a verbal agreement for three thousand duros [Spanish money] with the Liceo, [Cagigas] would prepare in Cuba the introduction of a colony of paid Yucatec workers, for which I would later have to obtain the consent of the appropriate party on the Island. Cagigas, meanwhile, would obtain the necessary boats and capital. … Cagigas sealed the deal for everything needed for these two negotiations in New York, Yucatan and Mexico, and only lacked an agreement with Cuba. He had a credit for seventy thousand pesos [Mexican money] in his wallet, and he said, with a satisfied smile, that with ninety thousand we could get this show on the road. I listened to everything about his double project, without understanding what role my poems could have in it that would make them worth a quarter of the respectable amount for which, once proposed, he had them transferred or sold to two large commercial lending houses. ‘You don’t know what your name is worth,’ he told me with his habitual phlegmatic calm. ‘Let me guide you.’ ”

Works cited Ahmed, Sara. 2014. Willful Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Álvarez Cuartero, Izaskun. 2012. “Resistencia indígena y discursos racistas: una lectura biopolítica de los mayas yucatecos.” Confluenze 14(1): 196–​214. Ancona, Eligio. 1889. Historia de Yucatán, vol. 4. Barcelona: Jaime Jesús Roviralta. Archives. 1935. Archives of British Honduras, vol. 3, From 1841 to 1884, Being Extracts and precis Taken by a Committee from Such Records as Exist in the Colony, with a map, edited by John Alder Burdon. London: Sifton Praed. Bono López, María. 2002. “Los conservadores y los indios: Anselmo de la Portilla.” In La imágen del México decimonónico de los visitantes extranjeros: ¿Un estado-​nación o un mosaico plurinacional?, edited by Manuel Ferrer Múñoz, 237–​260. Mexico: UNAM. Calderón Collantes, Saturnino. 1859. “Instrucciones para el Capitán General Don Francisco Serrano Domínguez.” Ultramar, 4648/​10 (October 20). Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid. Calderón de la Barca, Ángel. 1853. Letter to Chargé d’Affaires of England in Madrid. Ultramar, 4642 (November 23). Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid. “Comunicaciones del Gobernador Capitán General.” 1853. In “Expediente sobre la detención en Belice de dos traficantes de esclavos,” Ultramar 4642/​2 (September 14). Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid. “Crónica extranjera.” 1856 La Prensa (September 9). Havana. Reproduced in Carlos R. Menéndez, Historia del infame y vergonzoso comercio de indios. Vendidos a los esclavistas de Cuba por los políticos yucatecos, desde 1848 hasta 1861. Mérida: Talleres gráficos de “La revista de Yucatán,” 1923, 182–​186. de la Torre, José María. 1850. Mapa de la Isla de Cuba:  Arreglado a la nueva división territorial. [n. pl.]: G. Muguet. Dumond, Don. 1997. The Machete and the Cross. Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press. Estrade, Paul. 1994. “Los colonos yucatecos.” In Cuba, la perla de las Antillas: actas de las I Jornadas sobre Cuba, edited by Consuelo Naranjo Orovio and Tomás Mallo Gutiérrez, 93–​107. Madrid: CSIC. “Expediente sobre la introducción de indios de Yucatán en Cuba para trabajos agrícolas.” Manuscript 13857. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid. Games, Alison, and Adam Rothman. 2007. “Preface.” In Major Problems in Atlantic History: Documents and Essays, edited by Alison Games and Adam Rothman, xv–​xviii. Wadsworth: Cengage. García Álvarez, Alejandro. 1993. “Traficantes en el Golfo.” Historia Social 17 (Otoño): 33–​46. González Navarro, Moisés. 1968. “La Guerra de Castas en Yucatán y la venta de mayas a Cuba.” Historia mexicana 18(1): 11–​34.

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Lisa Surwillo Jaulin, Robert. 1972. L’Ethnocide à travers les Amériques. Paris: Fayard. Jennings, Evelyn Powell. 2010. “Some unhappy Indians trafficked by force: race, status and work discipline in mid-​nineteenth-​century Cuba.” In Human Bondage in the Cultural Contact Zone, edited by Raphael Hormann and Gesa Mackenthun, 209–​226. Münster: Waxmann. Karageorgou-​Bastea, Christina. 2009.“Panorama y panóptico en México y los mexicanos de José Zorrilla.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 62(2): 163–​177. Lewis, Martin. 1999. “Dividing the Ocean Sea.” Geographical Review 89(2): 188–​214. Loureiro, Ángel G. 2003. “Spanish nationalism and the ghost of empire.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 4(1): 65–​76. Massey, Doreen. 1995. “Places and their pasts.” History Workshop Journal 39 (Spring): 182–​192. Menéndez, Carlos R. 1923. Historia del infame y vergonzoso comercio de indios.Vendidos a los esclavistas de Cuba por los políticos yucatecos, desde 1848 hasta 1861. Mérida: Talleres gráficos de “La revista de Yucatán.” Molenaar, Erik. 2015. “New maritime zones and the law of the sea.” In Jurisdiction over Ships. edited by Henrick Ringbom, 249–​277. Leiden: Brill Pacheco, José Emilio. 2001 “Reloj de arena: Infierno y paraíso de Zorrilla” Letras libres, March 31. Pezuela, Juan de la. 1854. “Sobre el arresto de un sujeto llamado JB Anduse, hecho en Belice por las autoridades Ynglesas, al cual se le consideraba ocupado en el robo de Yndios Yucatecos para trasladarlos á la Ysla, como esclavos.” Havana, January 6. Ultramar, 4642/​2. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid. Reed, Nelson. 2001. The Caste War of Yucatán. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Scott, Rebecca. 1985. Slave Emancipation in Cuba. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. “Sobre la publicacion de un periódico en Mejico, y admisión del mismo en la Ysla.” Ultramar, 4640/​2. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid. Suárez y Navarro, Juan. 1993. “Informe sobre las causas y carácter de los frecuentes cambios políticos ocurridos en el estado de Yucatán.” In La guerra de castas.Testimonios de Justo Sierra O’Reilly y Juan Suárez y Navarro, 147–​431. Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la cultura y las artes. van Deusen, Nancy. 2015. Global Indios:  The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-​Century Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zeuske, Michael. 2015. Amistad:  A Hidden Network of Slavers and Merchants, trans. by Steven Rendell. Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner. Zorrilla, José. 2001. Recuerdos del tiempo viejo. Madrid: Editorial Debate.

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25 POLITICS, AFFECT, AND THE NEGOTIATIONS OF GENDER IN CONCEPCIÓN ARENAL’S ANTISLAVERY WRITINGS Akiko Tsuchiya

Women, the public sphere, and spaces of sociability in nineteenth-​century  Spain Feminist literary critics and cultural historians specializing in nineteenth-​century Spain have recently begun to challenge traditional narratives on women’s relationship to the liberal public sphere, particularly in the second half of the century (Burguera 2012, Charnon-​Deutsch 2001, Smith 2006). Theresa Ann Smith has shown how, since the Enlightenment, women of letters began to carve out a sphere of social and literary activity for themselves, relying on different—​ and, oftentimes, even contradictory—​discursive strategies to achieve their objective (2006, 112). Likewise, Susan Kirkpatrick’s by now classic book on Las Románticas argues that the subsequent rise of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century allowed women of letters to find an outlet for asserting a right to subjectivity and self-​expression, even as the model of the domestic woman began to permeate the Spanish social imaginary (1989, 2). Thus, in spite of the rise of the so-​called separate spheres ideology in the second half of the century, which has been central to many feminist accounts of nineteenth-​century cultural history, it is by now widely accepted that this was also a crucial period during which women writers and intellectuals of Spain gained visibility in the public space. Pura Fernández (2015) and Mónica Burguera (2012), among others, have done pioneering work on the emergence of women’s “spaces of sociability”—​ which included various social, philanthropic, and cultural institutions, including the publishing industry—​through which women of letters were able to participate in public life, while still maintaining their respectability. At the same time, as Burguera and Jo Labanyi have noted, we cannot trace an excessively linear or monolithic trajectory of women’s progress as social and political subjects (Burguera 2012, 18–​19; Labanyi 2017, 43), nor can we assume the uniform impact that liberal discourse had on all Spanish women—​even of the same social class—​during this period of history. Few, if any, of the subjectivities of these women of letters were free of

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contradictions, as they strategically negotiated their place within the “spaces of sociability” that allowed them limited participation in the liberal public sphere.

Concepción Arenal: proto-​feminist, philanthropist, social reformer It is in this context that this chapter will examine the case of Concepción Arenal, a proto-​ feminist writer, activist, and social reformer of nineteenth-​century Spain, shedding light on the ways in which she negotiated the contradictions in her life and her writings, more specifically, in relation to her position on slavery. Arenal is best known among nineteenth-​century Iberian studies specialists for her writings on women’s issues, philanthropy, prison reform, and human rights—​her most famous works include Cartas a los delincuentes (1865), La mujer del porvenir (1868), Ensayo sobre el derecho de gentes (1879), and La mujer de su casa (1881). Critics and biographers have made note of Arenal’s collaboration throughout her life with influential progressive male intellectuals—​particularly, those who maintained affiliation with the Krausist school, such as Gumersindo Azcárate, Fernando de Castro, and Francisco Giner de los Ríos, in their projects of social reform (Campo Alange 1971, García Castellón 2004,Vialette 2015, 448). Given that one of the firmest principles of the Krausists was the abolition of slavery (García Castellón 2004, 268), it is not surprising that Arenal was also a prominent voice in Spanish abolitionism, although few critics to date have paid attention to her antislavery writings. Her poem “La esclavitud de los negros” won a competition sponsored by the Spanish Abolitionist Society (1866) for the best poem on the topic of slavery, and she wrote a series of articles in El Abolicionista and in other liberal periodicals of the times denouncing slavery and calling for its abolition. Just recently, biographer Anna Caballé discovered the unpublished manuscript of an antislavery play written by Arenal, presumably at around the same time she published her famous poem against slavery (2018, 382, n. 13).1 Yet, in spite of her constant defense of abolitionism, Arenal rejected any direct affiliation with organized abolitionist institutions, such as the Sociedad Abolicionista Española or La Asociación para la Enseñanza de la Mujer, from which many other nineteenth-​century activist organizations arose. In fact, in a letter to her close friend Pilar de Tornos—​also involved in the antislavery cause—​written on the date of the meeting (June 11, 1866)  in which the Sociedad Abolicionista Española’s poetry award was presented to Arenal, she explains her reluctance to join this organization, “por tomar la Sociedad un carácter enteramente politico” [because the Society takes an entirely political stance]2 (Campo Alange 1971, 252; Pérez Montero 2002, 290n921). In spite of her collaboration with politically liberal periodicals—​such as La Iberia, El Imparcial, and, of course, El Abolicionista—​and her apparent sympathy toward Krausism and Freemasonry (Caballé 2018, 260; Simón 2001, 194–​195), she refused to affiliate herself with any political organization or ideology. And given her affirmation in her Cartas a un señor that “siendo yo radicalmente reformista, soy resueltamente antirrevolucionaria” [being a radical reformist, I am resolutely antirevolutionary] (quoted in Campo Alange 1971, 339), it has become almost a commonplace for her biographers and critics to question her progressivism on abolitionism and other social and political issues. For example, Santiago Mulas, in his introduction to Arenal’s La mujer del porvenir, asserts: “Hay ocasiones … en que las ideas de Concepción Arenal no alcanzan sus últimas consecuencias, como si no se atreviera, o como si verdaderamente su pensamiento no fuese tan progresista como aparenta”3 (1993, 25). Other critics have expressed a similar view, in particular, on her gender politics4 (Jenkins Wood 2014, 11).Yet, any biographical account on Arenal will show her unflagging commitment to better the lives of those who were socially marginalized—​ women, prisoners, and the poor. 370

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It is my contention that, in presenting her antislavery stance, Arenal was conscious of negotiating her (perhaps ambivalent) relationship to liberal discourse and the political sphere to make a strategic entry into a social space that allowed women a certain degree of agency in a civil society dominated by men. On the one hand, we can see how her ideas on social reform and progress identify her with masculine Enlightenment reason, particularly in her reliance on juridical discourse. She makes known her debt to the Spanish Enlightenment thinker, Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (Vidart 1887, 22), and her work of international law, Ensayo sobre el derecho de gentes, prefaced by none other than the famous Krausist jurist, Gumersindo Azcárate (Arenal 1879, ix–​xliv), is founded on the idea of the presumed universality of the Enlightenment principles of freedom, justice, and natural law, at the basis of liberal thought.Yet, at other times, Arenal invoked arguments based on her special status as a woman, making an appeal to the emotions and to women’s sensibility, or relying on the discourses of religion, domesticity, or maternity. Given the socio-​historical context in which she was writing, these seemingly antithetical stances were not necessarily incompatible.

Sensibility and social reform: strategies of negotiation in Arenal’s antislavery writings In her study of the emerging female citizen in the Enlightenment period, Theresa Ann Smith proposes the notion of “maternal citizenship,” which allowed for the reconciliation of reason and passion, an appeal to universal rights and “a gender-​specific civil society” (2006, 199), as a way for women to gain the right to participate actively in political reform. Likewise, Labanyi, expanding on Mónica Bolufer’s argument, affirms that “Enlightened sociability” presumed the need to maintain a balance between sensibility and reason (2017, 45). While these critics refer to an earlier period—​the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—​presumably before sentiments became closely linked to the Romantic “sense of an autonomous self ” (Bolufer 2016, 26), Arenal’s subjectivity has been identified most closely with the model of the masculine Enlightenment subject, which was not always seen as incompatible with her more “feminine” characteristics. Some of her male contemporaries repeatedly called attention to the coexistence of reason (gendered masculine) and emotion (gendered feminine) in Arenal, while others chose to highlight her “masculine” characteristics, emphasizing her intellect.5 Indeed, Arenal and other nineteenth-​century Spanish women involved in the abolitionist movement constantly renegotiated their subjectivities through their discursive tactics, gradually undermining the gendered distinction between passion and reason, the language of sensibility and that of social reform. Nor should we assume that Arenal’s strategies of negotiation remained static, as history and her place in it evolved due to changing political circumstances.The period between 1866 and 1875, coinciding roughly with the Democratic Sexenio, represented an emblematic moment in Arenal’s antislavery activism. An analysis of her writings of this period will shed light on the strategic ways in which she shifted her discursive tactics and positioning, even as she remained constant in her opposition to slavery.

Arenal’s antislavery poem: “La esclavitud de los negros” Arenal’s first known antislavery publication was her prize-​winning poem, “La esclavitud de los negros” 6 (1866), which was subsequently published in an anthology titled El cancionero del esclavo, along with the submissions of the other top-​ ranking contenders in Sociedad Abolicionista’s competition. Arenal’s poem is prefaced by an epigraph by the moral philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, known especially for his principle of utilitarianism,7 according to which 371

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“the utility of an act—​its goodness or badness—​is determined solely by its consequences: the pains and pleasures experienced by the person affected by the act(s) under consideration” 8 (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2019). The epigraph, which reads “El altar del bien público, como el de la Divinidad, no exige sacrificios bárbaros: tened presente que las lágrimas del dolor son abrasadoras, y nunca compondreis con ellas una bebida refrigerante, porque contienen un veneno corrosivo que os devorará las entrañas”9 (1866, 17), alludes, of course, to slavery, represented as the cause of “burning tears of pain,” which can never be cooled, as they contain “corrosive poison” that will “devour our guts” (translation mine). The poem begins with the speaker’s apostrophe to the “Muse of pain,” appealing to her for inspiration to express the profound pain and indignation provoked by “una desdicha inmensa” [a great misfortune], which the reader soon discovers to be a reference to slavery: ¡Oh musa del dolor! Dame tu llanto Más hondo, más acerbo y dolorido; Sea mi voz un lúgubre gemido, Un ¡ay! Desgarrador sea mi canto. … Dame lágrimas tristes, sin consuelo, Para llorar una desdicha inmensa. Y tú, Indignación santa, tú, que inspiras Fuertes impulsos á los fuertes pechos, Que á las terribles iras Del noble corazon vienen estrechos; Llega, enciende mi alma, Sopla en ella tus recias tempestades, Que enfrente á la maldad de las maldades Es oprobio la paz, mengua la calma. ¡Horrible esclavitud!10 (1866,  17–​18) The speaker continues her emotional plea through the personification of the many elements of nature that collectively protest the “sacrilege” of slavery, which violates the natural order. While the emotional tone and imagery gender the lyric voice as feminine, she also makes clear that her outcry against slavery is founded on reason and, more specifically, on the Enlightenment notion of natural rights for all men, and their inalienable right to freedom: “¿Y no hay piedad, justicia, ni derecho?” [And is there no pity, no justice, no law?] (19). The underlying religious element equating piety with justice and law challenges the traditional dichotomy between reason and faith.11 The speaker of the poem gives voice to an enslaved person, who confronts his master with the crime of slavery—​“nefanda impiedad y sacrilegio” [loathsome impiety and sacrilege]—​for which the slave owner must face final judgment before God (Arenal 1866, 20). It should be noted that, while Arenal’s philosophical views reflect the values of the Enlightenment, religion provides her with the moral foundation from which to denounce slavery (Caballé 2018, 148). For the poet-​speaker, the desire for justice is inseparable from her religious duty to “save” and “redeem” the oppressed (22). Throughout the poem, she refers to slavery as a “sin” and a “sacrilege,” and calls for the intervention of divine justice to put an end to the atrocities committed against “la oprimida raza” [the oppressed race] (21). The strategy is to appeal emotionally to the audience’s sense of justice, through the speaker’s compassion for and identification with the enslaved person, which she expresses through her 372

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(abundant) tears of sympathy and indignation. Implicit is the assumption that all women, by virtue of their natural sensibility, would readily identify with Arenal’s emotional outrage when confronted with the unjust treatment of enslaved persons. Not to do so, she implies, would be to go against nature. As Manuel García Castellón notes: “Se rebela especialmente cuando es nada menos que la mujer quien, olvidando el especial rasgo genérico femenino de la compasión, se constituye en defensora del oprobioso sistema, cuando no en verdugo ella misma”12 (2004, 270), referring to the following verses of her poem: “¡Oh, Esclavitud! … ¿De los hombres no basta que hagas fieras? /​¡Las mujeres también! ¡Las nobles damas! /​¡Vergüenza! ¡Horror!” [Oh, Slavery! … Is it not enough that you make beasts of men? /​Women too! Noble ladies! /​Shame! Horror!] (1866, 25). While Arenal is presumably aware of the predominantly male composition of her audience, the fact that she specifically condemns the depravity of women who are complicit in upholding slavery is significant, as what goes against “women’s nature” would be deemed doubly abhorrent. Yet, while condemning those who practice and defend slavery, the poet deprives the (masculine) enslaved subject of his agency, representing him as a victim of oppression, whose salvation depends on the good will of the (white, European) Christians: the “almas buenas” [kind souls] (22).13 Through the voice of the enslaved person, the poet decries the bondage and degradation to which he has been subjected, and which has bereft him of “claro entendimiento” [clear understanding] (19)—​that is, of enlightened reason that begets honor and virtue. This voice, which clamors against the slave owner, holds the enlightened white Europeans responsible for rescuing and redeeming (in a Christian sense) the enslaved person, who has been driven to commit a crime out of pain and indignation against his better judgment (“trocando en arma vil la inteligencia” [turning intelligence into a vile weapon], 21). In fact, the enslaved person is cast as a martyr—​comparisons to Christ abound—​awaiting vindication and justice, and the role of the “poeta inspirado” [inspired poet] is to incense her readers by awakening their consciousness to this injustice (21). Arenal’s invocations of the nation (“patria”) in the poem are perhaps more contradictory, although not surprising, given her subject position as a privileged European woman writing about slavery in the colonies. The “glorious” nation that the speaker envisions in this poem is the imperial nation that ensued from the Reconquest of Christian Spain; the heroes of the Reconquest are evoked, as is Columbus, the first explorer to undertake a voyage to the New World under the sponsorship of the Spanish Crown. The speaker thus addresses the conqueror: Tú, divino Colon, genio sublime/​¿Diste un mundo á Castilla/​Para que en él clavando sus pendones/​Extenso campo á la maldad abriera,/​Y el mónstruo que rechazan las naciones/​allí patrocinado se acogiera?/​¿Qué nos vale decir con arrogancia,/​Poniendo por testigo al justo cielo:/​“Ya no hay esclavos en el noble suelo/​Donde se alza Gerona y fué Numancia?”/​¿Y América infeliz?14 (1866,  27–​28) The speaker appears to be completely oblivious to the connection between colonialism and slavery, even as she condemns the forces of the economic market that continue to maintain the industry, alluding to the situation in colonial Cuba. In an apostrophe to her homeland, she proclaims that the greatness of the nation can only be regained when it recognizes the error of slavery: “Mientras cobije esclavos tu bandera /​Grande no puede ser, ni respetada” [As long as your flag covers up slaves /​It cannot be great, nor respected] (29). The final verse of the poem drives home the idea that the nation can be great only when it is finally able to achieve justice 373

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for all: “Sé justa ¡oh patria mia! Y serás grande” [Be just, oh my motherland! And you will be great] (36). Once again, Arenal reconciles the discourse of religion (gendered feminine) with that of reason (gendered masculine)—​as she invokes her “patria amada” [beloved motherland], in the name of God, imploring it to reject the legacy of slavery once and for all. Finally, the gendering of the “patria” and the speaker’s plea to the motherland not to bring shame on its citizens—​“No nos cause rubor llamarte madre” [Do not make us blush to call you mother] (35)—​suggest that the honor of the nation rests on the virtue of the allegorical mother, a virtue that can be achieved only if she is to embrace reason and enlightenment. The use of gendered political allegories to represent national honor is, of course, not unique to Arenal (White 1999); however, here the poet grants agency to the motherland to choose right over wrong, justice over injustice, based on her capacity to reason.

Arenal’s “Abolición de la esclavitud” and the affirmation of the political subject A year after the appearance of her prize-​winning poem, Arenal published her article, “Abolición de la esclavitud,” in El Imparcial, in response to the law of June 24, 1867, in which the Spanish government definitively outlawed the slave trade.15 She begins by echoing Rousseau, affirming in the spirit of the Enlightenment the value of an education based on the harmony between “rational man” and nature, and decrying the damage (and injustice) that the “malas pasiones” [evil passions] have the potential to cause. In denouncing slavery as a form of gross injustice, Arenal invokes the traditional gendered opposition between the public and the private, identifying women with the realm of the emotions and men with that of action. “Dejemos á los hombres una esfera de actividad mas brillante, empleemos las mujeres todas las facultades que hemos recibido de Dios, pocas ó muchas, las que hemos recibido, empleémoslas en beneficio de los desdichados,”16 she proclaims, adding that women’s function is to shed “lágrimas compasivas” [tears of compassion] to serve as consolation for the innocent victims of oppression and denounce the unjust oppressors (1867, 1). Yet, in the paragraph that follows, the author undermines the gendering of the spheres on which she has founded her initial argument, exclaiming: ¿Pero no podremos dar á los pobres esclavos mas que lágrimas? Probemos á discurrir. Aunque es una opinion muy recibida, no es ningun articulo de fé el que las mujeres sean incapaces de discurso, y esten destituidas de razon, ni carezcan de entendimiento.17 (1867, 1) She goes on to argue that if women have equal responsibility under the law—​referring to the Penal Code—​the assumption is that she has “conciencia, libertad moral, y un poco de entendimiento” [conscience, moral liberty, and a little understanding] (1), that is, enough “reason” for her to be able to recognize and protest the injustices of slavery. In other words, she reclaims women’s right to a political voice equal to that of men, a voice that demands justice: “esa voz es nuestra voz, la voz de la humanidad, del derecho, de la justicia reconocida. Entendámoslo bien, reconocida” [that voice is our voice, the voice of humanity, of the law, of recognized justice. Let us understand that well: it is recognized] (1). Her direct appeal to the Enlightenment values of reason, justice, and moral freedom could not be more unequivocal. Arenal follows the appeal to reason and justice with a direct denunciation of slavery as an institution that has been upheld in the name of economic interest of the metropolis, as an hecho [fact], rather than a derecho [right]. Again, she founds her argument on the premise that Spain is 374

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a nation where equality has deep roots.Yet she continues, if the poor, even in the (presumably) enlightened metropolis, by virtue of their poverty run the risk of being trampled on, “¿qué le sucederá al negro en América, esclavo ignorante, embrutecido, intimidado, que no sabe su derecho, ni los medios de hacerle valer, que tal vez ni sabe hablar ni comprende la lengua de sus opresores?”18 (1867, 1). As in her poem Arenal’s patronizing attitude toward enslaved Afro-​ descendants is evident, even as she emphasizes Spain’s moral obligation to abolish slavery once and for all. She ends her article with a poem written in the format of an imagined dialogue between the captain of a slave ship and a missionary who is also on board.While the missionary singles out the captain as the target of condemnation, blaming him for the harsh conditions facing the enslaved people on board, the latter defends himself by responding to the missionary that he alone is not responsible for the suffering of his passengers.The poem ends with the final words of the captain, who absolves himself of the crime, by placing the blame on the institution of colonial slavery itself, which prioritizes economic profit over human rights: “Mientras hay mercado/​no ha de faltar mercancía” [Where there is a market /​there is no lack of merchandise] (1867, 1). Arenal concludes the essay in her own voice, affirming her political position: “para acabar con la trata no hay mas que un medio: ABOLIR LA ESCLAVITUD” [there is only one way to end the slave trade: ABOLISH SLAVERY] (1). Clearly, she asserts her voice and agency as a political subject by taking a public stand against slavery, even while she paradoxically—​and perhaps unconsciously—​undermines the agency of the enslaved person.

Women’s sphere of influence and imagined communities:  “A las mujeres” In “A las mujeres,” published in El Abolicionista in 1873, Arenal addresses a specifically female audience, relying once again on seemingly antithetical but complementary discursive tactics. The first half of the essay maintains a tone of reasoned inquiry, establishing the moral and philosophical foundation on which she will construct the argument to follow. Extending the Enlightenment principles of inalienable rights and common good, Arenal argues for the responsibility of individual citizens to influence the government by voicing their collective opposition to the institution of slavery. Yet, while on the one hand she invokes the voice of “universal conscience,” she also makes a special appeal to the sensibility of women, whose hearts could not possibly remain “impasibles [ante] ese dolor inmenso” [impassive in the face of that great pain] of black people, even if men are unmoved by it (1974, 418). Christopher Schmidt-​Nowara’s notes that Arenal “argued that women found slavery noxious because it denied human love and natural familial bonds” (1999, 97), citing as an example the following lines from “A las mujeres”: “El pobre negro compendia todos los dolores de la humanidad. Es el hombre sin compañera, sin hogar, sin familia; la mujer sin amor legítimo; el anciano sin amparo; el joven sin apoyo; el enfermo sin auxilio; el niño sin madre; la madre sin hijo”19 (1974, 418). Rhetorically speaking, the author insists on her “feminine” sensibilities, appealing to her readers’ emotions and their sense of compassion, rather than deploying reasoned arguments against slavery based on notions of natural rights and justice, as she has done on other occasions. This type of discourse might imply that the subaltern subject—​“el pobre negro” [the poor black man]—​is no more than the receptacle of emotional pain and deprivation, shared universally by all of humanity, rather than situating the enslaved person historically as the victim of systemic injustice resulting from colonialism and concomitant racism. At the same time, it could be argued that Arenal’s appeal to universal emotions is in itself a rhetorical strategy that she consciously employs as a way of calling her audience’s attention to a historically specific injustice. 375

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In relation to the suffering of enslaved peoples, she affirms that, if men are deaf to the voice of conscience, it falls upon Christian women to practice compassion and charity, “implorando el auxilio de Dios” [praying to God for help] (1974, 418): Mas, ¿por qué estamos persuadidas de nuestra debilidad, si no hemos probado hasta dónde alcanza fuerza? ¿No somos más de la mitad del género humano, cuando se trata de una obra piadosa? ¿No tenemos padres, hijos, esposos, hermanos, que no pueden ser sordos a nuestra voz, que no lo han sido nunca cuando esa voz es la voz de la justicia que se siente en el corazón, que resuena en la conciencia?20 In essence, she argues for a female sphere of influence within the realms of religion and the family, through which they can participate in the reform of the nation. It is in a strategic sense that she makes ironic use of the discourse of female inferiority (“¿Qué haremos, qué podemos y sabemos hacer nosotras, pobres mujeres, débiles e ignorantes?” [What will we do, what can we do, what do we know how to do, poor, weak, ignorant women that we are?] [419]), only to prove her point that women can, indeed, have influence in the public sphere. She recounts an anecdote concerning a group of women who, “con … piadoso objeto” [with charitable intentions], accompanied her to visit a prison of 400 women. In spite of their initial doubts as to their ability to serve a useful purpose to the prisoners, they learn that where there is the desire to be charitable, God will always be with them and “buena obra” [good deeds] can be accomplished (419). Through her direct appeal to “mujeres piadosas, mujeres caritativas” [compassionate, charitable women] (1974, 419), Arenal sought to expand the network of charitable and compassionate bourgeois women willing to join her in her fight against slavery, since in the nineteenth century, philanthropic societies, of which she became a leading advocate, served as a venue through which “respectable” women of the privileged classes could exercise a certain amount of influence in the public sphere (Burguera 2012, 25–​26, 43–​67). Arenal’s writings represent the legacies, almost a century later, of an Enlightenment sensibility, which according to Mónica Boloufer, came to designate “the capacity to experience emotions through sympathy or affinity with the feelings of another, which awakens compassion that in turn incites action,” and gradually became connected to a “broader notion of sociability,” which included women’s social and cultural networks (2016, 23, 26).21 While the Enlightenment principles of universal law and justice for all human beings are at the basis of Arenal’s call for social reform—​and for women’s participation in it—​her discursive strategies relied on arguments about the particular merits of women. In fact, in a tactical rhetorical move at the end of the essay, she includes all Spanish women as a part of this imagined community, specially endowed to feel outrage and compassion, thus inciting political action:  “Que resuene esa justicia en vuestra conciencia, ¡oh, mujeres de mi patria! ¡Que vibre en las fibras más delicadas de vuestra alma! ¡Que triunfe en vuestro corazón!” [May justice resound in your conscience, my fellow countrywomen! May it ring in the depths of your souls! May it triumph in your heart!] (419, emphasis mine). In the same way that the “imagined community” that defines a nation is founded on a deep emotional attachment to a socio-​cultural concept that becomes “political” (Anderson 1991, 4–​5), emotional legitimacy—​gendered as it may be—​is an important component of Arenal’s political discourse. In expressing her desire to proclaim to the enslaved people on the other side of the ocean: “Las mujeres de España os acogen bajo su amparo…” [The women of Spain take you under their wing] (419, emphasis mine), her use of metaphors—​such as “alma” and “corazón” [soul, heart]—​that evoke an emotional register linked to feminine affect is, of course, deliberate. By making a claim to citizenship 376

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based on women’s special sensibilities Arenal, as a woman, assumes the burden of responsibility for representing the misfortunes of enslaved people to her audience with adequate emotional force, so as to incite them into action: “Si no os movéis a piedad,” [if you are not moved with pity] she exclaims, “siempre creeré que es porque no acerté a pintaros aquella desventura sin igual” [I will always believe it is because I did not manage to portray for you that unparalleled misfortune] (419). For Arenal, the ability to produce emotional impact through representation is in itself an attribute of the feminine gender.

Utility and justice in Arenal’s antislavery writings of the 1870s In contrast to her earlier works, Arenal’s two essays on slavery, published in El Abolicionista in 1875, rely less on making an emotional appeal than on the “masculine” model of reasoned inquiry. In “¿A quién aprovecha la esclavitud?” she addresses the relationship between justice and utility as they pertain to slavery, arguing that “la verdadera utilidad” [true utility] cannot be based merely on individual gain or self-​interest, but rather, it must lead to social good for the larger community. For Arenal, the only sure path to utility is to “hacer lo que es justo” [do what is right] (1875, 201), and it is the individual’s duty to choose the morally correct path. In light of Arenal’s earlier reference to Bentham’s idea of “el bien público” [the public good] (in the epigraph of her poem, “La esclavitud de los negros”), we can safely presume the influence of his utilitarian philosophy on her thinking,22 as well as that of the fundamental principles of universal rights and “common utility,” enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.23 Yet, whereas Bentham’s utilitarianism did not entirely rule out practices like slavery that violated natural rights,24 Arenal prioritized the natural rights of all human beings, condemning slavery as an institution that violates the principles of both utility and justice: it poses an obstacle to “todo lo bueno, lo útil, lo justo, y constituye además tal foco de corrupcion, que esto solo bastaria para hacerla incompatible con el interés bien entendido” [everything that is good, useful, just, and is, moreover, such a seat of corruption that this alone would make it incompatible with public interest] (1875, 201). Thus, in addition to reiterating, once again, her view that utility and justice are inseparable, grounding her opinion on the Enlightenment doctrine of moral and natural rights, she goes further to assert that slavery is harmful not only to enslaved persons, but also to those responsible for enslaving others (1875, 201): La esclavitud es perjudicial á la España europea, perjudicial á las provincias españolas de América, perjudicial hasta á los dueños de esclavos, que ganarian mucho con que no hubiera existido nunca, porque ven comprometidos sus capitales en una mala especulacion, en una especulacion inmoral, cruel, odiosa, odiada, y contra la cual se levanta un grito unánime en el mundo cristiano diciendo: —​¡Basta!”25 Of course, the appeal to Christianity is always paradoxical, as historically, colonialism—​and, by extension, slavery—​were founded on this religion; yet, this same statement is radical for its times in its critique of the colonial system itself. We might recall Bentham’s own writings in which he states: “Colony-​holding is a species of slave-​holding equally pernicious to the tyrant and the slave” (quoted in Rosen 2005, 37). Arenal acknowledges that, while colonialism exists, there will always be injustice and inequality, reflected not only in the enslavement of Afro-​descendants, but also of Asians, another marginalized and vilified “race” (1875, 201). In developing her argument, Arenal links her discussion of justice and utility to the nationality and citizenship of colonial subjects. In particular, she addresses the question of citizenship, which has remained unresolved since it was first debated in the Cortes de Cádiz in 1812, and 377

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whose resolution, she declares, can no longer be postponed. Referring to the exclusion of Afro-​descendants in the colonies from Spanish citizenship, she deplores: “Los americanos ¿se resignarán eternamente á vivir desheredados de una gran parte de los derechos que todos los españoles tienen, como si fuesen de condicion inferior, como si reflejasen en parte la ignominia de la esclavitud?”26 (1875, 201). The exclusion of Americans from citizenship on the basis of their race, she asserts, is tantamount to their exclusion from the “law of humanity” (201, translation mine), robbing them of their natural rights. She calls on nations to find utility grounded in justice; and, in the concrete case of slavery, if it is unjust, she claims, it cannot be useful or moral. Thus, she concludes her essay by making an appeal to reason, calling on her Enlightened readers to “rectifica[r]‌el error en nombre de la lógica” [rectify the mistake in the name of logic] (1875, 202). The rhetorical shift from the “feminine” language of emotion of her earlier essays to the “masculine” one of reason here is noteworthy.

Morality and reason in “Moral blanca y moral negra” Morality, like reason, is a foundational concept in Arenal’s essay, “Moral blanca y moral negra,” originally published in El Abolicionista on April 18, 1875.The rules of justice, logic, and common sense, she argues, dictate that slavery is a violation of natural and divine law. Only under “la moral negra” [black morality] does slavery—​a crime that robs human beings of their freedom—​ become a “right” that is deemed useful and necessary (1996, 75).What she calls “la moral negra,” then, defies reason and justice by reducing everything to economic profit, at the expense of religious and moral values (1996, 76). For her “el orden religioso, moral y jurídico” [religious, moral and legal order] are one and the same (76). Once again, Arenal combines secular and religious discourse, reason and sentiment, appealing at first to a gendered rhetorical strategy that relegates women to the emotional, private sphere of action, when confronted with the injustices of slavery: “La Iglesia la anatematiza en nombre de Dios, los filósofos en nombre de la razón, los juristas en nombre del derecho, los hombres de conciencia en nombre de la moral … y las mujeres la lloran para hacerla imposible”27 (“Moral blanca,” 75, emphasis mine). Thus, while Arenal clearly models her essay on the Enlightenment discourse of rational inquiry and argumentation, speaking “en nombre de la lógica y de la justicia” [in the name of logic and justice] (76), and downplays the explicit appeal to emotion that she demonstrated in her earlier writings, rhetorically she underscores the power of women’s emotions to bring about political change. Moreover, it is undeniable that the plea to the readers’ sense of justice gives the essay a strong emotional charge. In this essay Arenal sets up her argument against slavery by establishing an opposition between morality and economic profit, “Dios/​Justicia/​Derecho/​Humanidad” [God/​Justice/​ Law/​ Humanity] in the first column, and “Azúcar/​ Café/​ Algodón/​ Añil” [Sugar/​ Coffee/​ Cotton/​Indigo] in the second; and, more specifically, she condemns those who, driven by “la moral negra,” respond to the call for the first set of terms with the second. In doing so, Arenal denounces the capitalist discourse of utility that prioritizes the economic benefit of the few over justice for all (1996, 76). We see, once again, the utilitarian philosophy that undergirds her argument, in her critique of the “moral negra” that fails to establish the connection between utility and justice: Es preciso que nos pongan de manifiesto esos nuevos principios de equidad, esas reglas de derecho, por las cuales la utilidad, en vez de armonizarse y confundirse con la justicia, la combate, la vence, y después la niega. Es preciso que nos inicien en el

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secreto de esta moral que no está en la conciencia de los hombres honrados, ni en la ley de los cristianos.28 (1996, 77) Moreover, she affirms that this “law” should apply in the same way in the colonies as in the metropolis, asking how it could be possible that “lo que es absurdo en Europa es razonable en América” [what is absurd in Europe is reasonable in America] (77). An appeal to reason predominates throughout the essay, both in its rhetorical structure and substance. Arenal’s critique of capitalist logic and its role in upholding slavery seems to be much more explicit here than in her previous writings. In spite of her general stance against socialism and any form of revolutionary action (Caballé 2018, 250), it is telling that she concludes her essay with a quote from the famous anarchist Proudhon, who rejected private property—​“La propiedad es el robo” [Property is theft]—​turning this question around to ask her readers: “¿El robo es la propiedad?” [Is theft property?] (1996, 77).While she defended the right to property in her Cartas a un obrero as “un derecho fundado en razón y en justicia” [a right based on reason and justice] (Arenal 1880, 353), she is aware that this argument cannot hold when applied to slaveholders who have acquired their “private property” by robbing the enslaved of their freedom.29 Affirming that “[l]‌a esclavitud es el robo de la libertad” [slavery is the theft of freedom] Arenal maintains that there is no reason “del orden religioso, jurídico y moral” [based on religion, law, or morality] that serves as a justification for the slaveholder not to return the “stolen good” (freedom) to its “owner” (the enslaved person) (1996, 76).

Conclusion: gender, enlightenment, and liberal subjectivity in Arenal While Arenal’s writings evince her unwavering commitment to social causes, from prison reform to the abolition of slavery, it bears repeating that she was unwilling to tie herself to any political organization or ideology. Nor was she immune to a blindness to her own privileged position as a white, European woman, which led to ideological contradictions and problematic assumptions about race and class, when writing about slavery.Yet, she was able to negotiate her position strategically within the dominant masculine culture of liberalism to reach and convince her desired audience, who were, for the most part, “enlightened” European bourgeois men. As we have seen in her antislavery writings, at times she played deliberately into gendered rhetoric, making an appeal to women’s special status to grant them legitimacy within masculine culture; at others, she adopted the masculine discourse of reason, founded on Enlightenment philosophy.Yet the relationship between Enlightenment discourse and liberalism in Spain differed from the case of France, as Catholicism played a significant role in the construction of liberal subjectivity in Spain (Radcliff 2017, 23). Gender, then, was yet another element that intersected in complicated ways in the construction of liberal subjectivity in nineteenth-​century Spain. Ultimately, gendered subjectivity is always a strategic construction (Labanyi 2017, 44)—​and I would maintain that, for Arenal, it was also a performance that allowed women intellectuals and activists to exercise their agency in the liberal public sphere. As Schmidt-​Nowara has argued, even the male liberal reformers who advocated for a separate domain of action for women feared the tenuousness of the public/​private divide, believing that women could “exercise considerable power over public politics” through their emotional influence in the private sphere (1999, 97). Arenal pushed the boundaries of this division in her antislavery writings, as well as in other arena of participation in public life as a social reformer and activist.

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Acknowledgments I am grateful to Washington University’s Center for the Humanities for supporting the research for this publication through their Summer Faculty Research Grant. A Summer Stipend (2019) from the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed me to follow up on research in Spain on Arenal’s antislavery writings and to meet with Anna Caballé, author of the award-​ winning biography, Concepción Arenal:  La caminante y su sombra (2018). Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for the Humanities or of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I have benefitted much from the knowledge and bibliographical references on Arenal offered by Caballé, Cristina Patiño-​Eirín, and Aurélie Vialette. I also thank Erika Rodríguez for her diligent work as my research assistant during the summers of 2018 and 2019.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Anna Caballé for sending me a copy of this unfinished work, which she reconstructed from the original manuscript in the Museo de Pontevedra. Since the text is as of yet unpublished, I limit myself to mentioning the existence of this work. 2 All translations are by Linda Grabner, University of Pennsylvania. 3 “There are times … when Concepción Arenal’s ideas are not followed through to their ultimate consequences, as if she did not dare, or as if her thinking were not really as progressive as it seems.” 4 However, feminists, such as Lou Charnon-​Deutsch (2001), have proposed a more nuanced understanding of Arenal’s ideological contradictions, at least in relation to the latter’s gender politics, arguing that she strategically maneuvered her place within the dominant discourse of gender to gradually assert her influence in the public sphere. 5 The famous physician Tolosa Latour’s characterization of her is rather typical: “brillaba en aquellos ojos severos el resplandor de un alma compasiva, tierna, femenina y maternal, y al hablar con voz dulcísima salían de su boca, con pausado acento, las palabras dictadas por un cerebro equilibrado, profundo y varonil” [shining in those punishing eyes was the radiance of a compassionate, gentle, feminine and maternal soul, and when she spoke with her sweet voice, from her mouth emerged, with measured accent, words dictated by a mind that was stable, deep and male] (qtd. in Campo Alange 1971, 106).The Krausist Gumersindo Azcárate describes her as follows: “era un ser varonil física e intelectualmente. En lo primero, porque su cuerpo parecía que tenía la resistencia de un hombre para todos los menesteres de la vida … En lo segundo, porque su cerebro tenía la facultad de penetrar en las causas de las cosas con una observación y un espíritu tan viriles que producen verdadero asombro…” [She was a mannish being, physically and intellectually. First, because her body appeared to have the stamina of a man for all of life’s duties … Second, because her mind had the capacity to delve deeply into the reasons for things with an observation and a spirit so manly that they were truly astonishing] (qtd. in Campo Alange 1971, 109). 6 1866 is the year in which the Spanish government established the Junta de Información de Ultramar, composed of Creole reformers and Peninsulars, “to consider the question of reform in areas such as labor, trade, and taxes; and elections were held on the island to elect delegates to that commission” (Ferrer 1999, 17). Faced with grievances from those in the colony who wanted greater political freedom and the abolition of slavery, the government responded with repressive measures, hence fueling the rebellion that would lead to the Ten Years’ War (Ferrer 1999, 17). 7 Vila Vilar notes that Arenal’s dialogue with Bentham in her epigraph reveals “la dimensión intelectual de Concepción Arenal y su conocimiento de las grandes corrientes de pensamiento europeas” [the intellectual scope of Concepción Arenal and her knowledge of the great European schools of thought], particularly that of the Enlightenment (2014, 319–​320). 8 John Stuart Mill, liberal philosopher and disciple of Bentham, defines utilitarianism as: “The doctrine that the basis of morals is utility, or the greatest happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong in proportion as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness” (2017, 5).

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Politics, affect, and gender 9 “The altar of the public good, as with that of Divinity, does not demand barbaric sacrifices: keep in mind that tears of pain are fiery, and you will never make a cooling drink with them, because they contain a corrosive poison that will devour your guts.” 10 “Oh, muse of pain! Give me your /​deepest, bitterest, most painful cry; /​Let my voice be a mournful moan, /​And a heartrending lament my song. /​… /​Give me sad, inconsolable tears, /​To cry my great misfortune. /​And you, holy Indignation, you, who inspires /​Strong impulses in strong hearts, /​ Which to the terrible wrath /​Of noble hearts are tied; /​Come, set my soul afire, /​Blow it away with your fierce tempests, /​Let it face the vilest of evils /​Peace is a disgrace, tranquility in short supply. //​ Abominable slavery!” 11 Theresa Smith questions the dichotomy between “religious faith” and “reasoned inquiry,” presumed in traditional understandings of the Spanish Enlightenment, calling for scholars to rethink this relationship in more complex and complementary ways (2006, 6). From a historical perspective, Pamela Radcliff shows that, in contrast to the case of France, religion played a central role in Spanish liberalism—​a fact reflected in the Constitution of 1812—​with many liberals embracing Catholicism as a key element of Spanish national identity (2017, 23). Lacalzada de Mateo, for her part, traces Arenal’s “philosophical-​ moral” stance back to the Christian humanist tradition of the Renaissance, for which the notion of natural law was fundamental (1993, 739–​40). 12 “She rebels especially when it is none other than woman herself who, ignoring the special feminine trait of compassion, becomes a defender of the shameful system, if not the executioner herself.” 13 In fact, Arenal inserts an editorial note which reflects her patronizing, if idealizing, attitude toward the enslaved subject, even as she presumably defends his rights: “Sabidos son los muchos ejemplos de fidelidad y abnegación dados por los negros, cuya benevolencia es bien conocida de todo el que los ha estudiado sin prevenciones interesadas. Hay un hecho notable, que no queremos dejar de consignar aquí. En la Martinica fué imposible hallar entre los negros quien se prestase á ser verdugo” [There are many well-​known examples of loyalty and self-​sacrifice on the part of black people, whose benevolence is well known among those who have studied them without self-​interested precautions. There is a notable fact that we do not wish to leave unrecorded here. In Martinique it was impossible to find anyone among the black people who would lend himself to be executioner] (1866, 31, n. 1). In speaking on behalf of enslaved Afro-​descendants, she domesticates and, implicitly, feminizes them, referring to their loyalty and self-​sacrifice. Her paternalism was not limited to her attitude toward enslaved persons. As Labanyi notes, Arenal also directed a condescending tone toward the prisoners for whom she was advocating in Cartas a los delincuentes (Labanyi 2017, 51). 14 “You, divine Columbus, sublime genius /​Did you give a world to Castile /​So that in planting its banners there /​It would open endless fields to evil, /​And the monster that nations reject /​Would there be sponsored and welcomed? /​What is it worth for us to arrogantly say, /​Taking God as our witness: /​ “There are no more slaves on the noble soil /​Where Gerona rises and Numancia once stood?” /​And wretched America?” 15 While Spain agreed to a treaty with the British government to ban the slave trade in 1817, the Spanish government did little to enforce it and, in fact, the illegal slave trade continued to grow in the 1820s and 1830s, and beyond (Schmidt-​Nowara 2012). 16 “Let us leave to the men a more brilliant sphere of activity, while we women employ all the abilities we have received from God; be they few or many, whatever we have received, let us use them to help the unfortunate.” 17 “But can we not offer more than tears to the poor slaves? Let us attempt to think this through. Although it is a commonly held belief, it is by no means a given that women are incapable of discourse or lacking in reason or understanding.” 18 “What will happen to the black man in America, ignorant, brutalized, intimidated slave, not knowing his rights, or how to exercise them, who perhaps neither knows how to talk nor understand the language of his oppressors?” 19 “The poor black man embodies all the ills of humanity. He is the man without a wife, without a home, without a family; the woman without legitimate love; the elder without refuge; the youth without support; the ailing without care; the child without a mother; the mother without a child.” 20 “But why are we convinced of our weakness, if we haven’t proven how strong we can be? Are we not more than half of the human race, when it comes to works of charity? Do we not have fathers, sons, husbands, brothers who cannot be deaf to our words, who never have been when those words are ones of heartfelt justice, that resonate with our conscience?”

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Akiko Tsuchiya 21 Following Boloufer’s line of thinking Rebecca Haidt, in a brief discussion of Arenal’s work on charity, shows how the social reformer’s concept of philanthropy draws, to some extent, on an affective register of solidarity, sympathy, and humanity, associated with Enlightenment sensibility, while also grounding it within a framework of Christian charity (Haidt 2016, 87). 22 In her biography of Arenal, Anna Caballé refers to her as “nuestra Jeremy Bentham” [our Jeremy Bentham], noting that “sus presupuestos teóricos son muy parecidos” [their theoretical assumptions are very similar] (2018, 14). While important, a more in-​depth analysis of Bentham’s impact on Arenal’s thought is beyond the scope of this chapter. 23 The Declaration of Rights did not include women in defining the rights of all citizens, nor did it mention slavery. Spanish Enlightenment thinkers, such as Josefa Amar y Borbón, also relied on the notion of “common utility” to argue for the inclusion of those marginalized groups—​women, in Borbón’s case—​that had been excluded from the Enlightenment discourse of “universal” rights. In her Discurso en defensa del talento de las mugeres (1786), Amar y Borbón advocated for women’s admission into the Economic Society based on the argument that they could contribute to “la utilidad común,” “la causa común,” “el bien general” [common utility, the common cause, the common good] (1786). Women’s participation, she affirmed, was fundamental to “el bien de la patria” [the good of the motherland] (1786). 24 Bentham’s position on slavery was, indeed, more ambiguous than Arenal’s unequivocal stance against it. Bentham scholars have criticized his view of distributive justice that the equality of all human beings needed to be balanced against the security of property (Rosen 2005, 31). 25 “Slavery is detrimental to European Spain, detrimental to the Spanish provinces in America, detrimental even to the slave owners, who would gain much if it had never existed, because they see their money committed to a bad investment, to an immoral, cruel, odious investment, against which a unanimous cry is raised in the Christian world, saying, ‘Enough!’ ” 26 “Will Americans be resigned to live forever disinherited from many of the rights that all Spaniards have, as if they were of inferior condition, as if they reflected, in part, the ignominy of slavery?” 27 “The Church condemns it in the name of God, philosophers in the name of reason, lawyers in the name of law, men of conscience in the name of morality … and women shed tears to make it impossible.” 28 “It is necessary for us to reveal those new principles of equity, those rules of law, by which utility, instead of harmonizing and combining with justice, battles it, defeats it, and then denies it. It is essential that we be initiated into the secret of this morality that does not exist in the conscience of honorable men, nor in Christian law.” 29 I am unable to do justice in this limited space to Arenal’s extensive discussion of property in Cartas a un obrero, begun in 1871, and published in La Voz de la Caridad. What is clear, however, is that, for her, “property” had different implications in the colonies, where enslaved people were considered private property, than it did in the metropolis: “El propietario de la tierra no es ya señor de los que la cultivan, no es su legislador, ni su juez, ni tiene derechos cuyo recuerdo ruboriza. El hombre no puede ser ya propiedad de otro hombre; y aunque para vergüenza y dolor de España todavía haya esclavos en sus dominios, es un hecho cuyo derecho no se defiende … La propiedad es respetada siempre en su esencia, pero se la obliga á variar de forma cuando en la que tiene sirve de obstáculo al bien general” [The owner of the land is no longer the master of those who cultivate it, he is not their lawmaker, nor their judge, nor does he have rights that remembering them make us blush with shame. Man can no longer be property of another man; and even though, to the shame and sorrow of Spain there are still slaves in its territories, it is a fact, the right to which cannot be defended … Property in its essence is always respected, but its form must be modified whenever it serves as an obstacle to the common good] (Arenal 1880, 355–​356). Once again, she draws on the notion of common utility. I thank Aurélie Vialette for urging me to explore this issue in the context of Arenal’s other work.

Works cited Amar y Borbón, Josefa. 1786. “Discurso en defensa del talento de las mugeres, y de su aptitud para el gobierno, y otros cargos en que se emplean los hombres.” In Antología del ensayo. www.ensayistas.org/​ antologia/​XVIII/​amar-​bor/​. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.

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Politics, affect, and gender Arenal, Concepción. 1866. “La esclavitud de los negros.” In El cancionero del esclavo:  colección de poesías laureadas y recomendadas por el jurado en el certamen convocado por la Sociedad Abolicionista Española, 17–​36. Madrid: Sociedad Abolicionista Española. Arenal, Concepción. 1867. “Abolición de la esclavitud.” El Imparcial, July 16. Arenal, Concepción. 1875. “¿A quién aprovecha la esclavitud? El Abolicionista, August 15. Arenal, Concepción. 1879. Ensayo sobre el derecho de gentes. Madrid: Imprenta de la Revista de Legislación. Arenal, Concepción. 1880. Cartas a un obrero. Bilbao: Imp. y Enc. de la Editorial Vizcaína. Arenal, Concepción. [1873] 1974. “A las mujeres.”Vol. 1 of El proceso abolicionista en Puerto Rico: Documentos para su estudio, 416–​419. San Juan: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas. Arenal, Concepción. [1875] 1996. “Moral blanca y moral negra.” In Los abolicionistas españoles. Siglo XIX, edited by Enriqueta Vila Vilar and Luisa Vila Vilar, 75–​77. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica. Bolufer, Mónica. 2016. “Reasonable sentiments: sensibility and balance in eighteenth-​century Spain.” In Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, edited by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi, 21–​38. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Burguera, Mónica. 2012. Las damas del liberalismo respetable. Madrid: Cátedra. Caballé, Anna. 2018. Concepción Arenal: La caminante y su sombra. Barcelona: Taurus. Campo Alange, María. 1971. Concepción Arenal 1820–​1893. Estudio biográfico documental. Madrid: Revista de Occidente. Charnon-​Deutsch, Lou. 2001. “Concepción Arenal and the nineteenth-​century Spanish debates about women’s sphere and education.” In Recovering Spain’s Feminist Tradition, edited by Lisa Vollendorf, 198–​ 216. New York: MLA. Fernández, Pura, ed. 2015. No hay nación para este sexo: La Re(d)pública transatlántica de las Letras: escritoras españolas y latinoamericanas (1824–​1936). Madrid: Iberoamericana-​Vervuert. Ferrer, Ada. 1999. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–​1898. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. García Castellón, Manuel. 2004. “Krausismo y humanismo neo-​católico: Concepción Arenal en el ámbito del abolicionismo español.” In Romance Studies Today in Honor of Beatriz Varela, edited by Elaine Brooks, Eliza Miruna Gil, and George S. Wolf, 267–​274. Newark, NJ: Juan de la Cuesta. Haidt, Rebecca. 2016. “Emotional contagion in a time of cholera: sympathy, humanity and hygiene in mid-​nineteenth-​century Spain.” In Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History, edited by Luisa Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández, and Jo Labanyi, 77–​94. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Jenkins Wood, Jennifer. 2014. Spanish Women Travelers at Home and Abroad, 1850–​ 1920. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Kirkpatrick, Susan. 1989. Las Románticas:  Women Writers and Subjectivity in Spain, 1835–​1850. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Labanyi, Jo. 2017. “Afectividad y autoría femenina. La construcción estratégica de la subjetividad en las escritoras del siglo XIX.” Espacio,Tiempo y Forma 29: 41–​63. Lacalzada de Mateo, María José. 1993. “Concepción Arenal: por la abolición de la esclavitud y a favor de la emancipación de la persona humana.” In V Symposium de Historia de la Masonería, Cáceres (1991), 737–​747. Zaragoza: Centro de Estudios Históricos de la Masonería Española. Mill, John Stuart. 2017. Utilitarianism, edited by Jonathan Bennett. https://​www.earlymoderntexts.com/​ assets/​pdfs/​mill1863.pdf Mulas, Santiago. 1993. “Introducción.” La mujer del porvenir, by Concepción Arenal, 7–​44. Madrid: Castalia. Pérez Montero, María Eugenia. 2002. “Revisión de las ideas jurídicas, morales y políticas de Concepción Arenal.” PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Radcliff, Pamela Beth. 2017. Modern Spain: 1808 to the Present. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-​Blackwell. Rosen, Frederick. 2005. “Jeremy Bentham on slavery and the slave trade.” In Utilitarianism and Empire, edited by Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis, 31–​48. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Schmidt-​Nowara, Christopher. 1999. Empire and Antislavery:  Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–​1874. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Schmidt-​Nowara, Christopher. 2012. “Spanish antislavery and Africa, 1808–​98.” Republics of Letters:  A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 3(1). https://​arcade.stanford.edu/​rofl/​ spanish-​antislavery-​and-​africa-​1808–​1898. Simón Palmer, Carmen. 2001. “Puntos de encuentro de las mujeres en el Madrid del siglo XIX.” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares 56(1): 183–​201. Smith, Theresa Ann. 2006. The Emerging Female Citizen:  Gender and Enlightenment in Spain, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Akiko Tsuchiya Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019. “Jeremy Bentham.” https://​plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​bentham/​ #PaiPle Vialette, Aurélie. 2015. “A woman’s political answer to the cuestión social in nineteenth-​century Spain.” Hispanic Review 83(4): 445–​466. Vidart, Luis. 1887. “El padre maestro Fr. Benito Jerónimo Feijóo (estudio sobre su vida y sus obras científicas).” Almanaque de la Ilustración 15: 11–​22. Vila Vilar, Enriqueta. 2014. “Concepción Arenal, feminista y abolicionista.” Minervae Baeticae. Boletín de la Real Academia Sevillana de Buenas Letras 42: 311–​321. White, Sarah. 1999. “Liberty, honor, order: gender and political discourse in nineteenth-​century Spain.” In Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, edited by Victoria Lorée Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff, 233–​257. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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26 “LOS QUE NO PUEDEN SER OTRA COSA” Nineteenth-​century state arts administration and Spanish identity Óscar E. Vázquez “…son españoles … los que no pueden ser otra cosa” [Spaniards are … those that cannot be anything else] (Pérez Galdos, 2001, 130). This assertion—​expressed in even more heated terms in present Spain’s political discussions over a multi-​ethnic and pluralistic nation—​has generally been attributed to the late nineteenth-​century Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo. He probably coined this sarcastic phrase as a frustrated response to the contemporary, stagnating debates over definitions of Spanish citizenship and nationality, when a new constitution was being drafted in 1876. But his phrase, or Benito Peréz Galdos’s, who is the most often cited source, serves us well as a starting point for exploring how nineteenth-​century institutional collecting and administration of art manifested the contestation over a Spanish national identity. Cánovas del Castillo’s quotation, sarcasm aside, begs the question of why Spaniards “cannot be anything else”? No doubt, his statement suggests that the definition of “Spaniard” remains a singular one and that the “anything else”—​namely the multi-​ethnic, linguistic, and territorial identities within Spain—​must be excluded by his essentialist definition. Cánovas, influenced by historians such as Ernest Renan and equating Spanish citizenry with a singular Spanish nation cemented by history, language, and religion, promoted restricting, if not abolishing, regional rights such as those of the Basques (Fusi 2000, 184–​185). But his 1876 statement transgresses the boundaries of a nation’s own internal differences, and by structural necessity, will be inflected by international and historical differences in the definition of “Spaniard” and “Spanish.”The Prime Minister’s statement creates a structural quandary: the differences that distinguish definitions of a “Spaniard” are based upon a negation (or rather, the remnants of all negations) of what a Spanish national or citizen is not (or cannot be, “los que no pueden ser”); yet, that definition is dependent on its relation to that which has been rejected and defined as impossible, the “otra cosa,” namely, all foreign, historical, as well as national or regional entities. In similar fashion, these comparisons are relations that also circumscribed and helped to define a Spanish national arts identity.Yet, and perhaps unlike Cánovas and his senatorial cohorts in 1876 struggling with a definition of a “Spaniard,” art critics’ assumptions about definitions of the “Spanish” in an art collection elided the very question of how a collection was to be understood in national terms. Would it necessitate that the collected works be by artists identifying themselves as Spanish? And would these include works in historical collections, or those created by Catalans, Basques, 385

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or Galicians? Or would any collection be considered Spanish as long as it was gathered within Spanish territories? We need not dwell here on the problems of essentializing notions of nationalism, but simply remind ourselves of the irreducibility of difference. Just as important, it is a reminder that definitions of Spain and “Spanishness” had for centuries—​perhaps more than most European countries—​been created in relation to other nations (Europe’s “other”). It is through the relational descriptions within the press that we begin to see the tensions and problems of essentialist definitions and the building blocks of a centralized state formation in mid-​nineteenth-​century Spain. Further, they challenge researchers to understand what was the discursive frame that allowed particular meanings to be placed on specific relations established by objects and their critical reception by collectors and amateurs. In this chapter, while it is more general rather than focused on any specific collection or collector, I return to issues concerning Spanish collections I investigated in an earlier publication (Vázquez 2001). However, it focuses on the relation between administrative apparatuses of a centralized, increasingly bureaucratic state in nineteenth-​century Spain that attempted to control and frame some of the relational definitions of the “Spanish” of national collections and collecting practices. Thus, the criticism and administration of late nineteenth-​century state-​ funded exhibition and collecting practices through an increased bureaucratization—​part and parcel of the centralizing tendency of Spain’s, indeed, Europe’s governments—​I argue, were central in the materiality of constituting national identities by defining these as “Spanish” at the cost of, and in relation to “anything” else, even while critics and administrators argued over Spain’s pluralistic fabric. As a part of these wider tendencies, it also employed a variety of strategies to control the circulation and display of art objects and collections as a means of defining the Spanish nation. Contemporary arts criticism and institutional discourses reveal generally how Spanish artists, art objects, collecting, and display practices were repeatedly compared in the press against international markets and foreign government support. Indeed, comparisons on the national level were part of an international competitive market paralleling the rise of industrial exhibitions and universelles. A reviewer of an 1846 art exhibition in Madrid’s Liceo understood that principle by telling his viewers that “Los adelantos de las artes se deben a la comparación, como los progresos de la literatura á la crítica” [All progress in the arts, as with criticism for the progress of literature, is due to comparisons [of works of art]] (Fernández de los Ríos 1846, 145). It can be argued that this question of the linking of collections and nationalism is exactly the same as asking about the definition of art styles in national terms, something which critics, it is true, debated vociferously in the first half of the century. The difference, however, is that scholarship has tended to keep formal analysis of national styles separated from an examination of the institutional apparatus that controlled the circulation and accumulation of those privileged material art objects. Scholars examining collections have theorized how “artworlds” (Danto 1964), “systems of objects” (Baudrillard 1996), networks and habitus (Bourdieu 1984), have given symbolic values to objects and cultural identities to collectors (Pomian 1987; Belk 1995). In recent decades, scholars taking the “material turn” have studied the role of objects in the development of specific cultural nationalisms (as but a few examples, Cruz 2011, Zubrzycki 2017, and Gerritsen and Riello 2016). In this chapter, I am speaking largely in terms of collections owned or controlled by the state and put on public display, and will leave aside the, albeit important, question of the organizing of historical monuments as national patrimony (in this regard, see as an introduction Díez Moreno 1989). It begins with the premise that collections are, in many respects, the perfect materialization of a structuralist problem; none of the individual objects will have any significant meaning except by virtue of their relation to all other objects in the system, or 386

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collection. The meaning of collections therefore is also defined by the entanglements of objects with other systems that confine, interrupt, and challenge those meanings brought to them by collectors. The categories that are expelled—​what cannot be anything else—​from any consideration of the contents or valuation of collections, be it subject matter (e.g. history painting, landscape, portraiture), media (sculpture, oil painting, drawings, watercolor), or historical value (“old masters,” national award winners), to name but a few, would be boundless, and would include for that matter, race, gender, and class (Culler 1982, 123; Tagg 1992, 154). In this sense, the definition of any collection, regarding its ability to represent any identity of an individual or nation as Spanish, would always be deferred and dependent on the structuring of other categories representing individuals or groups (Vázquez 2001, 24).

The nineteenth-​century expansion of collecting “El gran problema de los siglos XIX y XX” Juan Pablo Fusi remarked, “iba ser, por tanto, articular un verdadero Estado nacional” [The big problem of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be, therefore, how to articulate a true national State], a problem made even more complicated in Spain because of the growing nationalisms that included those of the Catalan, Basque, and Galician regions; the lack of a sense of territorial unity; the late development of a governmental administrative machinery; and the uneven economic development of Spain’s different regions (Fusi 2000, 163). Nationality (and its contentious relation with the concept of citizenship) had a lengthy European legal history that vacillated between definitions of citizens’ rights based on vecindad (residency), that is birth in national territories (ius solis, soil), or by naturaleza, citizenship based on blood descent (ius sanguinis).The debates over whether Spaniard as a nationality and Spanish “citizen” were two distinct, legal terms that should be defined separately, continued through the century, and was all the more complicated because of the expanse of Spain’s overseas empire. The scholarship and complexity of these historical debates concerning citizenship are beyond the parameters of this chapter. However, although I  am focusing largely on nationalism, I must acknowledge that, in either case of vecindad or naturaleza, the question of suffrage was dependent upon citizenship and tied to annual contributions based on property holdings. Through the late nineteenth century, the “real liberal revolution,” in the words of Raymond Carr (2000, 209), was the “attack on corporate property in the name of absolute individual property rights as a receipt for economic progress.” A sign of the pervasiveness and ubiquity of collecting and collectors is that by the late nineteenth century the individual collector had become a stock social type in periodicals and images. In 1880, French novelist Edmond de Goncourt (as quoted by Brookner 1971, 142–​ 143) claimed that a “passion” for art had become “universal,” making “collectors of practically everyone,” while in 1895 Max Nordau (1993, 27) condemned the “present rage for collecting,” seeing it as symptomatic of a modern, mass “oniomania,” or the buying craze and “the irresistible desire among the degenerate to accumulate useless trifles.” My argument here is not simply, as other have convincingly argued (Reyero 2017), that art collecting and display were increasingly used as a means for the construction of individual identities based on, among other characteristics, prestige and status. Indeed, the rise of art collecting was facilitated, and perhaps even a partial consequence of, the nineteenth-​century expansion of private collecting venues that included everything from flea markets to the ostentation of national salons, and from public art markets to auction houses (for early modern sources of the latter, see Alvarez 2007; Burke and Cherry 1997). Rather, and as I have argued elsewhere (Vázquez 2001, c­ hapter 1), it was through all the variety of sites in relation to one another that individual collections and collectors were framed and defined in any number of ways, including as “Spanish.” Further, 387

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the collecting craze was also aided by numerous patronage and mercantile societies, and “corporaciones” (social organizations with similar economic or socio-​political goals): a critic in 1884—​the first year the term “corporación” (Perfecto 2006, 183), although found in earlier usage, appears in a Real Academia dictionary (Real Academia Española, “Mapa de diccionarios académicos”)—​stated that in Spain, “[l]‌a última expression, el lujo del coleccionismo, es el de la corporación precisamente más modesta entre [t]antas contamos en nuestro país, que es el país de las corporaciones”1 (Palacio 1884, 1). In short, by the late nineteenth century, collecting and the display of collections were seen as a pervasive practice among individuals, “corporaciones,” and, we should add, government agencies; they were by then equated with the identities and economies of the modern age of high capital. The expansion and spread of collecting practices then were paralleled by an increase in the government’s interest in regulating them and using them to its own advantage. It did so through a variety of laws and state apparatuses that controlled the circulation, importation/​exportation, and even display of objects. Indeed, one of the significant characteristics underscoring the difference of nineteenth-​century collecting and display from that of earlier collecting and patronage practices—​say, of powerful monarchs of the early modern period (see Morán and Checa 1985)—​is the complex state administrative units that helped define via relational differences the meaning of collections and acts of patronage. For it is not possible to understand collecting history without understanding the laws making particular properties and objects available or restricted across national borders, for appraisal, consumption, taxation, and documentation within inventories. Art objects were part of those inventories of properties. (Further, although not examined in depth here, art objects, as alienable assets, would have been part of the valuations upon which annual contributions were determined, even though immovable assets were more important in justifying suffrage rights.) Property laws circumscribing much of the national and citizen identity throughout the century, importation/​exportation tariffs, international protectionist sanctions (regulating which paintings and objects could enter or exit the kingdom), and government control of documentations of these, all helped shape and define the subjects of collections as Spanish, and consequentially, collectors as Spaniards. As such, an understanding of how state administrations and laws regulated, directed, and circumscribed taste (understood as collecting and display patterns)—​and consequentially subject identities—​is necessary. We can identify three crucial, influential government strategies that would have affected the collecting practices of both private individuals and corporations: (1) the call for, and control of the acquisition and public display of works for a national collection; (2) protection and control over importation and exportation of art objects through tariffs; (3) an increased control by government agencies over disclosure of property (that included art). Each of these in their own way can be seen as related to state strategies of controlling art and valuable objects (within the larger context of the control of property rights), but also as revealing the way that government regulation of objects and display overlap with the definitions of national citizenry and the economies of nation building.

The creation and control of a national collection and exhibition system The first of the strategies, the creation of a nationalized collection, was one born as much out of progressive tendencies of liberal governments, as by the Civil Wars and related fear of cultural and economic decline. We find there is no better barometer of perceptions of artistic decline—​ which has a lengthy history of its own—​in the age of high capitalism than the contemporary 388

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journals’ reviews and debates concerning government support, prize monies, and exhibitions. Spanish critics, artists, and administrators in the first half of the century, when describing Spain’s state of the arts, often invoked the term atraso, or backwardness. They pointed to numerous reasons for that atraso, including ignorant audiences, deficient academies of art, lack of home patronage or support for the arts, and the first Carlist Civil War, which they felt had worsened an already bleak arts situation in the country (Vázquez 2001). Critics, however, just as often attributed Spain’s artistic weakness to another factor: the lack of support for artists and the need for a national exhibitions system, which, they felt were further exacerbated by a lack of a policy of protection from foreign market competition. The government neither supported Spanish artists internally, nor protected them, they felt, from foreign artists’ dominance of stronger viable sales and promotions venues across the continent. Spanish critics, when asking for greater protection and support of their national school, often compared their own country’s situation to the administrations and more profitable markets of England, Germany, and even Italy. And they did so often by laying the blame with the Spanish fascination for foreign trends. Spanish art critic (and later director of the Prado Museum) Pedro de Madrazo asked in 1835 if “¿Es la fatalidad la que condena a la España a la imitación de todo lo malo del estrangero [sic] y desprecio de lo bueno?” [it is fate that condemns Spain to imitate everything bad that is foreign, and to despise all that is good [in our own country]?], while later describing Spanish artists’ enthusiasm for everything foreign (“espíritu de estrangerismo”) as “una de las cosas más perjudiciales a nuestros artistas” [one of the most detrimental things to our artists] (Madrazo 1835a, 30 and 1835b, 51). One reviewer in 1838, scolding Spanish and other non-​French artists, stated it was incomprehensible that “otras naciones tales como Italia, Flandes y España, que poseen escuelas muy superiores a la que fundó [French painter Jacques-​ Louis] David y que han tenido artistas de mérito tan sobresaliente, se hayan dejado dominar de tal influencia”2 (“V” 1838, 82). However, and as indicated by the previous quote, it was France’s highly established markets, exhibitions, and comparative massive artistic production that were the principal object of Spain’s concerns, and that manifested themselves through the press in terms of envy and disdain. Spanish critics praised “in a moment of envy” the French government’s patronage, commissions, prizes, and exhibitions of the plastic arts (Fernández de los Ríos 1846, 148). At the same time, the press condemned Spanish artists “seduced” by the applause in and use of Paris as a commercial outlet for Spanish arts productions, or the deliberate imitation of French artistic developments (Varela 1838, 43–​46; Lozano 1860, 3). Novelist Pedro Antonio de Alarcón began an essay examining Hispano-​Franco relations by recounting the mythologized tale of Louis XIV telling his son, the future Felipe V of Spain, “Debéis ser de aquí en adelante buen español; pero sin olvidar que nacisteis francés: ¡Ya no hay pirineos!” [You need to be from here on a good Spaniard, but without forgetting that you were born French. The Pyrenees no longer exist!]. In that essay Alarcón denounced Spain’s love–​hate relationship with France, equating it with the abdication of Spanish citizenship: Despreciamos los franceses porque de algún tiempo a esta parte tenemos a orgullo el imitarlos en todo:  porque pretendemos parecerles; porque hemos abdicado (intencionalmente tan solo) nuestro españolismo tradicional en aras de un continuo y lamentable galicismo; porque deseamos confundirnos con ellos, pasar por tales; merecerles carta de ciudanía… ¡Porque hemos renegado, para decirlo de una vez! Porque ahora, en ahora fin, somos nosotros los que decimos a cada instante la aborrecida frase de Luis XIV: ¡Ya no hay Pirineos! 3 (Alarcón 1859, 83) 389

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No doubt, here, citizenship has been seamlessly conflated with nationalism. But such assessments were part of continued historical discussions of afrancesados, that is, those Spaniards in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who were followers of French Enlightenment ideals, or had sided with the French on any number of military conflicts, but was a term later applied to artists who imitated the French stylistically and thematically. Throughout the century, even foreign critics, artists, and travelers condemned, perhaps not surprisingly in chauvinistic fashion, Spanish artists for imitating the French schools. Etienne Délécluze (1856, 64)—​the biographer of painter Jacques Louis David—​described the “exaggerated submission with which [Spanish artists] … follow our French school…” (cited by Pantorba 1980, 2). Further, critic Charles de Leutre (1851, 119) declared that “l’Espagne n’existe plus,” noting the few Spanish works appearing in international salons. His essay—​as Gutiérrez Burón has shown in his seminal work on the Spanish National Exhibitions (1987)—​caused indignation and stirred the national consciousness on the part of Spanish artists and critics, who called on the Spanish government to commit once and for all to the arts by the establishment of an official system of National Exhibitions. Even as late as 1880, novelist Émile Zola declared that all non-​French artists tended to compare themselves with his country’s artists, arguing that to be separated in French salons (distanced physically in displays) from French works was similar to being “left at home” (as cited in Gilmore Holt 1988, 221). The above critical assessments of Spain’s artistic dependence on France—​on the part of both French and Spanish reviewers—​indicate the strength and influence of French art markets in Europe, but they also reveal the perceptions of cultural sequestration felt by many Spanish critics and artists. Those assessments may have given way to the exaggerated views of nineteenth-​ century Spaniards as seeing “their country through French reminiscences,” as suggested by turn of the century foreign scholars (Le Gentil 1909, 214, cited in Carr 2000, 209). They also suggest that in the era of high capitalism, national identities were always formulated on the basis of relations of competitive capital, and for Spain’s art community, that relation was chiefly with France’s robust production, markets, and exhibition systems. The concerns driving these types of comparisons of the state of Spain’s arts with other nations, however, had real political foundations, and were the rhetorical side of material interventions on the part of government agencies to strengthen, protect, and control the national arts. Earlier foreign invasions and civil wars were among the political events that caused increasing concern over the need for government intervention. But out of this there arose numerous initiations; one of these was the government program initiated in the 1830s, and again later during the 1850s, of suppressing numerous religious orders in Spain, and placing on public sale their properties. This program, called the desamortización (or disentailment), had—​at least from the perspective of queen Isabel II’s central government—​three main aims: to raise capital from what was perceived as an idle clergy occupying valuable land needed for urban expansions; the profits from the confiscation and sale of those properties were to be used to elevate a slow-​developing middle class; while, a third reason was an attempt to simultaneously weaken the base of the Catholic Church which had sided with the pretender Don Carlos (Queen Isabel II’s uncle), in the First Carlist War of monarchical succession (1833–​1839). The effects of the desamortización’s confiscation and sales of church properties were multiple on the arts of Spain. For one, it placed thousands of valuable objects confiscated from suppressed church holdings onto the open market and made them vulnerable to exportation by eager foreign collectors, dealers, and government officials. Accordingly, there were a couple of types of actions that were simultaneously hailed as confiscations, or “rescues,” of works of art. One was carried out by foreign art collectors and administrators, such as the French writer and arts commissioner Baron Isidore Taylor, whose act of extracting valuable works from a 390

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civil-​war-​r idden Spain was described by the French as a “mission of redemption,” for “saving” endangered works from ruin and offering them “asylum” in France (Hempel 1972, 124–​126). Romantic-​era Spain of the 1830s and 1840s, in short, had become the “bargain basement” of the nineteenth-​century European art market. Spain’s situation also fueled the European craze for all things Spanish, or españolismo, and especially after the opening in 1838 of French King Louis Philippe’s “Galerie espagnole” in the Louvre Museum containing works purchased or smuggled out of Spain by French agents such as Taylor. The dangers of the extraction of valuable national works prompted a call to action, or a second type of “rescue,” conducted by way of a campaign spearheaded by Spanish academicians and intellectuals that demanded government intervention in order to save Spain’s artistic patrimony from either foreign hands (more on this shortly), or from ill-​climatized convents and monasteries that stored historical works by famed, especially Spanish, painters. In Spain, the confiscated works were consolidated into centralized regional sites that were the foundations of many provincial museums, while many of the best works (but largely from the districts of Madrid,Toledo, Avila, and Segovia) were delivered to Madrid. There, the confiscated paintings and sculptures were housed in the ex-​convent (building no longer extant) of the Order of Trinitarians, one of the many orders that had been suppressed and whose properties were confiscated by the desamortización decrees of 1835. A royal decree of the following year transformed that order’s convent, first, into a government arts storage facility, and then by another decree of 1837, into a national museum (opened briefly in 1838, but again from 1842 through 1872). We have seen how critical arts reviews in the daily press were replete with comparison of Spain’s arts situation with that of other nations, and filled with anti-​French, xenophobic sentiments. The calls on the part of critics, artists, and administrators for a national museum and exhibition system demonstrate just how deeply embroiled the discourses of collections and collecting were in the ideology of nation building. One of the clearest indications in the Isabelline period for a call for a national museum was the review by the critic of the 1846 exhibit in Madrid’s Liceo Artístico y Literario.The critic sarcastically applauded, while pointing, again, to a morally reprehensible but artistically laudable French government as both curse and cure: ¿Quién que haya recorrido los salones del palacio de Versalles, en que Luis Felipe ha consignado todos los grandes hechos de Francia, reuniendo las estatuas y retratos de todos los Reyes, de todos los sabios, de todos los guerreros, de todos los magistrados, de todos los poetas, de todos los artistas, de todos los hombres famosos, en fin, de todas las mugeres [sic] ilustres que han producido aquella nación, ha dejado de sentir un movimiento de envidia hacia un país en que saben perpetuar, hasta con esceso [sic] y sobrado presunción, los hechos famosos y la memoria de los hombres grandes? ¿A quién al ver allí expuestos cuadros que representan exageradamente hechos de armas de los franceses en la Península, en que aparecen los españoles ridículamente a capricho del pintor, no le ha ocurrido oponer a estas impropiedades ofensivas al orgullo español, una colección semejante en que aparezcan con toda la exactitud y verdad características de nuestra patria, la historia de ella puesta en acción desde los tiempos mas remotos hasta los presentes?4 (Fernández de los Ríos 1846, 148) The wish by this and other critics to have a museum housing history painting, in similar fashion to France, was only partially realized by Spain’s creation of a state-​funded national exhibition system in 1856. Before that year, the annual official exhibitions were held in regional academies 391

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of art, the most important being the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. (That academy became through various reorganizations the central and most powerful by a decree of 1849 which placed all other academies and schools under its control.) The biennial National Exhibitions, for their part, were intended to promote and stimulate the arts by the awarding of medals and monetary prizes in various subject categories, the largest number and with most monies of which was history painting. Indeed, one of the products of this biennial exhibition system was a strong school of history painters producing for the government visual narratives of the nation’s grand epics, with themes covering the “discovery” and conquests of the New World, the Reconquest (re-​Christianization) of Spain in the wars with Islamic medieval dynasties, and the glories of the Spanish monarchies. All top prize-​ winning submissions to those gala biennial events became government purchases that were stored for many years in the National Museum of the Trinidad. After the 1868 dethronement of Queen Isabel II, the Trinidad’s collection (housing the desamortización objects, as well as the state purchases from national exhibitions) was unified with that of the Prado, the former royal collections now nationalized (Museo del Prado 1991, esp. vol. 2). Their unification represents a consolidation of collections and museums, which was an essential element within the administration’s centralizing attitudes. This consolidation was but one of several ways through which the state gained increasingly greater control of the administration of the arts (Vázquez 2001, 110–​112)

Importation and exportation restrictions In addition to the confiscation, nationalization, and consolidation of art collections, a second set of government strategies was the creation of an array of protectionist tariffs on the exportation and importation of goods that also covered art, as well as academic regulations intended to keep valuable works in the country, while excluding foreign works from exhibitions. Within these, there was a system of prohibitive art exportation laws, some arising from the desamortización, aimed at first to deter the extraction of valuable works, but later expanded to include a farther-​ reaching system of protectionism intended to help academicians, their limited patrons, and government representatives. I argue these measures were part of the larger, in the words of Artola (1987, 178), “systematic prohibitionist character” of legislation during the second Isabelline period. There had been attempts before the nineteenth century to control the circulation of art across borders; for example, in 1779 under Charles III who wished to protect native works from entering foreign collections, and in 1810 during the French invasion. Laws that taxed or prohibited importation and exportation of works increased precipitously in the first half of the century, following the decade of the Napoleonic invasion, the First Carlist War, and the desamortización (Garín Ortíz de Taranco 1964; Hempel Lipschutz 1972, c­hapter  2). But further importation laws and tariffs were established that paralleled the creation of the national salon system. A  royal decree of 1853 officially establishing the state-​ supported biennial National Exhibitions (the first staged three years later), also allowed that works by foreign artists could be admitted into the Spanish salons, but only if those works were executed on Spanish soil. The history painter José Galofré (1819–​1877)—​who played a key role in convincing the government to create and sanction the official National Exhibitions—​complained that the government’s exhibition regulations should have either “haber abierto las puertas de los concursos a nacionales y estranjeros en igualdad de circunstancias, como se practica en otros paises, o haber dejado los premious para los españoles” adding that “porque una obra por ser hecha en España, no es precisamente Española”[original italics]”5 (Galofré 1854, 2). Like contemporary 392

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disputes over definitions of nationality and citizenship, the national status of a work was caught up in arguments over residency and parentage (that is, if the author was Spanish or if the work was executed on Spanish soil). Spain’s protectionist tariffs were intended to keep the playing field more level, and against the possibility of foreign, namely French and English, well-​established artists (trained in the well-​ greased machinery of academic systems with comparatively rich, though more crowded and competitive, exhibition systems of their own), from dipping their hands into the more modest Spanish exhibition prize cookie jars.There is a correlation between the regulations determining the numbers of foreign works to be admitted into national exhibitions, and wider trade tariffs and laws. For example, although there were earlier importation tax reforms (such as in 1841), the first modern tariff system that was oriented towards free-​trade reform and protectionist tariff reductions was the bill issued in 1849, the same year in which all provincial academies were placed under the legislative control of the Madrid San Fernando Academy and conversations were initiated leading to the establishment of the state-​sponsored National Exhibitions (Tallada 1943, 49 and 55). Those 1849 tariff reforms and reductions were the foundations upon which was built the more significant 1869 Laureano Figuerola Act that annulled (at least for a brief period of time) most previous prohibitions against imported products (Tallada 1943, 60). On the heels of that Act, which took effect after the dethronement of Queen Isabel II in 1868, importation tariffs on foreign goods were eased, and further academic reforms allowed admission of all eligible foreigners to the National Exhibitions beginning in 1871; the exhibition of that year showed a marked rise in the submission of foreign artists’ works. As Gutiérrez Burón (1989, 37–​57) has shown, subsequent salons of 1884 and 1892, for which tariffs and transportation costs were further reduced or covered, show even larger number of foreigners participating. But the increasing complexity of tariffs on works of art also was a point of contention even for Spanish nationals. In 1866, a full decade after the first official National Exhibition in 1856, art periodicals were advising Spanish artists working abroad sending works to the national salons that they should have an individual representative in order to handle all the legalities of exhibition fees and importation taxes (Exposición Artística Nacional 1866, 61). Importation tariffs and rights in Spain, as across Europe, had become so dense and difficult that an 1858 “Literary and Artistic Congress” was held in Brussels; although largely dealing with copyright laws and literary properties, it also attempted reductions of international importation and exportation duties on artworks (Lozano 1858, 3). (In many ways a precursor to the creation of the 1878 Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, and the later more important Berne Convention of 1886 that focused on writer-​artists’ rights.) The effects of the importation/​ exportation tariff laws can be further seen, and as just one example, through the differences among media of exported works around mid-​century: 6,310 prints paid exportation taxes at Madrid’s customs gates in 1847, compared to only sixty-​four paintings, signaling not just academic preferences in higher tariffs on paintings, but also the ease of shipping of prints (Madoz 1847, vol. 10, 1044–​1046; and 1849, vol. 14, 400). The consequences of such laws would have affected, therefore, the types of art in circulation in the country; art used for displaying, viewing, learning, and of course, the possibilities for what might be included in collections.

Property laws and disclosure The documentation of art through increasing demand for inventories and briefs is a third strategy employed by the government and one that reveals how the discourses of collecting and nationality overlap with governmental administrative tools regulating art. This state oversight was part of a relatively new government fiscal policy to control disclosure of private properties 393

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which had ramifications for collections and collecting practices of both individuals and state arts officials. Inventories of artworks, of course, had existed for centuries and were widely used in the seventeenth century, but these were largely the domain of the aristocracy (Burke and Cherry 1997, 187ff.). However, the growth of the centralized bureaucratic state during the Second Isabelline era, and the accompanying proliferation of administrative units, occasioned a significant increase in the production of property records and inheritance registration. Certainly, this was a characteristic of the modern bureaucratic Western state yet these forms were for the public’s access, state use, and now had become part of an official arts administration. The state was gaining control over documentation and circulation of properties with importation/​exportation laws (as we have seen), but also through other laws regulating the activities of agents and the documents they produced. The principal players in the property-​inventory processes in Spain, as across Europe, were notaries public. Control over these agents, and the question of who owned the documents they produced (such as inventories, testaments, and wills), had been argued since at least the onset of the Bourbon dynasty in the reign of Philippe V, when the archives were placed within the city council buildings. By the mid-​nineteenth century, however, the Spanish state began to regulate the activities of public notaries: in 1844 the first chairs for educating notaries were created by Royal Decree, while the “Proyecto Arrazola” of three years later was an initial attempt at strictly regulating accountability in their field. The debates in Spain over the ownership and use of public notary documents were for all intents and purposes brought to closure by the Public Notary Law of 1862 that stated decidedly that notary records were the property of and controlled by the State (Duplá del Moral 1990, 6; Esteve Pardo 1983). Other government-​issued civil codes also required legal documentation of properties; among the types of documents were inventories for testaments or dowries through which each person was required by law to bring (that is, disclose) certain percentages of properties to a marriage. For example, the liberal constitution of 1869 attempted the separation of Church and State by creating a registry of civil marriage distinct from Catholic Church’s documents and authorization. Through that registry married couples placed their properties under extra scrutiny of state agents. An additional decree of 1872 compelled further use of that registry by deeming as illegitimate any children born to marriages that had not been officially registered (Muñoz-​Perez and Recanno-​Valverde 2011, 490), and thereby placing regulations on inheritances. Property and inheritance laws were not greatly changed until the Civil Code of 1889 which combined the canonical and civil regulations of marriage, thereby further redefining inheritance procedures (Aguado 2011, 750–​751). That 1889 Code also stipulated that parents could bequeath and distribute more freely percentages of their property (Muñoz López 2001, 365–​369). In general, by the years of the Restoration (begun in 1874), notarial laws had taken a tighter control of the management of properties. At stake in the control over the practices of public notaries was access to documents divulging the property holdings of individuals; properties that included not just land holdings, but also sculpture, paintings, and decorative objects, all now open to the gaze of government administrators. The increasingly state-​ regulated control of the circulation and disclosure of properties affected the arts community in other ways beyond the personal disclosure of art and valuable objects collections. For one, private systems of art management—​such as the appraisal of art and fine objects, architecture, and other personal properties—​also became increasingly monitored through state legislative interventions in the 1850s. Although there had been since 1841 definitions and regulations controlling “peritos” (expert appraisers), the examination and enforcement of these began by 1852. The percentage of taxes that could be charged, and the administrative procedures of academicians evaluating or advising in particular fields (such as 394

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architecture) were further defined in Royal Orders of 1854 and 1855, although it appears that painting remained largely unaffected in practice (Martínez Alcubilla 1887, vol. 7, 844, 892). The opening up to wider audiences the contents of at least larger private collections may have offered opportunities for individual collectors a chance to boast of their lengthy familial lineages (Vázquez 2001, ­chapter  5; Martínez Plaza 2018, 223–​265). As such, the increased demand for documentary disclosures, and the augmentation and bureaucratization of the arts managements (that brought in appraisers and notaries public), may also have been an opportunity for the growth of the study of the history of art by permitting scholars wider access to a larger array of potentially available inventories of historical works. However, for the Spanish collectors and holders of art, conversely, the professionalization of an increasingly bureaucratized system requiring inventorying of properties was, in many instances no doubt, further unwelcome demands by an intrusive state. One may get a clearer understanding of the growing machinery of the mid-​nineteenth-​ century bureaucracy in Spain by understanding how one “super ministry” (López Garrido 1982, 37–​39) was created by the state to handle many of the above functions of the inventory process, but also of the circulation, and display of art objects and products across the nation.The Ministerio de Fomento (literally, the Ministry of Development, akin to Ministry/​Departments of the Interior and Home Affairs in parts of Europe, the UK, and the US), was the principal governmental agent responsible for arts administration in Spain. Created in 1832 it underwent various transformations across the century (Suárez 1948–​49; Bleiberg 1969, vol. 2, 1071). As an example of the expansive duties performed by this Ministry, it was charged with transactions of community properties, the direction of public notaries, mail and communications, the press, literary and academic societies, regulations concerning much of the nation’s commerce, aspects of municipal governments, fairs, and markets. But the Ministry, through its many sub-​units, oversaw academies and schools of arts, museum collections, purchases and commissions of works for the national as well as provincial governments. As such, it had, for much of the century, a veritable control over the education, circulation, importation, exportation, collecting (including those works from the desamortización), and display of officially sanctioned art objects (Suárez 1948–​1949, 36;Vázquez 2001, 103–​105). The quantity of charges of the Ministry of Fomento reveals the burden of the centralizing, bureaucratic nature of the Second Isabelline government. Indeed, the increased control of the arts—​whether due to the demand by artists for greater support, or from politicians calling for the “rescue” and protection against foreign interventions—​was part of larger, centralizing efforts to homogenize identities into a singular definition of “Spanish.” In this regard, the new administrative plan and map of provinces created in 1833 by Francisco Javier de Burgos (among the most important administrators in nineteenth-​century Spain), eliminated, in effect, the older political mapping based on traditional kingdoms of Spain, in favor of a new homogenizing plan of forty-​nine administrative provinces centered on Madrid. In an essay from earlier in the century, he described the concept of a centralized, “omnipresent,” administrative state in which “la inmensidad de la administración, no puede deberse sino a la multiplicidad de sus agentes” who should form “una cadena, que, acabando en el último agente de policía municipal, empiece en el gefe de la administración,” all aimed at promoting, “con un solo impulso uniforme e ilustrado, una masa inmensa de prosperidad”6 (Burgos 1850, 65; Martín Retortillo and Argullol 1973, vol. 1, 95). A somewhat different view of how state administrations should function for the arts was proffered by history painter José Manjarrés. He complained in 1866 that the state arts administration (as in Burgos’ quasi-​utopian “long chain” of agents working in unison) was inefficient and argued for its even greater consolidation and streamlining: “Porque cuanto de esta máquina 395

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existe en España con relación al mismo, no produce resultado alguno, por su complicación.” He recommended that if the public administration “ha de conservar los recuerdos y los intereses artísticos del país, natural es que sus actos tiendan a disponer la máquina administrativa de modo que pueda atenderse con facilidad a semejante objeto”7 (Manjarrés 1866, 110).

Conclusion It was not, of course, a simple either/​or question (as debated by Burgos and Manjarrés) of choosing between consolidation into a single government entity, or a multiplicity of agents; or of—​as Cánovas and his contemporaries agonized—​the choice between “Spaniard,” or a multiplicity of national identities or “otras cosas.” I am not suggesting that there was a single ideological aim behind all of these endeavors: of the increasing centralization and bureaucratization of the state, the contested definitions of “Spaniard,” and the augmentation of state laws and practices controlling the circulation, display, and collecting of art objects.Yet, it was a holistic definition of nationality (and its related citizenship question) that was, after all, precisely at stake. All of these varied instruments and strategies discussed here, in their own way, and as I have argued in this chapter, were vehicles for the state’s intervention, and bringing to bear art collecting and display, in those debates concerning holistic, if not essentializing definitions of “Spaniard.” Scholars have characterized Spain’s nineteenth-​century arts and exhibitions situation as a product of a failed system; one in which vehicles such as the state-​sponsored National Exhibitions became stilted, or “asphyxiated” in the words of Gutiérrez Burón (1987, 169). For some, perhaps a majority, of artists—​especially those outside of the most privileged circles—​it may well have been. (The history of Western art, after all, was until recently that of those privileged media and objects by select artists catering to the wealthiest and most powerful patrons.) The government’s programs had success in some areas such as the patronage and rise of a school of prominent history painters. Nonetheless, and in spite of the government’s heavy-​handed interventions, and with all well-​aimed intentions, the results fell far short of its ambitions: the desamortización’s sales of properties failed to build up and establish a solid enough middle class that could interest themselves as regular patrons of the arts; the National Exhibitions failed at offering wider sales opportunities because of the lack of an economically strong or interested public (indeed, a reviewer of the 1866 national exhibition cynically questioned the need to ask support for the arts from the government when the latter only “pile[s]‌up paintings and statues in some office corner, or in difficult-​to-​access passage ways or isolated rooms” of museums (Fernández Giménez, 1867, 118–​119). Further, in spite of a growing number of academies and schools of art, Madrid’s San Fernando academy continued to have monopolistic control of the arts, partially because of the 1849 decrees that placed most other art schools under its jurisdiction, but also because of its location in the capital, Madrid, offering easier access to royal, aristocratic, government, and other official patronage. In these ways, the government, for all intents and purposes, and in the words of one reviewer, “comprendiendo las cantidades que se destinan a compra de cuadros, … el Gobierno tiene que ser consumidor de sus propios productos”8 (“Sección Artística” 1868, 3). Yet, I  offer that, from the perspective of a nineteenth-​century government’s centralizing aims—​a system of almost total control over the objects and works relating the nation’s stories, and circulation, inventorying, and collection of art and valuable objects that comprised the status of not only individuals but of the nation itself in relation to its international competitors—​it was successful. And in this respect, we might see why, even in years well after Cánovas’ attempts at defining Spaniards as “los que no pueden ser otra cosa,” a strong, heavily centralizing, and 396

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far-​reaching arts administrative system that homogenized national histories, protected foreign arts competition, and constantly made obliging, albeit frequently disdainful, comparisons to other nations’ systems, proves to have been key as tool for forging national identity.

Notes 1 “The latest expression, that of the luxury of collecting, is that of corporations, namely the small, most modest among those we count among us in our country, because we are the country of corporations.” 2 “It is absolutely incomprehensible that other nations such as Italy, Flanders and Spain, who possess schools superior to that founded by David, and who have had artists of equally great merit, have let themselves be dominated by [French] influence.” 3 “We despise the French because for some time here we have the honor of imitating them in everything; because we pretend to be like them; because we have intentionally abdicated our traditional españolismo in rings of continuous and lamentable Gallicism; because we desire to confuse ourselves with them and, to pass for them; to earn [their] letters of citizenship … Because now, in the end, it we who are saying at every opportunity, that abhorrent phrase of Louis XIV: The Pyrenees no longer exist!” 4 “In going through the salons of the Palace of Versailles, in which Louis Philippe has allocated [representations of] all of France’s great deeds, reuniting statues and portraits of all the monarchs, learned people, warriors, magistrates, poets, and artists, in short, of all the famous men and illustrious women that that nation has produced, who has not felt envy for a country where they know how to perpetuate, even if with excessive conceit, the famous deeds and memory of great men? Upon seeing exhibited there works representing with exaggeration France’s military deeds in the peninsula, and which represent the Spaniards as ridiculous according to the whims of the painter, who has not considered opposing these offensive improprieties against Spanish pride, with a similar collection in which there appears with all exactitude and truth characteristics of our patria, our nation’s history in action from the most remote times to the present?” 5 To have either “opened the doors of the contest equally to nationals and foreigners alike, as is practiced in other countries, or to have restricted the prizes to Spaniards alone,” adding that “just because a work of art is done in Spain does not make it exactly Spanish.” 6 The “immensity of the administration is owed to the multiplicity of its agents,” who “should form among themselves a large chain which, ending with the last municipal police agent, begins with the Chief of Administration” all aimed at promoting “with one single, uniform and enlightened impulse, the masses towards prosperity.” 7 “As long as this [administrative] machine exists as it presently does in Spain, it will not produce any [positive] results because of its complication.” He recommended that if the government “wishes to conserve the monuments and artistic interests of this country,” then it should “make the administrative machine operate with greater facility for that purpose.” 8 Official instruction of the Bellas Artes in Spain, “given the quantities of works destined for sales because the government must become the consumer of its own products, totals less than 4 million reales.”

Works cited Aguado, Ana. 2011. “Familia e identidades de género. Representaciones y prácticas (1889–​1970).” In Familias. Historia de la sociedad española (Del final de la Edad Media a Nuestros Dias), edited by Francisco Chacón and Joan Bestard, 743–​808. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. Alarcón, Pedro Antonio. 1858. “Esposición de Bellas Artes. Pintura.” La Época 3 (October 12): 2914–​2917. Alarcón, Pedro Antonio. 1859. “España y los franceses.” Museo Universal 3(11): 82–​84. Álvarez, Mari-​Tere. 2007. “The Almoneda: the second-​hand art market in Spain.” In Auctions, Agents and Dealers. The Mechanisms of the Art Market 1660–​1830, edited by Jeremy Warren and Adriana Turpin, 33–​39. Oxford: Wallace Collection. Artola, Miguel. 1987. La burguesía revolucionaria (1808–​1874). Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Baudrillard, Jean. 1996. The System of Objects, trans. by James Benedict. London: Verso. Belk, Russell W. 1995. Collecting in a Consumer Society. London: Routledge. Bleiberg, Germán, ed. 1968–​1969. Diccionario de Historia de España. 3 vols. Madrid: Revista de Occidente.

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Óscar E. Vázquez Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction. A  Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burgos, Javier. 1850. “Exposición dirigida al señor Fernando VII por Javier de Burgos, desde Paris en 24 de enero de 1826.” Anales del reinado de Isabel II, vol. 1, Appendix 1, 47–​71. Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográficos de Mellado. Burke, Marcus B., and Peter Cherry. 1997. Collections of Paintings in Madrid, 1601–​1755, edited by Maria L. Gilbert. 2 vols. Los Angeles, CA: Provenance Index of the Getty Information Institute. Brookner, Anita. 1971. Genius of the Future; Studies in French Art Criticism: Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, the Brothers Goncourt, Huysmans. London: Phaidon. Carr, Raymond. 2000. Spain. A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cos-​Gayon, Fernando. 1851. Historia de la Administración Pública de España. Madrid: Imprenta de José Villeti. Cruz, Jesus. 2011. The Rise of Middle-​Class Culture in Nineteenth-​Century Spain. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1982. On Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Danto, Arthur. 1964. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61(19): 571–​584. doi:10.2307/​2022937. Délécluze, Etienne J. 1856. Les Beaux Arts dans les deux mondes en 1855. Paris: Charpentier. Díez Moreno, Fernando. 1989. “La evolución constitucional del patrimonio nacional.” Reales Sitios 25: 15–​30. Duplá del Moral, Ana, ed. 1990. Madrid en el Archivo Histórico de Protocolos. Madrid: Consejería de Cultura, Secretaría General Técnica. Esteve Pardo, José. 1983. Notariado y Burocracia en la España del Siglo XIX. Madrid: Ilustre Colegio Notarial. “Exposición Artística Nacional.” 1866. Revista de Bellas Artes y Arqueología, November 25, 1(8): 61. Fernández de los Ríos, Angel. 1846. “Liceo. Exposición de Pintura del año 1846. Primer Artículo.” El Siglo Pintoresco 2(7): 145–​150. Fernández Giménez, José. 1867. “Las bellas artes en España con motivo de la Exposición de Madrid de 1866.” Revista Hispano-​Americana, February 28, 4(51): 118–​119. Fusi, Juan Pablo. 2000. España. La evolución de la identidad nacional. Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy. Galofré, José. 1854. “Nobles artes. Exposiciones públicas.” La Nación, January 20, 6 (1741): 2. Garín Ortíz de Taranco, Felipe María. 1964. “Recuperación y coleccionismo artístico durante el dominio francés y la desamortizaión en Valencia.” Anales del Centro de Cultura Valenciana 49: 1–​39. Gerritsen Anne, and Giorgio Riello, eds. 2016. The Global Lives of Things.The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. London: Routledge. Gilmore Holt, Elizabeth. 1988. The Expanding World of Art, 1874–​ 1902. New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press. Goncourt, Edmond. 1881. L’Maison d’un Artiste. Paris: Charpentier. Gutierrez Burón, Jesus. 1987. Exposiciones nacionales de Pintura en España el el siglo XIX. 2 vols. Madrid: Editorial de la Universidad Complutense. Gutiérrez Burón, Jesus. 1989. “Artistas extranjeros en las Exposiciones Nacionales de Bellas Artes en el Siglo XIX.” Fragmentos 15–​16: 37–​57. Hempel Lipschutz, Ilse. 1972. Spanish Painting and French. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Le Gentil, Georges. 1909. Le poète Bretón de los Herreros et la société espagnole de 1830 à 1860. Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie. Leutre, Charles de. 1851. “Exposition Générale des Beaux-​Arts à Bruxelles.” L’Illustration, August 23, 18(443): 119–​121. López Garrido, Diego. 1982. La Guardia Civil y los Orígenes del Estado Centralista. Barcelona: Crítica. Lozano, Manuel. 1858.“Congreso Literario y Artístico de Bruselas.” El Diario Español, October 21, 1955: 3. Lozano, Manuel. 1860. “Bellas Artes. Exposición de 1860. I” El Diario Español, October 23, 9(2574): 3. Madoz, Pascual. 1845–​1859. Diccionario Geográfico-​Estadístico-​Histórico de España y sus Posesiones de Ultramar. Madrid: P. Madoz y L. Sagasti. Madrazo, Pedro de. 1835a. “Afecto a las artes—​afectos a los empleos.” El Artista 2(3): 29–​31. Madrazo, Pedro de. 1835b. “Protección debida a las Bellas Artes.” El Artista 2(5): 50–​52. Manjarrés, José. 1866. “Las bellas artes y la historia en sus relaciones con la administración pública.” El Arte en España 5: 110–​112. De Marchi, Neil, and Hans J.Van Miegroet. 1999. “Exploring markets for Netherlandish paintings in Spain and Nueva España.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 50: 80–​111.. Martinez Plaza, Pedro J. 2018. El coleccionismo de pintura en Madrid durante el siglo XIX. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica.

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“Los que no pueden ser otra cosa” Martínez Alcubilla, Marcelo. 1886–​7. Diccionario de la administración española. Compilación de la novísima legislación de España península y ultramarina. 4th edition. 8 vols. Madrid: J. López Camacho Impresor. Martín-​Retortillo, Sebastian, and Enrique Argullol. 1973. Descentralización Administrativa y Organización Política. 3 vols. Madrid: Alfaguara. Millán Jesús, and María Cruz Romeo. 2004. “Was the Liberal Revolution important to modern Spain? Political cultures and citizenship.” Social History 29(3): 284–​300. Moran, Miguel, and Fernando Checa. 1985. El Coleccionismo en España. Madrid: Cátedra. Museo del Prado. 1991. “El Museo de la Trinidad (Bienes Desamortizados).” In Museo del Prado. Inventario General de Pinturas, vol. 2, 11–​19. Madrid: El Museo; Espasa Calpe. Muñoz López, Pilar. 2001. Sangre, amor e interés. La familia en la España de la Restauración. Madrid: Marcial Pons, Ediciones de Historia. Muñoz-​Perez, Francisco, and Joaquín Recanno-​Valverde. 2011. “A century of nuptiality in Spain, 1900–​ 2007.” European Journal of Population 27(4): 487–​515. Nordau, Max. 1993. Degeneration [1895], trans. by George L. Mosse. Lincoln, Ne:  University of Nebraska Press. Palacio, Eduardo de. 1884. “Coleccionistas.” El Imparcial, August 31, 19(6194): 1. Pantorba, Bernardino de. [1948] 1980. Historia y crítica de las Exposiciones Nacionales de Bellas Artes celebradas en España. Madrid: Gráficas Nebrija. Pérez Galdós, Benito. [1912] 2001. Cánovas. Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. Perfecto, Miguel Ángel. 2006. “Corporativismo en España desde los orígenes a la década de 1930.” Pasado y Memoria. Revista de Historia Contemporánea 5: 185–​218. Pomian, Krzysztof. 1987. Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris,Venise: XVIe-​XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard. Presno Linera, Miguel Ángel. 2012. “El origen del derecho electoral español.” Revista Española de Derecho Constitucional 96: 163–​186. Reyero, Carlos. 2017. Fortuny, o el arte como distinción de clase. Madrid: Cátedra. Reyero, Carlos. 1993. Paris y la crisis de la pintura española, 1799–​1889. Del Museo del Louvre a la torre Eiffel. Madrid: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma. “Sección Artística.” 1868. El Imparcial, April 27, 2(351): 3. Suárez, Federico. 1948–​1949. “La creación del Ministerio del Interior en España,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 19: 15–​56. Tagg, John. 1992. Grounds of Dispute. Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Tallada, Jose María. 1943.“La política comercial arancelaría en el siglo XIX.” Anales de Economía 3(9): 47–​71. “V.” “El pintor David.” 1838. El Panorama, May 3, 6: 81–​83. Varela, J. 1838. “España vista desde Francia y otros países.” El Panorama, May 3, 6: 87–​88. Vázquez, Oscar E. 2017. The End Again. Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Vázquez, Oscar E.  2001. Inventing the Art Collection. Patrons, Markets, and the State in Nineteenth-​Century Spain. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Zola, Emile. [1880] 1988. “Le Naturalisme au Salon.” In The Expanding World of Art. 1874–​1902, edited by Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, 220–​226. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zubrzycki, Genevieve. 2017. National Matters. Materiality, Culture, and Nationalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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27 THE DREAM OF A FEDERAL REPUBLIC United States independence as a model for Rossend Arús i Arderiu’s activism and freemason ideology Aurélie Vialette

Introduction How can one successfully practice activism? This question has always been current in discourse on political affairs. It was an especially important question in the second half of the nineteenth century in Spain, when liberty and independence were concepts difficult to practice and promote. The country was a crumbling empire in search of legitimacy, and I would argue that, because of that environment and of the uncertain history of Catalonia’s relationship to Spain, social and political activism took a specific meaning in Catalan circles that, as I will demonstrate, were linked to freemasonry and supported the creation of an Iberian Federation. Among those freemasons with a Catalanist ideology in favor of a federation of states on the Iberian Peninsula is the activist Rossend Arús i Arderiu, whose archive shows an anti-​colonial ideology and a discourse in favor of a sovereign Catalonia inspired by the United States’ struggle for independence. In this chapter I will focus in particular on his practice and works. I contend that as a Catalan freemason and Republican Federalist, Arús looked to the US as a model for a Catalonia that would ideally be part of a federalist state encompassing the whole peninsula (including Spain and Portugal). The US was the perfect example of a well-​functioning recent federalist state project and was often said to be something for Iberia to aspire to in Catalan freemason circles. As a specifically Catalan—​not Spanish—​freemason, Arús strongly opposed colonialism and looked to the US for political inspiration. In this sense, he represented an ideology and defended a political project that was in direct antagonism with Spanish freemasonry, which was mainly favorable to the maintenance of the colonies under Spanish rule and to the continuance of Spain as a centralist country. By being in favor of the colonies’ independence he also distinguished himself ideologically from some of the Republican Federalist leaders such as Francesc Pi i Margall or Emilio Castelar, who when the Federal Constitution was approved in 1873, never considered Cuban independence and converted the country to another territory of the new Republic. I consider Arús a characteristic figure in the understanding of the attitude of nineteenth-​ century leftist Republican Federalist, Catalanist, and freemason intellectuals. Arús (1845–​1891) 400

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was a freethinker and author of social theater, an actor, journalist, member of the Centre Català (founded in 1882 by Valentí Almirall) and secretary of the First Catalanist Congress in 1880. He collaborated in the first phase of the development of Catalanism with Almirall. Arús was a Grandmaster of the Gran Lògia Simbòlica Regional Catalana, the co-​editor of the Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Masonería (published in Havana, Cuba, in 1891), and he supervised the writing of the Lògia Constitution that, greatly influenced by Pi i Margall and Almirall’s ideology, said that Catalonia should become a sovereign State within the Iberian regions (Sanchez Ferrer has demonstrated Pi i Margall’s and Valentí Almirall’s influence on the Gran Logia Catalana’s autonomist ideology, see 2015, 159). Almirall was an intransigent Federalist, part of the Club de los Federalistas, and Editor-​in-​Chief of the newspaper El Estado Catalán. Diario republicano federalista intransigente (1869–​1873). The intransigent Federalists defended the theory of the synallagmatic federal pact, which, according to Pi i Margall, consisted in a contract between entities that should be sovereign:  these were the only conditions for establishing a federation. It implied, moreover, a preexisting juridical personality among the parties who signed the pact. Finally, the Iberian Federation ought to be organized from bottom to top, that is, from first, the existence of free states, to second, the federation.Without this concrete and previous pact, the federation could not exist (Pomés-​Vives 2017; Máiz, 2009). However, Pi i Margall never questioned the existence of the Spanish State and, in fact, once in power as president of the First Spanish Federal Republic, never implemented the pact from bottom to top, but governed from the top (Cagiao y Conde 2013, 243). Within this panorama, Arús has to be considered a special figure of Republican Federalism, especially for his advocacy of the political model of the United States—​according to Ángel Duarte and Pere Gabriel, referring to the US as a possible political model was not common in Spanish Republican thought of the 1880s (2000, 23–​24). The United States political model is based on what is called a “Dual Federalism,” which means that sovereignty is divided: on the one hand, the central government and on the other, the states; however, the federal government holds more power than the individual states. Arús’ political activity fell within the wider activism that, in late nineteenth-​century Spain and other countries, fought for the development of democratic values (Ramos 1997, 93). His activism focused on social and political actions at the local level, with an emphasis on creating local ephemeral theater companies (they would last between one day and several months) and on organizing carnivals to help the poor and the people of his neighborhood (Vialette 2017, 138, 140–​149, 157–​159). He defended democratic values in a society in which, according to him, the human being was oppressed by the government. His ideological position is perceptible in his own archive, in which the dramatist, the activist, the Catalanist, and the freemason are inseparable (Vialette 2017). Activism was his point of departure for the creation of ideas and declarations that he put into practice in his neighborhood and city in general: in this sense, he defended a Catalan freemason ideology according to which all people were equals without regard to race, age, sex, religion, or social status. Catalan freemason ideals—​liberty, solidarity, progress, abolition of slavery, among others—​were carefully crafted in all his writings and neighborhood activities. My aim is to prove how Arús articulated ideas central to Republican Federalism and Catalan freemasonry through his activism. Moreover, I contend that Arús is a central figure in the cultural and ideological exchanges between Catalonia and the Americas. In particular, my analysis will show how and why Arús thought the relatively recently independent United States was a possible model for the political future of Iberia. Finally, my study will show, through this man of letters who strongly influenced his epoch but somehow has not been of interest to contemporary critics, that Catalan Republican Federalism and freemasonry were closely linked in 401

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nineteenth-​century Spain—​as Xucla Comas says, many Republicans were allies or members of the freemasons (2001, 38).1

Arús’ fight for an Iberian Federation and freemasonry ideology Rossend Arús i Arderiu was Great Master of the Gran Lògia Simbòlica Regional Catalana (GLSRC), and as such the most important representative of its philosophy. I think it is useful here to explain the specifics of the GLSRC and of Catalan freemasonry. This will help frame Arús’ activism and political defense of a Federalist Iberian Peninsula, as well as giving a better understanding of the archival documents I will bring to the discussion afterwards. The Gran Lògia Simbòlica Regional Catalana (which would later be the Gran Lògia Simbòlica Regional Catalano-​Balear) was based on the three traditional symbolic degrees of freemasonry:  Apprentice (“aprenent”), Fellowcraft (“fadrí”), and Master Mason (“mestre maçó”).The GLSRC was founded in 1886; among its founders was Arús, who had been initiated in Lodges that practiced the French Rite or Modern Rite, sponsored by the Gran Oriente Lusitano Unido (GOLU). This simple historical fact is of significance because the GOLU functioned as, or could have prefigured if it had come to pass, a sort of Iberian Union. Antonio Ferrer Benimeli underscores, “al menos durante diez años, la masonería portuguesa y una parte de la Española estuvieron unidas en una prefiguración de Unión Ibérica … bajo la égida del Grande Oriente Lusitano Unido”2 (1987, 499–​500).The GLSRC was composed of members who advocated a federalist model for Spain, based on a federation of sovereign states and Pere Sánchez Ferrer affirms that freemasonry was acting as a discourse that reflected a Catalan socio-​political reality. The first point of the Gran Lògia Simbòlica Regional Catalana’s Constitution asked for the forming of a sovereign state for Catalonia within an Iberian Federation.3 Also, it is to be noted that it was the only Lodge in Spain in favor of the independence of the Spanish colonies (Ferrer Benimeli 1999, 165; on the Gran Lògia Simbòlica Regional Catalana and Federalism see Sánchez Ferrer 1990, 354). The three pillars of the GLSRC were the following: republicanism, anti-​clericalism, and freethinking.These pillars converged in the fight for the abolition of Catholic political power and the Monarchy, the mainstays of the colonial project. Freemasons’ anti-​imperialist stand in the GLSRC was articulated through advocating political, religious, and educational liberties, human rights for all races, fraternity among social classes, and equality among the people on the peninsula and people overseas (Ferrer Benimeli 1999, 159). Sánchez Ferrer recalls that its members claimed a total liberty to practice politics and quotes Cristóbal Litrán, Federalist, freemason, and freethinker, for whom “la masonería sólo era de utilidad si podía colaborar en ‘desmonarquizar el cielo’ para así poder ‘republicanizar la tierra.’ Ese es el talante masónico que impera entre los promotores de la GLSR Catalana”4 (1990, 355). This ideology was against colonial practice in general and in particular against the colonial domination that Spain was still trying to maintain overseas at that time, despite the processes of independence that were taking place throughout the Americas. Catalan was the official language of the GLSRC. Arús advocated the use of Catalan administratively for institutions, associations, etc. He certainly promoted this motion to use Catalan officially in the Societat del Born, a carnival theatrical society created in 1857 by Sebastià Junyent and for which Arús was a secretary (Vialette 2017). The 1871 Regulations of the Society stipulated, in its first article, that the official language of the society would be Catalan (Tubino 1881, 433–​435). This has to be interpreted in the general context of the second half of the nineteenth century, during which many cultural initiatives to use Catalan administratively and culturally were taking place, the most famous being the Renaixença. A manuscript in Arús’ archive titled “Llista d’amics,” in which Arús listed all his friends’ names, contains a sheet, 402

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“Renaixença y poetas,” including Renaixença intellectuals such as Jacint Verdaguer, Narcís Oller, Frederich Soler, Conrad Roure, Joseph Lluis Pellicer, among others, showing the wide networks of friends and ideological influences that Arús built during his lifetime. In “Quatre Paraules del autor al que llegeixi” (a text that is a preamble to the satirical poem Cartas a la dona, which I will analyze shortly), Arús explains the political meaning of writing in Catalan. Any Catalan writer who uses his language to write is performing a political act: “convinguin en que l’últim dels escriptors catalans, es un dels primers soldats de la crehuada catalanista; es un dels que, en la noble propaganda de difundir nostre llengua, se l’trova sempre en la primera fila; es un dels que mes alta arbola la bandera de la seva renaixensa; es un per última, dels que may li faltan forsas pera cridar: ¡avant!”5 (Tubino 1881, 29). Catalanism is presented as a crusade in which culture has a central, if not primary, role in the nation building for which writers are faithful soldiers. The military vocabulary here tells us already how the search for legitimation for Catalanists’ demands was conceived as a symbolic and concrete fight for a federalist Iberia against Madrid’s centralism. Arús’ fight for an Iberian Federation and his freemason ideology are present in many documents in his archive. His poem titled “A Catalunya” clearly shows the fight that Arús undertook in favor of a sovereign Catalonia against Spain’s political system, including its colonialist politics. The text is held at the Biblioteca Pública Arús in Barcelona and has been catalogued as “A Catalunya [Poema independentista. Al darrere, anotacions i dibuixos de R.  Arús]” [To Catalonia (Independence poem. At the back of the page, annotations and drawings by R.  Arús)]. It is a printed text, although no reference to where it might have been published is included in the description, nor is one perceptible on the document. As the cataloguing indicates, the poem advocates an independent Catalunya and the dismantling of Madrid’s centralism. A Catalunya ¡O rica Catalunya! [sic] de’l trevall la maravella, No desmayis pas t’empresa; Encar que’t llensi á la pobresa La superbia de Castella. Recordat de ‘ls diputats que pergurs ’N defensá la industria de la terra, Que cuan la patria alsat ‘l crit de guerra Catalunya entusiasta á donat en son concurs Tresors y rius de sang de bona gana; ¡La germana de Castella com li paga! Trevallain s’aruina y despitada, Trepitxa ‘ls recorts d’las barras Catalanas; Despertat terra; invocant á Clarís y Fivaller Y prenent ‘ls Centralistas la pólvora y canons Perque ‘l toch de ‘l badall d’ la campana Enfonsém d’una vegada la terra de ‘ls chorizos y sigrons. Avans que insuls de polítichs Madrileñs, Avans que ‘l jou d’nostres fills, y la míseria; Siguia ‘l crit sacrosant d’ nostra terra, Que visquia Catalunya Independenta. ABAIX ‘L CENTRALISME DE MADRID VISQUIA LA INDEPENDENCIA CATALANA.6 403

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Catalonia, described as rich and hard-​working, is the addressee of the poem. It is to be praised, encouraged to keep working and be brave enough to start fighting for its rights. If Catalonia is enthusiastic and a good, collaborative family member to Castile, Castile is, on the contrary, an arrogant, exploitative sister. At the center of his poem, Arús uses the word “Centralistas” to refer to Spaniards that Catalans have to fight against. The poem violently denounces Castille’s political, human, and territorial exploitation of Catalonia. Arús uses one of the main arguments that Catalanists had against Spain:  that it used Catalonia’s exceptional economic (“tresors” [treasures]) and human (“rius de sang” [rivers of blood]) resources in the most cruel ways for its endeavors and wars, especially the colonial wars. Treasures and rivers of blood insist on the destructive intervention of Castille in Catalonia’s vital material and human capital. The use of a violent vocabulary is a perceptible speech act: the intention goes beyond the denunciation; it asks the reader to realize the existing exploitation and calls for political action. Humor is not left out in the poem. In fact, in Arús’ writings, laughter is everywhere and is political. It is the source for a political theorization and a social critique, and a form of dissidence (Vialette 2017, 153). His theater, in particular, has been described as a political tribune by Galofré (1989, 37). Its revolutionary content is very much based on satire and other humorous approaches to social relationships. That is why Arús also organized carnivals in his neighborhood, the Ribera-​Borne. In “A Catalunya” Castilians are mocked and associated with sausages (“chorizo”) and garbanzo beans (“sigrons”). Saying that someone is a chorizo is accusing him or her of being a thief and using the word garbanzo to refer to someone is also a way of saying that this person is both mean-​spirited and miserly. The poem ends with two lines in capital letters in a call for independence expressing Arús’ desire for the collapse of Spanish centralist politics. More than independence as we understand it nowadays, we should understand this concept as Arús used it: sovereignty for Catalonia within an Iberian Federation. The objective for Arús was the creation of a Catalonian state in a federal republic that would include Portugal. This political project for the Iberian Peninsula corresponded to a tendency that Ramon Máiz calls “federalismo republicano” [Republican Federalism], which is different from “república federal” [a Federal Republic]. Republican Federalism is represented in the theory and conceptual position of Pi i Margall’s political thought. “Republican” should be attached to the political dimension of the federation and not vice versa (44–​45). Behind Margall’s and Arús’ political thought was the idea that Federation is the noun, marking first the end of the centralist state, and Republic is the adjective, insisting thus on Republican values, so Republicanism was conceived as a way to bring about and practice Federalism.This was at the core of Arús’ fight for an Iberian Federation, one that of course implied the existence of the Republic but only if it was within the functioning of the Federation itself, with a plurality of States. We see in Catalan Federal Republicans such as Arús a defensive character and a suspicion of the central State. Federalism was seen as a way to maintain or get municipal and individual prerogatives of civil society, something that was completely missing in the Spanish monarchical system. Sovereign Catalonia goes hand in hand with a sovereign Catalan freemasonry in Arús’ thought. In “A Catalunya,” Arús mentions two freemasonic names, Fivaller and Claris. The three shared political values:  Republicanism, the defense of Catalan municipal liberties, and identity. Pau Claris, a historical figure of the Reaper’s War (1640–​1659), or the Catalan Revolt, proclaimed the Catalan Republic on January 17, 1641 under the protection of the French monarchy. Claris’ name became a common term for Catalan Republican freemasons because of its historical associations and the political impact of Claris’ actions (Rodán Rabadán 1987, 533). The name actually appears both in the poem and in a list included in Arús’ manuscript “Notes, apunts, memorias, indicacions, recorts, fets y datas importants y memorables de la Gran Familia: per a us y servey d’en Rossend Arús y Arderiu (Fivaller): llibre 1er, en mars comensa—​1881.”7 Arús’ 404

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inclusion of two freemasonic names in the poem, as examples that Catalonia should invoke in its fight for sovereignty, to be protected and helped, reveals the centrality of freemason ideology in Arús’ conception of a Federalist State. Claris’ is accompanied by another freemasonic name in the poem, Fivaller, Arús’ freemasonic name. The name was taken from Johan Fivaller, a fifteenth-​century councilman from Barcelona considered a champion of Catalan municipal liberties. Ramon Grau i Fernández (1996, 53) reminds us that, even if Fivaller is not a well-​known historical figure anymore, he was an object of reverence and became part of the gallery of Catalan heroes and a referencing figure of national values during the liberal period. Sánchez Ferrer says that Arús is a “simbólico Fivaller” [symbolic Fivaller] (1987, 835), which underscores the particular work and enterprises that Arús initiated in the city he was living in to protect and develop its identity. For example, he played a great part in creating a culture of popular theater and festive activities in La Ribera-​Borne. In addition, the creation of the Arús library, the first public library of the city, stemmed from a desire to establish an urban space where all would be welcome to read, discuss, play music, and meet in a space that would reflect the heterogeneity of the neighborhood. It is to be noted that this library was envisioned by Arús and commissioned by him. It was created by Valentí Almirall and Antoni Farnés in 1895 after Arús’ death, according to his will. Arús had written norms that reflected his ideology: the space was public, free, bilingual, open to all (no one could be discriminated against and refused entrance), all books were admitted, and portraits of a political nature and religious symbols were not to be exhibited.

US independence as a laboratory for an Iberian Federation: the federal state as model The United States is unquestionably, in Arús’ manuscripts, an example that Catalans should follow; looking toward the United States meant discovering possible social and political models for Catalonia. The country had declared its independence on July 4, 1776, that is, just a century before most of Arús’ writings. Many commemorations were happening for the Centennial, among them the World’s Fair in Philadelphia.The interest in the centennial of US independence and the World’s Fair led Arús to write a satirical poem, Cartas a la dona, on the Spanish role in the Fair. It first appeared in one of his journalistic endeavors, La Llumanera de Nova York, a Catalan-​ language journal published in New York from November 1874 to 1881, edited by Catalan businessman Artúr Cuyàs i Armengol and distributed to several cities in the US, Latin America, Cuba, and Spain. Cuba was a priority market. In Barcelona, it was sold in Inocencio López Bernagosi’s bookstore. López Bernagosi, a Federalist Republican, member of the Revolutionary Junta in Barcelona in 1868, boosted the initiative of newspapers by publishing, for example, La Esquella de la Torratxa (satirical) and La Campana de Gràcia (anarchist), which gives us an important point of departure for tracing the networks of people and ideological influences in the editorial project of La Llumanera. Daily tertulias (gatherings) took place in López Bernagosi’s bookstore, attended by people engaged with the Catalanist cause, most of whom were masons: Pompeu Gener, Serafí Pitarra (Frederic Soler), and Pi i Margall, among others (Sánchez Ferrer 1987, 833). Serafí Pitarra was actually the correspondent of La Llumanera in Barcelona. Masons who were not Catalans, such as Emilio Castelar, Nicolás Salmerón, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, among others, visited this gathering. According to Sánchez Ferrer (1987), “Arús y sus compañeros de viaje formaron parte de aquella juventud que durante los últimos años del reinado de Isabel II se agrupaba en centros llamados ‘talleres’ ” [Arús and his traveling companions were members of that young generation that during the final years of Isabel II’s reign gathered in centers called “workshops”]. All topics were discussed freely in these tertulias, which in turn became the nucleus for many initiatives: the 405

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creation of newspapers, the performance of theatrical plays, and the organization of carnivals. One of the most outstanding tertulias was the “rebotiga (trastienda) de Pitarra” [Pitarra’s back room], in Escudellers Street, where many political movements and satirical newspapers were conceived (Sánchez Ferrer 1987, 834). These connections must be considered when analyzing the ideological impact and the underlying message of Arús’ Cartas a la dona published in La Llumanera and his will to imitate the US Federalist political system. Cartas a la dona was later published in New York in 1877 in book form under the same title (on La Llumanera, see Lluís Costa 2005, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, and Emmy Read 2016). The poem Cartas a la dona is without a doubt the most important contribution Arús made to the journal. But he never went to the Fair. His archive reveals the trick:  the illustrator Frederic Garriga traveled to Philadelphia and wrote letters to Arús (who stayed in Barcelona) in which he offered his vision of the Fair. Interestingly enough, the first letter addressed to Arús by Garriga is mostly in Castilian whereas the others are only in Catalan. In that first letter, Garriga uses both flattering arguments and ironic mention of prospects of international fame to convince Arús to write the satirical poem: “A este fin deseamos que con la facilidad que tu tienes nos hagas un romance critico del departamento de industria de España … Todo dicho va a hacerte mas popular que Castro y Serrano con sus relaciones—​viage al izmo de Suez escrito desde Madrid”8 (1876, 1). With Garriga’s account in prose, Arús wrote the poem in verse and published it in a serialized form under the pseudonym, Pau Pi Pla. The poem concentrates the description of the international writer/​traveler to the “yanqui” country, as Garriga calls it in his letters. However, the creative process is to a greater extent complicated because Arús’ fictional traveler, Pau Pi Pla, is a Catalan mayor from a small town who is completely astonished by the grandeur of the US and the idea of cosmopolitanism and extremely satirical about his own country, Spain. This perception of Pau Pi Pla’s ideas on these questions is possible because we have direct access to his thoughts: he is the narrator, and what we are reading is framed as the daily letters he writes to his wife. The dedication to the Cartas a la dona further plays with this notion of fiction. It is a letter to Philadelphia’s City Hall and first appears in English “To the Righ [sic] Honourable Corporation of the City of Philadelphia. Pen. U.S.A” (17) and then translated into Catalan “Traducció de la dedicatoria. A l’Ajuntament de Filadelfia se’l’hi enviaren escritas en pergami, las dos dedicatorias; la original y la traduhida” [Translation of the dedication. Written on parchment, the two dedications—​the original and the translation—​were sent to the Philadelphia City Council] (18–​19).The manuscript in the Arús archive, in Catalan, is dated January 28, 1877.This material aspect of the book (the existence of a manuscript in Catalan that in the book is supposed to be the translation of an English text) is the point of departure for the main idea of the project: the construction of a fictional communication between Catalonia and the US through different voices and through the inclusion of paratexts that I  will analyze further:  dedications, letters, prefaces to the reader, prologues, and warnings. The three voices are first the fictional international traveler Pau Pi Pla, second the writer Rossend Arús i Arderiu, and third, the freemason Fivaller; and all write in and sign the publication.These voices all converge into one ideological project: that of extoling the US political, social, and economic model while disapproving of Spain’s decision on how to project its image in the World’s Fair. In fact, in “Quatre Paraules del autor al que llegeixi,” one of the paratexts in the book, Arús explains how the project went from being a review of the World’s Fair to being a narration about “lo mes principal y recomenable que te la gran república americana” [the most important and recommendable thing that the great American republic has] (1877, 26). The publication of a satirical poem in the press has to be interpreted in a specific publishing context in which satirical poems with political critiques written by Republicans were the norm after the Gloriosa Revolution of 1868. This constitutes 406

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part of the character of opposition and resistance of Republicanism at that time (Duarte and Gabriel 2000, 13). Arús is undeniably a representative of this publishing trend. In the letter to the Philadelphia City Hall, Arús discusses Catalonia and the US in the following terms: “desitjo de juntar los noms de dos pobles que ja ols uneix de sempre l’entrañable y cega idolatria que tenen per la sacrosanta llibertat” [I wish to join the names of two peoples that have already been forever united under the endearingly blind adoration they have for sacrosanct liberty]. In this letter, Arús speaks as Fivaller but signs as Rossend Arús, making visible his commitment to freemason values by publicly signing what was written in Fivaller’s voice and acknowledging it as his own. Arús never concealed that he was a mason. He says that his poem (Cartas a la dona) is, at least partially, a dialogue between the noble homeland of Washington and the proud homeland of Fivaller (3). George Washington, on top of being one of the main protagonists of the American Revolution that led to the Independence of the US, was a freemason, who had joined freemasonry in the Lodge of Fredericksburg,Virginia, in 1752. Washington, as well as other founding fathers, played a great role in the fascination that Catalan freemasons such as Arús had for the US and its independence as a model. In fact, in Garriga’s letters to Arús, freemasonry is mentioned as something that a US citizen is proud of—​most of the American founders were masons. Garriga offers Arús many descriptions of Americans in his correspondence. In one of them, he explains how a typical US man is dressed: “una levita amb als faldons als peu, per medallon del relotjes la estralla masónica” [a floor-​length dressing gown, and the Masonic Star for a watch medallion] (27). As we can see, the reference to freemasonry is very concrete, not only showing that the typical American is a freemason, but that he is so publicly. In truth, and according to Georg Simmel (1906, 483), freemasons in the US were those who most enjoyed political liberties in the nineteenth century. Brotherhood and fraternity are conceptually and ideologically aligned with Arús’ freemasonic principles and go hand in hand with his anti-​Castille sentiment (discussed in the previous section) and his praise of the US model, for example, in “Escrit adreçat als alcaldes,” his June 30, 1877 manuscript. This is a text addressed to US mayors and published both in Cartas a la dona and in La Llumanera. This letter is a reflection of his Republican Catalanism, his Catalan freemasonry, and his fascination with the US. In it, he does not hesitate to take for granted that the political model in Spain is outdated: “Ja s’està acavant l’Espanya; /​Primer qu’ell a n’el dimoni!” [Spain is already at its end; /​First, to the devil with you!] (21). Besides denouncing Spain’s abuses as a country that “sempre diu que ns’ protegeix … /​y en pago nos oprimeix” [always says it will protect us … /​and as payback it oppresses us] (30), Arús creates a set of oppositions and resemblances in which Spain, Catalonia, and the US are the items in play. In this sort of redistribution of an avant la lettre geopolitics, Arús, through the voice of Pau Pi Pla, compares Catalonia and the US by pointing out the resemblances between Philadelphia and Das (Pau Pi Pla’s hometown): “pel rest’ Filadelfia y Das /​son iguals en tots terrenos. /​Tenen carreres, tenen plassas. /​edificis, fossar, gent … /​lo mateix exactament /​salvo l’ número de passas” [for the rest, Philadelphia and Das /​are the same in all respects. /​They have streets, they have plazas. /​buildings, cemeteries, people … /​the exact same /​except in size] (22–​23). The physical similarities one would qualify as naïve (the character of Pau Pi Pla is indeed constructed as a naïve Catalan who is amazed at what he experiences abroad) are nevertheless the justification for advocating political sovereignty for Catalonia. Arús picks up the thread of the comparison between the US and Catalonia in “Quatre Paraules del autor al que llegeixi” as a way to underscore the particularities of Catalonia within Spain: “Al noble desitx de que Catalunya, que en la current impetuosa del progrés marxa com sempre al devant de tot lo rest de Espanya, com aquesta república Nort americana va á la vanguardia de tot lo mon”9 (1877, 27). Here the comparison is less than naïve; it is a demand that Catalonia be recognized with a status comparable 407

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to that of the US internationally and geopolitically.To come back to “Escrit adreçat als alcaldes,” the narrator expresses his regret that Catalonia joined Castile in the Middle Ages—​probably a historical reference to the Reaper’s War and Paul Claris (“Nos varen fer castellans: /​qui es que hi pensa y no renega …! /​D’alli ns’ ve tota la pega … /​de no anar sols com avans!” [We were made Castilian: /​who’d think about it and would not grumble...! /​From then on, we’re all trapped … /​by not being alone as before] [25])—​and affirms that he wants his country to imitate the United States of America: “Ne desitjo per ma patria /​Vostres lleys, vostres ventura” [What I  want for my homeland /​your laws, your future] (32). The word patria here refers to Catalonia, and Arús describes it as a future sister to the US, both politically and emotionally: “Ja qu’en sentiments semblans /​los nostres cors se nudreixan, /​si ara casi no s’coneixan, /​ que demá sigan germans” [Since in feelings like this /​our hearts are nourished, /​if now they hardly know each other, /​may tomorrow they be brothers] (33). Arús’ ending his letter with a mention of brotherhood has to be understood along with the interpretation I provided of the previous poem, “A Catalunya.” If Castile is a cruel sister to Catalonia, the United States will be the perfect substitute. Philadelphia is presented as a model city in Arús’ letter to the Philadelphia City Hall. He mentions how the city, a century before “doná l’entussiasta crit de ‘Via fora’ contra lo despota dominador, esporuguintlo ab los rugidors accents que al espay llensava, ferida ab rabia per son batall, la campana de la independencia”10 (3). It is necessary to look at Arús’ interest in the US Centennial through some historical referents. Indeed, according to Luis Moreno in Federalización de España. Poder político y territorio, we can establish a parallel between the colonial fight for emancipation in the US (and its resulting independence) and the Spanish War of Independence against the French invader starting in 1808. However, the outcome in Spain after the war was the contrary to that of the US: the transposition of a centralized bureaucracy and a juridical and cultural homogeneity with the abolition of separate political territories, a concept the government considered backward (Moreno 2008, 60). Arús’ manuscript writing and correspondence with Garriga show that he conceived his Cartas a la dona as a way to transmit ideas about the legitimacy of Federalism. In fact, the ideological ground seems to have been prepared in the journal before the publication of Arús’ poem. Indeed, US independence from the British Empire and its Constitution creating a federal state is the central topic of the first few issues of La Llumanera de Nova York. In its first issue, published in November 1874, an article on United States independence was published anonymously: “Lo dia 4 de Juliol de 1876 farà cent anys que aquet pays se proclamá en República federal” [July 4, 1876 will be 100 years since that country proclaimed itself a Federal Republic] (2). This first article, in fact, is political and addresses the Federal Republic as well as the US centennial. It explains how the World’s Fair was to take place in Philadelphia from May 19 until October 10, 1876. It was actually the first official World’s Fair. The article mentions that Spain should take this opportunity to show its value to the world, since in the United States people usually believe Spaniards are either bullfighters or lazy. In the text all the stereotypes associated with the European and American imaginary regarding Spain at that time are listed; the country is even qualified as “molt abandonat” [very isolated] at an international level. The article adds that, by the same token, it would be necessary to show what is done in Catalonia because the Fair would be a great opportunity for Catalonia and would open markets and business alliances in the US and in South America with Barcelona (3). The concern that Catalonia be well represented at the Fair in Philadelphia is constant. In the December 1876 issue, the editor mentions that this Fair will be the central theme of the journal, and that every issue will address a topic that will have to do with the Fair and with its preparation, and will gift the readers with illustrations of the Fair’s buildings and Philadelphia’s buildings in general. 408

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We have to read the articles and Arús’ poem Cartas a la dona in La Llumanera de Nova York with the archive, and thus along the grain (Stoler 2010). The archive here reveals the creative process for the construction of an ideological plan that advocates a specifically Federalist political model for Spain. As one would expect, many stories told by Garriga ended up not being part of the satirical poem. For example, some of Garriga’s letters are a window into American social practices at that time and are also very amusing. The letters contain many glosses added by Garriga to his own text regarding the English language and its pronunciation: “I do not understand /​se pronunciá llegintu am totas las lletras. AI NO ANDESTEN” [all the letters are pronounced. I NO UNDERSTAN] (14), or “al estat de New-​Jersey /​se pronuncien NU JORSI” [the State of New Jersey /​is pronounced NOO JORSEY] (16). Indeed, Garriga’ and Arús’ communication was not always too serious. Garriga was determined to offer Arús the complete experience of a Catalan citizen discovering the US in all its aspects. He refers many times to Arús’ letters but unfortunately, Arús did not keep a libro copiador and these are in some hidden archive, yet to be found.

Conclusion There is a noticeable difficulty in working with masonic intellectuals like Arús (Sánchez Ferré 1987, 833), and the researcher has no alternative but to spend endless hours with manuscript archival documents. Indeed, it is only by disentangling Arús’ complicated and private paperwork and writings that one perceives the complexity of the interplay between Catalan freemasonic and federalist thought. It is necessary to prove not only its relevance but also its centrality to understanding nineteenth-​ century political movements. Indeed, it reveals how Catalan Republican Federalists advocated for an Iberian Federation in which Catalonia would be a sovereign State. In this process, the example of the United States federal system was crucial. Ideologically, Arús was Americanist. And his physical environment was and has been constructed as such since then. For example, a reproduction of the American Statue of Liberty was erected in 1895 in the Arús library, which was Arús’ former home, located in the Passeig de Sant Joan in Barcelona. The original statue—​now considered American—​was designed by Frédéric Gustave Bartholdi, a French freemason sculptor, and the iron structure that sustains it was done by Gustave Eiffel, a French freemason as well. The statue in the Arús library has the torch that enlightens the world and a book in her hand in which one can read “Anima Libertas,” a masonic reference. At the foot of the statue in New York, there is a bronze plaque that tells how the statue was installed in a masonic ceremony. In addition, this statue was a gift from France to the United States for the centennial of its independence. So again, the US Centennial, the Federal Republic, and freemasonry prove to be linked and interdependent around the important, albeit almost forgotten, figure of Rossend Arús i Arderiu.

Notes 1 See “Agustí Trilla i Alcover i la maçoneria a Cervera.” Xuclà Comas studies the performances of lawyer Agustí Trilla i Alcover, Republican, freemason, and Arús’ friend in Barcelona (2001, 38). 2 “[F]‌or at least ten years, the Portuguese and some Spanish masons were united in the precursor of an Iberian Union … under the aegis of the Grand United Orient of Portugal.” All translations of foreign-​ language quotations are by Linda Grabner, University of Pennsylvania. 3 Nonetheless, there was a great ideological heterogeneity regarding this issue among the members of the Catalan Lodge; some of them were more radical, for example, Cristóbal Litrán, who was a follower of Pi i Margall’s ideology (Sánchez Ferrer 1987, 843), and others were more moderate.

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Aurélie Vialette 4 “[F]‌reemasonry was only useful if it could collaborate in ‘dethroning heaven’ to then be able to ‘republicanize earth.’This is the prevailing masonic attitude among the promotors of the Catalan  GLSR.” 5 “[T]‌hey agree that the last of the Catalan writers is one of the first soldiers of the Catalanist crusade. He is one of those who, in the noble cause of spreading our language, finds himself always in the vanguard; he is one of those who raises high the standard of its rebirth; in the end, he is one of those who never lacks strength to shout, ‘Onward!’ ” 6 “To Catalonia /​Oh, rich Catalonia! [sic] the marvel of your labor, /​Never forget your destiny; /​Even though Castile’s pride /​May render you poor. /​Remember the representatives you are losing /​In defense of the bounty of the land, /​that when the homeland raises the war cry /​Catalonia, eager to willingly give, in her struggle, /​Treasures and rivers of blood. /​Castille’s sister, how you pay her! / Catalonia having worked so hard gets bankrupt and, spiteful, / Steps on the memory of the Catalan spangles; /​Awaken the land; invoke Clarís and Fivaller /​And take to the Centralists’ lands gunpowder and guns /​So that at the sound of the bell /​We bury once and for all the land of sausages and garbanzo beans. /​In the face of the insults of the Madrid politicians, /​In the face of the yokes of our children, and the misery; /​Follow the sacred cry of our land, /​Long live Independent Catalunya. /​DOWN WITH MADRID’S CENTRALISM /​LONG LIVE CATALAN INDEPENDENCE.” 7 “Notes, reflections, memoirs, indications, clippings, facts, and important and memorable dates of the Great Family:  for the use of Rossend Arús i Arderiu (Fivaller):  book 1, begun in March—​1881.” This list, however, seems to have been included a posteriori in the document. It is in a more recent handwriting and a different ink, probably from an archivist who tried to link freemasons’ names to civic names. 8 “To this end, we hope that with the ability you have, you will write us a critical romance of Spain’s Department of Industry … Everything said will make you more popular than Castro and Serrano with their relations—​trip to the Suez Isthmus, written from Madrid.” 9 “The noble wish that Catalonia, that in the impetuous current of progress, marches ahead of the rest of Spain, just as this North American republic marches ahead of all the world.” 10 “[E]‌nthusiastically shouted ‘To the streets!’ against the domineering tyrant, spurred on by the roars that filled the space, enraged by the sound of battle, the bell of Independence Hall.”

Works cited Alvarez-​Junco, José. 2004.“En torno al concepto de ‘pueblo.’ De las diversas encarnaciones de la colectividad como sujeto político en la cultura política española contemporánea.” Historia Contemporánea 28: 83–​94. Arús i Arderiu, Rossend. [18..?] “A Catalunya.” MMS. Arús i Arderiu, Rossend. [s.a]. “Cartas a la dona.” MMS. Arús i Arderiu, Rossend. 1877 (28 January). “Carta Manuscrite de Rossend Arús i Arderiu a l’ajuntament de Filadelfia.” MMS. Arús i Arderiu, Rossend. 1877 (30 June). “Manuscrit de l’escrit adreçat als alcaldes, regidors, vidicts y demas que composan l’Ajuntament de Filadelfia.” MMS. Arús i Arderiu, Rossend, and Lorenzo Frau Abrines. 1891? Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Masonería: con un suplemento seguido de la historia general de la Orden masónica desde los tiempos más remotos hasta la época actual … completado con un taller general de la francmasonería, guía de dignatarios y oficiales de las logias, capítulos y grandes cámaras … Havana: La Propaganda Literaria. La Campana de Gràcia. 1870–​1934. Barcelona: López. Cagiao y Conde, Jorge. 2013. “Pi y Margall:  figura emblemática del federalismo español.” In Figures emblématiques de l’imaginaire politique espagnol, edited by Paloma Bravo and Alexandra Palau, 239–​247. Paris: Indigo. “Lo centenari de la República.” 1874. La Llumanera de Nova York 1(1): 2–​3. Costa, Lluís. 2005. “La Llumanera de Nova York (1874–​1881): la veu d’una burgesia catalana a favor d’una Cuba espanyola.” Treballs de Comunicació 19: 55–​65. Costa, Lluís. 2012. La Llumanera de Nova York (1874–​ 1881):  un periòdic entre Catalunya i Amèrica. Barcelona: Llibres de l’Índex. Costa, Lluís. 2014a. “La prensa como instrumento cohesionador de la identidad nacional. La proyección de Cataluña en Cuba.” Hispanic Research Journal 15(6): 492–​514. Costa, Lluís. 2014b. “Advertising and journalistic modernization: the case of La Llumanera de Nova York (1874–​1881).” Catalan Journal of Communication and Cultural Studies 6(1): 95–​114.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures and in bold indicate tables on the corresponding pages. Abans del bany 319 Abasolo, J. M. de 258 Abbas, M. 104 Aben Humeya 174 “Abolición de la esclavitud” 374–​375 Abolicionista, El 370, 375, 377, 378 abolitionism: Arenal, C. 370 Abril, J. 256 acculturation 69–​70 acts of seizure 221–​222 Addresses to the German Nation 265–​266 Adolfo, G. 197–​198 A ese! 309 afilador de sables, El 100 agriculture 222 Aguinaldo, E. 116, 143 Aguinaldos puertorriqueños 278 Aguirre, A. 207 Ahmed, M. 104 Aidoo, A. A. 68, 72 Aires d’a miña terra 205 Alameda y Brea, C. 39, 47 al-​Andalus 172–​177, 173, 176 Alarcón, P. A. de 92, 389 Alas, L. 208 Alberdi, J. B. 258 Albino, J. 82 Albizu Campos, P. 290 Álbum puertorriqueño 278 Alcalá, P. de 81 Alcalá Galiano, F. 104 Alfonso XII 13 Alfonso XIII 77, 179, 245 Algeria, Spanish migration to 78–​81

Alhambra, architecture of 172–​177 Alhambra,The 178 Alhambra: A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and Spaniards,The 170 Allende, I. 258 Almirall,V. 163, 401 Alonso, M. A. 10, 278 Alsina, R. M. 94 Altamira, R. 270 Álvarez de Castro, C. 207 Álvarez Junco, J. 348 Amigo Manso, El 193 amor venga sus agravios, El 195 Amorrortu, S. 255–​256 amours de Cagayous, Les 79 Ampurdán y los ampurdaneses, El 274 Ampurdanés, El 41 Andalousie au temps des Maures, L’ 171, 173 Anderson, B. 14, 207, 279, 282–​283 Andreu Miralles, X. 169 Anduze, J. B. 362 Anguera, P. 328 Annals of Artists of Spain,The 178 Añón, F. 206, 207 Antiguedades, y principado de la ilustrissima ciudad de Sevilla 269 Anuario Estadístico de España 51 Aplec del Remei, L’ 43 Árabe delante de un tapiz 100 Arabian Antiquities of Spain 172 Arabian Nights 99 Araña, La 79 archaeology 272–​275 Archilés, F. 144

413

414

Index Architect’s Note-​book in Spain. Principally Illustrating the Domestic Architecture in that Country, An 182 architecture, Spanish 172–​177, 173, 176, 180–​181, 180–​183 Arenal, C.: “Abolición de la esclavitud” by 374–​375; “A las mujeres” by 375–​377; gender, enlightenment, and liberal subjectivity in writings of 379; “La esclavitud de los negros” by 371–​374; “Moral blanca y moral negra” by 378–​379; as proto-​feminist, philanthropist, and social reformer 370–​371; strategies of negotiation used by 371; utility and justice in writings of 377–​378; on women’s sphere of influence and imagined communities 375–​377 Arístegui, R. 9 Arizcun, A. 19 Arnalte, A. 64 Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2, Portrait of Thomas Carlyle 179 Arte para ligéramente saber la lengua aráviga, El 81 Artola, M. 7, 11, 236 arts administration, state 385–​387, 396–​397; creation and control of national collection and exhibition system in 388–​392; importation and exportation restrictions in 392–​393; nineteenth-​ century expansion of collecting and 387–​388; property laws and disclosure in 393–​396 Arús i Arderiu, R. 400–​402; fight for Iberian Federation and freemasonry ideology of 402–​405; on US independence 405–​409 Asociación Española para la Exploración de África 82 Asociación Vasco-​Navarra de Beneficencia 25 ¡A Somatén! 43 assimilationism in Puerto Rico 283–​285 Atlantic, geography of the 362–​364, 363 Aurelius, M. 270 Auténtico Espronceda pornográfico y el apócrifo en general: estudio crítico vindicativo al que precede la biografía del gran poeta, El 189, 191–​192, 194–​199 autonomism in Puerto Rico 283–​285 autonomy: of Caribbean islands 13–​14, 15; Enlightenment thinking on 371 Autorretrato 321–​322, 322 Aventures du dernier Abencerrage, Le 168 Aviñoa, X. 334 Avisador, El 211 Ayala, F. 191 Azcárate, G. 347, 370, 371 Babí, R. 334 Badia y Leiblich, D. 84, 85–​86 Bahamonde, Á. 304 Bairoch, P. 219 Bakunin, M. 42 Balaguer,V. 14, 35, 45, 110, 155–​158, 156, 158 Baldorioty de Castro, R. 10, 14 Ballano Gonzalo, F. 66, 67

Balzac, H. de 309 Bandera, Q. 141–​142, 145 Barcia, M. 299 Baroja, P. 240–​241 Barthes, R. 307 Basarrate, I. 182 Basques 84, 140, 244; construction of visible community in diaspora of 21–​25; diasporic identity of 26–​28; geographic origins of 20; migration and national identity of 19–​21, 20, 251–​253; nationalism and 254–​255; organized communities of 25–​26 Batalla de Tetuán, La 101–​105, 103 Baudelaire, C. 105 Baudrillard, J. 307 Bayamesa, La 43 Becerra, M. 110 Bécquer, G. A. 189, 192, 196–​197, 199–​200 Beecroft, J. 65 Bellini,V.  40 Bello Vázquez, F.  198 Ben Abdallah, S. M. 97 Benedito, M. 317 Benjamin, W.  307 Bennet, A. 206 Bentham, J. 371–​372, 377 Berger, J. 307 Bermúdez, C. 180 Bestia humana, La 314, 314 Betances, R. E. 11, 287–​289 Bible of Spain, or the Journeys, Adventures and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula,The 170–​171 Bilbao, J. 20 biography 189–​200; by Jarnés and Chacel 189–​200; novela vanguardista 191; and Ortega y Gasset 191–​193, 196; Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX 189–​190 Black colonizers 66 black women 140–​143 Blanco, F. 329 Blanco-​Amor, E.  256 Blasco Ibáñez,V. 244, 405 Böhl von Faber, J. N. 197 Boletín de Estadística Demográfico-​Sanitaria de la Península e Islas Adyacentes 50 Bolivar, S. 258 Boltanski, L. 239 Bolufer, M. 371, 376 Bomabá, J. R. 63 Bonaparte, J. 220 Bonaparte, L. L. 84 Bonifacio, A. 115, 116 Boquillon-​Wilhelm, G. L. 32 Borbones en pelota, Los 197–​199 Borovaya, O. 76

414

415

Index Borrow, G. 170–​171 Borrowed Words 208 Bosch i Gimpera, P. 275 Botet i Sisó, J. 273 Bouveret, P. D. 314 Bozal,V. 236, 238 Bringas, La de 124 Brookner, A. 387 Brooks, P. 122 Brouillet, P. A. 321 Brown, N. 126 Brull, J. 318 Brunet, M. 274 Bubis 66–​70 Bujons, J. A. N. 309 Burdiel, I. 197–​198 Burgos, J. de 395 Burguera, M. 369 Burguete, R. 146 burial of Christ,The 242 busca, La 241 Caballé, A. 370, 379 Cabet, E. 31, 42 Cabezas, J. A. 190 Cabot, F. S. 104 Cabral, M. 318 Cabra Loredo, M. D. 197 Cabrera de Córdoba, L. 268 Cagayous philosophe 79 Caja de Reempatrio 26 Caja Protectora del Inmigrante 26 Calaix de sastre 326 Caldera, E. 328 Calderón de la Barca, P. 197 Calle, M. L. de la 66–​67, 67 Callot, J. 236 Calvo Serraller, F. 244 campana de Gràcia, La 254, 405 Campión, A. 84 Canals, E. 71 Cancionero de Borinquén 278 cancionero del esclavo, El 371 Cané, M. 24 Cañes, F. 81–​82 Cánovas del Castillo, A. 13, 141, 286, 385 Cap al tard 45 Capdevila, F. 258 capitalism 123; Spanish cities in wake of, 1830–​1890 219–​225, 220–​221, 224, 224–​225; see also realism Capuchin theatre 332–​335, 333 Caribbean islands, the: causes and remedies for evil in 14; Cuban Wars and 140–​143; emancipation in 10–​11; Glorious Revolution and colonial uprisings in 11–​13; literary production in 9–​10; modernity in 8–​10; road to autonomy for

13–​14, 15; slavery in 7–​8, 10–​11, 296; Spanish colonization of 4–​7, 6; Spanish migrants to 250–​251; Spanish nationalism and 254–​257; United States involvement in 15, 16; see also soldiers, Spanish Carillo, C. 362 Carlist Civil Wars 20, 25, 78, 84, 328, 335, 389, 392 Carlos III 142, 349 Carmen 171, 183 Caro, R. 269–​271 Carpentier, A. 5 Carr, R. 387 Carrière, E. 321 Carrillo, J. L. 321 Cartas a la dona 405–​406 Cartas a los delincuentes 370 Casa de despesas, La 335 Casanova, G. 150–​151 Casanova, P. 208 Casas, R. 315, 316, 318–​319, 319 Castelar, E. 37, 77, 405 Castro, F. de 370 Castro, R. de 206, 207, 213–​215 Castro Antolin, M. L. 66–​67, 67 Catalan identity 160–​165, 162–​164; archaeology and 272–​275; Arús i Arderiu and 400–​409; migration and 251–​253; nationalism and 255–​256 Catalan Theater  335 Catalina Howard 331 Cataluña 155 “Catalunya, A” 403–​404 Catholic Church, the: citizenship, education, and 349; Claretian missionaries and 67–​71; desamortización and 390; national identity and 160–​165; in the Philippines 112–​113; property laws and disclosure and 394; Reformation and 264; unity of Spain and 156–​157; visual culture of suffering and 245–​246 Cavite Mutiny 114 Cayuela, J. 304 Celestina, La 241 Cents and Sensibility 123 Céspedes, C. M. de 11, 258 Chacarte, F. 144 Chacel, R. 189, 191–​196, 200–​201 Chacón, C. 67–​68, 70 chain migration 23 Chambers, W.  172 Champeville, C. 159 Champfleury, J. 101 Charcot, J. 321 Charles III 5, 151, 392 Charles IV 236 Chateaubriand, F. R. 168 Chaviano, L. 302 Chicharro, E. 317

415

416

Index child mortality 52–​53, 59, 223 Chinese influence in the Philippines 113–​114 choral societies 32–​35, 33, 46–​47; choral singers as new model of citizen and 35–​39, 37–​38; public entertainments and social identity with 39–​42; Romantic repertoire for 42–​46, 44, 46 Ciencia y Caridad 316 Ciges Aparicio, M. 146 cisne de Vilamorta, El 214 cities see urbanization citizenship: education and 348–​351; race and 378 Clairin, G. 100 Clamor de Galicia, El 209 Clarence-​Smith, W.  295 Claret, A. M. 39, 47 Claretian missionaries 67–​71 Clarke, J. 68 classical world, the 263–​267; Spanish nationalism and 267–​272; uses of archaeology of 272–​275 Clavé, À. R. 36 Clavé, J. A. 31–​35, 37–​39, 42–​45, 46, 47, 145; see also Cors de Clavé Clifford, C. 183 Clorosis 320, 320–​321 Club de los Federalistas 401 Codera, F. 82–​83, 85 cognitive mapping 272 collecting, art 396–​397; creation and control of national exhibition system for 388–​392; growth of 387–​388; importation and exportation restrictions on 392–​393; property laws and disclosure and 393–​396 Collell, J. 163 colonialism, Spanish 145–​147; in Cuba and Puerto Rico 4–​14, 6, 15–​16; end of 55; in Equatorial Guinea 63–​72, 67, 69; indifference and restitution in 138–​140; letters home from soldiers and 136–​138; in the Maghreb and Ottoman Empire 75–​87; migration to America and 250–​260; in the Philippines 106–​117; racializing and genderizing the nation through 140–​143; Spanish-​American War and 116–​117; Spanish-​Moroccan War and 91–​96, 159 Comas, X. 402 Comas y Blanco, A. 243 Comisión de Reformas Sociales 54 Comte Arnau, El 275 Conangla i Fontanilles, J. 146–​147 Concepción Arenal; o, El sentido romántico de la justicia 190 Conde, A. 174 Con la conciencia tranquila 317 Consideraciones generales de estadística médica 50 Coplas del Gibaro, Las 9 Corchado y Juarbe, M. 287 Córdova, P. T. de 8 Correo de Orán, El 78

Cors de Clavé: choral singer as new model of citizen and 35–​39, 37–​38; choral societies’ culture and 32–​35, 37, 39; origins of 31–​32; Romantic choral repertoire for 42–​46, 44, 46 Cossío, B. 347 Costa, J. 78, 84, 85 Costumbrismo 10 Courbet, G. 308–​309 Covadonga 156, 156, 160–​163, 162 Cowling, C. 143 Cremieux, A. 76 Crimean War  43 Cruz, A. de la 114 Cuarterona, La 287 Cuba: Cuban Wars 140–​143; Iberian migrants to 253–​254; illegal trade of enslaved Africans in 299–​301; slaves in 7–​8, 10–​11, 296–​297; sugar/​ slave binomial in 297–​299; see also Caribbean islands, the Cubano-​Iguina, A. 284, 287 cuestión palpitante, La 240 cuestión religiosa, La 157 Culi, J. 76 cultural dependence 72 Cunningham, A. 178 Curet, F. 326–​327 Curros Enríquez, M. 205–​206, 207 Cusí, M. 311–​312 D’Amat, R. 326 David, J. L. 390 Davillier, C. 97 Decisive Moments in History 191 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens 340 decree of 1833 220–​221 Degetau, F. 289–​290 Delacroix, E. 93 Délécluze, E. 390 Deleuze, G. 72 Democracia, La 14 Democracia Española, La 78 Derrida, J. 87 desamortización 390, 392 Desastres de la Guerra 235–​240, 238–​239 Desbois, J. 241 “Description du Sous” 84 Desgracia, Una 242 Desheredada, La 123, 129–​134 Despujol, E. 110 Diario de Barcelona 326, 329 Diario de la Coruña, El 211 Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África 92 diaspora see migrants, Iberian Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Masonería 401 Dickens, C. 134 Dimoni Coixo, El 78 Disasters of War 235–​240, 238–​239

416

417

Index Doble agonía de Bécquer 189, 192, 196, 199 Domínguez, J. J. 241 Doña Berta 124 Doradoras 311–​312, 312 Doré, G. 241 d’Ors, E. 272, 273–​274, 275 Dos de los trabajos, Los 318 Douglass, W. A.  20 Duarte, Á. 401 Eco Español, El 78 Eco Ferrolano, El 211 economic theory see realism education: instituting a system for 346–​348; nation-​state and 339–​342; relation to citizenship, civilization, and language 348–​351; state projects in 342–​346 Eibl-​Eibesfeldt, I.  72 Eller, A. 139 emancipation discourse 10–​11 Emeterio Betances, R. 287 Eminent Victorians 190, 191 empecinado, El 246 encantador de serpientes, El 99–​100 energy transition 227 Enlightenment, Spanish 371, 376, 379 Ensayo sobre el derecho de gentes 370 Entierro en Ornans 308–​309 Episodios nacionales 240, 241, 246 Episodios políticos del Siglo XIX 190 Equatorial Guinea 63, 71–​72; first period of identity dislocation in, 1827–​1843 64–​65; second period of identity dislocation in, 1843–​1899 65–​70, 67, 69; third period of identity dislocation in, 1900–​1931 70–​71 Erato Choral Society 35, 38 Eráusquin, M. 25 “Esclavitud de los negros, La” 371–​374 Escosura, P. de la 179, 180, 182, 195 Escriu, J. 92 Escuela Nacional de Sanidad 57 España 155 España artística y monumental 179, 180, 183 España de Galdós, La 193 España Sagrada. Teatro Geográfico-​Histórico de la Iglesia de España 180 Espigadoras, Las 309 Espina, A. 190, 191–​192 Espina y Capo, A. 54 Esquella de la Torratxa, La 405 Essai d’Éducation Nationale 339 Estado Catalán, El 401 Estado Libre Asociado 291 Euskaldun Guziak Bat 27–​28 Euskal Echea de Quilmes 25, 26 Euskal Etxea 252 Euterpe Choral Society 37, 42

Evil Eye 170, 171 Faber, S. 2, 195 Fábrica textil 311 Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea 268 Fages de Climent, C. 190 Familia del anarquista, La 317 Familia del anarquista el día de su ejecución, La 316–​317 Familia marroquí 94, 95 Fantasía Árabe 99, 99 Fatigada! 317 Faust 40 Febre d’or, La 123–​126 federalism, Spanish 400–​409 Federal Writers Project  25 Feijoo, B. J. 371 Felipe II 326 feminist critique 369; see also Arenal, C. Ferdinand VII 7, 8, 108, 151, 169, 174, 245 Fergusson, J. 180–​182 Fernán Caballero, la novelista novelable 190 Fernández, P. 369 Fernández Almagro, M. 191 Fernández de los Ríos, A. 391 Fernández Soria, J. M. 340 Fernando VII 236, 237, 283, 295, 328 Fernando Poo see Equatorial Guinea Ferrándiz, B. 100 Ferrés, M. 33 Ferrer, A. 5, 13, 141 Fichte, J. G. 265–​267 Fillol, A. 309, 314, 314–​315 Firmat, P. 192 First Republic, Spanish 37, 43, 44 Fisher, P. 245 Flórez, E. 180 Flors de Maig, Les 45 Fonseca, L. 138 Fontanella, L. 197 Fora Grillons! 258 Ford, R. 152, 153–​154, 180 Fort, C. R. 211 Fort, F. 101 Fortuny, la mitad de una vida 190 Fortuny Marsal, M.: battle paintings of 91–​96; Great Painting by 101–​105, 103; orientalist works and final trip to Morocco by 98–​100, 99; second trip to Morocco by 97–​98, 98; tableautin de casacones of 308 Fradera, J. 8, 139, 332, 336 Fraginals, M. M. 7, 296 Franco’s dictatorship 165 Fraternidad Obrera, La 78 Freemasonry 31, 370; Arús i Arderiu on 400–​409 Fromentin, E. 93 Fusi, J. P. 7, 387

417

418

Index Fuster, J. 80 Fuxà, M. 46 Gabriel, P. 401 Galas del cinca, Las 43 Galdos, R. 27, 123 Galichon, E. 95 Galicia 205–​208; Benito Vicetto and Manual Murguia on 208–​213; Emilia Pardo Bazán on 213–​215; migration from 251–​253; nationalism and 256–​257 Galofré, J. 392 Ganivet, A. 78, 270, 271 García, M. 312 García, P. 46 García Camba, A. 110 García Castellón, M. 373 García Espuche, A. 326 García Llansó, A. 308 García-​Sanz Marcotegui, A.  19 Garrido, F. 145 Garriga, F. 406–​409 Gatell, J. 84, 85–​86 Gatherings of Spain 170 Gaudí, A. 164 Gautier, T.  99 Gavarni, P. 241 Gayangos, P. de 174 Gazeta de Puerto-​Rico 278 Gazette de Beaux Arts 95 Geller, E. 290–​291 Generación del 98, 235, 272 General Curriculum, 1845 342–​346 General Serrano, Duque de la Torre, El 190 Géricault, T.  238 German culture 266–​267 Gérôme, J.-​L.  95 Gíbaro, El 10, 278 Giner de los Ríos, F. 347, 370 Ginger, A. 174 Global Hispanophone cultural production see Maghreb and Ottoman Empire, the Glorious Revolution 11–​13, 37 Glover, S. A. 32 Godoy, M. 85 Gómez de la Serna, R. 191 Goncourt, E. de 387 Góngora, L. de 268 González, M. 219 Gorriones y Bigaritas 43 Gosse, E. 190 Gounod, C. 40 Goupil, A. 95, 98, 100 Goux, J.-​J.  122 Goya, F. de 235–​236, 244, 245; Desastres de la Guerra 236–​240, 238–​239 Gralla, La 252

Gramática de los cuatro dialectos de la lengua euskara 84 Grammar of the Castilian Language 267 Granados, G. 70 Grandmontagne, F. 257 Great Master of the Gran Lògia Simbòlica Regional Catalana (GLSRC) 402–​405 Greek culture 264–​265, 274–​275 Grito de Balintawak 115 Grito de Lares 279, 287 Guatari, F. 72 Guerra de Castas 356–​362, 357 Gulf of Mexico 355–​356 Gutiérrez Burón, J. 393, 396 Guzmán, M. 357, 357 Haitian Revolution 5 Hallam, H. 173 Hamilton, N. 190 Handbook for Travellers in Spain,The 153 Handbook of Spain 180 health policies see public health, Spanish Helg, A. 141 Helvétius, C.-​A.  245 Herder 264–​265, 266, 274 hermano Buñol, Lo 335 Hernández, J. 24 Herrero, B. 82 Hidalgo, R. 195 Hidalgos de Monforte, Los 211 Hispano-​Americanism 257–​259 Historia de Cataluña y de la Corona de Aragón 155–​158 Historia de España 272 Historia de España y de la civilización española 270 Historia de Galicia 212 Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España 174 Historia General de España 155–​158, 270 Historias de Ultra-​Tumba 287 histories, national 155–​158, 156, 158 History of English Poetry 173 History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain 174 history painting 308–​309 Hoffmann, E. T. A.  42 Homer 264–​265 Hostos, E. M. de 288–​289 Howarth, D. 182 Hugo,V.  285 Humboldt, A. von 153, 161 Humboldt, W. von 153, 154, 161 Iberian migrants see migrants, Iberian Iberian Studies 2 Idearium Español 271 identity: Basque 19–​21, 20, 26–​28, 251–​253; Catalan 160–​165, 162–​164, 251–​253, 255–​256, 272–​275; Catholic Church and 160–​165; choral

418

419

Index societies and social 39–​42; dislocation of, in Equatorial Guinea 64–​71; Galician 205–​215; Puerto Rican 285–​289, 290–​291; Spanish 79, 83, 151–​155, 251–​252, 256, 260, 278, 285, 290, 297, 366, 385–​397; state arts administration and 385–​397 Igual, M. A. 335 Il Trovatore 42, 47 Ilustración de Galicia y Asturias, La 212 Ilustración Española y Americana, La 77 Ilustración gallega y asturiana, La 209 Illustrated Handbook of Architecture 180 imaginary resentment 238 Imagined Communities 207 Imparcial, El 83, 241, 374 importation and exportation restrictions on art 392–​393 Inauguración del ferrocarril de Langreo por la Reina Gobernadora. Entrada del tren en Gijón 184 Indiera 357 Industrial Revolution 122–​123 infectious diseases see public health, Spanish Ingres, J.-​A.-​D.  93, 94 Insolación 214 Inspección médica 314 Inspección para el Saneamiento del Cam 57 Instituto Central de Bacteriología e Higiene 53 Instituto de Seroterapia,Vacunación y Bacteriología Alfonso XIII 53 Instrucción General de Sanidad 55–​56 insufficient nationalization 145 interracial marriage 142 Irianni, M. 22, 23 Irigoyen, H. 258 Irving, W. 170, 178 Isabell II 11, 267–​268, 317, 346–​347, 393, 405 Isidro, C. M. 328 Isla Couto, R. 256 Islamic Spain and domestication of al-​Andalus 172–​177, 173, 176 Israelitas españoles y el idioma castellano, Los 77 Iturbide, Emperor Agustín de 258 Izquierdo, R. 109–​110 Jaleo, El 172 Jameson, F. 271 Jarnés, B. 189, 190, 191–​197, 199–​200, 201 Jennings, E. P. 360 Jensen, G. 146 Jiménez Aranda, L. 315 Jiménez de Aranda, J. 242 Jiménez Naranjo, M. 191 Johnson, B. 133 Jones, O. 175–​176, 176 Joseph I 236 Jovellanos, G. M. de 154, 160 Juana la loca ante el cadáver de su esposo 308

Juan Prim, 8 octobre 104 Juárez, B. 360–​361 Jullien, L. 43 Junto a la estufa or El amor de la lumbre 311 Junyent, S. 320, 320 Jurch, J. 40 Kalaayan 115 Kesidou, E. 299 Kirkpatrick, S. 369 Knight, F. 7 Koshar, R. 151 Krausism 347, 370, 371 Labanyi, J. 369 Laborde, A. 153 Labra, R. M. de 12, 14 Lachambre, J. 143 Lafarga, F. 328 Lafuente, M. 155–​158, 156, 158, 270–​271 Lamas Carvajal,V. 207, 214 Lameyer, F. 97 landscapes 158–​165, 162–​164 Laurak Bat 25, 26, 253 Lavandera, La 314 Lavery, J. 179 Layeta de Sant Just, La 335 Lee, H. 190 Legros, A. 241 Le Play, F. 51 Lerchundi, J. 82–​84 Lerena y Barry, J. J. de 65 Letamendi, J. 23–​24 Letters to Ponz 154 Leutre, C. de 390 Lewis, J. F. 178 Lewis, M. 362 Ley de Sanidad 53 liberal reforms and public health 54–​58 liberal subjectivity 379 Liberales, Los 43 Librería Belgrán 190 Libro del Obrero, El 35 Linz, J. 348 Lisle, R. de 44 Lleonart, J. 256 Llimona, J. 320 Llopis, A. 329 Llopis, E. 219 Llumanera de Nova York, La 405–​406 López Bernagosi, I. 405 Lotería nacional, La: Buying the ticket 170 Louis Philippe 101, 391 Louis XIV 267 Loureiro, Á. 366 Lucha por la vida, La 241 Ludwig, E. 190

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420

Index Luengo, E. 196 Luis Candelas, el Bandido de Madrid 190, 191–​192 Luther, M. 274 luxury fever 123–​124, 132–​134 Maceo, A. 13, 136–​137 Machiavelli, N. 263–​264, 267 Madame Bovary 200 Madrazo, P. 154–​155, 389 Madrazo, R. de 102, 317 Maeztu, R. de 77 Maghreb and Ottoman Empire, the 86–​87; grammars of Maghrebi/​Standard Arabic and Riffian in 81–​84; Sephardic communities in 75–​78; Spanish migration to Algeria in 78–​81; Spanish renegados and explorers in 84–​86; see also Spanish-​Moroccan  War Maluquer de Motes, J. 297 Mancha, T. 189, 191–​192; see also Teresa (novela de amor) Mandrell, J. 189 Manet, É. 312 Manila Galleon 106–​108 Manjarrées, J. 395–​396 Manuel musical a l’usage des collèges, des institutions, des écoles et des cours de chant 32 Mapa de Cuba 363, 363 Maragall, J. 275 Marfany, J.-​L.  44 María de Sanlúcar, M. 278 Mariana, J. de 156 Marichalar, A. 190, 191 Marín, M. 144 Marquina, E. 273 Marriage de Cagayous, Le 79 Marroquíes jugando con un buitre 100 Marruecos desconocido 85 Marseillaise, La 31, 44, 44 Martí, J. 13 Martí Alsina, R. 272, 309 Martí-​López, E. 179, 208 Martínez Torrón, D.  198 Martin-​Márquez, S. 84, 146 Marty, D. F. 361–​362 Maseras, A. 190 Masriera, F. 317 Massey, D. 362–​363 maternal citizenship 371 Maura, A. 110 Maura, F. 312–​313, 313 Maurois, A. 190 Maya 356–​362, 357 McKinley, W. 116–​117 Me’am Lo’ez 76 Melchor de Jovellanos, G. 154 Melus, C. 138 Menand, L. 123

Mendez, S. 356 Mendoza, P. 190, 196 Menéndez Pelayo, M. 76, 271 Menéndez Pidal, R. 272 Meninas, Las 179 Menocal, R. M. 81 Meravellós desembarc dels grecs a Empúries, El 274 Mercader de tapices, El 99 Merimée, P. 171 Mestres Esplugas, J. O. 333 Metrónomo, El 34, 36 Mexico see Yucatan Channel Meyerbeer, G. 39, 40, 47 Miampika, L.-​W.  69 migrants, Iberian 250–​251, 259–​260; Basque, Catalan, and Galician 251–​253; Cuban War of Independence and 253–​254; Hispano-​ Americanism and 257–​259; new impulse for Spanish nationalism among 254–​257; Puerto Rico and 279–​280 migrations 224–​228, 230 Milà i Fontanals, M. 45 Miles, N. A. 15 Mi libro de Cuba 4 Miller, S. 193 Millet, J.-​F.  309 Mina, F. X. 258 Ministry of Public Education, 1900 346–​348 Miralles, F. 317 Misericordia 123, 240 Mis memorias: o Puerto Rico como lo encontré y cómo lo dejo 9, 285–​286 Modernism and the New Spain 190 modernity 8–​10; guidebooks in emergence of 165; public health and 58–​59 Modern Language Association 2 Molina, F. 25 monasteries 157–​165 Moncada, G. 141 Monde Illustré, Le 92 Montero, M. 137–138​ Montesino, R. 192 Montserrat 162–​165, 163–​164 Monturiol, N. 31, 38 “Moral blanca y moral negra” 378–​379 morality and reason in antislavery writing 378–​379 Morea, C. 22 Morera, E. 273 Moret, S. 110 Morgades, J. 163 Moro Exposito 174 Morriña 214 Morson, G. S. 123 Mosén Anton en las montañas de Monseny 335 Mosquito, El 79

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Index Movimiento Natural de la Población de España 51 Moyano Law, 1857 346–​348 Mujer adúltera, La 315 Mujer del porvenir, La 370 Mujer de su casa, La 370 “Mujeres, A las” 375–​377 Mujeres entre cortinas 318 Mujer pensativa 309 Mukundi, P. M. 68 Muñoz Marín, L. 291 Muñoz Rivera, L. 14, 284 Murga, J. M. de 84, 85 Murguía, M. 207, 208–​213 Murphy, J. C. 172 Museo Universal, El 42 Músicos árabes 100 mutual-​aid societies 22, 34, 35 nacionalitat catalana, La 273 Nada, A. 329 Napoleonic invasion 220 Nash, M. 312 nationalism: the classics and 263–​275; diaspora and 254–​257; in Puerto Rico 290–​291; Spanish 140, 254–​257, 260, 267–​272, 356, 366; substate 257–​259 nation-​building 8–​10, 150–​151, 278; conflicting visions of Spain amongst foreign and national travellers and 151–​155; emergence of modernity in 165; national histories and competing national discourses in 155–​158, 156, 158; panoramas, landscapes, and national sites in 158–​165, 162–​164 nation-​state 1; education of the citizenry and 339–​342 Native Americans 358–​359 naturalism 240, 241–​242, 245 Neale, J. M. 182 Nebrija, A. de 267–​268 Negrín Fajardo, O. 68 Nena del gatet negre, La 320 Nena obrera, La 310 Nerín Abad, G. 78 Nervo, A. 257 New Biography 189–​190, 192 New Yorker 123 Nietzsche, F. 275 Nina dels ulls blaus, La 45 Niña haciendo media, Una 318 Nines del Ter, Les 45 Nochlin, L. 242 Nogales, J. 241 Nordau, M. 184, 387 North Africa see Maghreb and Ottoman Empire, the Norzagaray, Fernando de 110

Noticia Histórica y Arqueológica de la Antigua Ciudad de Emporion 273 Noticias de los arquitectos y Arquitectura de España desde su Restauración 180 Nova Catalunya 258 Novales, A. 114 Novelas de Torquemada 123 Noyes, D. 170 Nuestra hermana Aguafiestas o Reflexiones desde una neurosis antioccidental 68 Núñez, F. 104 Nussbaum, M. 134 Obrador de modistas 312 Ocios de españoles emigrados 174 Ocios de la juventud 278 Odalisca, La 93–​94, 94 O’Daly, D. 283 O divino sainete 206 O’Donnell, L. 91–​92, 102 Oiarzabal, P. 25 Oliva, La 211, 213 Oller, F. 12, 124–​126 Oller, N. 123, 403 On the Study of Greek Poetry 264 Oración en la mezquita 99 O’Reilly, A. 5 Orientalism 168 Orientalization of Spain 168–​169 oriental Spanishness 169–​172, 171–​172 Oriental Translation Fund  174 Orillas del Llobregat, A 43 Orlando 190 Orovio, M. 347 Ortega y Gasset, J. 191, 265–​266 Otaegui, T.  de  259 ¡Otra Margarita! 242, 242 Ottoman Empire, the see Maghreb and Ottoman Empire, the “Ouad-​Noun et le Tekna á la côte occidentale du Maroc, L’” 84 Pact of Bic-​Na-​Bató  116 Padre Carnot en Guimerà, El 335 Padre de Familia, El 31 Pageard, R. 197 pain and suffering: Desastres de la Guerra depicting 235–​240, 238–​239; introduction to visual culture of 235–​236; social painting of ordinary life between sensationalism and the new aestheticism of 240–​244, 242–​243 paintings, 19th century: battle 91–​96; figures and scenes of bourgeois women in 317–​322, 319–​320, 322; by Fortuny 91–​105, 98–​99, 101–​105, 103, 308; history painting 308–​309; realism and emancipation of secular genres in 308–​309; social painting of ordinary

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Index life between sensationalism and the new aestheticism of 240–​244, 242–​243; social realism in 309–​317, 310, 312–​314, 316; Spanish Catholicism and 245–​246; women in 307–​322 País del porvenir: el afán de modenidad en Puerto Rico, Un 10 Palacio, R. 14 Palafox, J. 7 Palma, A. 190 Palmero, M. 114 Palmero,V.  114 Pan-​Hispanism  2 panoramas 158–​165, 162–​164 Parcerisa, F. J. 154 Pardo Bazán, E. 123, 128, 198, 207–​208, 213–​215, 240–​241, 245 Parejo, A. J. 357 Parentalia 172 Paris Peace Treaty  117 Pascua, M. 52 Paternina, E. 315 Patuet, El 79–​81 Pazos de Ulloa, Los 123, 128–​129 Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, el novelista romántico 190 Pelagius of Asturias 156 Pellicer, J. L. 403 Peninsular War 151, 152, 220 Peón, S. 358 Perales, M. A. 329–​330 Peregrinación de Bayoán, La 289 Pérez Escrich, E. 315 Peréz Galdós, B. 240, 241, 246, 385 Pérez Reoyo, N. 212 Pérez Villaamil, G. 179, 180–​181, 182, 184 Perrone, R. 334 Philip II 4, 174, 268 Philippines, the: American intervention in 116–​117; Catholic Church in 112–​113; Chinese influence in 113–​114; colonial economy of 106–​108; education in 113; limits of political reform in 108–​112; metropolitan masculinities in 143–​144; peculiarities in colonial governance of 112–​114; road to revolution in 114–​116 Phillip, J. 170 Picasso, P. R. 316 Picó, F. 10 Pidal, M. 75 Pidgin English 68–​69, 69 Piferrer, P. 154 Pi i Margall, F. 44, 154–155, 167, 400–401, 404–405, 410 Pitarra, S. 405 Pla, C. 318 Placer Bouzo, C. 212 Planas, E. 104 Planella, J. 310, 310

Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra, from Drawings Taken on the Spot in 1834 by the Late M. Jules Goury and in 1834 and 1837 by Owen Jones.With a complete translation of the Arabic inscriptions, and historical notice of the Kings of Granada, from the conquest of that city by the Arabs to the expulsion of the Moors, by Mr Pasqual De Gayangos 175 Playa Africana 98 Plutarco de moda: la biografía moderna en España 190 Polavieja, C. 143–​144 Political Economy see realism Políticos españoles del siglo XIX 190 politics of justice 238–​239 Pom de flors, Lo 45 Pondal, E. 209 Poniéndose el sombrero 318 Ponz, A. 180 popular indifference 145 popular music 39–​42, 45–​46; see also choral societies population 223–​224, 226 Pórtico del Monasterio de Benevívere 179 possibilism in Puerto Rico 283–​285 poverty and social policies 54–​55 Power y Giralt, R. 6, 280–​283 Pradilla, F. 308 Prat de la Riba, E. 273 Pratt, M. L. 282 Premier Chant des Industriels 31 Presa di Tetuán 104–​105 Prim, J. 103–​104, 159 Primer amor, El 43 Primer paso á la lengua bubi ó sea ensayo á una gramática de este idioma 68 Prim y Prats, J. 297 Prise de la smalah d’Abd-​el-​Kader 101, 105 property laws and disclosure 393–​396 Provincias Vascongadas 25 Prueba, De 318 Public Education Committee Report, 1813 342–​346 Public Education Law, 1857 346–​348 public entertainments 39–​42 public health, Spanish: birth of health administration for 53–​58; demographic and epidemiological background on 50–​53, 51; modernization and 58–​59 public sphere 369–​370 Public Treasury  222 Puebla, T. de la 318 Puerto Rico 278–​283; Americanos españoles in 289–​290; assimilationism, autonomism, and possibilism in 283–​285; images of hispanorriqueño identity in 285–​289; national and political identity in 290–​291; political ideology in 280–​283; publishing in 278–​279; as stopover

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Index point for Europeans sailing to the Americas 279; see also Caribbean islands, the Puiggarí, J. 42 Pulido, A. 75, 77 Quadernito de varias especies de coplas muy devotas 278 Quadrado, J. M. 154 Quantana Report 342–​346, 351 Queen María Luisa, in a Mantilla 170 Quijano, A. 245–​246 Quijote, El 241 Quiñones, F. M. 284 railways 222–​223 Ramos Carrión, M. 45 Raquejo, T.  172 Real Cédula de Gracias 279 realism: biography and 193; diagnosing the financier’s ailments in 124–​129; economic theory and 122–​124; history painting and 308–​309; as luxury 134; luxury fever and 123; plotting the end of necessities and return of luxuries in 132–​134; regarding beauty in commodities and consumers 129–​132; social 309–​317, 310, 312–​314, 316 Rebelión de las Alpujarras 174 Reclus, É. 39, 42 Recuerdos Marroquíes del Moro Vizcaino 84 Recuerdos y bellezas de España 154 Redfield, M. 207 Rediker, M. 300 Reformation, the 263 Regnault, H. 104 Regoyos, D. de 244 Reher, D. S. 219 Renaissance, the 263–​264 Renaixença, Catalan 45 Renales Cortés, J. 208–​209 Renan, E. 385 Renart y Arús, F. 335 renegados 84–​87 Reprimenda, La 309 republicanism 31–​33; Arús i Arderiu on 400–​409; Romantic choral repertoire for 42–​46, 44, 46 Restoration era 225–​226 Revista Contemporánea 82 Revista de Geografía Colonial 77 Revista de Geografía Comercial 85 Revista de Occidente 191, 196 Revolutions-​Marsch 43 Ribera, R. 317 Riesgo y ventura del duque de Osuna (ensayo biográfico) 190 Riquer, B. de 348 Rizal, J. 115 Robersart, J. 178

Roberts, D. 94, 173 Robin, C. 7 Robinet, A. M. V.  79 Robrenyo, J. 335 Roca, S. 328 Roca Barea, M. E. 2 Rodríguez,V.  160 Rodríguez Calderón, J. 278 Rodríguez de Tió, L. 4, 14 Rodríguez-​Fischer, A. 190, 191 Roger, P. 241 Rogers, G. 190 Rojas, A. 259 Rojas, R. 6, 257–​258 Roman architecture 272–​273 Romano, J. 190 Románticas, Las 369 Romanticism 10, 86, 168, 196; choral societies and 42–​46, 44, 46; Galicia and 206–​207; oriental Spanishness and 169–​170 Romero de Torres, J. 317 Roncali, F. 358 Rosales, E. 104 Rossini, G. 39, 40, 47 Rouget de Lisle, C. J. 31, 44 Roure, C. 403 Rousseau, J.-​J. 43, 374 Rowand, R. 182–​183 Royal Family at Buckingham Palace,The 179 Rúa Figueroa, M. 211 Rudimentos del árabe vulgar 82 Ruiz Belvis, S. 287 Ruiz Zorrilla, M. 347 Saavedra, E. 82 Sagasta, P. M. 13, 284–​285 Sagrada Familia 165 Said, E. 168, 169 Saint-​Simon, C.-​H.  31 Sala de hospital durante la visita del médico, Una 315 Salmerón, N. 347, 405 Sánchez de Albornoz, N. 9 Sánchez Ferrer, P. 405 Santos Toro y Freyre, F. de los 64 Sanz, J. L. 11 Sanz del Río, J. 347 Sarmiento, D. F. 259 Sarrionaindía, P. H. 83–​84 Sarrote, D. 24 Sátiro, El 315 Saumell, M. 43 Scarano, F. 9 Schlegel, F. 264, 274 Schmidt-​Nowara, C. 375, 379 Schnaase, K. 175 Schnapp, A. 272 Schorn, L. 175

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Index Scienza Nuova 264 Se armó la gorda 43 second industrialization 225–​230 Semana pasada murió Bécquer, La 192 Seoane, M. 50 Sephardic communities 75–​78, 86–​87 Serrano Mañes, M. 178 Shapiro, M. 123 Siege of Sebastopol Quadrille 43 Siesta, La 309 Sífilis 315, 316 Siglo de las luces, El 5 Sin labor 312–​313, 313 slavery: Arenal’s writings on 369–​379; in the Caribbean islands 7–​8, 10–​11; Equatorial Guinea and 66–​67; illegal trade in Cuba 299–​301; laws ending Spanish 302; Spain’s role in world 295–​297, 301–​304; Spanish Abolitionist Society and 10, 370; sugar/​slave binomial in Cuba and 297–​299; in the Yucatan Peninsula 359–​360 Sloterdijk, P. 134 Smith, A. 238 Smith, T. A. 369, 371 Sobera, J. B. 317 social identity and public entertainment 39–​42 social painting 240–​244, 242–​243 social realism in painting 309–​317, 310, 312–​314, 316 social reform 370–​371, 376–​377 Sociedad de Africanistas and Colonistas 82 Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País 341 Sociedad Española de Higiene 55 Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid 82, 85–​86 Soguero García, F. M. 190, 191 soldiers, Spanish 145–​147; global metropolitan masculinities of 143–​145; image and experiences of rebel Cuba and 140–​143; indifference and restitution and 138–​140; letters on colonial women from 136–​138 Soler, F. 403 ¡Somatén! A 43 Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain 182 Sontag, S. 236, 238 Soriano Fuertes, M. 35 Sorolla, J. 184–​185, 236, 242, 242, 242–​244, 317 Sor Patrocinio, la Monja de las Llagas 190, 191–​192 Soto Freire, M. 212 spaces of sociability 369–​370 Spain, understanding nineteenth-​century 1–​3 Spanish Abolitionist Society 10, 370 Spanish-​American War 116–​117, 227–​228 Spanish and Spanish-​American Lives of the Nineteenth Century 191 Spanish language 68–​69 Spanish-​Moroccan War 91–​96, 159; see also Fortuny Marsal, M.

Steiner, G. 169 Steiris, G. 264 stereotypes and perceptions of Spain 168–​169; domesticating al-​Andalus and 172–​177, 173, 176; beyond Moors, gypsies, bandits, bullfighters, etc. 177–​185, 180–​181, 183–​184; tropes of oriental Spanishness in 169–​172, 171–​172 Stevenson, R. A. M. 178 Stirling, W.  178 Stolcke,V.  142 Strachey, L. 190, 191 Strauss, Jr., J. 43 Strauss, L. 263–​264 substate nationalism 257–​259 Sugrañes,V. 101, 102 Sundiata, I. 67 Tacón y Rosique, M. 8 Tanger 94 Tannhäuser 42 Tapia, A. 9 Tapia y Rivera, A. 285–​287, 289 Tapiró, J. 100 Taylor, B. I. 390–​391 Teatre dels Gegants 329–​331 Teatre de Santa Creu: 1820–​1821 329–​331; up to 1835 326–​328 Teatre Nou 332–​335, 333 Tejedora, La 311 Teniers, D. 178 Ten Years’ War 12, 43, 254, 258 Teresa (novela de amor) 189, 191–​192, 194–​196, 198, 200–​201; see also Mancha, T. Terrades, A. 31, 38 Terrero, E. 110 tertiary sector 227–​230 Theatre of the Cruelties,The 236 theatre spaces, Barcelona 325, 335–​336; free use of, 1836–​1850 331–​332; new Capuchin theatre or Teatre Nou, 1843–​1848 332–​335, 333; Teatre de Santa Creu and others theatrical spaces up to 1835 326–​328; Teatre de Santa Creu & Teatre dels Gegants, 1820–​1821 329–​331; theatrical and political scene, 1808–​1835 and 328–​331 Théophile Thoré, É. J. 308 Thirty Years’ War  267 Titó y Doña Paca 335 Tizon, G. 358 Tolliver, J. 199 Tomich, D. W.  298 Tone, J. 139 Topete, J. B. 44 Tornos, P. de 370 Torquemada 126–​128 Torre, J. M. de la 363, 363 Torre, M. de la 8

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Index Torrendell, J. 256 Torres i Bages, J. 163 Torruella, D. 136–​137 Tortella, G. 9 Toulouse-​Lautrec, H. de 314 tourism in Spain 151–​155 Tranquils Orchestra, Els 41 Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TASTD) 298, 299, 302–​303 Translation Studies 169 Translatlantic Studies 2 Trata de blancas 314 travellers, visions of Spain among 151–​155 Traviata, La 40, 42, 47 Treaty of Westphalia  267 Tresserra, C. 35 Tribunal en la Alhambra 100 Trilogy of Desire 126 Tristana 193 Triste Herencia 243–​244 Trovadors moderns, Los 45 Turco, Le 79 Ucelay-​Da Cal, E. 156, 157, 284 United States, the: Americanos españoles of Puerto Rico and 289–​290; intervention in the Philippines by 116–​117; migrants from Spain to 250–​260; as model for federal republic in Spain 405–​409; Spanish-​American War and 116–​117, 227–​228 urbanization 218, 230–​231; historical antecedents to 218–​219; during the second industrialization, 1890–​1920 225–​230, 226–​228, 230; in wake of new liberal regime and nascent capitalism, 1830–​1890 219–​225, 220–​221, 224, 224–​225 Urquiza, J. J. de 258 USS Yale 15 utilitarianism 371–​372 Vara de Rey, J. 258 Vasconia, La 26 Vasco Núñez de Balboa 92 Vega, J. 236 Vega, L. de 197 Velázquez 178 Velázquez, D. 104, 178–​179 Velázquez and his Times 178 Ventura, P. 40, 43 Venuti, L. 169 Verdaguer, J. 163, 403 Verdi, G. 39–​40, 42, 47 Vernet, H. 92, 101 Vernet, R. 329 Verstegan, R. 238 Vesteiro Torres, T. 206, 207 Viage de España 180 Viaje aerostático 157

Viaje de Fray Gerundio por Francia, Bélgica, Holanda y orillas del Rin 156–​157 Vialette, A. M. 32 Vicetto, B. 207, 208–​213 Vicino, T.  357 Vico, G. 264 Victoria, Queen of England 65 Victoria Eugenie, Princess of England 179 Vidal, L. 320, 321–​322 Vidal i Valenciano, G. 36 Vidas españolas e hispanoamericanas del siglo XIX 189–​190, 191, 196 Vidas sombrías 241 Vigía de Cádiz 303 Vilaseca, J. 46 Villa-​Urrutia, Marqués de 190 Visita de la madre al hospital, La 315 ¡Viva la libertad! 43 Vizcarrondo, J. 10 von Pettenkoffer, M. 54 von Schlegal, A. W.  197 Voyage en Icarie 31 Voyage pittoresque et historique de l’Espagne 153 Voyages d’Ali Bey el Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie pendant les Années 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, et 1807 84 Voz de España, La 78 Voz de Galicia, La 213 Wagner, R. 42 War of the French 235 Warton, T.  173 wa Thiong’o, N.  68 Ways of Seeing 307 Webb, A. 182 Weyler,V. 136–​137, 146, 258 Wilde, J. A. 23 Wilkie, D. 178 Williams, J. B. 178 Wolff, L. 169 women: colonial 136–​147; feminist writing and 369–​379; figures and scenes of bourgeois 317–​322, 319–​320, 322; global metropolitan masculinities and 143–​145; in nineteenth-​ century paintings 307–​322; public sphere, spaces of sociability, and 369–​370; social realism portrayals of 309–​317, 310, 312–​314, 316; sphere of influence of 375–​377 Woolf,V.  190 Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The 307 World Republic of Letters,The 208 Worth, C. F. 132 Wren, C. 172 Wyatt, M. D. 182

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Index Yáñez del Castillo, B. 212 Y dijo Dios: Ganarás el pan con el sudor de tu rostro 310 Young, A. 326 Yriarte, C. 92, 104 ¡Y todavía dicen que el pescado es caro! 243, 243 Yturriaga Barberan, J. A. 71 Yucatan Channel 355–​356; geography of the Atlantic and 362–​364, 363; war in the Yucatan

Peninsula and 356–​362, 357; Zorrilla on 364–​365 Zambrano, M. 193–​194 Zanardi, T.  170 Zavala, F. 79–​81 Zola, É. 240, 314–​315 Zorrilla, J. 364–​365 Zuloaga, I. 244 Zweig, S. 190, 191

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