Monarchy and Liberalism in Spain - Taylor & Francis Group

Monarchy and Liberalism in Spain

Bringing together the work of top specialists and emerging scholars in the
field, this volume is the first book-length study of the rapport between lib-
eralism and the Spanish monarchy over the long nineteenth century in any
language.
   It is at once a general overview and a set of original contributions to knowl-
edge. The essays discuss monarchy’s rapport with the pre-liberal, liberal,
and post-liberal nation-state, from the eve of the French Revolution, when
the monarchy regulated a ‘natural’ order, to the unstable reign of Isabel II,
fraught by revolutions that ended in her exile, to the brief republican monar-
chy of Amadeo I, the much-maligned foreign king, to Alfonso XIII’s expul-
sion from Spain following the failure of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
The essays approach the subject through two main thematic-­analytical axes.
The first, political axis examines the monarchy’s confrontation with, and
adaptation to, liberalism as a political force that aimed to nationalize the
Spanish people. The second axis is cultural, and studies the Crown’s sup-
port of liberalism’s nationalizing aims through various staging strategies that
comprised visits, rituals, ceremonies, iconography, religiosity, and familial
and military display. The dual approach invites the reader to question the
boundaries between the political and the cultural, especially in regard to
the ceremonial, and during critical times that witness the transformation of
political power and the building of the nation-state.
   Designed for Hispanists and students of politics, ritual, liberalism, and
monarchy, this collection should appeal to academics and researchers as well
as anyone interested in modern European history.

David San Narciso completed his PhD in Modern and Contempo-
rary History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He works on
nineteenth-­century Spanish history and specialises in the history of mon-
archy and the construction of masculinity. He has published several articles
in international peer-reviewed journals. Together with Raquel Sánchez, he
is the editor of La cuestión de Palacio. Corte y cortesanos en la España contem-
poránea (2018).

Margarita Barral-Martínez is Professor of Contemporary History at
the University of Santiago de Compostela. She received the 2009 Galicia
Research Prize (Xunta de Galicia, Spain). She has directed research projects
and her monographs and edited collections editions include Alfonso XIII
visita España. Monarquía y nación (2016); Eugenio Montero Ríos: a Restaura-
ción e o urbanismo clientelar en Santiago de Compostela (2016); and A visita de
Isabel II a Galicia en 1858. Monarquía e provincialismo ao servizo da nacion-
alización (2012).

Carolina Armenteros is the Director of the Centre for European Studies at
the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra and a regular Visiting
Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. Her publications include The French
Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794–1854 (2011); ‘The
Political Thought of Madame de Genlis: Rousseau’s Royalist Legacy’, Revue
électronique de littérature française (2013); and ‘Le XVIIe siècle des royalistes:
l’héritage politique de Montesquieu et de Voltaire, 1771–1831’, Cahiers de la
Maison de Chateaubriand (2018).

Routledge/Cañada Blanch Studies on Contemporary Spain
Edited by Paul Preston and Sebastian Balfour
Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies,
London School of Economics, UK

22 Revolution and the State
Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
Danny Evans

23 Medicine and Conflict
The Spanish Civil War and its Traumatic Legacy
Sebastian Browne

24 Nineteenth Century Spain
A New History
Mark Lawrence

25 Falangist And National Catholic Women in the Spanish Civil War
(1936-1939)
Angela Flynn

26 War in Spain
Appeasement, Collective Insecurity, and the Failure of European
Democracies Against Fascism
David Jorge

27 Monarchy and Liberalism in Spain
The Building of the Nation-State, 1780-1931
Edited by David San Narciso, Margarita Barral-Martínez
and Carolina Armenteros

Also published in association with the Cañada Blanch Centre:

Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Sebastian Balfour and Paul Preston

The Politics of Contemporary Spain
Edited by Sebastian Balfour

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

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

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, David San Narciso, Margarita Barral-
Martínez and Carolina Armenteros; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of David San Narciso, Margarita Barral-Martínez, and Carolina
Armenteros to be identified as the authors 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
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 9780367409906 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780367810375 (ebk)

Typeset in Garamond
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

    List of figuresxi
    About the Contributorsxii
    List of abbreviationsxvi

		 Introduction: Possible monarchies: the political
   and cultural modernisation of Spanish liberalism           1
    DAVID SAN NARCISO, MARGARITA BARRAL-MARTÍNEZ
    AND CAROLINA ARMENTEROS

PART I
An institution’s political dynamics                          21

 1 The mutations of the Spanish monarchy (1750–1868)         23
    JEAN-PHILIPPE LUIS

 2 Spanish modernity and the (gendered) monarchy:
   From biography to history and back to biography           42
    ISABEL BURDIEL

 3 Amadeo I: The republican king?                            58
    EDUARDO HIGUERAS CASTAÑEDA AND SERGIO SÁNCHEZ COLLANTES

 4 The consolidation of the constitutional monarchical
   system (1874–1902)                                        77
    ÁNGELES LARIO

 5 The two monarchies of Alfonso XIII, 1902–1931             93
    JAVIER MORENO-LUZÓN

x    Contents
PART II
Ritual, staging, and nationalisation                           111

    6 The ritual problem in the Spanish post-revolutionary
      monarchical fiction (1833–1868)                          113
      DAVID SAN NARCISO

    7 The royal family as a symbolic fiction: A mixed picture
      of the new forms of legitimacy in Spain’s liberal
      monarchy (1843–1931)                                     132
      ALICIA MIRA-ABAD AND ROSA ANA GUTIÉRREZ-LLORET

    8 The king on a coin: Monarchy, state, and nation
      through nineteenth-century Spanish coins and stamps      151
      RAQUEL SÁNCHEZ

    9 The pious Crown: The monarchy’s religious devotions
      during the reign of Isabel II                            169
      DAVID MARTÍNEZ VILCHES

10 The king’s descent into the people’s assembly:
   Monarchy and liberalism in Spain’s nineteenth-century
   State Opening of Parliament ceremony                        184
      ORIOL LUJÁN

11 Royal travels: The modern staging and legitimation
   of the Spanish monarchy, 1858–1931                          202
      MARGARITA BARRAL-MARTÍNEZ

      Index                                                    221

List of figures

 8.1 First coins of Isabel II’s reign (Raquel Sánchez,
     family collection)                                         155
 8.2 Coins of Isabel II’s reign (Raquel Sánchez,
     family collection)                                         156
 8.3 First Spanish stamp (1850) (Raquel Sánchez,
     family collection)                                         158
 8.4 Evolution of the image of Isabel II (Raquel Sánchez,
     family collection)                                         158
 8.5 Stamp with the image of Hispania (Raquel Sánchez,
     family collection)                                         159
 8.6 Coin of five pesetas (Raquel Sánchez, family collection)   160
 8.7 Five cents of peseta (perra chica) (Raquel Sánchez,
     family collection)                                         160
 8.8 King Amadeo (Raquel Sánchez, family collection)            161
 8.9 Stamp of the First Republic (Hispania) (Raquel Sánchez,
     family collection)                                         162
8.10 Coin of the cantón of Cartagena (Raquel Sánchez,
     family collection)                                         163
8.11 Coins of Alfonso XII’s reign (Raquel Sánchez,
     family collection)                                         164
8.12 Evolution of the image of King Alfonso XII
     (Raquel Sánchez, family collection)                        164
8.13 Evolution of the image of King Alfonso XIII on coins
     and stamps (Raquel Sánchez, family collection)             165

About the Contributors

Carolina Armenteros is the Director of the Centre for European Studies at
  the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra and a regular Visiting
  Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She organised the conference
  ‘Monarchy and Modernity since 1500’, held at the University of Cambridge
  in January 2019, where most of the papers in this collection were presented.
     An intellectual historian of modern Europe, Carolina has worked
  on the European Counter-Enlightenment and monarchism in the Age
  of Revolutions. Her publications on this last subject include The French
  Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794–1854 (2011); ‘The
  Political Thought of Madame de Genlis: Rousseau’s Royalist Legacy’,
  Revue électronique de littérature française (2013); and ‘Le XVIIe siècle des
  royalistes: l’héritage politique de Montesquieu et de Voltaire, 1771–1831’,
  Cahiers de la Maison de Chateaubriand (2018).
Margarita Barral-Martínez: Professor of Contemporary History at the
 University of Santiago de Compostela, she received the 2009 Galicia
 Research Prize (Xunta de Galicia, Spain). She has directed research projects
 and her monographs and edited collections editions include Alfonso
 XIII visita España. Monarquía y nación (2016); Eugenio Montero Ríos: a
 Restauración e o urbanismo clientelar en Santiago de Compostela (2016); and
 A visita de Isabel II a Galicia en 1858. Monarquía e provincialismo ao servizo
 da nacionalización (2012). She is also the author of book chapters and of
 articles in journals like Hispania, Ler História, Historia contemporánea,
 Dereito, Cahiers de civilisation espagnole contemporaine, The International
 Journal of Civic, Political and Community Studies and Revista general de
 derecho del trabajo y de la Seguridad Social.
Isabel Burdiel is Professor of Modern History at the University of Valencia
   and honorary research fellow at the University of East Anglia. She is also a
   founder and the first director of the European Network on the Theory and
   Practice of Biography. Her research has concentrated on the political and
   cultural history of nineteenth-century European liberalisms with a special

About the Contributors xiii
  interest in constitutional monarchies, the relationships between history
  and literature and the heuristic potential of biographical history.
    She is the author of ‘Myths of Failure, Myths of Success: New
  Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Spanish Liberalism’, Journal of
  Modern History, 70; ‘The Queen, the Woman and the Middle Class: The
  symbolic failure of Isabel II of Spain’, Social History 29-3; Isabel II. Una
  biografía (2019 [2010], Spain’s National Prize for History 2011), and with
  Roy Foster, La historia biográfica en Europa. Nuevas perspectivas (2015).
  Her latest book is Emilia Pardo Bazán (2019).
Eduardo Higueras Castañeda is a Lecturer in History at the Faculty of
  Communications of the University of Castilla-La Mancha. He received
  his PhD in History from the above-mentioned University with an
  Extraordinary Doctoral Award (2016). His main lines of research focus
  on the origins of democratic mobilisation and republican political culture
  in liberal Spain, mostly from a biographical perspective. He is the author
  of several publications on these matters. Among them can be highlighted
  the books Con los Borbones, jamás. Biografía de Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla,
  1833–1895 (2016) and Pablo Correa y Zafrilla: republicanismo y cuestión
  social en la España del ochocientos (2018).
Angeles Lario is Professor of Contemporary History at the Universidad
  Nacional de Educación a Distancia as well as a member of the Board
  of Directors and of the Academic Council of the Institutional Chair in
  Parliamentary Monarchy at the University of Burgos. She is the author
  of several books and articles on Spanish constitutional monarchy,
  parliamentarism and presidentialism systems, monarchy and republic,
  liberalism and democracy, and social liberalism. Her publications include
  ‘Monarchy and Republic in Contemporary Portugal. From Revolution
  to the Rise of Executive Power’, Portuguese Studies (2017); ‘Repúblicas
  monárquicas y monarquías republicanas en la constitución del mundo
  ibérico’, Estudos ibero-americanos (2017); ‘Individuo y sociedad: la
  incorporación de lo social al liberalismo’, Estudos do Século XX (2016); ‘El
  lugar del rey. La configuración del lugar del rey a partir de la Constitución
  de 1837’, Alcores (2017); El Rey, piloto sin brújula: la Corona y el sistema
  político de la Restauración (1875–1902), (1999). Monarquía y República en
  la España Contemporánea (2007).
Rosa Ana Gutiérrez-Lloret is chair of Late Modern and Contemporary
  History at the University of Alicante. Her research has focused on the
  political and social history of the nineteenth century and the first third
  of the twentieth. She has published several books and contributions
  to collective works. In addition, she has published articles in several
  specialised Spanish and international journals, some of them in the field
  of comparative history.

xiv     About the Contributors
         She has directed and participated in several research projects that have
      given rise to various lectures and publications. In recent years her research
      has focused on two themes: Catholic propaganda and political mobilisation
      in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (with a special interest in women’s
      role during the first third of the twentieth century) and the Spanish monarchy
      in the nineteenth century (its image, its discourse, its representation, as well
      as monarchist imaginaries in comparative and transnational perspective).
      She is currently the coordinator of the National Plan project entitled
      ‘Monarchies in Southern Europe (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries).
      Royal Cultures and Practices)’ [‘Las monarquías en Europa meridional
      (siglos XIX y XX). Culturas y practices de la realeza’] (HAR2016-75954-P).
Jean-Philippe Luis is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of
   Clermont-Auvergne. He has been a member of the Casa Velázquez, Vice-
   Director of the Centre d’Histoire Espaces et Cultures and, since 2014,
   he is the Director of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (University
   of Clermont-Auvergne/Centre National de Recherche Scientifique) of
   Clermont-Ferrand.
       He has published over 70 articles or book chapters and 13 books as
   author or editor, including L’utopie réactionnaire: épuration et modernisation
   de l’État dans l’Espagne de la fin de l’Ancien Régime (1823–1834) (2002),
   L’ ivresse de la fortune. A.M. Aguado, un génie des affaires, (2009) L’État dans
   ses colonies. Les administrateurs de l’Empire espagnol au XIXe siècle (2015).
Oriol Luján is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
  Spain. He has also been visiting researcher at European University Institute
  (Florence, Italy) and invited researcher at Sorbonne-Université (Paris,
  France). His research interests include political representation, electoral
  studies, parliamentary studies, and political corruption, particularly in
  nineteenth-century Spain. He is currently working on silence and memory
  in Spanish and French nineteenth-century commemorations and on a
  cultural approach to liberal voters’ self-perception in Spain.
Alicia Mira-Abad is a Senior Lecturer in Late Modern and Contemporary
  History at the University of Alicante. Her research has focused on
  cultural history and gender studies. She has published several books
  and contributions to collective works, as well as articles in several peer-
  reviewed Spanish and international journals. Most of them are focused
  on comparative analyses of Spanish and Latin American republican and
  monarchist discourses and imaginaries.
     Her research field comprises the socio-political projection, symbolic
  construction, and modulation of gender stereotypes of kings and queens
  as a strategy to legitimise the institution. She has worked in other
  fields of research like motherhood and its social projection through the
  construction of the maternal imaginary and she has also approached the
  female experience of emigration and exile in the 1930s. She is likewise

About the Contributors xv
  conducting a new project on the concept of transgression and its impact on
  gender stereotypes during the 1970s and 1980s. In parallel to her teaching
  and research, she has held several university management positions: vice-
  dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, department secretary, and
  entrance examination specialist in Spanish History.
Javier Moreno-Luzón is Professor of Political History and Chair of the
   Political History, Theories and Geography Department at the Universidad
   Complutense de Madrid. He is the author of several books and articles on
   political clientelism, liberalism, elections, parliament, monarchy, national
   symbols and nationalism in modern Spain. Among his publications in
   English are Modernizing the Nation. Spain during the Reign of Alfonso XIII,
   1902–1931 (2012); with Pedro Tavares de Almeida (eds.), The Politics of
   Representation. Elections and Parliamentarism in Portugal and Spain, 1875–
   1926 (2017); and, with Xosé M. Núñez Seixas (eds.), Metaphors of Spain.
   Representations of Spanish National Identity in the Twentieth Century (2017).
Raquel Sánchez is Associate Professor of Modern History at the Universidad
  Complutense de Madrid. She is the author of the books Mediación y
  transferencias culturales en la España de Isabel II. Eugenio de Ochoa y las
  letras europeas (2017), Románticos españoles (2005) and Alcalá Galiano y
  el liberalismo español (2005). She was the editor of Un rey para la nación.
  Monarquía y nacionalización en el siglo XIX (2019), La cultura de la espada.
  De honor, duelos y otros lances (2019) and La cuestión de Palacio. Corte y
  cortesanos en la España contemporánea (2018). In the last years, she has been
  working as the coordinator of the research projects ‘Court, Monarchy and
  Liberal Nation, Spain 1833–1885’ and ‘Culture of Honour, Politics and
  Public Sphere in Liberal Spain, 1833–1890’.
Sergio Sánchez Collantes is Lecturer in History at University of Burgos.
  He received his PhD degree in History from the University of Oviedo,
  with an Extraordinary Doctoral Award. His main lines of research are
  related to the social, political and cultural history of modern Spain.
  He has specialised in the democratic tradition, republicanism, women’s
  participation in politics and history of the press, mainly during the
  nineteenth century. As regards publications, he has written several papers
  in collective monographs and peer-reviewed journals. He is also the author
  of several books, the last one being El pueblo a escena. Republicanismos y
  tradición democrática en la Asturias del siglo XIX (2019).
David San Narciso completed his PhD in Modern and Contemporary
  History at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He works on
  nineteenth-century Spanish history and specialises in the history of
  monarchy and the construction of masculinity. He has published several
  articles in international peer-reviewed journals. Together with Raquel
  Sánchez, he is the editor of La cuestión de Palacio. Corte y cortesanos en la
  España contemporánea (2018).

List of abbreviations

Archive du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères,

AMAE-CPE      Correspondance politique de l’Espagne
AC            Archivo Cánovas
AGP           Archivo General de Palacio
ASV-NM        Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Nunziatura di Madrid
ASV-SS        Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Segretaria di Stato
DSC           Diario de las Sesiones del Congreso
NA-FO         National Archives, Foreign Office
AHN-DTF       Archivo Histórico Nacional, Diversos. Títulos y Familias
RAH           Real Academia de la Historia
RBP           Real Biblioteca de Palacio
AD            Archivo Dato

Introduction
Possible monarchies: the political and cultural
modernisation of Spanish liberalism
David San Narciso
Margarita Barral-Martínez
Carolina Armenteros

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

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

Introduction   3
An intense political struggle: Impositions, resistance,
and compromises
In 1840, the progressive politician Joaquín María López gave a course in
constitutional politics at the Ateneo de Madrid following the custom of these
spaces of political education and socialisation. There, before the cream of
Spain’s politicians and intellectuals, he affirmed that the monarchy and the
nation were engaged in a war ‘fast or slow, muted or declared, softened by
moderation, dissimulated by hypocrisy, tempered or suspended by events’,
whose end could only lead to ‘[parliamentary] representation disappearing
or monarchy ceding and becoming dependent upon [the nation]’.5 Recent
experience certainly supported his view. When he pronounced these words,
little more than four years had passed since Spanish liberalism had man-
aged to impose itself definitively on a monarchy more than mistrustful of it.6
The attempts at political involution encouraged by the Crown before—and
after—1840 entailed maintaining a vigilant attitude to force the institution
to maintain itself within liberalism.
   The process was enormously similar in Europe’s other countries. The
French Revolution had altered the royal figure in the whole continent, ini-
tiating a complex process to relocate it within the new liberal constitutional
framework. In 1815, the French theorist Benjamin Constant identified the
five powers contained in a constitutional monarchy.7 Among them, the
‘royal power’ stood out among the others as a neutral and mediating ele-
ment. Monarchy thus became the keystone of a whole system articulated
around the separation of effective functions and control of the other actors.
The fundamental difference between absolute and constitutional monarchy,
Constant specified, was the establishment of a whole series of precautions
that avoided the usurpation of other powers. Fifty years later, Walter Bagehot
synthesised this whole current of opinion regarding the role that the monar-
chical institution and its representatives should have in a liberal and wholly
constitutional world. In his reflections, the British writer and journalist
established a clear division of power between what he named dignified and
efficient parts. Thus, whereas the former were charged with acquiring respect
and prestige, in order to ‘excite and preserve the reverence of the population’,
the latter had the mission of ‘work and rules’.8 This cleavage rested, therefore,
on the clear delimitation between a monarchy that dignified the State and a
cabinet that used this reserve of authority and legitimacy in the daily labours
of government. It was a theory that depended on the Crown’s neutralisation
as a structure of political power in order to seclude it in a symbolic space, and
place it above party struggles.
   What we have gleaned from Bagehot’s analysis should not lead us into
error. As an ideal type, his monarchical model still represents an archetype—
unreal, but referential even for his contemporaries—of the process of the
monarchy’s adaptation to the constitutional system.9 The rise of new consti-
tutional frameworks opened up a path that was difficult to transit based on

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

Introduction   5
State, and it developed no mechanisms of mutual control.17 In this way, an
openly anti-liberal and counter-revolutionary king used his constitutional
prerogatives—like the suspensive veto—to delay many of the laws that ema-
nated from the Cortes and to create government crises. The liberal impulse
came to an abrupt end with the Holy Alliance’s armed intervention through
the French army, following Fernando VII’s appeals for help to his European
cousins. In 1823, liberalism was condemned to exile and to using uprisings
to obtain power, although always with unsatisfactory and dramatic results.
   Fernando VII’s death in 1833 opened up a window of opportunity to con-
summate the liberal revolution in the context of a bloody civil war.18 The king
had left as heir a three-year-old girl, Isabel II, whose mother, María Cristina
of Bourbon, exercised the regency. With most counter-­revolutionaries up in
arms in support of prince Don Carlos, Fernando VII’s brother, the regent
queen had to seek the liberals’ help. María Cristina compromised with a
weak, incipient, and uncertain constitutional model already founded in a
new political theory. In 1834 she promulgated the Estatuto Real, a sort of
endowed charter that proclaimed sovereignty as shared between the mon-
archy and the Cortes, and that amply reinforced the power of the former
vis-à-vis the 1812 model. Over the medium term, this text implied the
definitive establishment of liberalism and constitutional monarchy in Spain.
However, the Estatuto Real’s framework soon ceased providing a space of
minimal encounter. Given the obstacles that the Crown constantly raised to
the regime’s liberalisation, a liberal revolt occurred in 1836 that ended the
monarchy’s attempts to control the political process from above.19 Liberalism
imposed itself definitively on the monarchy, configuring a constitutional
regime founded on the theoretical principles of doctrinaire liberalism,
and the rejection of the assembly-­      inclusive monarchy that was formu-
lated by the Constitution of 1812. In this way, the two Constitutions that
defined the political framework of the liberal State, the progressive one of
1837 and the moderate one of 1845, proclaimed that sovereignty was shared
between the monarchy and the nation and increased the Crown’s executive
power.20 Both attributed to the monarchy a legislative power portrayed in the
capacity to make laws under the formula ‘las Cortes con el Rey’ (the Cortes
with the King). To this was added the capacity to initiate law on a par with
the Cortes and the ability to summon, close, dissolve, and suspend them.
   The creation of a shared sovereignty between the Cortes and the Crown—
the so-called regime of dual trust—weighted the balance towards the
strengthening of royal power, that is, of the executive. This was achieved
through three mechanisms: the refusal to sign, the use of the decree of dis-
solution of the Cortes, or government through Royal Decree.21 It was done
in such a way that, as the conservative political writer Jaime Balmes put
it, in the case of a conflict between the government and the parliament it
was the queen who resolved it ‘either accepting the ministry’s resignation
or withdrawing her trust or dissolving the Cortes… The monarch opted,
then, between the ministry and the Cortes’.22 This was all done under the

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

Introduction   7
priority over the Crown.26 With the Constitution approved, a search for a
monarch was then conducted among European dynasties that represented
fully liberal government, among which the Italian one stood out, following
Italy’s recent process of unification. Amadeo of Savoy was the king of Spain
that the Cortes elected in 1870. It was the start of a brief and convulsed reign
characterised by the disaffection of almost everybody, that after the disman-
tling of the revolutionary coalition, lacked political defenders.27 In addition,
political practice and dynamics ended up denaturing this constructed regime,
so that, for instance, elections were fraud—as had happened before and would
happen again—in spite of the demands for transparency during the electoral
processes that presided over the revolution of 1868 and the constituting pro-
cess. Without a political or social base, the king decided to abdicate for him-
self and his descendants in 1873. Thus began the first republican experience
in Spanish history, which lasted hardly a year, and was spent in the festering
confrontations between republican supporters of a federal and a unitary model.
   In 1874 another military uprising inaugurated the reign of Isabel’s son,
Alfonso XII. Known as the Restoration, this was a period conceived, first,
as a response to the excesses of the previous age regarding the political par-
ticipation and mobilisation of the masses. It was also organised by analysing
the errors made during Isabel II’s reign, particularly party exclusivism and
the recourse to violence as a tool to access government. In this way, the new
Constitution of 1876 gathered up the revolution’s conquests in exchange for
accepting the conservative precept of shared vis-à-vis national sovereignty.
The king maintained his constitutional prerogatives and his important posi-
tion in the system as a moderating power. The difference was now in the par-
ties’ framework of understanding, in the will to establish a stable system that
could integrate political adversaries and be founded on agreements between
parties.28 To attain this, it was necessary to provide for what had not been
accomplished during the Isabeline age: the articulation of stable and cohesive
parties that could peacefully take turns in power through legal mechanisms.
   Alfonso XII’s unexpected death in 1885, with a regent queen pregnant
with the future king Alfonso XIII, struck fear about the permanence of
political achievements since 1874.29 In this situation, the leaders of the two
major parties agreed to succeed each other cyclically in power. In this way,
a harmonious relationship was established between the government and the
opposition that implied agreeing on norms and resolving political conflicts
through negotiation. It was a system based on electoral fraud—controlled
by the new government and based on an agreement about the number of
each party’s seats—where the monarchy maintained a preponderant role
as the last instrument of government change. In spite of the political cri-
ses that succeeded each other, particularly after the enormous impact of the
Spanish-American War and the end of Spain’s overseas empire,30 liberalism
maintained a long idyll with the monarchy that had been unknown until
then. The Restoration’s system survived María Cristina’s regency and struc-
tured, in this way, the first liberal phase of Alfonso XIII’s effective reign

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

Introduction   9
implied.35 But in order to be successful, democratisation needed the partici-
pation of republicans and socialists, as well as an agreement between liberal
currents.36 These political actors had collaborated to conspire against the dic-
tatorship and to attain power through force of arms, a recourse that had been
absent since the pronunciamiento of 1874, but that the coup d’ état of 1923
had again legitimated, breaking the consensus of the Restoration. Mistrust of
a king who had prioritised the authoritarian solution and broken his oath put
a break on the possible process of parliamentarising the liberal constitutional
regime, and led to the monarchy’s end in 1931.
   Thus ended the combat between the monarchy and liberalism that had
raged since 1812. The struggle was, as we have seen, very intense. And in it,
in addition to the political and constitutional aspects analysed, a series of
cultural elements would be determining that were related to the new repre-
sentative and symbolic functions that the monarchy had to assume with the
liberal revolution.

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

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

Introduction   11
English46 —and with the image of security and progress that liberal reality
harboured until the First World War.47 But the genesis of peripheral or sub-
state nationalisms and their conflict with the nation and Spanish patriotism,
perhaps due to lack of consideration, converted the national question into a
central problem since the reign of Alfonso XIII.
   The symbolisation of dominant national social values was the second
tool the monarchy used to justify its presence in the new political system.
Organising and mobilising certain familial metaphors was essential to gen-
erating favourable sentiments of adhesion. A family model was created that
mediated between the old aristocratic ideal and the new, bourgeois one.48
But this link between familial and political metaphors was not new in the
nineteenth century. Its roots were rather in the Old Regime’s absolutist con-
ceptions. From there it would evolve into the liberal perception of a king who
was ‘father of his governed ones [sus gobernados]’—with political authority,
but filtered by liberal morality.49
   The familial monarchical allegory acquired a certain complexity when
a woman represented the Crown, as in the case of Queen Isabel II. This
influenced gender and national discourses that were readily comparable with
those of other contemporary monarchies.50 Royal propaganda used gender
stereotypes like the model of domestic wife and angel, of Christian, virtu-
ous, pious, and charitable mother. Queen Isabel II, the only regnant queen
in modern Spain, and the kings’ consorts were projected as mothers of the
nation. As a male and a family man, the king’s task was to govern and repre-
sent the nation.51 It was a hegemonic masculinity that would become regen-
erating and modern as soon as the twentieth century began.52 That is, the
nation, incarnated in the figure of the king or queen, acquired the sexed
values and characters of bourgeois society, hybridised with nationalism, that
George Mosse has discussed.53 A model was thus reproduced that copied the
hegemonic cultural pattern, with roles clearly defined in modern families,
just as in the English case.54
   During the regency of María Cristina of Bourbon (1833–1840) her maternal
image was already emphasised, highlighting her condition as a private mother
raising her daughters. Once her daughter and that of Fernando VII, Isabel II,
began her effective reign (1843–1868), the familial metaphor was socially pro-
jected, especially after the heir’s birth in 1857, when she became mother of the
nation as well.55 But the passage of time would demonstrate that this symbolic
capital could not maintain itself. The queen was not capable of representing
liberal and bourgeois ideals either in her political and institutional activity, or
in her private and family behaviour, marked by the scandals of her love life.56
The royal marriages formed by Amadeo of Savoy and Maria Vittoria dal Pozzo
(1870–1873), by Alfonso XII and María Cristina of Habsburg (1879–1885)
and by Alfonso XIII and Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg (1906–1931) also
developed family representations related to middle-class cultural patterns and
gender stereotypes. These discourses referred to conjugal and family lifestyle,
to maternal models, to the education of heirs, and to the Christian charity