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 liberalism 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 knowledge. 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 monarchy of Amadeo I, the much-maligned foreign king, to Alfonso XIII’s expulsion 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 support 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 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).
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 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).
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. Among her publications are 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).
