Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction
David San Narciso, Margarita Barral-Martínez and Carolina Armenteros
Part I: An Institution’s Political Dynamics
1. The Mutations of the Spanish Monarchy, 1750–1868
Jean-Philippe Luis
2. Spanish Modernity and the (Gendered) Monarchy: From Biography to History and Back to Biography
Isabel Burdiel
3. Amadeo I: The Republican King?
Eduardo Higueras Castañeda and Sergio Sánchez Collantes
4. The Consolidation of the Constitutional Monarchical System (1874–1902)
Ángeles Lario
5. The Two Monarchies of Alfonso XIII, 1902–1931
Javier Moreno-Luzón
Part II: Ritual, Staging, and Nationalisation
6. The Problem of Ritual in the Spanish Post-Revolutionary Monarchical Fiction (1833–1868)
David San Narciso
7. The Royal Family as a Symbolic Fiction: A Mixed Picture of New Forms of Legitimacy in Spain’s Liberal Monarchy (1843–1931)
Alicia Mira-Abad
Rosa Ana Gutiérrez-Lloret
8. The King on a Coin: Monarchy, State, and Nation through Nineteenth-Century Spanish Coins and Stamps
Raquel Sánchez
9. The Pious Crown: The Monarchy’s Religious Devotions during the Reign of Isabel II
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
Oriol Luján
11. Royal Travels: The Modern Staging and Legitimation of the Spanish Monarchy, 1858–1931
Margarita Barral-Martínez
