Monarchy and Liberalism in Spain

The Building of the Nation-State, 1780–1931

David San Narciso, Margarita Barral Martínez, Carolina Armenteros, David San Narciso, Margarita Barral Martínez, Carolina Armenteros

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367409906
• eBook ISBN: 9781000245097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

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.

Part II

Ritual, staging, and nationalisation

6 The ritual problem in the Spanish post-revolutionary monarchical fiction (1833–1868)¹

David San Narciso

In 1983, David Cannadine published a fundamental essay for British monarchy studies.² In this text, he proposed to analyse royal rituality with a long-term perspective and applying a ‘dense description’ in the Geertzian sense; that is, connecting royal rituals with the specific context that produced them. His final aim was to go beyond the description of these ceremonies to reach their historical interpretation. His conclusions were fundamental in historiography, marking the future analysis of European monarchical rituality for modern times. Establishing 4 phases, Cannadine concluded that in the late nineteenth century the British Crown enhanced old ceremonies with new readings or directly invented new ones in order to anchor itself in a long and sumptuous ceremonial tradition. This was a historical process that would be equally experienced by other European monarchies until the First World War. Cannadine's theoretical approaches have been criticised for being excessively teleological, for giving priority to elite interpretations or for the ambiguities raised by the term ‘invention’, which implies a construction from scratch.³ His conclusions have been equally contested. Some authors have stressed the existence of a public interest in the monarchy since the 1830s, emphasising the spontaneous and popular character of these manifestations as opposed to their identity as organised elite rituals at the end of the century.⁴ The dimension from below would also bring with it ‘a concomitant enthusiasm for pageantry’ in public opinion.⁵ Even so, Cannadine's pioneering work initiated a fruitful debate about the monarchy's rituality, its uses, and its meanings in contemporary society.

Liberal and constitutional Europe understood monarchy as an essential piece of the political, social, and cultural building that emerged from the ruins of revolution. The process was not at all easy, especially due to the resistance that monarchs tried to put up to maintain their functions and sovereignty. However, re-signified and replaced in the new system, monarchies demonstrated not to be a vestige of the past, a fragile and decayed wreck destined to disappear.⁶ On the contrary, as Arno J. Mayer demonstrated, the Crown was the centrepiece of the European authority system and the nexus of the nation with the present, but also a legitimating link with the past.⁷ In the quest for new functions and arguments of legitimation, monarchs' capacity for representation would justify their presence in representative regimes.⁸ For those reasons, the monarchy became the nodal centre of the symbolic scheme of the new political and social order. This fact led monarchs to utilise the new social bonds and refresh the pre-existing collective feelings of belonging that monarchy possessed, but also to play them publicly. As Clifford Geertz has pointed out, every authority needs to possess ‘the active centres of the social order’, but also to express this possession symbolically, connecting transcendentally with these centre's fundaments.⁹ As Georges Balandier summarised it, power is ‘maintained only by transposition, by the production of images, by the manipulation of symbols and their organisation in a ceremonial framework’.¹⁰

For that reason, monarchical ceremonies played a central role in the nineteenth-century European political systems. First, they allowed the monarchy to legitimise itself in the new political framework. But liberalism also did not miss the opportunity to use monarchical legitimacy as a tool, utilising its ceremonies—anchored in a long-established tradition—and its possibilities of social projection derived from its strong personification. Liberalism, otherwise put, took advantage of the fact that ceremonies are a public dramatisation of the possession of certain symbolic capital condensed in ritual's symbols and forms. They constitute a representative system with strong symbolic power, understandable as Pierre Bourdieu formulated it: ‘a transformed form, that is, unrecognisable, transfigured and legitimate, of other forms of power’ exerted as recognisable power.¹¹ In the end, rituals require a continuous and pragmatic reinvention to maintain their efficiency.¹² As cultural tools, they are socially constructed and historically changed in relation to the context that develops, produces, and receives them.¹³ Some symbolic actions are characterised by ritual's capacity for semiotic condensation, by its polysemy and ambiguity which serve ‘as an important means of channelling emotion, guiding cognition, and organising social groups'.¹⁴

In short, rituals may be conceived as representations that condense into a tangled mess of symbolic systems the principles and relationships of the system that produces them. Therefore, they publicly dramatise political discourses to define the community's sense of identity and generate sentiments of adhesion.¹⁵ They constitute images in movement deployed in physical and temporal space—like a rigging system—with visions about their present based on past incidents and justifying a future project. For that reason, they favour struggles for symbolic power and for conquest of the monopoly of discourse. Likewise, their symbolic elements are subject to variable combinations and constant updates because they re-appropriate, re-produce, and modify. Therefore, rituals are transformational actions that organise the meaning and negotiate the worlds in which they are performing.

To explore this problem historically, I first discuss the theorisation of royal rituality in the liberal nation-state through manuals of etiquette. These texts summarised and systematised all of the monarchy's ceremonies. For this reason, they illustrate the concept that their writers had about the monarchy and provide a thoughtful reading of the Crown's symbolic role, its articulation with other institutions and its integration within the State's policy of representation. I then study the connection of these theorisations with their implementation by the Spanish monarchy. To achieve this implementation, the Crown had to represent in the public space what I have called the post-revolutionary monarchy's ‘triple fiction’: the constitutional, the domestic, and the national. By publicly representing these identity dimensions, the monarchy could justify its role in the new liberal system and achieve popular legitimacy. The discourses it produced—returning to the initial debate on David Cannadine's text—were made and represented from 1830s onwards.

Reflecting on monarchical rituality in post-revolutionary liberalism

The death of King Fernando VII in 1833 left a barely three-year-old girl on the throne and her mother as regent supported by liberalism as opposed to absolutism. A profound process of change was due to begin. The transformation was slow and by no means peaceful as it had to be imposed on the regent herself; but, it implied the final establishment of liberalism and parliamentarianism in Spain. This political process was followed simultaneously by a profound reflection on the monarchy's role and by its political and symbolic articulation in the post-revolutionary world. These last two developments would take place in three ceremonial moments corresponding to three fundamental historical periods in the Spanish implementation of the constitutional regime.

Shortly after ascending to the regency, María Cristina of Bourbon would compromise on a tenuous constitutional model based on the new political theory of promulgating a charter. This model forced a rethinking of the monarchy's entire apparatus of representation, and included two institutional figures—with all the weight of sovereignty that this implied—who would be present, with varying nomenclatures, from then onwards in the majority of cases within the Spanish political system: the procuradores—similar to deputies—and the próceres—more or less equal to senators. Consequently, on 19 February 1835, María Cristina ordered the creation of a committee composed of aristocratic courtiers whose objective was to rethink the monarchy's ceremonial and its system of precedence, focusing on a fundamental ceremony: hand-kissing. In the end, the promulgation of the Royal Statute and the change in the political system generated new figures who, ‘if previously known, [were] not considered’.¹⁶ However, this circumstance would serve as an excuse to rethink the monarchy's whole symbolic and ritual dimension. Two incidents made this particularly necessary. First, administrative chaos reigned in some ceremonials that had been altered in practice by King Fernando VII's personal and arbitrary determination of monarchical rituality. Second, the change in the monarch's gender with his daughter's rise to the throne altered all the ceremonies and the Crown's public dimension.

Thus, the Royal Palace's reception rooms were divided into two types. The so-called ‘interior’ rooms or rooms ‘of trust’ continued. However, the committee decided to reserve them for the more intimate environment of the queen's women, fundamentally ‘for the decorum that the honest sex of Her Majesty deserves.’ After these rooms, the three ‘receiving chambers' were organised in hierarchies among the great civilian, military, and religious employees, integrating modern institutions into the court's traditional reception structures. An equivalence was thus established between sociopolitical and symbolic relevance. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the procuradores were held back in the antechamber, while the próceres were allowed to enter into the royal chamber. The committee found a clear justification for this distinction in historical tradition: the antechamber was where ‘the deputies of the Kingdoms that remained after the last Cortes of Castile were closed by Emperor Carlos V’, that is, the comuneros. Independently of its veracity, this distinction shows the strategic option of majority liberalism to be anchored in a long constitutional tradition, displaying present advances as recoveries of lost po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halfpage
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• About the Contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Possible monarchies: the political 
and cultural modernisation of Spanish liberalism
• PART II Ritual, staging, and nationalisation
• Index