Jesus Cruz

Building Liberal Identities in 19th Century Madrid: The Role of Middle Class Material Culture

In recent years, most historians have abandoned the idea that the revolutions that shook the Atlantic world between 1776 and 1848 were the work of a single social class. A number of studies on the social composition of the groups that ignited and propelled the different revolutionary processes demonstrate the diversity of conditions and social backgrounds of the revolutionaries. However, this revisionism is posing new questions as to why these contingencies in Europe and the Americas decided to mobilize, to construct new liberal national states, and how they carried it out. Spain is a good sample case for this historiographical inquiry. At present, few historians accept the idea that the series of upheavals that brought about a new liberal state during the 19th century resulted from the exclusive pressure of a national bourgeoisie. Recent scholarship has revisited the classic bourgeois revolution paradigm by presenting liberalism as an ideology that captivated the imagination of Spaniards of a variety of social ranks, with special impact among urban middle and popular groups. But if Spanish scholars are providing better explanations regarding who embraced liberal ideas and facilitated their spread, the answers for the “why” and “how” this process occurred are, in my opinion, less convincing.

La construcción de una nueva identidad liberal en el Madrid del XIX: el papel de la cultura material del hogar

Taking the perspective of the history of consumerism and material culture, this article focuses on two themes concerning the incorporation of Spain to modernity. Using the case of Madrid as a sample, the author first explores the adoption by its middle and upper classes of the elements that characterize the culture of modern consumerism. Second, there is an analysis regarding the contribution of that culture to the shaping of the new identities that ignited mobilization around the ideals of revolutionary liberalism. The study is based on the analysis of 766 probate inventories of families who lived in Madrid between 1750 and 1880.

Notability and revolution: social origins of the political elite in liberal Spain, 1800 to 1853

Don Anselmo, the protagonist of a story by Mesonero Romanos, was a wealthy established gentleman in one of Andalusias leading towns. Young, good-looking, affable, and generous, Anselmo held all the virtues and qualities that can make a man happy, except for one weakness: an overbearing ambition for becoming important. First, he did everything possible to attain a position of power in his town. Unsatisfied with merely local power, he decided to leave his house and possessions in the hands of an administrator and emigrate to Madrid, the only place in Spain where one could achieve a brilliant political career. Once in Madrid he spent his time and his money looking for protection and political connections, a process in which he experienced only personal humiliation and frustration. In the end, Don Anselmo, once a wealthy provincial gentleman, became a failed politician who abandoned both his family and his estate. Don Anselmos sorry destiny illustrates, according to Mesonero, one of the worse diseases of Spanish society: the empleomania of its elites, a terrible misjudgment that provoked the abandon of productive activities and contributed to the countrys backwardness.

Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image: Resina, Joan Ramon: Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 288 pp., Publication Date: July 2008

and issues in new ways, provides a coherent picture of Ireland over a long and complex period, and points out areas for further research. But for those unfamiliar with the basics of Irish history, such as most undergraduates (and graduate students) in U.S. universities, for example, this book will be difficult to grasp. This is because the book has an additional purpose, the delivery of an argument about the nature of identity in Ireland, which emphasizes “the fluid and contingent nature of allegiances and aspirations, and . . . the capacity of personal, local, and strategic alliances to cut across seemingly intractable lines of ethnic, political, or religious division” (497). Connolly introduced these ideas in a previous work, Religion, Law and Power (Clarendon Press, 1992), arguing that Irish society was not divided into two distinct and antagonistic cultures: Gaelic and English, conquered and conqueror, Catholic and Protestant. For Connolly, Irish society was not really a colony, as some have argued, but was more in line with ancien régime Europe, where there was severe inequality but also a great deal of exchange and negotiation between different groups. This point is important because Connolly uses it to challenge the nationalist narrative that traditionally identifies continuities between the oppressed in colonial Ireland, the “hidden Ireland” of the eighteenth century, and nationalism in the nineteenth century. In some ways, Divided Kingdom attempts to make the main arguments of Religion, Law and Power more accessible to a wider readership. Relegating historiographical debates to the footnotes, for instance, may have been a logical choice, especially as the book is already more than five hundred pages long, but will the general reader be able to understand the significance of debates such as those over Gaelic poetry when debates are given only a passing mention in the notes? Furthermore, unlike in typical surveys, the author has incorporated a great deal of his own primary research to bolster his arguments. While this research undoubtedly moves the debates forward, the general reader has no real basis to gauge how so. In some cases, new directions are implicit, as in the case of the title for chapter 6, “Metropolitan Province,” clearly an adjustment of the term metropolitan colony that places Ireland in a subordinate, colonial relationship to England, and an idea that Connolly has challenged in the past. This idea of a metropolitan province is intriguing, but exactly what it means is not spelled out. As a final point, a bibliography would have been a useful addition to this broadly based survey, but these minor criticisms aside, Divided Kingdom is an excellent and sophisticated study of a difficult period in Irish history. The work is stimulating, and, for this reader, eyeopening in many ways. But it is a survey for those already initiated into the vagaries of Irish history, and those who have charged Connolly with “revisionism” in the past are likely to do so again.

Del ‘cortesano’ al ‘hombre fino’: una reflexión sobre la evolución de los ideales de conducta masculina en España desde el Renacimiento al siglo XIX

La diversidad de textos aparecidos a lo largo de la historia sobre la cortesı́a, las formas, la etiqueta y el gusto, lo que en la tradición francesa se conoce como el savoir-vivre y en la española como la urbanidad, constituyen una fuente esencial para el conocimiento de la evolución del comportamiento social. Como ha señalado Alain Montandon, este tipo de fuente refleja la sistematización de las prácticas sociales existentes en un determinado momento y lugar, pero sobre todo es un testimonio de su idealización transmitido por quienes se erigen en portavoces de la sociedad dominante. A partir del siglo XVIII los manuales de cortesı́a crearon un imaginario con sus mitos, temas, argumentos y caracterizaciones, similar al que se encuentra en la novelı́stica o en la poesı́a de la época. Por ello su estudio es fundamental para entender el proceso de codificación del ideal de esa entidad que en el vocabulario del siglo XIX se designó con el epı́teto de ‘buena sociedad’. El objetivo de este artı́culo es analizar la manera en la que se han presentado y evolucionado en España los diferentes ideales dominantes de conducta a través de la literatura de la urbanidad, desde el Renacimiento hasta el siglo XIX. El marco teórico en el que se sitúa esta investigación es el expuesto en los clásicos trabajos de Norbert Elias. Según el modelo de Elias las normas de cortesı́a que se fueron implantando en el occidente europeo desde la baja edad media, cuyo contenido era el ejercicio del autocontrol,