Independence and Constitution: The Spanish Nationalization of Personal Experience During the Peninsular War and its Aftermath

Introduction

One of the major facets of the Age of Revolutions is the interplay between French imperial expansion and the rise of nationalism throughout Europe. ¹ As is well known, Spain is an important case in point. The Peninsular War, traditionally called the ‘War of Independence’ in Spain, is among the ultimate causes of Napoleon's defeat. The ‘Spanish ulcer’ drained significant resources from France and opened a Southern front for the anti-Napoleonic coalitions. Its origins date back to 1807, when Napoleon decided to attack Portugal, a British ally, and signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau with Manuel de Godoy, the unpopular Charles IV's prime minister. The Grande Armée crossed the Pyrenees and advanced unopposed. However, it started to occupy Spanish cities as well and Godoy was deposed by a palace coup in March 1808. King Charles abdicated in favour of his son Ferdinand, but Napoleon intervened and obtained the Spanish Crown for his brother Joseph. The dynastic crisis turned into an open war after the upheaval of 2 May in Madrid, which was followed by further violent episodes of resistance against the French military presence and Joseph's government. The breakdown of the Spanish monarchical state in the Peninsula caused by this situation unleashed both an imperial crisis and a nationalist liberal revolution. The outcome of these processes would be the 1812 Cádiz Constitution, and their developments and consequences would resonate in several continents and polities. ² After coming back from his confinement in Valençay, Ferdinand VII abolished the Constitution in 1814. The following decades in Spain would be shaped by the conflict between liberals and reactionaries, eventually ending up in the first Carlist war (1833–1840) and the triumph of the moderate liberals.

In 1994, the historian José Álvarez Junco published an article entitled ‘The Invention of the War of Independence’. It was one among the main contributions that he made in the 1990s to the history of Spanish nationalism, and it would ultimately form part of his landmark 2001 work Mater dolorosa. ³ Paraphrasing Hobsbawm and Ranger's very influential volume, Álvarez Junco wrote a conceptual history of the term ‘War of Independence’ (Guerra de la independencia). ⁴ He identified the process behind which the ‘War of Independence’ became a key myth in the Spanish nationalist canon and argued that the concept was not contemporary to the events of 1808–1814 but only emerged in the 1820s at the earliest. Álvarez Junco acknowledged the ‘patriotic’ elements that can be found in the fight against Napoleon's armies, but he also vehemently demoted the nationalist component by pointing out other influential aspects: the dynastic crisis of the Bourbons and the confrontation between modernizing and traditionalist Ancien Régime Spanish elites, the legality of the French presence in Spain due to the Treaty of Fontainebleau, historical anti-French sentiment in Spain, and the general unrest against Godoy.

This view shaped an entire historiographical generation that rebelled against traditional nationalist instrumentalization and its survival in present-day Spanish society. Not without reason, 1808 (and specifically the upheaval of 2 May) is still taken as the founding moment of ‘modern Spain’ in many history courses. In uncovering social and economic factors, debating the actual involvement of people in politics at the time and reassessing the phenomena of guerrillas and afrancesados (pro-French Spaniards), this historiography of the War of Independence from the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century became robust and broad enough to cope with the nationalist pressure of the commemorations that took place from 2008 onwards. It also ensured a level of historiographical interest in at least part of the Spanish nineteenth century, which has received less attention than the more widely covered twentieth-century topics (for example, the 1936–1939 Civil War). ⁵

Yet the interpretations made within this historiography were not satisfactory for many historians. A number of works took a critical stance against these positions and, assuming their important contribution, argued that the national component of the war was undeniable. ⁶ Evidence of a Spanishness that could be defined as ‘national’ before the triumph of liberalism and the emergence of the nation-state did exist, but it was not considered relevant enough. It was overlooked based on two tenets: the meaning of the terms ‘nation’, ‘Spain’ and ‘Spanish’ differed from those attached to the ‘modern’ usages of the words and, even if a sort of continuity existed, the nationalization would likely have been minoritarian because the sources that we have only tell us about the upper classes.

Of course, both of these tenets are closely linked to the modernist mindset in nationalism theory: nations are inventions of modernity and a consequence of modernization; they are foremost created by the state and the elites; and Spain, as an example of a backward society beleaguered by inefficiency, civil wars, political instability and alternative national projects, is a case of weak nationalization in which something ‘went wrong’ during the nineteenth century. ⁷ As Charles Esdaile writes about 1808:

In embarking on a critical reassessment of the Spanish war effort, the historian is immediately faced with a major problem in that the struggle began with a series of episodes that appear to confirm the idea that the populace rushed into battle against Napoleon.

However, he would conclude that ‘the populace on the whole wanted nothing to do with the war’. ‘Patriotism in the modern sense did not exist in Spain, and, what is more, could not exist, for the country had not gone through the processes that were the sine qua non of the development of such feelings’. ⁸ Hence, what appears to be nationhood cannot be.

In this paper, I will contribute to the historiography that is critical of these approaches. I argue that, despite their undeniable value in dismantling Spanish scholarly nationalism, they reproduce parts of the mythical structure that they seek to debunk and hinder further advances in our knowledge by neglecting a broader picture of how people living under the Spanish monarchy during the Age of Revolutions felt about the idea of Spain.

I say ‘hinder’ because the key to a full understanding of what actors say about Spain in the 1808 uprising or in the 1810 Cortes de Cádiz is to study the vocabulary that they had available at the time as well as the way in which it transformed due to the new context – in other words, ascertaining what ‘nation’, ‘Spain’, ‘Spanish’ or other kindred terms meant to them and doing so without the application of any aprioristic grand theory. A careful consideration of the influence of the previous period of the Ancien Régime and Charles III's and Charles IV's reigns is also necessary. ⁹ Labels such as ‘ethnic patriotism’ or ‘protonationalism’ might not be ideal for the purposes of properly assessing the evidence. Something similar is also true of Ferdinand VII and the ‘impossible’ Spanish nationalism of the absolutists after the war. ¹⁰ For this historiography, absolutism and nationalism are a contradiction in terms. ¹¹

I also believe that the mythical structure is partially reproduced not only because of the teleology and normativity of having a standard of ‘nation in the modern sense’, but also because of its groupist language. Groupism, as defined by Rogers Brubaker, is the consideration of collective entities (the people, the nation, Spain, the ‘elites’ or Esdaile's ‘populace on the whole’) as actual homogeneous agents that can ‘do’, ‘feel’ and ‘intend’ things and, arguably, produce sources about them. ¹² Groupism is part of nationalist thought, but it is also present in any analytical framework that assumes the existence of such actors. Against this, I align with those who prefer to consider nationhood as a ‘phenomenon’ made by narratives and their social performance. ¹³

Hence, I will address the previous issues by adopting a more bottom-up point of view and analyzing how Spanish identity was experienced and enacted as a national idea in different forms and contexts and, when possible, how that shaped the way in which contemporaries lived and navigated through the world they had to inhabit. ¹⁴ In order to reflect that ‘individual experience’, I will look at common patterns of usage within a corpus of almost fifty personal accounts (more specifically, memoirs, journals and travel books) that were written from the 1780s to the 1830s. ¹⁵ I will revisit the nationalization of the War of the Independence by extending the period of study beyond 1808–1814, by including narratives written by literate lower- (whenever possible) and middle-class individuals along with ego-documents from upper classes and by studying how group categories related to nationhood appear in accounts of everyday life and personal experience. ¹⁶ Moreover, I will use these sources to buttress the idea that there is no need for systematic, efficient, top-down nation-building. If the adequate combination of circumstances, interactions and memories takes place at a micro level, the nation can be socially created and reproduced anyway.

Spanishness as Nationhood

Three main patterns of meaning for the word ‘nation’ and its kindred terms can be inferred from the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Spanish personal accounts that I have analyzed. ¹⁷ I will call them ‘genetic’, ‘ethnotypical’ and ‘liberal’ concepts of nationhood; the latter pattern constitutes a minority of cases and is usually confined to very political contexts (discussions about the work of the Cortes, the 1812 Constitution and so forth). ¹⁸ The most common patterns, even after the outbreak of the Peninsular war, are the genetic and, particularly, the ethnotypical. The genetic meaning construes nation as ‘birth’ in a loose sense. This gens as a large tribe or as the people born in the same place is often merely classificatory, and it is not necessarily linked to the actual individual's feelings of belonging. Drawing on previous works on stereotyping and the concept of ‘ethnotype’, ¹⁹ I use the term ‘ethnotypical nationhood’ to refer to a group notion that is based on the belief that the human world is divided among nations, which are the basic unit of human diversity. Those nations are defined by supposedly collective leanings in terms of ‘national character’. When these nations as national characters are not associated with any political community, I use the term ‘nonpoliticized ethnotypical nation’. When national character is mixed with allegiance to and the political tradition of an already existing polity, as was the case, for example, in the European Ancien Régime kingdoms, I prefer to speak of ‘politicized ethnotypical nationhood’. The liberal idea of nation refers to the sovereign assembly of citizens, endowed with theoretically equal rights and duties as well as a common general will.

An example of genetic nationhood can be found in Catalan priest Raimundo Ferrer's journal recording the French occupation of Barcelona during the Peninsular War. In an 1809 entry he talks about a general who was ‘of the French nation, but at His Catholic majesty's service’ (‘francés de Nación, pero al servicio de S.M. Católica’). And in 1813 he wrote, ‘This morning French troops who were encamped outside have entered [the city], and they bring with them 30 prisoners, Spaniards, English and sailors from this nation’. ²⁰ In eighteenth-century Spain, the genetic concept was not only expressed using ‘nation’ in a way that had such a loose meaning; it was also expressed by other signifiers such as the word patria (‘homeland’). ²¹ For instance, the Asturian author Jovellanos refers in a 1793 diary entry to an evening conversation with some of his friends. One of them made some remarks about salmon that caught his attention and that he therefore wrote down. The first comment was that every salmon, ‘coming back from the sea, returns to its patria, that is, the river in which it was born’. ²²

By contrast, Faustino Casamayor, a low-level clerk in the Real Audiencia of Zaragoza, provides a pre-1808 example of ethnotypical nation (in this case, of the non-politicized kind). In an October 1785 entry of his account, he describes a get-together where the attendants started talking about the situation faced by the country (‘varios asuntos útiles trataron por nuestra España’). Then the author writes in a poetic tone that the participants

looked up and, saddened, acknowledged how far they were from that simplicity, that candour, that purity of habits from past times, times (I say with pain) that were not Enlightened [but] made us love her: [that] brave Nation, full of splendour; greatly coveted Nation, but feared Nation. Nation praised by the Nations, fairly celebrated holy Nation: Oh, Spain!, they cried, oh, unhappy Spain, everybody said, and their eyes seemed fountains of tears. ²³

As Casamayor shows in his lament, many eighteenth-century Enlightened members of the Spanish middle and upper classes adopted the idea that modernity was something foreign (namely French) and alien to the Spanish ‘Golden Age’. ²⁴ The experience of the afrancesados would prove that this interpretation of modernity caused them great distress, but it is also evidence of the extent to which their thought was framed by the language of (ethnotypical) nationhood even before 1808.

In this paper, I argue that ethnotypical varieties of Spanish nationhood were the most common forms by 1808 and that, once the war started, they served as common ground for the nationalization of the Peninsular War experience. This nationalization affected populations with different degrees of politicization, and it allowed liberals and absolutists alike to develop clashing definitions of the Spanish nation based on common ideas to which they attributed increasingly conflicting meanings. Thus, the historical stakes of early-nineteenth-century Spain should not be explained as the problems derived from a liberal nationalist minority sustaining a socially weak nation but by discussion of whether too wide a gap between the positions of liberal revolutionaries and reactionaries had a negative effect on the nationalization process. In order to explore these issues, I will organize the evidence according to two of these common ideas: independence and constitution.

Independence

On 2 May 1808, the actor Rafael Pérez wrote in his diary, ‘Tragic day in Madrid’. News had arrived that the last members of the Royal Family remaining in the city were being evacuated. That information spread quickly and violence broke out. Pérez witnessed the slaughter and wrote that the massacre would have been bigger if Marshal Murat's army had not restrained itself and the local Spanish authorities had not tried to calm the situation: ‘On this ill-fated day there were some exemplary actions of courage by the Spaniards’. ²⁵ Apart from this line, Spanish nationhood is missing from the account.

However, as the diary progresses, the text reflects changes in the local situation, the availability in Madrid of intelligence on other anti-French upheavals in provincial Spain and the circulation of patriotic proclamations within the city. Pérez's entries become more and more nationalized, and a narrative framing of the events of 1808 as the Spanish nation defending its independence appears through the way in which this middle-class subject codifies his first-hand experience using the language of nationhood.

After the upheaval, the French began preparing for another attack on Madrid and this unsettled the population. According to the diary, one of the military commanders in Cádiz, General Solano, was mistaken for a French collaborationist by the protesting crowd and was ultimately killed. Pérez comments in relation to this event, ‘In brief, Spain as a whole, all the villages and towns and all the people were burning with a desire for revenge, and the brave, energetic, noble proclamations that the generals published and spread raised the enthusiasm and fury in the hearts of all Spaniards’. ²⁶ Some days afterwards, he wrote a general assessment of what had happened during those days. When the country (la patria) found itself in the extraordinary circumstances brought about by the March–May 1808 crisis,

eleven million souls without a king, without a government, came together to establish one without political turmoil, [and they did that] without shedding a drop of blood, of Spanish blood, loyal, virtuous and brave blood. They only wanted to spill their blood in defence of their forefathers’ august religion, their homeland (patria) and their beloved monarch, the Desired Ferdinand VII. ²⁷

Pérez equates virtue with patriotism and points out that their appearance ‘produced tears of fondness, tears of joy, tears that comforted Spaniards, and all those wonders were attributed to God’. Pitying the Spaniards, he ‘had looked compassionately at an innocent nation that was about to fall prey to the world's biggest tyrant’. Consequently, ‘the kind of courage [our] armies will display was clear to see: every soldier was anxious to spill French blood and avenge the outrages committed against their country (patria), religion and king by those despicable vandals’. ²⁸

After the news of the first Spanish victories, his tone became excited: ‘Everlasting glory to the great nation! Bonaparte, what has happened to your legions, your glory, your power? Look at it, crushed in Spain’. Recent developments made Pérez think that such a happy outcome was already partially achieved. Final success would certainly involve a common military struggle that the population would undertake with optimism: ‘The whole of Spain became a barracks; people were arming themselves everywhere, donations were being made, cloth, ammunitions, artillery, songs and papers were being written, and people were crying: Ferdinand, Ferdinand! Long live Ferdinand VII!’ Our author thus wonders rhetorically: ‘A nation that finds itself in such a state, can it [ever] be conquered?’ ²⁹

Pérez's ego-document is not an isolated case. Reading the events that began in 1808 as a national struggle for independence does not seem to have been a mere invention crafted by intellectuals some decades later. Even enemies of the supposedly precarious Spanish liberal state (which, according to modernists, would have been the creator of Spanish nationalism) recorded a nationalized memory in their ego-documents. Among them was Juan Gabriel del Moral, an anti-liberal member of the local elite from a small village in eastern Andalusia. His memoirs were written in the late 1810s or in the 1820s (perhaps during the Liberal Triennium). Del Moral partakes in the idea of the heroic independence struggle against tyrants (‘In these fateful times Spain found itself, for our tragedy, exposed to easily fall prey to the infernal tyrant, the emperor of the French, who by that time was already the absolute lord of the other thrones in Europe’), but he has his own views on the causes: ‘Laxity in good habits had made most Spaniards lovers of living in absolute freedom, independent from God, his holy law and his ministers. This was the main appeal that the Frogs had for us’. For this reactionary, the worst part of the situation was that the vendepatrias (treacherous) Spanish elites had ‘declared for our enemies. Who would have believed this? It was the common folk who kept loyal to and kept loving God and the king. Here Providence performed one of the biggest wonders in both religious and secular history’. As a result,

The fury (el fuego) of the 2nd May in Madrid travelled through the air (penetró por el aire) so quickly to every city, town and village in Spain that (unusually) practically the same missive made it [the uprising] known in Toledo, Figueres, Cadiz, Pamplona, Badajoz, Seville, Guadalajara, etc.

An additional example of antagonism toward the French comes from the public notary Hilarión Sancho, who in July 1808 wrote in his diary,

Some days [ago] the enemy appeared at Valladolid, although as soon as they went out, the authorities and the people kept their wish to avenge the great outrages that they and the nation had suffered; thus, the town council and a [newly] created junta started great war preparations and [ordered] uniforms for the enlisted people. ³¹

Another case in point comes from a Carmelite nun from Seville, who described the French invasion somewhat apocalyptically:

The nuns devoted themselves to bloody disciplines, cruel spiked belts, extraordinary fasting, privation and rejection of every joy or pleasure, even the most innocent and accepted ones. [They did that] because their fervour made them do so, as well as [because of] the pain of seeing their Divine Husband so offended, the holy religion in danger of disappearing from our soil, and so many wretched people suffering the harshness of the enemies who occupied our beloved and cherished nation. ³²

The territoriality showed by this nun is illustrative of the extent to which the liberal nation was built upon ethnotypical nationhood. However, it is reasonable to assume that such a – the liberal one – notion was not very common at this point. Most frequently, individuals simultaneously use the genetic and ethnotypical forms. An example is Cipriano Calvo, a Spanish rank-and-file soldier who was captured during the early stages of the war and taken to a POW camp in Antwerp. In 1812, he kept a short diary: ‘I belong to the Spanish nation, I am not ashamed to say it’, he asserts to a Frenchman whom he is speaking with. ‘For better or worse, I was captured at Ciudad Rodrigo, so I feel no sorrow to be under your flag’. However, the motivations behind the war are a different issue. ‘The grief you have seen in me, the sadness that torments me, comes from that unfair action, that perverse action, that your emperor has carried out with Spain. That is my affliction’. Some moments before this conversation, he had narrated a French attempt to arm him along with his fellow prisoners and integrate them into the Napoleonic armies:

All at once yelled: We will never be French! We would rather lose our lives and everything we have. Long live Spain and her flags!. These we will always follow, as we have sworn ourselves to them and we will swear ourselves to no others.

Calvo points out that opinions among the Spanish prisoners were divided. Some said that upholding their loyalty to the Spanish flag would automatically turn them into prisoners. Others replied that they would be prisoners anyway, ‘but we will be able to say without risk or loss of face that we had the determination of true Spaniards’. ³³

There can be many ambiguities in ego-documents and debates about meanings, and intentions will always remain unsettled. However, these two common elements (the war is about a nation fighting for its traditions and independence; the Spanish nation is construed as a preexisting, often political entity) are undeniably prevalent within the so-called ‘patriotic’ side. It is instructive to compare del Moral's account with that of Juan Rico y Vidal, a Valencian revolutionary priest who published a ‘Historical memoir on the revolution in Valencia’ in 1811. Despite his totally different political stance, he coincides with del Moral in the blame put on the Ancien Régime elites who had ‘involved themselves in the enslavement of the nation’. However, he uses this against absolutism, not for it. Echoing del Moral, the point of departure in his analysis is the decadence of the nation, although this is perceived to be caused by very different factors: ‘There was no patria and the Spanish soil was a field devastated by the passions and infamy of a despotic government’, patria having here the liberal meaning of proper political institutions and rights. ³⁴

During the war, Ferdinand VII's persona was still a malleable construction whose ‘liberty’ and ‘independence’ were blended with those of the whole nation. ³⁵ When news of the king's abdication reached Valencia, Rico y Vidal wrote that there was great consternation because the event represented ‘the loss of national liberty and independence’. Hence, ‘the people could suffer no more and the entire nation, seeing that it was treated like a flock of beasts or slaves, cried out against such a perfidy at once and everywhere, and excitedly shouted that they [the people] knew no king but Ferdinand’. ³⁶ In my view, this was genuine monarchism for some people; the king was an essential and defining part of their nation. Others simply used the language of politicized ethnotypical nationhood, applied to the new circumstances (which included a vacatio regis situation), as a vehicle towards liberal nationalism.

This latter trait can be seen in Raimundo Ferrer's writing: he narrates how in 1809 some prisoners at the Montjuïc castle refused to acknowledge Joseph I as their king, and he describes the reasons they gave to those who tried to convince them to recognize him as monarch:

[They said] that when they refused to take the oath they had taken into consideration not the success of the fighting forces but the justice of the cause. Their decision was not a mistake but their duty, since, even accepting the legitimacy of Charles IV's and Ferdinand VII's renunciations, and even adding to them the abdication of the entire Bourbon dynasty and every immediate heir, the nation, which is not a flock of sheep that can be sold, transferred or traded, taking back the sovereignty rights that rightfully belong to it, could place them [those rights] in whoever it wanted, and in this case, if the nation placed them in Joseph Napoleon, they [the prisoners] would recognize him as their sovereign. ³⁷

If the issue of ‘independence’, and with that the liberty of the nation, is the main reason brandished by contemporaries to construe the war as a ‘national war’, the conditions of its restoration differ depending on the actor – the King or the Parliament (las Cortes) – that they considered its guarantor. Thus, one of the fundamental post-war cleavages was formed during the war. ³⁸

Whereas some ego-documents present the return of Ferdinand VII from his French imprisonment as the recovery of Spanish national liberties, ³⁹ many liberals would have to manage the disappointing gap between the Spanish nation in their minds and the experience of political persecution. After the 1814 repeal of the 1812 Constitution by the king, the liberty of the nation was again in danger, but now due to a domestic tyrant. One of these liberals, Manuel José Quintana, wrote an autobiography between 1817 and 1818, whilst he was imprisoned in Pamplona. He recalls the opening of the Cortes in Cádiz a few years earlier: ‘The Cortes finally gathered in due time, and the tears that brimmed in my eyes when I saw the members of the parliament marching from the Regency Palace to the church [where they would convene] were faithful proof of my joy and enthusiasm’. It was a key moment in his political life:

The great leap forward was done, national representation was established, liberty was restored, and tyranny destroyed. Back then it seemed to me that a comeback to the previous oppression was impossible, and I simply could not believe that most Spaniards could ever desire it. But, oh!, how little did I know my fellow countrymen and how little experience did I have in the matter of political passion. ⁴⁰

In contrast to the previous cases, absolutists and reactionaries framed ideas of national independence and liberty in terms of monarchy and religion. In a clear continuation of eighteenth-century Bourbon cultural policies, they presented the king as the father of the nation. However, because these concepts were used as tools for counterrevolution, their politicized ethnopolitical meanings had to assume much more clearly than they had before 1808 that the Spanish nation was a political actor. In order to rebut the liberal semantic innovation, they had to evolve their own national languages in a much more nationalized (and political) way. Arguably, this is what the king himself demonstrates in a diary entry from September 1823, just some days ahead of the end of the Liberal Triennium and his release from detention. He depicts one of the discussions that he had while he was in a besieged Cádiz:

Golfín [a liberal representative] said: My Lord, to appease these people, it would be advisable to promise a representative government. I answered: I do not promise anything but to provide a government seeking the happiness of the nation. He answered back: Your Majesty can believe that it [the representative government] would please the entire nation. I answered back: Is Cádiz the entire nation? ⁴¹

Certainly, independence and liberty can be framed in national terms with potentially contradictory meanings, but a connection between the nation and its rightful government is found across the whole ‘patriotic’ political spectrum. The breakdown of this relationship is inherently linked to a threat to national independence and liberty. During the conflict against the French Empire, the way in which this relationship was worked out involved ambiguous terms and so boosted the war effort, but after 1814 the cleavage became active and defined a cultural war for the definition of the nation that, together with other elements, would shape Ferdinand VII's reign and the rest of the Spanish nineteenth century.

Constitution

As I mentioned above, independence was also understood as national liberty from internal tyranny. This trope would be essential in terms of how the aforementioned cultural war unfolded. Domestic tyrants who tried to enslave the Spanish people included the treacherous afrancesado elites (vid. del Moral's case) or the king himself, whom a section of the liberals would start to characterize as a despot. For example, diplomat José García de León y Pizarro affirms in his memoirs, which were probably written at the end of his life in the 1830s, that a good, patriotic people and a disastrous, unreliable ruling class seemed to be a structural trait of Spanish history. Referring to the political instability of the period and the events of 1808 (the uprising against the French), 1814 (the revocation of the Cádiz Constitution), 1820 (Riego's coup d’état) and 1822–23 (a second, this time successful, French invasion and the restoration of Ferdinand's ‘absolute’ power), he points out, ‘In all these critical moments (lances), it has been the Spanish people that saved itself, despite the frequent treason and continuous stupidity of its rulers’. ⁴²

Nevertheless, the internal tyrant par excellence who activated the ‘enemy within’ framework is Manuel de Godoy. He was accused of having conspired with Napoleon against Spanish independence, deliberately implemented policies that weakened the country, perverted Spanish institutions and even usurped the king's role. ⁴³ Hence, the Mutiny of Aranjuez, in which he was outed, is presented as a moment of national awakening. Valencian parish priest Joaquín Centelles wrote in his diary, ‘21st March [1808]: a proclamation was published stripping the Prince of Peace Godoy, mentioned in the year 1800, of all his employments. […] There was universal joy all throughout the nation, since he was a tyrant’. ⁴⁴ Similarly, del Moral remarks in his memoirs, ‘That butcher wolf left the Nation emaciated (en esqueleto)’. ⁴⁵ And the Catalan nobleman Rafael d’Amat wrote in his diary, ‘25th March […] A great day for Spain as Don Manuel Godoy has fallen, […] this was the happiest of announcements for the entire nation, which has awaited this day for a long time to rid itself of the oppression under which it lived’. ⁴⁶

This ‘double tyranny model’ (internal-external), ⁴⁷ with its quite flexible political adaptation, was complemented by the equally flexible belief in an ancient Spanish constitution, whose particular definition served as a standard for what ‘internal tyranny’ actually was. As with national independence, this issue also connects the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ⁴⁸ In his memoirs, written from 1787 to 1790, the Basque Juan Antonio de Armona, a high-ranking official, revelled in the contrast between the French chaos and the ‘tranquillity’ of the 1789 Madrid Cortes, where the 1713 Salic Law was abolished. According to him, one of the objectives of this Ancien Régime parliament was ‘to re-establish the constitutional law that governed the order of succession to the Crown in Spain, without excluding female candidates’. ⁴⁹

It is evident that the complex amalgam of privileges, overlapping jurisdictions, kingdoms, councils, orders, corporations and secular and ecclesiastical institutions that made up what we traditionally know by the name of the ‘Hispanic monarchy’ is in many ways far from the liberal state envisaged in the 1812 Cádiz Constitution (setting aside, of course, other critical differences, such as the repercussions of having a single constitutional text or the nature of its drafting and ratification). However, this is not how many contemporaries, including non-liberals, experienced and construed the post-1808 political changes based on a concept that was intertwined with the war itself (defending national independence was defending the Spanish constitution) and that allowed the same room for ambiguity and appropriation in terms of how to understand power structures and limitations, as well as individual/collective rights. ⁵⁰ Hence, it is because Spain was believed to already have a constitutional structure that pro-absolutist hidalgo Joaquín Zaonero, handling both old and new concepts, wrote in his diary in 1812 that ‘a new constitution of Spain’ had been published. ⁵¹ This is also why lawyer Francisco Gallardo refers to ‘the new Spanish constitution’ in his chronicle from Valladolid and why Spanish-Mexican priest Teresa de Mier points out in his autobiography that the 1520-22 Revolt of the Comuneros had happened ‘in order to sustain the constitution of Spain’ against the foreign despotism of Charles I. ⁵² Moreover, this is probably what explains the way in which Juan Domingo Palomar sought to justify his appointment at the pro-French administration of Alcalá in his diary in 1810 (two years before the Cádiz Constitution). He had to swear loyalty to Joseph I, an act that he found difficult to integrate into his identity.

I expressed only obedience to the King, without saying which [king] and secretly meaning the legitimate one (haciendo intención del legítimo). I swore what I had to and what mattered to me, and for the same reason, I had no qualm about reading ‘I swear to serve the King, the Constitution, and the Nation in this appointment’, because for me the King was, according to the Constitution, that of the true Spain, and the Nation, the non-Frenchified Spanish one (la española no afrancesada). The only duty that I have imposed on myself is to help the people and work in their favour, resisting as much as I can the iniquities of these vandals. ⁵³

Ego-documents from liberal individuals who opposed Napoleon also used the idea of the Spanish constitution as a token of the antiquity of an independent Spanish nation, but they did so with different semantic connotations by exhibiting different historicist contents. Here the truly ‘ancient constitution’ is enshrined in the medieval past of Iberia when the Christian kings were, according to them, subjected to their ‘parliaments’. ⁵⁴ Thus, the traitors to the national essence were the ‘absolute kings’ who had compromised the nation's independence and freedom. By menacing the last traces of national dignity, the French invasion had, following a long period of subjection under several tyrants (including Napoleon and Godoy), awakened the nation. ‘Once the veil over Bonaparte's perfidy had fallen with the 2nd May atrocities, the nation came back to its senses (volvió en sí)’, wrote the exiled liberal priest Joaquín Lorenzo Villanueva, ‘and blushed at having suffered the yoke of illegal despotism that had put it on the edge of ruin’. ⁵⁵ In his 1825 memoirs, he reflects on the concept of sovereignty and relies on the double tyranny model to explain the 1808 upheaval:

The Spanish did not wish to alter their original system of government, as the French had wanted in their revolution; they did not want to turn their monarchy into a republic; they were happy to be ruled by their king, but they wanted to be ruled the way their forefathers were before the Austrian despotism; ⁵⁶ [they wished to be] ruled by a king loyal to the sworn compact of the fundamental laws, a king that rules according to them and who will surely respect his subjects’ rights and, of course, those of the nation. ⁵⁷

As with independence, the idea of a constitution was certainly ambiguous, and its cleavages regarding power and legitimacy would also nourish political conflict once the war had been won. This ambiguity and its consequences would manifest themselves in some key issues, such as freedom of the press, the Inquisition, and the prerogatives of the king and the Church. ⁵⁸ From this point on, the word ‘constitution’ increasingly becomes associated with the document proclaimed in Cádiz on 19 March 1812, which reactionary Juan Gabriel del Moral would end up labelling ‘the stigma (sambenito) of the Spanish nation’. ⁵⁹

The actual role played by Ferdinand VII certainly contributed to the polarization, and conditioned the rhythms and intensity of the triumph of the liberal nation as a politically enshrined principle and a socially assumed concept. Unlike Louis XVIII, the restored king did not grant any charter, and he overcame many of the limitations that his father Charles IV had had to deal with. However, the cultural war over the definition of the Spanish nation was shaped not only by the king's hostility towards liberalism but also by other political issues: should the unquestioned Catholic character of the Spanish nation provide the Catholic Church a privileged political and economic position? What are the limits of citizenship? Does the representative system work? ⁶⁰

Looking at the process from the viewpoint of my subjects’ personal experiences, what stands out is how much the anti-liberals within my corpus integrate Spanish nationhood into their narratives, and, simultaneously, how violently they treat their supposedly liberal fellow countrymen. For instance, Juan Gabriel del Moral comments on the alcalde ⁶¹ who raised a militia force to capture the fleeing Rafael del Riego after the liberal regime was overthrown in 1823: ‘He was Spanish and Christian Spanish’ (era español y español cristiano). ⁶² Riego was, as del Moral puts it, ‘sentenced to be hanged, and he was so in Cebada Square [in Madrid] before a large crowd, which impatiently wanted to see him hang (hecho un racimo entre dos palos), and they and every good Spaniard who is a firm believer in God got what they wanted’. ⁶³

Later in his life, in the middle of the ‘Ominous Decade’, del Moral recalls his ‘horror’ and distress during the Liberal Triennium, especially regarding religious policies, and commends ‘the countless imprisonments, punishments, hangings and shootings, banishments and sentencings to hard labour that have been executed in Spain, punishing that contagious and pestiferous filth of constitutional Masons’. ⁶⁴ In his will, del Moral asks his children to follow his ideals, namely ‘true love to our holy Catholic religion and our Spanish country’ (nuestra patria de España). ⁶⁵

It is not surprising that liberals would develop their own national meanings for ‘independence’ and ‘constitution’. They did so with a particular intensity during the second 1812 Constitution period (1820–1823). Thus, in 1825 Villanueva denounced what he called ‘the open war’ conducted at the time by many clergymen against the liberal government ‘in order to enslave again this heroic nation, which had been able to gloriously restore its inalienable rights’. Equally, a Catalan liberal militiaman writes in his diary about the 1823 anti-liberal guerrillas. According to him, these armed groups ‘did nothing but burn, disgrace and kill, and they said that they were defending the faith, and this despicable damned rabble did nothing but disrupt all our beloved Spain’. ⁶⁶

It would not be fair, however, to exclusively depict this symbolic war over the meanings of true Spanishness in such violent terms. After all the conflict, ego-documents from the 1820s and 1830s whose authors show any degree of politicization seem to reveal an underlying common ground derived from the acknowledgement of sharing the same nation. Hence, the same author, writing in 1824, does not ask God for the disappearance of the absolutists but for ‘a happy peace and union, which is what every good Spaniard is looking for’. ⁶⁷ A year before, an absolutist general, the Baron of Eroles, visited Reus, another Catalan city. According to a witness's account, ‘He approached the [parading] troops and reviewed them. He said in front of the entire division: “long live the king, long live Spain, and hail the harmony among us”, and right afterwards the division marched before him’. ⁶⁸

Perhaps as a backlash against the political consequences tied to this feeling, Galician jurist and civil servant Arias Teijeiro, a future Carlist, adopts a bleak tone in his 1828–1831 diaries. In March 1828, he depicts a government meeting in which two members of cabinet clashed.

Oh, poor nation! And His Majesty insists on supporting these ministers, men who are going to lead the nation to ruin, not just because of their ignorance but because of an evil plan devised by the Masonic lodges. […] The only thing that we have left is God, who seems to be watching over us with a special Providence in order to avoid the complete triumph of the revolution. It seems that only a miracle can eventually prevent it (así, esto sólo por milagro se sostiene). ⁶⁹

In this account the king seems to become less and less important in the definition of the Spanish nation and some criticism of him starts to emerge. It should not come as a surprise that most anti-liberal individuals had undergone such personal evolutions by the late 1820s and 1830s. In his last years, Ferdinand VII restored some liberals and former afrancesados to power, so as to, among other things, strengthen his only daughter's future claim to the throne against his brother Charles. After his death in 1833, they would shape the consolidation of (moderate) liberalism in Spain, including a (limited) principle of national sovereignty. At this point, the mental world of the absolutists was strained, but evidence suggests that, as had happened before, this experience was not lived without or against the nation, but with and through it. In February 1830, the king granted a special privilege to a liberal regarding debts payment. ‘For Heaven's sake’, his diary entry says, ‘this cannot be worse’ (no puede llegarse a más). ‘Annihilating the nation to reward crime and its enemies, and persecuting loyalty at the same time. […] [What a] wretched nation that has become the property of half a dozen scoundrels and thieves’. ⁷⁰

The number of sources covering the 1830s within my corpus is much smaller than the number of sources on the War of Independence and its immediate aftermath, so inferences must be drawn much more prudently here. The War of Independence had entered the strata of long-term memory for most of the subjects. In Arias Teijeiro's case, he was barely nine years old on the 2 May, while Jovellanos and his generation were long gone. Supported by many anti-liberals, the French invasion of 1823 did not spawn the same reaction as did that of 1808. What clearly remains is the common sense of Spanishness as a valid tool for codifying life experience, despite all the violence and civil conflict, all the political instability and the (theoretical) nonexistence of a Spanish nation (and nationalizing)-state.

This is why Hilarión Sancho takes the trouble to share with us the letter that the liberal commander of the Valladolid garrison sent to the stronger Carlist army that was entering the city in September 1837:

The city has been evacuated and it will not resist you; it will thus be under the guarantees of the laws of war and humanity; and since all of us are Spaniards, you have to fulfil the duty that this miserable country (esta patria desgraciada) imposes on you. […] I will gain no military advantage from property being respected. I make the request solely out of the feeling of Spanishness (por el solo sentimiento de español), of which I remind you, having faith that this town, if it remains peaceful, will suffer nothing during the military operations, which are exclusively a business between you and me. ⁷¹

The Carlists did not attack, and bloodshed and destruction were avoided. We might never know why for sure. It is easy to understand, nevertheless, why an inhabitant of the city would remember that day.

Conclusions

Debunking the ‘War of Independence’ as a Spanish nationalist myth was a commendable and necessary work. The result was suitable for the Spanish ‘weak nationalization’ paradigm, which held that the appearance of alternative national projects in late nineteenth-century Spain was a result of an inefficient state that was unable to appeal to its citizens and expand a common national narrative. It was also instrumental in hegemonic modernist theories of nationalism, since it offered a good and straightforward way to confirm the whole ‘invention of tradition’ analytical narrative. In the case of Spain, evidence appearing to show nationhood was demoted by assessing it through the standard of national sovereignty and pointing out that its defenders were a tiny minority within Spanish society. As, according to that standard, ‘real’ nationhood equals national sovereignty, which in turn equals ‘modernity’, absolutists and the whole spectrum of anti-liberalism could not be ‘truly’ national. In fact, Spaniards themselves could not be wholly national (excepting some troubled isolated progressive elites who had been able to receive the light of civilization from without, usually Britain and France).

Setting aside all the normativity and simplification inherent in the notion of ‘modernity’, in this paper I have advanced the point that this argument does not hold water for both theoretical and empirical reasons. Theoretically, we no longer see nations as ‘things’ that are instilled into the masses by states. The concept of ‘nationalization’ has thus become more complex and decentralized. If nations are not stable essences but aggregates of individuals engaging in collective phenomena, their study cannot be detached from the experiences and worldviews of those embodying them. The fact that the events that shaped the Spanish Age of Revolutions later nurtured the Spanish nationalist narrative does not say anything about the events themselves and how they were experienced by contemporaries. Therefore, instead of projecting our own concepts on the past, I have proposed an alternative conceptual framework based on continuities and changes in the way in which people from the past thought about their nations. Owing to the subject matter, the most relevant concepts in this model are the genetic (the nation as a loose birth tie), the ethnotypical (the nation as a group endowed with a national character, which can be related to an existing polity) and the liberal (the nation as the citizens’ common will).

Empirically, the use of these overlapped, but their semantics present a certain long-term evolutionary pattern – from genetic to ethnotypical and then to liberal – in the corpus of ego-documents that I have used. However, differences between them are primarily the product of the interplay between personal circumstances and political conflict. Further work is required on comparison with other cases, nationhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, afrancesados, the American question and the retrieval of more sources from lower classes, but, from my point of view, the existing hegemonic assumptions about the Spanish War of Independence should be intensively revised. More sources written before 1808 and during the 1808–1814 war would still be necessary for a more precise understanding of how widespread the nationalization was and the specific weight of the different forms of nationhood that we have identified. Nevertheless, it is clear that individuals from different places and backgrounds, born within the realms of the Hispanic Monarchy before the age of the nation-state and mass schooling, codified their experiences of the ‘Peninsular War’ using the underlying assumption that the Spanish nation was struggling for its independence and its constitution. Serving as a common thread, the notions of ‘independence’ and ‘constitution’ would also be key areas in the conflict between liberals and reactionaries after the war. Drawing on the experiences that they had between 1808 and 1814, the former would develop a fully-fledged liberal concept of the Spanish nation, while the latter would stick to certain politicized ethnotypical forms and stress the primacy of the Catholic Church and the king's sovereignty. Between these two poles, ego-documents also reveal a wide spectrum of gradualism and ambiguity that demonstrates the sheer complexity of life but nonetheless suggests a significant extension of genetic and ethnotypical ideas of nationhood in 1780s–1830s Spain and a truly nationalized experience of the War of Independence for many subjects.