RECURSOS
DIDÁCTICOS

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND HISTORICISM

The process of construction of Spain as a national state and the triumph of the liberal revolution walked parallel to a growing and very romantic concern for the past, observed from then on as a dynamic fact, a process without breaks with the present. The past will not be conceived, therefore, as something dead and obsolete. As a legacy and source of inspiration, the past will begin to form part of the present. Thus, while the present was impregnated with history, the past ended up coming to life.

The nation, a new bond of cohesion after the crisis of the monarchy, thereafter became the subject par excellence of historical studies. The nation was understood in this context as an aggregate formed around a volkgeist, a unique and unrepeatable popular character, which had to be maintained and, where appropriate, defended from any foreign deformation. Tracing its antiquity and, above all, its unbreakable and peculiar continuity became a patriotic activity to which historians devoted themselves with fervor within the framework of the numerous general histories of Spain, which began to spread. Those made by Eugenio de Tapia (1840), Juan Cortada (1841-1842), Fermín González Morón (1841-1846), Fernando Patxot y Ferrer (1857-1859), Antonio Cavanilles (1860-1863), Dionisio Aldama and Manuel García (1861-1864), Antonio del Villar (1862-1864) or Eduardo Zamora (1873-1875). De todas ellas, sin embargo, la que más repercusión tuvo fue, sin duda, la monumental Historia general de España desde los tiempos primitivos hasta nuestros días, en 30 tomos, del sacerdote y, después, periodista, además de político, Modesto Lafuente y Zamalloa (1850-1867), the only one that was capable of definitively displacing the History of Spain that Father Mariana had published at the beginning of the 17th century.

The new way of writing history was characterized by its new interests. The kings were no longer the only protagonists of the historical story. In any case, it would be the relationship between monarchy and people, expressed through legal freedoms, which would constitute the axis of the narrative, while the nobility began to appear as the main obstacle to the historical development of the nation, understood under the form of constant progress, although subject to ups and downs, of the national unification process, culminated, logically, only with the liberal State. The independence of the nation, of which the constant struggle of the indigenous people, our ancestors, against successive invasions was proof, will be the first step and the exploits of Sagunto or Numancia, its main example. The Visigoth monarchy, first, and the reconquest epic culminated by the Catholic Monarchs, later, constituted milestones of a process, in which the unfaithful al-Andalus or the despotic monarchy of the Habsburgs were interpreted, on the contrary, as foreignizing epochs, that had led to the dissolution and bankruptcy of the national spirit. Although the interpretation of the decadence varied, which for the liberals was inextricably linked to the Habsburgs, but for the conservatives it would have only begun with the last and weak Austrias, both agreed in seeing in the Middle Ages the culmination of the patriotic essences and , incidentally, a prefiguration and an immediate precedent of the time in which they lived. Do not forget that Argüelles had come to present the Constitution of 1812 as the culmination of the Middle Ages.

The new liberal interpretation of the history of Spain, represented by authors such as Antonio Alcalá Galiano, Eduardo Chao, Antonio Gil y Zárate, Tomás Muñoz y Romero, Pedro José Pidal or Amador de los Ríos,It clashed, however, with other visions, especially those linked to the traditionalism of Jaime Balmes, of which the General History of Spain by journalist Víctor Gebhart (1861) is perhaps the most representative sample. The most doctrinaire Catholicism, which saw in God the only sovereign power and in the monarch its only natural delegate, was also refractory to the notion of the people until the defeat of Carlism.

Donoso Cortés constituted the main bastion of this type of positions. However, the disarmortization, first, and the discredit caused by his adherence to the cause of the Infante Carlos, later, significantly reduced the support for this reactionary historiography, which began to occupy defensive positions with the denunciation of his nefarious machinations to the service of tyranny.

Anti-liberal historiography also had a very important influence among the regionalist and localist positions, which were on the rise during the Elizabethan period, which confronted the “Castilianism” of the most popular versions from the springs of central power, especially in Catalonia, whose decline was associated precisely to its forced integration into the Spanish State from the monarchy of the Catholic Monarchs. However, the History of Catalonia by Víctor Balaguer, a progressive, stated in an argued manner a model of integration of Catalonia in Spain based on very different historiographical bases.

In any case, the writing of this History was an increasingly secularized, scientific and institutionalized exercise, thanks to the reorganization of the Royal Academy of History (1847-1848), the founding of the Higher School of Diplomacy ( 1856) and the Corps of Archivists and Librarians (1858); above all, after the Moyano law of public instruction (1857), which meant its incorporation as a mandatory subject at different educational levels. Despite this, the weaknesses of the educational system, still more interested in promoting religious instruction than the national ideology, largely explain the difficulties of liberal historiography in establishing itself as a hegemonic and consensual interpretation of the history of Spain.

LITERATURE

BOYD, C. P. (2000) Historia patria. Política, historia e identidad nacional en España: 1875-1975, Barcelona, Pomares-Corredor.

CIRUJANO, P.; ELORRIAGA, M. T. y PÉREZ GARZÓN, J. S. (1985) Historiografía y nacionalismo español (1834-1868), Madrid, CSIC.

FLITTER, D. (2006) Spanish Romanticism and the Uses of History. Ideology and the Historical Imagination, Oxford, Legenda.

FRADERA, J. M. (2003) Cultura nacional en una sociedad dividida. Cataluña, 1838-1868, Madrid, Marcial Pons.

MORALES MOYA, A. (1993) “Historia de la historiografía española”, en M. Artola (dir.), Enciclopedia de Historia de España, Madrid, Alianza, t. VII, pp. 583-684.

MORENO ALONSO, M. (1979) Historiografía romántica española. Introducción al estudio de la historia en el siglo XIX, Sevilla, Universidad de Sevilla.

PEIRÓ MARTIN, I. (1995; 20062) Los guardianes de la Historia. La historiografía académica de la Restauración, Zaragoza, Institución “Fernando el Católico”.

PEIRÓ MARTIN, I. (1996) “Los historiadores oficiales de la Restauración (1874-1910)”, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, CXCIII/I, pp. 13-72.

PEIRÓ MARTIN, I. (2008) El espectáculo de la Historia. Imágenes del pasado nacional y representaciones del oficio de historiador, Salamanca, Prensas Universitarias de Salamanca.