Developments in Contemporary Spanish Historiography - From Social History To Cultural History - Miguel A. Cabrera

Developments in Contemporary Spanish Historiography: From Social History to the New
Cultural History
Author(s): Miguel A. Cabrera
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 77, No. 4 (December 2005), pp. 988-1023
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/499832
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Review Article
Developments in Contemporary Spanish Historiography:
From Social History to the New Cultural History*
Miguel A. Cabrera
Universidad de La Laguna
Historical research in Spain, as in other countries, has been deeply affected by the
historiographical revolution of the twentieth century—the decline and retreat of
traditional history and the consequent rise and dissemination of the social history
paradigm, embodied, for example, in the Marxist and Annales schools. The tran-
sition to social history undoubtedly started later in Spain than elsewhere, and it
was largely brought about by foreign influences. Indeed, Spain’s historiographical
dependence on the outside continues even now; Spanish historians are more often
beneficiaries than creators of historiographical innovations. Regardless of the ge-
nealogy of the Spanish historiographical revolution, however, the important point
is that it happened, and as a result historical research in Spain during recent decades
has reached a level of analytical sophistication similar to that of the most advanced
historiographies. Since the advent of social history, the objects of study, method-
ological and theoretical concerns, research agendas, and principal debates of Span-
ish historians have been essentially the same as those of their foreign colleagues.
At the same time, the huge growth of historical research and the creation of a solid,
professional academic infrastructure, including academic journals, have clearly
brought Spanish history much closer to the forefront of the discipline. Indeed,
Spanish historical research is now clearly in the international mainstream. The
object of this article is to describe the terms and extent of this modernization
process and to examine the specific impact it has had on works in the fields of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish history. I will try to give the reader not
only a comprehensive view of recent developments in Spanish historiography but
also an assessment of the contribution of this historiography to the general devel-
opment of historical knowledge.
The adoption by Spanish historians of the new social history paradigm and the
abrupt theoretical change this involved led to a fundamental redefinition of the
object of study. In Spain, as elsewhere, the old narrative history of high politics,
institutions, and great individuals gave way to a history that was more concerned
with the study of economic and social phenomena and of collective action. Spanish
social historians were driven to explore historical events that had previously been
* Translated for the Journal of Modern History by Edwin Tudsbery.
The Journal of Modern History 77 (December 2005): 988–1023

䉷 2005 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2005/7704-0004$10.00
All rights reserved.
Developments in Contemporary Spanish Historiography 989
ignored or considered irrelevant, and they went on to rewrite Spanish history. This
thematic reorientation was not just due to the rise of social history, however: it
was also influenced by the unusual political circumstances of the time. Both the
theoretical requirements of history and the political concerns of the community of
historians, as well as the complex interaction between them, prompted this devel-
opment: the theoretical changes pushed historians to study new facets of historical
reality, while political concerns encouraged them to study certain events and pe-
riods because of their contemporary relevance. Thus, for example, the explosion
of studies from the 1970s onward dealing with the Second Republic and the civil
war (1931–39) resulted from an increasing interest in change and social conflict,
as well as a desire to recover a chapter of Spanish history that had remained in
the shadows during Franco’s regime (1939–75). This interaction between theo-
retical demands and practical impulses is not, of course, unique to Spanish histo-
riography, but it must be examined in order to explain how Spanish historians
chose their research topics. Likewise, the political circumstances and cultural cli-
mate of the postwar period must be taken into account to explain the singular roots
of the Spanish historiographical revolution and the late introduction of social his-
tory in Spain.
I
The triumph of Franco in the civil war and the subsequent establishment of the
dictatorship had a considerable impact on Spanish historical research, since it in-
terrupted the process of theoretical and methodological renewal that had begun in
the preceding years and prevented Spanish history from being drawn into the new
historiographical currents that were on the increase in other Western countries. The
outcome of the war obliged many of the most innovative historians to go into exile,
while others were expelled from universities or suffered academic ostracism. It
also led to the establishment of a political and intellectual climate that discouraged
the introduction of new historiographical approaches. This climate reinforced the
predominance of a positivist methodology that was concerned with the scrupulous
establishment of facts but unwilling to examine these facts within a theoretical
framework. In an isolated society marked by the weight of cultural traditionalism
and state ideological intervention, an official history developed that conditioned
not only the theoretical framework but also the topics of research. Francoism led
to the institutionalization of a national Catholic history that was overtly implicated
in the ideological legitimization of the new regime. It focused almost exclusively
on those periods of history, such as the Era of the Spanish empire’s expansion,
that nourished this same nationalist fervor. At the same time, it displayed a com-
plete lack of interest in other periods, such as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment
and the rise of liberalism in the nineteenth century, that were considered to be eras
of national decadence.1
1
On the historiographical rupture provoked by the civil war and the postwar stagnation, see
Gonzalo Pasamar, Historiografı́a e ideologı́a en la postguerra española: La ruptura de la tradición
990 Cabrera
The predominance of this positivist narrative history, which extolled the virtues
of nationalism and remained absorbed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
ignoring the later modern period, began to show the first signs of change during
the 1950s. That change accelerated in the following years and led to the indisput-
able launch of the Spanish historiographical revolution during the 1970s. This
initial minority reaction against an overwhelmingly traditional and ideological ac-
ademic history whose subject matter was anchored in nineteenth-century histori-
cism was aided by new contacts with innovative European historical currents. Their
influence led to the immediate adoption of a new theoretical outlook that empha-
sized the study of social and economic conditions, as well as the use of new sources
and analytical methods. Defending a professional history characterized by a sci-
entific and objective methodology against a history steeped in an ideological and
political agenda became one of the main paths to renewal, since it enabled Spanish
historians to produce a history different from the official one. They also began to
make use of the new quantitative techniques that were on the rise in other countries.
In this initial phase of historiographical transition toward social history, the fun-
damental reference of Spanish historians was the Annales school, which provided
the main theoretical, methodological, and thematic innovations that began to be
applied to the study of Spanish history. Its techniques included, among other nov-
elties, integrating geography, demography, economy, and society into historical
analysis. This was the time when Spanish history adopted the idea of social ex-
planation that was associated with the notion of “total history.” Human interactions,
economic fluctuations, social structures, and conflicts between classes (studied, as
Fernand Braudel suggested, over both the long and the short term) became not just
objects of study but also, and more importantly, essential variables in explaining
historical processes. At the same time, moreover, the previously prevailing induc-
tive model was rejected in favor of the procedures of what is known as “problem
history,” based on a hypothetical-deductive model, and historians began to make
systematic use of both new sources and new quantitative and statistical method-
ological tools. Already by the end of the 1950s the first articles of the Annales
historians had been translated and published in Spanish, especially those of Brau-
del, and the influence of French social history continued to grow over the coming
years. The first works of Spanish historical theory that made use of the ideas of
the Annales school and openly advocated the study of the structural relations be-
tween individuals and groups also appeared at this time.2
In this initial, introductory phase of social history the work of the Catalan his-
torian Jaime Vicens Vives stands out.3 After attending the IX International Con-
gress of Historical Sciences in 1950, Vicens became one of the first Spanish his-
torians to establish close and steady contact with the Annales school; he adopted
liberal (Zaragoza, 1991). On the connection between history and ideology during Franco’s regime,
see Carolyn P. Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity in Spain, 1875–
1975 (Princeton, NJ, 1997), chap. 8.
2
This is the case of José Antonio Maravall, Teorı́a del saber histórico (Madrid, 1958).
3
The most complete study on Vicens is that of Josep M. Muñoz i Lloret, Jaume Vicens i Vives
(1910–1960): Un biografı́a intel•lectual (Barcelona, 1997).
their theoretical framework and methods and introduced economic and social his-
tory to Spain. At the same time, he criticized the official history sanctioned by the
government. He advocated instead the realization of a scientific history in which
historians would avoid making value judgments and adopting specific ideological
attitudes toward the past and would aim to provide genuine explanations rather
than simply to offer erudition. Regarding methodology, Vicens began employing
quantitative methods and treating sources more systematically and rigorously. With
respect to theory, he was guided by the ambition of writing a total history that
would consider the interaction of different levels of historical reality. Its subject
matter was not to be an abstract, nationalistic concept of the Spanish people, but
rather the living reality of that people as a mass of actual, ordinary human beings.
The unmistakable shift toward the kind of economic and social history advo-
cated by Vicens began in the pages of the journal Estudios de historia moderna
(1951), which he founded, and in his Manual de historia económica de España
(1956). It culminated, however, in an ambitious research project that he directed
and that resulted in the publication of the Historia social y económica de España
y América (1957–59). This work discussed, for the first time, the relationship of
social structures and group mentalities to political life. Starting from the conception
of society as a totality, it considered the way of life and the working conditions of
all social classes; consequently, it placed the lower classes, including the workers,
at the center of historical analysis. Vicens went on to advance the history of the
working-class movement, a subject he started researching in the second half of the
1950s; one of the legacies of that project is an important work by one of his
students, Casimir Martı́, Origenes del anarquismo en Barcelona (1959).
Besides these accomplishments, Vicens was inspired by the French example to
promote research into regional history. He also embarked on the study of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and breathed life into that virtually dormant
subject. With this project he became a pioneer of late modern history and distanced
himself even further from the official academic history. Vicens managed to sur-
round himself with a highly influential group of historians who were also dedicated
to social history, with the result that Catalan historiography was in the vanguard
of the movement to renew historical studies in Spain—a position it maintained at
least until the beginning of the 1980s. In this group were distinguished historians
such as Jordi Nadal and Josep Fontana; the latter eventually adopted historical
materialism and published a broad and influential Marxist-inspired work of re-
search and theoretical reflection. Another achievement of the Catalan social his-
torians was the publication from the 1970s onward of Recerques, one of the most
influential Spanish history journals.
The renewal of historical studies that began timidly in the 1950s continued and
strengthened during the following decade, as the web of historians employing the
theories, analytical methods, and subject matter of social history expanded. While
the first center of renewal was in Catalonia, other centers soon emerged in uni-
versities such as those of Valencia and Madrid. As the decade wore on, contacts
between Spanish historians and the outside world increased, and Spanish histori-
ans’ acquaintance with the latest tendencies in historical research grew. The influ-
ence of the Annales school continued to expand, aided by an initial group of young
992 Cabrera
historians who studied in France under the guidance of Fernand Braudel and other
distinguished Annalistes. At the same time, the influence of the other main school
of social history, historical materialism, grew at an even faster pace and came to
dominate the field of contemporary social history. Finally, in the 1960s, Spanish
history began to welcome theoretical and methodological influences from other
social sciences, such as sociology and political science. It was during this period
that late modern history consolidated itself as a field of study, sustained by newly
created university departments. This expansion of the social history paradigm was
doubtless advanced by the growing openness of the country to foreign influence,
and specifically by the renaissance of cultural activity and its increasing diversity.
Throughout these years, interest in foreign cultures grew, information about them
became increasingly available, and communication channels with other countries
became more and more fertile. As a result, in the second half of the 1960s there
was already a widespread movement of cultural and intellectual opposition to
Franco’s regime, fed by a new generation of university teachers and students who
embraced left-wing ideologies and were becoming ever more distant from official
institutions, including academic ones. Many historians inclined toward social his-
tory were prominent in this increasingly active cultural and intellectual opposition.
As we shall see, historians brought their political concerns to their field of study
and, in consequence, tended to conceive of history not just as an intellectual dis-
cipline but also as a tool in the political struggle to transform society. It was at this
time that the entanglement between history and political opposition to Francoism,
and in general between historical research and political action, became a distinctive
characteristic of Spanish social history, and the consequences of this development
can still be felt.
After the initial foray led by Vicens and his group, other Spanish historians
joined the trend toward social history. They began to make use of materialist
explanations and to consider individuals’ conditions of existence—demographic,
social, economic—as essential for explaining political behavior and cultural crea-
tion. Of course, not all these historians adopted the entire theoretical paradigm and
agenda of social history research. But they participated in a clear historiographical
trend: they distanced their work from the official academic history, incorporated
new subject matter in their research, and were frequently influenced by other social
sciences. These historians resisted the idea that the purpose of history was to
legitimize the political regime. This in turn led to a change in their ideological
attitude toward nineteenth-century Spain and contributed to the consolidation of
late modern history as a specialized area of study. Until this time, as I have said,
the study of the nineteenth century had been virtually ignored. This was due not
just to the prevailing political and ideological climate but also to epistemological
reasons—a belief that the period was too recent and the necessary hindsight lack-
ing. From this moment on, however, there was a historical and ideological reval-
uation of liberalism that led to its establishment as a new area of research, justified
by the specific nature of the society and political system that grew up in the nine-
teenth century as a consequence of the liberal revolution. Along with the creation
of this specialization, there was an urge to investigate and understand the origins
of the outbreak of civil war in 1936 and the situation of the country at the time.
This newfound interest in late modern events was so pronounced that, from the
following decade, it became the predominant field of research among Spanish
historians and the pioneering area in the shift to social history.
The scientific and ideological devalorization of the official academic history and
the resulting shift of interest to the late modern era can be seen, for example, in
the field of political history. Not only did the subject matter expand substantially,
moving beyond state institutions and the actions of important leaders to take ac-
count of the global processes of political change, but in addition concepts and
methods from other disciplines, such as political science, came into play. A pioneer
in the field of political history was Miguel Artola, whose work Los origenes de la
España contemporánea, published in 1959, openly broke with the accepted canons
of official academic history. Artola not only broadened his subject matter but also
adopted a different ideological approach to the liberal regime, criticizing previous
outlooks as simplistic and pejorative and proposing a dispassionate and objective
study of the period. In addition, Artola explored the social roots of liberalism for
the first time. He also used a solid scholarly and documentary framework and was
inspired by the recent contributions of political science, especially from American
scholars. In consequence, his work greatly contributed to opening up the field of
late modern history and brought widespread academic recognition to subjects such
as the War of Independence, the transition to liberalism, the disentailment of mu-
nicipal and ecclesiastical lands (desamortización), and the development of the
liberal political system. With the more open historiographical atmosphere, other
historians began researching the same topics as Artola and following the path taken
by the Catalan group of historians. This was true of the Valencia group of histo-
rians, which included Joan Reglá, a follower of Vicens himself, and José Marı́a
Jover, one of the main innovators in late modern Spanish history. This group’s
endeavors and its fresh conception of history led to an early collective work that
integrated many of the new theoretical approaches and themes and represented
another landmark in the process of modernizing Spanish historical research. This
work was the Introducción a la historia de España, published in 1963; it was long
to remain the best available compendium of Spanish history and was the book that
would instruct successive generations of university students.4
One of the contributory factors to the renewal of Spanish history from the 1960s
onward and to the growth of late modern history was the rise of a group known
as the Hispanists—foreign historians, mostly from Britain, the United States, and
France, who wrote about Spanish history. Many of these historians were motivated
by the desire to discover and understand the causes and origins of the civil war.
While their outlook was conventional abroad, it was quite novel in Spain, where
history continued to be weighed down by the ideological vigilance of Franco’s
regime, the use of old-fashioned theories, and the difficulty of gaining access to
archives. Consequently, the works of the Hispanists, as they became available in
Spanish translation, developed into another source of inspiration for the new gen-
eration of Spanish historians. Following in the wake of the seminal books of Gerald
4
Antonio Ubieto, Joan Reglá, and José Marı́a Jover, Introducción a la historia de España
(Barcelona, 1963).
994 Cabrera
Brenan and Hugh Thomas appeared a work that was to have an even greater
impact, Raymond Carr’s Spain, 1808–1939. This volume was translated into Span-
ish in 1969 and offered the first complete overview of late modern Spanish history.
Moreover, under Carr’s guidance, an initial group of Spanish historians (such as
Joaquı́n Romero Maura, José Varela Ortega, and Juan Pablo Fusi) were trained
and went on to contribute to the modernization of Spanish history, especially po-
litical history. Carr’s influence was supplemented by that of other Hispanists such
as Gabriel Jackson, Stanley Payne, and Edward Malefakis.5 Both the subject matter
and the methodology of the Hispanists’ works gave a powerful stimulus to Spanish
historiography. These highly professional studies, empirically very sound and writ-
ten in an elegant literary style, concentrated on the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies and offered great historical panoramas. Although they gave priority to po-
litical history, they related it to the economic, social, and cultural context. In these
studies the authors devised working hypotheses, handled new concepts and inter-
pretations, and brandished a greater analytical neutrality than Spanish historians
could command. They also had access to bibliographies and newspapers that were
unavailable in Spain. These were works that broke with the prevailing Manichaean
outlook on history, and since they were written from a liberal ideological viewpoint
they clashed with the official Franco version of history (although they were also
critical of any left-wing extremism). When the first works of the Hispanists ap-
peared, the twentieth century in Spain, and in particular the 1930s, was mostly an
unexplored territory for historical research, so that the Hispanists were also able
to contribute decisively to making the recent past an institutionalized field of aca-
demic study.
The French Hispanists were influenced both by the Annales school and by his-
torical materialism. Like their English-speaking counterparts, some French histo-
rians also devoted their works to the history of Spain, beginning with Braudel
himself and including such authors as Pierre Chaunu and Nöel Salomon. However,
from the second half of the 1960s onward, the influence of the Annales school
began to decline, and historical materialism became the predominant trend in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century social history. Some noteworthy Marxist histo-
rians, such as Josep Fontana, severely criticized the Annales school,6 and from this
time on the influence of French historiography was exerted by Marxist historians.
Prominent among them was Pierre Vilar, author of a history of modern Catalonia
5
Among the works translated into Spanish before 1975 that had an important influence are the
following: Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (London, 1943; trans. Paris, 1962); Hugh
Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (London, 1961; trans. Paris, 1967); Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808–
1939 (Oxford, 1966; trans. Barcelona, 1969), and Carr, ed., The Republic and the Civil War in
Spain (London, 1971; trans. Barcelona, 1973); Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the
Civil War, 1931–1939 (Princeton, NJ, 1965; trans. Mexico City, 1967); Stanley Payne, Falange:
A History of Spanish Fascism (Stanford, CA, 1961; trans. Paris, 1965), and Politics and the
Military in Modern Spain (Stanford, CA, 1967; trans. Paris, 1966); Edward Malefakis, Agrarian
Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain (New Haven, CT, 1970; trans. Barcelona, 1971); and
Joan Connelly Ullman, The Tragic Week: A Study on Anti-clericalism in Spain, 1875–1912 (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1968; trans. Barcelona, 1972). As can be seen, many of the works were translated
by Spanish exiles in France and then smuggled into Spain.
6
Josep Fontana, “Ascens i decadència de l’escola dels Annales,” Recerques 4 (1974): 283–98.
that was organized much like the great regional Annales histories, but with a Marx-
ist conceptual framework.7 His work was considered a model by numerous Spanish
historians, some of whom undertook regional research of a similar nature. The
influence of the Annalistes had provided the first impetus to the renewal of Spanish
contemporary historiography, encouraging the trend toward the study of social
phenomena and introducing the notion of structural determinism. Nonetheless, as
the 1960s progressed, contemporary Spanish history became increasingly domi-
nated by historical materialism, which, combined with the strengthening of the
tripartite theoretical division of the economy, society, and politics, gave greater
importance to the class struggle as a factor of historical change. In this initial phase
the structural and Althusserian form of historical materialism, which had originated
in France, predominated. This model usually conceived of the connection between
political and cultural life, on the one hand, and economic conditions, on the other,
as determined by a causal unidirectional link, and the relations between the state
and the lower classes were basically considered in terms of social control. During
this period, only a few Catalan Marxist historians, such as Fontana, had made
contact with British Marxist historiography, and the influence of that historiogra-
phy was not felt significantly until the 1980s when its main works were translated.
Apart from Vilar and other French historians, one of the main contributors to
the increasing influence of historical materialism in Spanish historiography was
Manuel Tuñón de Lara, an exiled Spanish historian trained in France. Tuñón un-
dertook a social history that was inspired by Marxist-leaning authors such as Ernest
Labrousse, Albert Soboul, and Vilar but that also made use of the language and
the techniques of the Annales school, especially the distinction between different
timescales and the use of quantitative and statistical methods. In the case of Tuñón,
however, the structuralist and Althusserian influence was moderated by a loose
conception of the causal link between the economic base and the cultural and
political superstructure. According to his theoretical framework, societies are his-
torical totalities with articulations joining the different levels. The basic levels of
society are demography and the economy (which is divided into structures and
conjunctures), while the second level is made up of groups and social conflicts.
The outstanding social group is the class, understood as a group of individuals
who come together because of their position in relation to the means of production
and the social organization of work. Finally, on the upper level are mentalities,
culture, ideology, and politics. However, in contrast to the most mechanistic ver-
sions of historical materialism, Tuñón’s model explains social phenomena by the
reciprocal interaction between the different levels. While the socioeconomic base
is considered the most important explanatory variable, cultural and political
changes are seen as more than just by-products of the changes experienced by that
base.
The first works by Tuñón on contemporary Spanish history were published in
the 1960s. Two that stand out for their broad scope and widespread influence are
La España del siglo XIX (1961) and La España del siglo XX (1966). These works
7
Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne (Paris, 1962; Catalan trans., Barcelona,
1964–68; Spanish trans., 1978–87).
996 Cabrera
were later supplemented by El movimiento obrero en la historia de España (Ma-

drid, 1972), the first general study of this subject written from a social history
perspective and a genuine landmark in the new history of the labor movement.
Tuñón’s analysis, which was based on a Marxist theoretical outlook, postulated a
causal relationship between socioeconomic circumstances and context, on the one
hand, and the organization and struggles of the working-class movement and its
development over time, on the other. In addition, Tuñón cultivated the field of
cultural history and published influential analyses of the nature of political power
in late modern Spain.8 He also considered theory and methodology, publishing his
Metodologia de la historia social de España in 1973 (there were several subse-
quent editions). This became an essential reference work on theory and method-
ology for the new generation of Spanish historians. In this volume, Tuñón argues
in favor of a scientific conception of history, based on rigorous methods for the
formulation of hypotheses, the construction of models, and the search for historical
regularities pursued with the minimum possible subjective involvement of the his-
torian. While criticizing the traditional approach of studying periods of history in
isolation, he portrays the class struggle as the essential mechanism of historical
change and suggests that the individual subject is replaced by the collective group.
Tuñón’s influence on the development of Spanish social history was consider-
able and was not just limited to his works, the first of which were introduced
secretly in Spain and read widely in the increasingly effervescent and open intel-
lectual and academic circles. Apart from his written works, his influence also
penetrated into Spain through direct contact between Tuñón himself and the new
generation of Spanish historians. Starting in the 1970s, Tuñón began to organize
occasional meetings with Spanish historians at the University of Pau, where he
was a professor. These Pau Seminars, also attended by French Hispanists, provided
an opportunity to discuss and debate different aspects and periods of late modern
Spanish history. They constituted another one of the fundamental motors of the
renovation process in Spanish historiography and provided a forum where the
reinterpretation of the history of Spain according to a social perspective was in-
termingled with political criticism of Franco’s regime. The seminars not only pro-
moted historical materialism but also fed the debate on the history of Spain and
directed research to periods that up until then had hardly been covered by Spanish
historiography, especially the Second Republic and the subsequent civil war, and,
to a lesser extent, the Restoration (1875–1923).
II
After the first tentative movements of the 1950s and the slow transformations of
the 1960s, the process of the thematic and theoretical renewal of Spanish historical
8
See, respectively, Manuel Tuñón de Lara, Medio siglo de cultura española (Madrid, 1970),
and Historia y realidad de poder: El poder y las elites en el primer tercio de la España del siglo
XX (Madrid, 1967). On the contribution of Tuñón to the renovation of Spanish historiography,
see José Luis de La Granja, Alberto Reig Tapia, and Ricardo Miralles, eds., Tuñón de Lara y la
historiografı́a española (Madrid, 1999).
research noticeably strengthened and accelerated from the early 1970s onward.
During this time, and coinciding with the final stages of Franco’s regime, social
history in Spain entered a phase of expansion and growth that continued during
the following decades, and social historians undertook a systematic and compre-
hensive study of the new subjects now considered relevant. The social history
paradigm guided a growing proportion of Spanish historical research. A majority
of historians (including entire university departments) clearly remained on the
margins of social history, however: even when they took up the new research
subjects (demography, economy, social structures, and social conflicts), they still
dealt with them from the theoretical perspective of traditional narrative history.
Nonetheless, the essential fact is that social history took a huge step forward, and
traditional history began a marked period of decline (which continued until re-
cently, when the weakness of social history began to contribute to its revival).
During this time, there was a vast increase in research and publications, and a solid
network of specialized journals and stable professional associations was created.
Finally, Spanish historiography fundamentally changed in the 1970s when Spanish
social historians began to take into account the main debates that had been devel-
oping in the international arena and thus began to study essential periods of Spanish
history in the light of and according to the terms of these debates. This was the
case, for example, with studies of the liberal revolution. This involvement in in-
ternational debates represented another step in updating Spanish historical research
and enabled Spanish historians to make an original contribution to these debates
for the first time.
In the 1970s Spanish social history also acquired its most familiar and enduring
characteristic: an unusual mixture of scientific objectives and political goals. The
close connection between the renewal of historical studies and the cultural and
political opposition to Franco’s regime left a deep and lasting impression on Span-
ish historical research. This fact, reinforced by the influence of Marxism, explains
why ideological and political motivations have so much weight in the work of
Spanish social historians even now, in spite of the considerable time that has passed
since Franco’s death. In the 1970s a type of social history emerged that historian
Enric Ucelay Da Cal later described as frentepopulist, since it was a history that
aimed both to be professional and to have a civic or political purpose: to be at the
service of social change and the defense of the lower classes, the oppressed and
exploited.9 Of course, not all historians practiced this kind of politically engaged
history, but it was widespread. Many historians explicitly claimed that their works
were tools in the political struggle, not just because they provided a knowledge of
reality that was a useful guide in social conflicts but also, in the narrower and more
utilitarian sense, because they promoted a specific ideology or defended a specific
political cause, whether it was the emancipation of the proletariat, the liberation
of women, or the remembrance of victims of Franco’s regime.
9
This term was coined by Enric Ucelay Da Cal to refer to Catalan social history, but it can be
applied to Spanish social history in general. See Enric Ucelay Da Cal, “La historiografı́a en
Cataluña, 1960–1980: Marxismo, nacionalismo y mercado cultural,” Historia y crı́tica 1 (1991):
131–53.
998 Cabrera
Thus, from the 1970s onward, Spanish historical research underwent a rapid
modernization process; in just a few years it was able to cover ground and do work
that had taken considerably longer in other countries. This genuine renaissance in
historical studies was immediately manifested in a rapid blossoming of new re-
search subjects and in the resulting published works. Contemporary social histo-
rians changed their focus to an analysis of the socioeconomic transformations of
Spanish society, to the nature and causal mechanisms of these transformations, and
to the new groups and social conflicts associated with them. Issues such as the
establishment of Spanish capitalism, industrialization, and the disentailment of
assets in the nineteenth century attracted increasing attention, although it was the
working-class movement and the bourgeois revolution that most engrossed histo-
rians. The working-class movement soon became one of the most researched sub-
jects of late modern historians, who were frequently motivated by both professional
and political reasons, and published works in this field grew continuously until
interest in the subject began a perceptible decline in the 1990s.
Although some groundbreaking works already existed, such as those of the
aforementioned Casimir Martı́, the real explosion in the history of the Spanish
labor movement took place at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s,
coinciding with the appearance of Tuñón de Lara’s work on this subject. Over the
following years, a huge number of works were published that were devoted to a
profound historical reconstruction of the development, programs, and struggles of
the working-class movement and its political organizations and trade unions from
their roots in the middle of the nineteenth century until the civil war in 1936. These
developments were related to the economic context and the conjunctures of crisis,
the changes in Spanish society, and the living and working conditions of the work-
ing classes. The first batch of works on the history of the Spanish working-class
movement (some of national and others of regional scope) included those of the
social historians David Ruiz, Miquel Izard, Josep Termes, Antonio M. Calero, Jordi
Maluquer, and Carlos Forcadell.10 These have been supplemented by the works of
British-educated historians such as Joaquı́n Romero Maura and Juan Pablo Fusi,
who wrote, respectively, on the Barcelona and Basque Country labor movements,
and whose primary objective was to create a highly detailed empirical reconstruc-
tion of events.11 An essential subject of study from the start was the workers’
anarchist movement, given its great size and the enormous influence it acquired
during the first third of the twentieth century, both among the urban working class
and among the rural laborers. On anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism the outstand-
10
David Ruiz, El movimiento obrero en Asturias: De la industrialización a la Segunda Repúb-
lica (Oviedo, 1968); Miquel Izard, Revolució industrial i obrerisme: Les ‘Tres Classes de Vapor’
a Catalunya, 1869–1913 (Barcelona, 1970); Josep Termes, Anarquismo y sindicalismo en España:
La Primera Internacional, 1864–1881 (Barcelona, 1972); Antonio M. Calero, Historia del mo-
vimiento obrero en Granada, 1909–1923 (Madrid, 1973), and Movimientos sociales en Andalucı́a,
1820–1936 (Madrid, 1976). Also, Jordi Maluquer de Motes, El socialismo en España, 1833–
1868 (Barcelona, 1977); and Carlos Forcadell, Parlamentarismo y bolchevización: El movimiento
obrero español, 1914–1918 (Barcelona, 1978).
11
Joaquı́n Romero Maura, La Rosa de Fuego: El obrerismo barcelonés, 1899–1909 (Barcelona,
1974); and Juan Pablo Fusi, Polı́tica obrera en el Paı́s Vasco, 1880–1923 (Madrid, 1975).
ing work is that of Albert Balcells on Catalonia, those of Antonio Elorza and José
Alvarez Junco on the ideological aspects, and that of Xavier Cuadrat on the origins
of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT; National Confederation of La-
bor).12 These years also saw a multitude of works on specific issues, territories,
and periods, forming an increasingly dense network of research that continued
growing until the 1990s.
During this first stage, the Spanish historiography of the labor movement could
be described as fairly traditional, given the three main areas studied by historians.
The first of these was the political and trade union organizations and their foremost
leaders. The preferred subjects of research in this area were the appearance of the
first workers’ associations in the nineteenth century, the growth of the big socialist
and anarchist trade union organizations from the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, and their rapid expansion during the Second Republic. The second main area
concerned the ideological programs of such organizations, as well as their changes
of political attitude and strategy over time. The third element of the labor move-
ment that absorbed the attention of historians was the political and syndicalist
conflicts of labor organizations, including strike activity and cycles of strikes. This
history of the labor movement, therefore, was focused on the institutions of the
working-class movement, but it was based on the theoretical framework of the
social history paradigm. It assumed that there was a causal relationship between
economic and social conditions, on the one hand, and the development of the labor
movement, on the other; that the working class had an objective social identity;
and that the organizations and actions studied constituted a natural and direct ex-
pression of this. From this point of view, the late surge of the Spanish working-
class movement, as well as the unusual vigor of anarchism, may be explained by
the late industrialization of Spain and the survival of many features of a traditional
society. The growth of the labor movement and the consequent worsening of social
conflicts that took place from the beginning of the twentieth century (and that
ended in the civil war) was considered to be the result both of the economic and
social modernization of Spain, which led to the expansion of a class-based, ur-
banized society, and of the incapacity of the stagnant Spanish political system to
integrate the emerging social forces.
As we have seen, the nineteenth century became a natural research subject
following the transition to social history in Spanish historiography. From the sec-
ond half of the 1960s, however, and especially during the 1970s, the history of
this period was shaken by a profound theoretical transformation. Specifically, the
study of the Spanish liberal revolution was greatly influenced by the debate con-
cerning the transition from feudalism to capitalism that had been developing in
Europe since the 1950s, advanced, in particular, by Marxist-leaning historians.
Questions relating to the nature and reach of the social and political changes pro-
voked by the Spanish liberal revolution were already present in the work of authors
12
Albert Balcells, El anarquismo en Cataluña (Barcelona, 1973); Antonio Elorza, La utopı́a
anarquista bajo la Segunda República (Madrid, 1973); José Álvarez Junco, La ideologı́a polı́tica
del anarquismo español (Madrid, 1976); and Xavier Cuadrat, Socialismo y anarquismo en Ca-
taluña: Los orı́genes de la CNT (Madrid, 1976).
1000 Cabrera
like Vicens and Artola, but it was only at this time that these questions were
considered explicitly and in all their theoretical depth. The historiographical in-
clusion of studies on nineteenth-century Spain in this debate had several results.
First, it led to a study of Spanish history according to the assumptions, concepts,
working hypotheses, and pertinent questions brought up during the debate, so that
the debate defined the new research agenda of Spanish historians. Second, the
Spanish liberal revolution came to be studied and evaluated in terms of an ideal
type or standard pattern of bourgeois revolution. The critical question for historical
research was whether or not the Spanish case fitted the norm (usually associated
with the French experience)—or, more precisely, whether and to what extent Span-
ish society underwent an authentic bourgeois revolution. Once historians adopted
this theoretical framework and the corresponding research agenda, as well as the
normative pattern of bourgeois revolution, it became obligatory to study the Span-
ish case in terms of the dichotomies of success/failure and normality/anomaly. And
given that neither the revolutionary process, nor the leading groups, nor the re-
sulting society and political regime seemed to fit the standard defined by the theory,
the predominant conclusion among Spanish social historians was that the Spanish
bourgeois revolution had failed or was incomplete. They believed, therefore, that
Spain constituted an anomaly in this respect: it was an exceptional case, a country
that had been diverted from the natural path and had followed its own. In Spain,
as elsewhere, the ideas of failure and of the existence of a special way were the
result of applying indiscriminately the theoretical framework supplied by the social
history paradigm. Naturally there were also many authors who maintained that the
social, political, and legal changes that had occurred essentially represented a bour-
geois revolution, but their work still conformed to the terms of the debate when it
came to defining the nature and measuring the depth of these changes.
Once this theoretical perspective was adopted, the key problems to resolve, the
questions to answer, and the relevant research topics sprung up naturally. The first
puzzle was, of course, to find the reasons for the failure, frustration, or derailment
of the Spanish liberal revolution, one of the main consequences of which was the
late industrialization and economic backwardness of Spain. Historians attributed
this in part to the weakness of the bourgeois class, the tendency of this class to
join forces with the old aristocracy, and the absence of the peasantry in the revo-
lutionary process. These factors were examined early on by historians such as
Fontana, and they remained for years a favorite subject of controversy among
specialists of nineteenth-century Spain.13 The second question to resolve concerned
the character and extent of the changes that had occurred and the nature of the
society and political regime that grew out of them. Some historians maintained
that the Spanish bourgeois revolution did reach a conclusion and then gave way
to the introduction of a capitalist society, with the bourgeoisie as the dominant
13
Josep Fontana, La quiebra de la monarquı́a absoluta (Barcelona, 1971), and La crisis del
Antiguo Régimen: 1808–1833 (Barcelona, 1979); Bartolomé Clavero, Pedro Ruiz, and F. J. Her-
nández Montalbán, Estudios sobre la revolución burguesa (Madrid, 1979); and Alberto Gil No-
vales, ed., La revolución burguesa en España (Madrid, 1985). Regarding the specific issue of the
failure of the Spanish industrial revolution, see Jordi Nadal, El fracaso de la industrialización en
España, 1814–1913 (Barcelona, 1975).
class. This is the position of authors such as Enric Sebastiá and José A. Piqueras,
who argued that the legal and juridical changes of the middle decades of the
nineteenth century led to the elimination of feudalism and opened the way to a
society of classes based on contractual relations.14 Theirs is a minority position,
however. The predominant hypothesis among Spanish social historians is that
the liberal revolution did not reach a conclusion and therefore did not enable the
introduction of capitalist social relationships, nor did it transfer all power to the
bourgeois class. On the contrary, the new Spanish society contained numerous
remnants of feudalism and feudal class structure, especially in the systems of prop-
erty and exploitation of land and in the realm of mentalities, which were obstacles
to capitalist and industrial development. The political system had a dual character,
since power was not in the hands of the bourgeoisie but belonged to an alliance
of the bourgeoisie and the old landowning nobility. This alliance between elites,
called an oligarchy or oligarchic power block, is a key concept in defining the
nature of the Spanish society and political regime that came into being in the
nineteenth century. It was this oligarchy (resulting from the weakness of the bour-
geoisie and the inconclusive nature of the bourgeois revolution) that held power
during the period of the Restoration. Its power base was founded on a widespread
and efficient system of political clientism or patronage known as caciquism, and
its hegemony only began to be questioned, temporarily, during the Second Re-
public. This is the view painstakingly argued and defended by authors such as
Tuñón de Lara and shared by the majority of social historians who studied this
subject.
Apart from imposing its research agenda on the specific issue of the liberal
revolution, the aforementioned debate has also informed the entirety of historical
research on nineteenth-century Spain, and its terms and relevant questions reso-
nate, almost without exception, on every page of the abundance of works produced
by Spanish historians during the last three decades.15 This can be observed in much
historical work on the bourgeoisie, in which the aim is almost always to determine
not only its composition and size but also its level of homogeneity and its attitude
and collective behavior during the revolutionary process. Likewise, the study of
the peasantry and of peasant revolts appears to be motivated frequently by the
desire to explain its minor impact on the revolutionary process, although in this
case another historical phenomenon immediately imposes itself. That phenomenon
is the widespread peasant mobilization in favor of Carlism, the Spanish counter-
revolutionary movement opposed to the liberal revolution, which unleashed several
civil wars during the nineteenth century and survived into the twentieth century,
even playing an active role in the 1936 civil war.16 Naturally, given its aim of
14
Enric Sebastià and José A. Piqueras, Pervivencias feudales y revolución democrática (Valen-
cia, 1987); and Enric Sebastià, La revolución burguesa: La transición de la cuestión señorial a
la cuestión social en el Paı́s Valenciano (Valencia, 2001).
15
For an excellent account of the debates concerning the history of nineteenth-century Spain
and the liberal revolution, see Isabel Burdiel, “Myths of Failure, Myths of Success: New Per-
spectives on Nineteenth-Century Spanish Liberalism,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4
(1998): 892–912.
16
Justo Serna and Anaclet Pons, La ciudad extensa: La burguesı́a comercial-financiera y su
dominación en la Valencia del siglo XIX (Valencia, 1992). On peasant revolts, see Manuel Ardit,
1002 Cabrera
evaluating the extent of the Spanish liberal revolution, historical research has es-
pecially focused on the disentailment of municipal and ecclesiastical lands, since
the transfer of property this led to was an important indication of the depth of the
transition to capitalism. In the same way, the change in the relations of production
in agricultural communities is an important indication of the rise of capitalism.17
The debate on the transition to capitalism has injected vitality into many of the
works devoted to the genesis, working logic, and development of the liberal sys-
tem, which took place in the period beginning with the war against the French
occupation, which led to the drawing up of the first liberal constitution in 1812,
and ending with the six-year revolution that began in 1868 with the overthrow of
the monarchy of Isabel II, saw the installation of the ephemeral First Republic in
1873, and concluded with a new military insurrection in 1874.18
III
The expansion of the research agenda that resulted from the adoption of the social
history paradigm was not the only thematic innovation of the 1970s. The combi-
nation of changes in the theoretical orientation of historians and the political cir-
cumstances in Spain encouraged a broadening of historical research to include
periods in Spanish history that had hardly been touched. The Second Republic and
the civil war stand out the most, although there were also many studies on the
Restoration. Interest in the 1930s was motivated in part by a desire to recover a
chapter of Spanish history that had remained hidden or had been ideologically
disapproved of in Franco’s time, as well as by a wish to discover the causes of the
civil war. But that interest was awakened above all by the predominant place the
decade of the 1930s occupied in twentieth-century Spanish history. The Second
Republic was the era when the Spanish working-class movement reached its max-
Revolución liberal y revuelta campesina: Un ensayo sobre la desintegración del régimen feudal
en el Paı́s Valenciano, 1793–1840 (Barcelona, 1977); and Jaume Torras, Liberalismo y rebeldı́a
campesina, 1820–1823 (Barcelona, 1976). On Carlism, see Julio Aróstegui, El carlismo alavés
y la guerra civil de 1870–1876 (Álava, 1970); Jesús Millán, Rentistas y campesinos: Desarrollo
agrario y tradicionalismo polı́tico en el sur del Paı́s Valenciano (Alicante, 1984); Pere Anguera,
De, rei i fam: El primer carlisme a Catalunya (Barcelona, 1995); and Pedro Rújula, Contrarre-
volución: Realismo y carlismo en Aragón y el Maestrazgo, 1820–1840 (Zaragoza, 1998).
17
Antonio M. Bernal, La lucha por la tierra en la crisis del Antiguo Régimen (Madrid, 1979);
Germán Rueda, La desamortización de Mendizábal y Espartero en España (Madrid, 1986); Pedro
Ruiz, Señores y propietarios: Cambio social en el sur del Paı́s Valenciano (Valencia, 1981), and
“Reforma agraria y revolución liberal en España,” in Reformas y polı́ticas agrarias en la historia
de España, ed. A. Garcı́a Sanz and J. Sanz Fernández (Madrid, 1996), 201–45.
18
Alberto Gil Novales, El trienio liberal (Madrid, 1980); Isabel Burdiel, La polı́tica de los
notables: Moderados y avanzados durante el régimen del Estatuto Real, 1834–1836 (Valencia,
1987); M. Cruz Romeo, Entre el orden y la revolución: La formación de la burguesı́a liberal en
la crisis de la monarquı́a absoluta, 1814–1833 (Alicante, 1993); and Isabel Burdiel and M. Cruz
Romeo, “The Making of the Spanish Liberal Revolution, 1808–1844,” Bulletin of Hispanic Stud-
ies 75, no. 5 (1998): 105–20. On the revolution of 1868, see M. Victoria López Cordón, La
revolución de 1868 y la I República (Madrid, 1976); and Gregorio de la Fuente Monge, Los
revolucionarios de 1868: Elites y poder en la España liberal (Madrid, 2000).
imum level of organizational and ideological development and when workers’

protests and social conflicts reached their highest point. This period also witnessed
a remarkable renaissance of political and cultural life. Once the republican oppo-
sition got into government, its leaders introduced a program of reforms that af-
fected policies in a broad range of areas, from land ownership to education, reli-
gion, the army, the regional organization of the country, and labor relations. But
apart from all this, the 1930s was a decisive conjuncture in the history of Spain
because it was the time when the crisis that had been building at least since the
military defeat by the United States in 1898 and the loss of Spain’s last colonies
(Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines) finally reached a denouement. That crisis
involved both social issues and the legitimacy of political power; it was rooted in
the half-hearted character of the liberal revolution and in the resulting backward-
ness from which Spain suffered. It had resolved itself, ultimately, in the form of a
civil war that frustrated the project of republican reform and resulted in a prolonged
dictatorial regime. In the eyes of the historians of the 1970s, therefore, the study
of the 1930s appeared to be not just an ideological and emotional obligation but
also an essential way of unraveling the fundamental conundrums of the modern
history of Spanish society, since it was in the period of the Second Republic and
the civil war that the raw antagonisms and structural contradictions of that society
came to the surface.
Naturally, much of the historical research on this period was carried out within
the theoretical and conceptual framework of social history. During the initial phase,
however, there were more studies on political life, political parties, syndicalist
organizations, and social conflict than on social groups and their behavior. More-
over, a considerable part of the new historical research on the Second Republic
was carried out by traditional liberal-leaning historians, such as Javier Tusell, au-
thor of the first studies of the elections of the republican period.19 Whatever the
origins of this research, it is certain that the 1970s witnessed a genuine explosion
in studies on the republican period. That explosive growth continued during the
1980s and enabled historians to build up a comprehensive knowledge of the period
in a relatively short time. During this time, some general overviews20 and several
analyses of the political changes experienced by Spanish society21 were published,
as well as a host of monographs dedicated to almost all the parties and political
movements active during the republican period.22 In addition, historians recon-
19
Javier Tusell, La Segunda República en Madrid: Elecciones y partidos polı́ticos (Madrid,
1970), and Las elecciones del Frente Popular (Madrid, 1971). Some of the main studies on
political parties were the work of political scientists rather than historians. See, for example, José
R. Montero, La CEDA. El catolicismo social y polı́tico en la II República (Madrid, 1977); Javier
Jiménez Campo, El fascismo en la crisis de la II República (Madrid, 1979); and Manuel Contreras,
El PSOE en la II República: Organización e ideologı́a (Madrid, 1981).
20
Manuel Tuñón de Lara, La Segunda República (Madrid, 1976); and Julio Gil Pecharromán,
La Segunda República española (Madrid, 1989).
21
Enric Ucelay Da Cal, La Catalunya populista: Imatge, cultura i politica en l’etapa republi-
cana, 1931–1939 (Barcelona, 1982); and Santos Juliá, Madrid, 1931–1934: De la fiesta popular
a la lucha de clases (Madrid, 1984).
22
Octavio Ruiz Manjón, El Partido Republicano Radical, 1908–1936 (Madrid, 1976); Santos
1004 Cabrera
structed the organizational and ideological development and activities of the large
labor unions (the socialist UGT and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT) and made a
meticulous analysis of social conflict, including the workers’ insurrections.23 In a
short time, an avalanche of research was produced that re-created the political life
and social struggles of the republican period in each Spanish region and province.
In the 1970s, historical studies on the civil war also began to increase, and the
war became the most studied topic by far of Spanish history: between 1975 and
1995 more than 3,500 works were published in this area. This level of interest is
not surprising given the civil war’s international repercussions and its determining
influence in the development of Spanish society, although it is sustained as well
by the war’s ideological and symbolic connotations and its hold on the collective
memory. All of these factors pushed historians to discover the causes of the conflict
and to analyze the social and political forces at work. The fundamental historio-
graphical novelty in this respect was that social historians tended to conceive of
the civil war as the outcome of the structural conflict that afflicted Spanish society
at the time; they rejected the interpretation of the Anglo-American Hispanists, who
attributed the causes of the conflict to the role of the different political forces during
the republican period. The symbolic weight of the civil war lay behind the growing
interest in the phenomenon of the repression carried out by both sides, which
became, from the 1980s onward, one of the most prolific fields of historical re-
search on the civil war and postwar period.
As had occurred with work on the Second Republic, the enormous growth in
research on the civil war enabled historians to piece together a detailed picture of
all its aspects and its entire evolution in almost all Spanish regions. They produced
general works on the structure of the opposing factions and the development of
the armed conflict,24 in addition to works focusing on more specific issues such as
the foreign involvement in the conflict,25 and the revolutionary and collectivization
Juliá, La izquierda del PSOE, 1935–1936 (Madrid, 1977), and Orı́genes del Frente Popular en
España (Madrid, 1979); Pelai Pagés, El movimiento trotskista en España, 1930–1935 (Barcelona,
1977); Juan Avilés Farré, La izquierda burguesa en la II República (Madrid, 1985); Julio Gil
Pecharromán, Renovación Española: Una alternativa monárquica a la Segunda República (Ma-
drid, 1985); Rafael Cruz, El Partido Comunista de España en la Segunda República (Madrid,
1987); and Pedro C. González Cuevas, Acción Española. Teologı́a polı́tica y nacionalismo au-
toritario en España, 1913–1936 (Madrid, 1998).
23
Albert Balcells, Crisis económica y agitación social en Cataluña, 1930–1936 (Barcelona,
1971); Marta Bizcarrondo, Octubre de 1934: Reflexiones sobre una revolución (Madrid, 1977);
Xavier Paniagua, La sociedad libertaria: Agrarismo e industrialización en el anarquismo español,
1930–1939 (Barcelona, 1982); Mercedes Cabrera, La patronal ante la II República: Organiza-
ciones y estrategia (Madrid, 1983); Eulalia Vega, Anarquistas y sindicalistas durante la Segunda
República: La CNT (Valencia, 1987); David Ruiz, Insurrección defensiva y revolución obrera: El
octubre español de 1934 (Barcelona, 1988); and Mercedes Vilanova, “Anarchism, Political Par-
ticipation, and Illiteracy in Barcelona between 1934 and 1936,” American Historical Review 97,
no. 1 (1992): 96–120. Published later on, the compendium on anarcho-syndicalism by Julián
Casanova, De la calle al frente: El anarcosindicalismo en España, 1931–1939 (Barcelona, 1997).
24
Manuel Tuñón de Lara et al., La guerra civil española: 50 años después (Barcelona, 1986);
Julio Aróstegui, ed., Historia y memoria de la guerra civil (Valladolid, 1988); and Ángel Baha-
monde and Javier Cervera, Ası́ terminó la guerra de España (Madrid, 1999).
25
Ángel Viñas, La Alemania nazi y el 18 de julio (Madrid, 1977), and, subsequently, Franco,
activity that took place in the republican zone.26 Recent work on the war period
has also been enriched by several studies on daily life and power relationships,
reflecting the theoretical renewal of social history.27 The study of repression de-
serves a mention of its own, since, as I have said, it experienced a vertiginous
expansion from the 1980s onward. The first objective of this research was to es-
tablish the numbers of victims of violence, not including those fallen in battle,
both in areas controlled by Franco and in republican territory. A vigorous debate
grew up on the specific nature of repression in each zone. In this respect, the most
widely accepted conclusion was that Franco’s side carried out a more systematic
and deliberate repression that aimed to neutralize or physically eliminate the po-
litical enemy, while repression on the republican side was mostly the work of
militias who were acting beyond the control of the state. With the aim of quanti-
fying the effects of the repression, a large number of Spanish historians embarked
on a detailed historical reconstruction based on a great diversity of sources, in-
cluding oral ones. This huge task brought together many territorial studies, which
finally enabled a general overview of the phenomenon.28
In the 1980s, the enlargement of subject matter I have described above expanded
even further when historians began to concentrate increasingly on Franco’s regime
(1939–75), as well as, soon after, on the subsequent democratic transition. At the
same time, there was a marked decline of interest in the Second Republic and civil
war. In the last two decades, historical research into Francoism has continued to
expand considerably, accompanied by an endless series of seminars and confer-
ences, such as the Encuentro de Investigadores del Franquismo (Conference of
Researchers on Francoism), which has been held periodically since 1992 in dif-
ferent Spanish cities with an ever larger number of participants. This research has
been characterized from the beginning by an active and prolonged theoretical de-
Hitler y el estallido de la guerra civil: Antecedentes y consecuencias (Madrid, 2001); Ismael Saz,
Mussolini contra la II República: Hostilidad, conspiraciones, intervención, 1931–1936 (Valencia,
1986); Enrique Moradiellos, La perfidia de Albión: El gobierno británico y la guerra civil es-
pañola (Madrid, 1996), “The Allies and the Spanish Civil War,” in Spain and the Great Powers
in the Twentieth Century, ed. Paul Preston and Sebastian Balfour (London, 1999), 96–126, and
El reñidero de Europa: Las dimensiones internacionales de la guerra civil española (Barcelona,
2001); and Juan Avilés Farré, Las grandes potencias ante la guerra de España (Madrid, 1998).
26
Julián Casanova, Anarquismo y revolución en la sociedad rural aragonesa, 1936–1938 (Ma-
drid, 1985); Aurora Bosch, Ugetistas y libertarios: Guerra civil y revolución en el Paı́s Valenciano,
1936–1939 (Valencia, 1983), and “The Spanish Republic and the Civil War: Rural Conflict and
Collectivization,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 75 (1998): 117–32.
27
Javier Cervera, Madrid en guerra: La ciudad clandestina, 1936–1939 (Madrid, 1998); and
Carmen González Martı́nez, Guerra civil en Murcia: Un análisis sobre el poder y los compor-
tamientos colectivos (Murcia, 1999).
28
Examples of regional studies include Josep M. Solé y Sabaté, La repressió franquista a
Catalunya, 1938–1953 (Barcelona, 1985) (a pioneering work in the use of new sources), and,
with Joan Villarroya, La repressió a la reraguardia de Catalunya (Barcelona, 1989–90); Francisco
Moreno Gómez, La guerra civil en Córdoba, 1936–1939 (Madrid, 1985); Julián Casanova, ed.,
El pasado oculto: Fascismo y violencia en Aragón, 1936–1939 (Madrid, 1992); and Julián Chaves
Palacios, La represión en la provincia de Cáceres durante la guerra civil, 1936–1939 (Cáceres,
1995). A general overview of the subject in Santos Juliá, ed., Vı́ctimas de la guerra civil (Madrid,
1999).
1006 Cabrera
bate on the nature of Franco’s regime. That debate had its origins in the 1960s,
and it has become so heated that historians have tended to align themselves in
clearly delineated groups. On the one hand, the social historians maintain that
Francoism was basically fascist, especially in its first stage, given that its aim was
to eradicate the working-class movement and to impose the absolute domination
of the Spanish bourgeoisie. On the other hand, there are those who characterize
the regime as a particular form of conservative or authoritarian dictatorship that
put power into the hands of several political “families” (Catholics, monarchists,
Falangists) and that enabled the exercise of a limited political pluralism.29
Various specific aspects of the Franco period have also been considered in great
detail by some historians30 —for example, the political opposition and armed re-
sistance to the regime.31 One might include under this rubric a series of works on
the reorganization of the labor movement under Franco, although some of these
are simultaneously studies on the general situation of the working class.32 Directly
29
Different facets of this debate are covered by a vast number of works, including Manuel
Pérez Ledesma, “Una dictadura ‘por la gracia de Dios,’” Historia social 20 (1994): 173–93;
Glicerio Sánchez Recio, “Lı́neas de investigación y debate historiográfico,” Ayer 33 (1999): 17–
40; and Ismael Saz, “El franquismo: ¿Régimen autoritario o dictadura fascista?” in Javier Tusell
et al., El régimen de Franco, 1936–1975 (Madrid, 1993), 1:189–201, and “El primer franquismo,”
Ayer 36 (1999): 201–21.
30
Josep Fontana, ed., España bajo el franquismo (Barcelona, 1986); Javier Tusell, La dictadura
de Franco (Madrid, 1988); José L. Garcı́a Delgado, ed., El primer franquismo: España durante
la Segunda Guerra Mundial (Madrid, 1989) and Franquismo: El juicio de la historia (Madrid,
2000); Carme Molinero and Pere Ysàs, El règim franquista: Feixisme, modernització i consens
(Vic, 1992); Javier Tusell et al., El régimen de Franco, 1936–1975 (Madrid, 1993); and Enrique
Moradiellos, La España de Franco, 1939–1975: Polı́tica y sociedad (Madrid, 2000). There is also
a vast quantity of biographies on Franco, including Juan Pablo Fusi, Franco: A Biography, trans.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto (New York, 1987); Javier Tusell, Franco en la guerra civil: Una bio-
grafı́a polı́tica (Barcelona, 1992); and Enrique Moradiellos, Francisco Franco: Crónica de un
caudillo casi olvidado (Madrid, 2002).
31
Javier Tusell, La oposición democrática al franquismo, 1939–1962 (Barcelona, 1977); Va-
lentina Fernández Vargas, La resistencia interior en la España de Franco (Madrid, 1981); F.
Barbagallo et al., Franquisme: Sobre resistència i consens a Catalunya, 1938–1959 (Barcelona,
1990); Javier Tusell, Alicia Alted, and Abdón Mateos, eds., La oposición al régimen de Franco
(Madrid, 1990); Abdón Mateos, El PSOE contra Franco: Continuidad y renovación del socialismo
español, 1953–1974 (Madrid, 1993); and Ángel Herrerı́n López, La CNT durante el franquismo:
Clandestinidad y exilio, 1939–1975 (Madrid, 2004). On the armed resistance, Secundino Serrano,
Maquis: Historia de la guerrilla antifranquista (Madrid, 2001), and Francisco Moreno Gómez,
La resistencia armada contra Franco: Tragedia del maquis y la guerrilla (Barcelona, 2002), and
“Huidos, guerrilleros, resistentes: La oposición armada a la dictadura,” in Julián Casanova, Fran-
cisco Espinosa, Conxita Mir, and Francisco Moreno Gómez, Morir, matar. sobrevivir: La violencia
en la dictadura de Franco, ed. Julián Casanova (Barcelona, 2002), 197–295.
32
Ramón Garcı́a Piñeiro, Los mineros asturianos bajo el franquismo, 1937–1962 (Madrid,
1990); Carmen Benito del Pozo, La clase obrera asturiana durante el franquismo (Madrid, 1993);
José Babiano, Emigrantes, cronómetros y huelgas: Un estudio sobre el trabajo y los trabajadores
durante el franquismo (Madrid 1951–1977) (Madrid, 1995); Carme Molinero and Pere Ysàs,
Productores disciplinados y minorı́as subversivas: Clase obrera y conflictividad laboral en la
España franquista (Madrid, 1998); and José Antonio Pérez, Los años del acero: La transformación
del mundo laboral en el área industrial del Gran Bilbao, 1958–1977 (Madrid, 2001). On the
creation and activities of the main trade union opposing Franco, Comisiones Obreras, see David
Ruiz, ed., Historia de Comisiones Obreras, 1958–1988 (Madrid, 1993). Finally, on workers’
associated with the debate on the nature of Franco’s regime is a rich body of
research on the institutionalization of the regime and on its web of organizations
for the political, social, and cultural control of the population.33 Studies on the
development of Spanish society, various social groups, and everyday life during
the Franco period have progressed at a slower rate, although there is already a
significant number of works in this area.34
Finally, there has been a huge increase in research on political repression in
recent years, which has thus extended the time period covered by previous studies
of the civil war. These works have redefined the subject of repression and have
examined it within a new conceptual and methodological framework. The first
phase of work in this area, whose aim was to quantify the scale of the repression,
has given way to analyses of many other aspects of the phenomenon, such as the
legal and institutional mechanisms implemented, the diversity of sanctions applied,
and the ideological use of repression as a means of consolidating the regime,
implementing social and moral control, and creating a consensus. The theoretical
outlook has also shifted from simply analyzing the impact of the repression on the
people to examining their behavior and attitudes. A kind of history from below
has been emerging, with an emphasis on the lower levels of society. Consideration
of even the smallest communities and a conscientious use of new sources has
enabled a more vivid reconstruction of the daily experience of repression.35 These
strikes, see Álvaro Soto Carmona, Diversas interpretaciones sobre las causas y consecuencias de
las huelgas en el franquismo, 1963–1975 (Barcelona, 1992); Xavier Domènech Sampere, “El
problema de la conflictividad bajo el franquismo: Saliendo del paradigma,” Historia social 42
(2002): 123–43; and Rubén Vega Garcı́a, ed., Las huelgas de 1962 en España y su repercusión
internacional (Oviedo, 2002).
33
The pioneering work of Encarna Nicolás, Instituciones murcianas en el franquismo, 1939–
1962 (Murcia, 1982), has been followed by others by Ángela Cenarro, Cruzados y camisas azules:
Los orı́genes del franquismo en Aragón, 1936–1945 (Zaragoza, 1997), and “Elite, Party, Church:
Pillars of the Francoist ‘New State’ in Aragon, 1936–1945,” European History Quarterly 28, no.
4 (1998): 461–86; Glicerio Sánchez Recio, Los cuadros polı́ticos intermedios del régimen fran-
quista, 1936–1959: Diversidad de origen e identidad de intereses (Alicante, 1996); and Antonio
Cazorla Sánchez, Las polı́ticas de la victoria: La consolidación del Nuevo Estado franquista,
1938–1953 (Madrid, 2000), and “Dictatorship from Below: Local Politics in the Making of the
Francoist State, 1937–1948,” Journal of Modern History 71, no. 4 (1999): 882–901. On the
Spanish Falange, the Francoist one-party, see Joan M. Thomàs, La Falange de Franco: El proyecto
fascista del Régimen (Barcelona, 2001). On youth and student movements, see the works of Juan
Sáez Marı́n, El Frente de Juventudes: Polı́tica de juventud en la España de postguerra, 1937–
1960 (Madrid, 1988); and Miguel A. Ruiz Carnicer, El Sindicato Español Universitario (SEU),
1939–1965 (Madrid, 1996); while the role of the media has been analyzed by Francisco Sevillano
Calero, Propaganda y medios de comunicación en el franquismo (Alicante, 1998).
34
José M. Lorenzo Espinosa, Dictadura y dividendo: El discreto negocio de la burguesı́a vasca,
1937–1950 (Bilbao, 1989); Carme Molinero and Pere Ysàs, Els industrials catalans durant el
franquisme (Vic, 1991), and “Economı́a y sociedad durante el franquismo,” in El franquismo:
Visiones y balances, ed. Roque Moreno Fonseret and Francisco Sevillano Calero (Alicante, 1999),
271–96; Ismael Saz and A. Gómez Roda, eds., El franquismo en Valencia: Formas de vida y
actitudes sociales en la posguerra (Valencia, 1999); Glicerio Sánchez Recio and Julio Tascón
Fernández, eds., Los empresarios de Franco: Polı́tica y economı́a en España, 1936–1957 (Bar-
celona, 2003); and Francisco Sevillano Calero, “Consenso y violencia en el ‘Nuevo Estado’
franquista: Historia de las actitudes cotidianas,” Historia social 46 (2003): 159–71.
35
A landmark of this new outlook is Conxita Mir, Vivir es sobrevivir: Justicia, orden y mar-
1008 Cabrera
studies of the repression have been accompanied by an intense debate on the

question of memory. The desire to avoid a similar conflict after the death of Franco
led to what is usually called a “forgetfulness pact” on the civil war, consisting in
a tacit agreement not to hold the leaders of Franco’s regime to account. However,
as the new democratic regime grew in strength, the question of how to handle the
dictatorial past reemerged—how to integrate it both into official history and into
ongoing historical research. A growing number of voices emerged opposing those
who wished to maintain the forgetfulness pact and calling for the civil and ethical
necessity of recovering the memory of the defeated and of the victims. No doubt
this change in sentiment was one of the causes of the increase in studies of the
repression.36
In recent years, the period of democratic transition has been added to the re-
search agenda of historians, thereby displacing political scientists, who were the
industrious pioneers of this subject. Priority has been given thus far to the study
of political changes, and the majority of this research has been carried out by
traditional historians. Little work on this period has yet been done from a social
history perspective.37
In concluding our thematic tour of late modern Spanish history, I must point
out the notable revival of interest in the Restoration period among historians over
the last ten years.38 Of course, study of this period had never ceased, and already
in the 1970s historians had undertaken significant new research projects, mostly
ginación en la Cataluña rural de posguerra (Lérida, 2000), and “El sino de los vencidos: La
represión franquista en la Cataluña rural de posguerra,” in Casanova, Espinosa, Mir, and Moreno
Gómez, Morir, matar, sobrevivir, 123–93. On concentration camps during Franco’s time in power,
see Carme Molinero, Margarida Sala, and Jaume Sobrequés, Una inmensa prisión: Los campos
de concentración y las prisiones durante la guerra civil y el franquismo (Barcelona, 2003). At
the same time, the history of the repression has been gradually integrated into more general studies
of political violence in contempory Spain: Santos Juliá, ed., Violencia polı́tica en la España del
siglo XX (Madrid, 2000).
36
The question of memory has generated many historical works, both analytical and theoretical.
For the current state of the debate, see Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the
Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, trans. Mark Oakley (New York, 2002), and
“Justice, Politics, and Memory in the Spanish Transition,” in The Politics of Memory: Transitional
Justice in Democratising Societies, ed. Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen González Enriquez,
and Paloma Aguilar (Oxford, 2001); Alberto Reig Tapia, Memoria de la guerra civil: Los mitos
de la tribu (Madrid, 1999); and Fernando León Solı́s, “The Transition(s) to Democracy and
Discourses of Memory,” International Journal of Iberian Studies 16, no. 1 (2003): 49–63. The
journal History and Memory 14, nos. 1/2 (2002) is devoted to this subject and includes articles
from the Spanish historians José Álvarez Junco, Ángela Cenarro, Xosé-Manoel Núñez, Eduardo
Manzano, and Juan S. Pérez Garzón, as well as the political scientist Paloma Aguilar.
37
Javier Tusell, La transición española a la democracia (Madrid, 1991); Manuel Redero San
Román, Transición a la democracia y poder polı́tico en la España post-franquista, 1975–1978
(Salamanca, 1993); Javier Tusell and Álvaro Soto Carmona, eds., Historia de la Transición, 1975–
1985 (Madrid, 1996); Álvaro Soto Carmona, La transición a la democracia: España, 1975–1982
(Madrid, 1998); David Ruiz, La España democrática, 1975–2000 (Madrid, 2002); and Javier
Tusell and Genoveva G. Queipo de Llano, Tiempo de incertidumbre: Carlos Arias Navarro entre
el franquismo y la Transición, 1973–1976 (Barcelona, 2003).
38
Manuel Suárez Cortina, ed., La Restauración, entre el liberalismo y la democracia (Madrid,
1997). This interest in the Restoration is related to the political circumstances in Spain. During
centered on caciquism. This was an essential element of the Restoration political

system, based on the rotation in office of the two great parties (the Conservatives
and Liberals), with frequent manipulation of electoral results.39 In recent years,
however, the study of the Restoration has undergone two major changes. First,
the concept of caciquism based on a framework of client relationships has been
revised. For classical social historians, caciquism was basically a mechanism of
class domination, specific to the oligarchic society that arose from the unfinished
bourgeois revolution, while for traditional political historians it was a mechanism
for administering and distributing favors. With the recent revitalization of po-
litical history, though, historians have begun to view caciquism as a specific mode
of functioning of the liberal system with its own logic, one in which peasants
and the lower classes were not merely passive actors.40 Second, the field of re-
search has been broadened to include many other subjects, such as the political
parties (both the official ones and those of the opposition) and their social and
ideological bases,41 political and institutional life,42 the role of the elites in so-
the transition to democracy, historians tended to look at the most recent democratic experience
(the Second Republic), but with the consolidation of the new democracy there was growing interest
in the longest-lasting parliamentary regime in Spain’s history, which was from 1876 to 1923.
39
Javier Tusell, Oligarquı́a y caciquismo en Andalucı́a, 1890–1923 (Barcelona, 1976); José
Varela Ortega, Los amigos polı́ticos: Partidos, elecciones y caciquismo en la Restauración, 1875–
1900 (Madrid, 1977); Joaquı́n Romero Maura, “Caciquismo as a Political System,” in Patrons
and Clients in Mediterranean Societies, ed. Ernest Gellner and John Waterbury (London, 1977),
53–62; Alicia Yanini, El caciquisme (Valencia, 1984); and, more recently, José Varela Ortega,
ed., El poder de la influencia: Geografı́a del caciquismo en España, 1875–1923 (Madrid, 2001).
During these first years, some attention was also given to the crisis in the Restoration political
system: Juan A. Lacomba, La crisis española de 1917 (Madrid, 1970).
40
Antonio Robles Egea, comp., Polı́tica en penumbra: Patronazgo y clientelismo polı́ticos en
la España contemporánea (Madrid, 1996); Salvador Cruz Artacho, Caciques y campesinos: Poder
polı́tico, modernización agraria y conflictividad rural en Granada, 1890–1923 (Madrid, 1994),
and “Clientes, clientelas y polı́tica en la España de la Restauración, 1875–1923,” Ayer 36 (1999):
105–29; and Xosé R. Veiga Alonso, “Anatomı́a del clientelismo polı́tico en la España liberal
decimonónica: Una realidad estructural,” Hispania 202 (1999): 637–61.
41
On the official parties, Marı́a J. González Hernández, Ciudadanı́a y acción: El conservadu-
rismo maurista, 1907–1923 (Madrid, 1990), and El universo conservador de Antonio Maura:
Biografı́a y proyecto de Estado (Madrid, 1997); Salvador Forner, Canalejas y el Partido Liberal-
Democrático, 1900–1910 (Madrid, 1993); Marı́a Sierra, “La polı́tica del pacto”: El sistema de
la Restauración a través del Partido Conservador Sevillano, 1874–1923 (Seville, 1996); Javier
Moreno Luzón, Romanones: Caciquismo y polı́tica liberal (Madrid, 1998); and José R. Milán
Garcı́a, Sagasta o el arte de hacer polı́tica (Madrid, 2001). On the opposition parties, Manuel
Suárez Cortina, El reformismo en España: Republicanos y reformistas bajo la monarquı́a de
Alfonso XIII (Madrid, 1986); José A. Piqueras and Manuel Chust, comps., Republicanos y repú-
blicas en España (Madrid, 1995); Jordi Canal, El carlismo (Madrid, 2000); and Àngel Duarte,
Història del republicanisme a Catalunya (Vic, 2003).
42
Mercedes Cabrera, dir., Con luz y taquı́grafos: El parlamento de la Restauración, 1913–
1923 (Madrid, 1998); Eduardo González Calleja, La razón de la fuerza: Orden público, subversión
y violencia polı́tica en la España de la Restauración, 1875–1917 (Madrid, 1998); Manuel Suárez
Cortina, El gorro frigio: Liberalismo, democracia y republicanismo en la Restauración (Madrid,
2000); and Carlos Dardé, La aceptación del adversario: Polı́tica y partidos de la Restauración,
1875–1900 (Madrid, 2003).
1010 Cabrera
cial networks and in exercising local power,43 and the impact of the crisis of
1898.44
IV
In the 1980s, Spanish social history continued to develop, thanks to the increasing
number of historians who shared this perspective, and research was enriched by
new theoretical and thematic approaches. At the same time, Spanish history estab-
lished a solid professional and academic structure made up of associations, jour-
nals, and conferences. The changes in this last respect were considerable. In 1989,
the Asociación de Historia Social (Association of Social History) was created,
holding its first conference in the following year.45 The Asociación de Historia
Contemporánea (Association of Contemporary History) was established in 1990
and began holding periodic conferences from 1992 onward. The latter association
had also begun to publish its own journal, Ayer (Yesterday) in 1991.46 In 1988 the
journals Historia contemporánea and Historia social had appeared, and the latter
became one of the most successful and influential Spanish history journals. Both
of them followed the groundbreaking path opened up by previous journals such
as Recerques and Estudios de historia social (established in 1977 and now de-
funct). The older journal Hispania, founded in 1940, is still being published. The
enormous volume of accumulated historical knowledge has enabled historians to
create growing numbers of comprehensive general works on late modern and con-
temporary Spanish history.47 In recent years, more and more Spanish historians
have begun to publish regularly in international journals, and their influence abroad
43
Juan Pro Ruiz, “Las elites en la España liberal: Clases y redes en la definición del espacio
social, 1808–1931,” Historia Social 21 (1995): 47–69; Pedro Carasa Soto, ed., Elites castellanas
de la Restauración: Una aproximación al poder polı́tico en Castilla (Salamanca, 1997); and
Lourenzo Fernández Prieto et al., Poder local, elites y cambio social na Galicia non urbana,
1874–1936 (Santiago de Compostela, 1998).
44
Juan Pan-Montojo, ed., Más se perdió en Cuba: España, 1898 y la crisis de fin de siglo
(Madrid, 1998); Octavio Ruiz Manjón and Alicia Langa, eds., Los significados del 98: La sociedad
española en la génesis del siglo XX (Madrid, 1999).
45
Santiago Castillo, ed., La historia social en España: Actualidad y perspectivas (Madrid,
1991).
46
Among the specialized journals in late modern and contemporary Spanish history, the fol-
lowing stand out: Anuario de historia contemporánea (1981), Anales de historia contemporánea
(1982), Revista de historia contemporánea (1982), Studia historica: Historia contemporánea
(1983), and Cuadernos de historia contemporánea (1988). More recently the journals Historia
del presente (2002) and Pasado y memoria: Revista de historia contemporánea (2002) have
appeared.
47
To the general histories undertaken by Miguel Artola (Madrid, 1973), Tuñón de Lara (Bar-
celona, 1983), and the updated history of Spain directed by Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid,
1970–2004) must be added, for example, the series by Ángel Bahamonde and Jesús A. Martı́nez,
Historia de España, siglo XIX (Madrid, 1994); Ángel Bahamonde, Pedro Carasa, Pere Gabriel,
Jesús A. Martinez, and Alejandro Pizarroso, Historia de España siglo XX: 1875–1939 (Madrid,
2000); Jesús A. Martı́nez, ed., Historia de España siglo XX: 1939–1996 (Madrid, 1999); Santos
Juliá, La España del siglo XX (Madrid, 2003); or the corresponding volumes of the series Historia
de España Tercer Milenio (Madrid, 2002).
has been increasing. Another development since the 1980s has been the interest
of some Spanish historians in theory and historiographical analysis; the history of
historiography has become a new field of study.48 Concerning other historiogra-
phies, the most outstanding novelty in the 1980s was undoubtedly the arrival of
British Marxist history, following the massive translation of its principal works.
Its influence (and especially that of E. P. Thompson) contributed to increasing the
flexibility of the materialist model’s theoretical framework, reviving interest in the
role of culture in shaping social subjects and their practices, and advancing new
fields of research.
In recent decades, late modern Spanish history has continued to expand and
diversify its field of study. In some cases this is due to the stimulus provided by
new international tendencies such as the new cultural history and by Spanish his-
torians’ renewed theoretical outlooks. It is also due in some cases to changing
circumstances, as has clearly been the case with nationalism. This was a subject
of research in late modern and contemporary Spanish history from early on, but
interest in nationalism has recently been stimulated by the growth of this phenom-
enon both in Spain and abroad.49 Work in this area has been revitalized in two
main ways. First, historians have looked beyond regional nationalisms to consider
Spanish nationalism as well, including its creation;50 at the same time, the period
under study has been extended to the present.51 Second, Spanish historians have
48
Josep Fontana, Historia: Análisis del pasado y proyecto social (Barcelona, 1982); Santos
Juliá, Historia social/sociologı́a histórica (Madrid, 1989); Julián Casanova, La historia social y
los historiadores (Barcelona, 1991); and Julio Aróstegui, La investigación histórica: Teorı́a y
método (Barcelona, 1995). Regarding the history of the historiography, one of the most recent
works is Ignacio Peiró and Gonzalo Pasamar, Diccionario de historiadores españoles contem-
poráneos (Madrid, 2002).
49
Borja de Riquer, Lliga Regionalista: La burguesia catalana i el nacionalisme, 1898–1904
(Barcelona, 1977); Juan Pablo Fusi, El problema vasco en la II República (Madrid, 1979); Albert
Balcells, El nacionalismo catalán (Madrid, 1991); Justo Beramendi y Ramón Máiz, eds., Los
nacionalismos en la España de la II República (Madrid, 1991); Justo Beramendi and Xosé M.
Núñez, O nacionalismo galego (Vigo, 1996); José Luis de la Granja, El nacionalismo vasco: Un
siglo de historia (Madrid, 1996); more recently, Antonio Elorza, Un pueblo escogido: Génesis,
definición y desarrollo del nacionalismo vasco (Barcelona, 2001); and Santiago de Pablo, Ludger
Mees, and José A. Rodrı́guez Ranz, El péndulo patriótico: Historia del Partido Nacionalista
Vasco (Barcelona, 1999–2001). For a general historical overview, see Xosé Manoel Núñez, Los
nacionalismos en la España contemporánea, siglos XIX y XX (Barcelona, 1999); and José Luis
de La Granja, Justo Beramendi, and Pere Anguera, La España de los nacionalismos y las auto-
nomı́as (Madrid, 2001).
50
The most original contribution, in this respect, is José Álvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa: La
idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid, 2001). By the same author, “The Nation-Building Process
in Nineteenth-Century Spain,” in Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula: Competing
and Conflicting Identities, ed. Clare Mar-Molinero and Angel Smith (Oxford, 1996), 89–106,
“The Formation of Spanish Identity and Its Adaptation to the Age of Nations,” History and
Memory 14, nos. 1–2 (2002): 13–36, and “El nacionalismo español: Las insuficiencias en la
acción estatal,” Historia social 40 (2001): 29–51. See also Borja de Riquer, “La débil nacio-
nalización española del siglo XIX,” Historia social 20 (1994): 97–114; Juan P. Fusi, España: La
evolución de la identidad nacional (Madrid, 2000); and Xosé-Manoel Núñez, “The Region as
Essence of the Fatherland: Regionalist Variants of Spanish Nationalism, 1840–1936,” European
History Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2001): 483–518.
51
Xosé-Manoel Núñez, “The Rewakening of Peripheral Nationalisms and the State of the Au-
1012 Cabrera
adopted new theoretical approaches that emphasize the importance of culture in

the formation of national identities.52
Among these new fields of study, women’s history deserves special mention,
not only because of its huge growth but also because of its innovative influence
on general historical studies. Women’s history emerged as a field of study in the
middle of the 1970s, produced by a combination of two factors that were not,
however, equally important. On the one hand, the change in emphasis made pos-
sible by social history, shifting attention from elites to all of society, meant that
women’s activities came into focus in the same way as the activities of other social
groups that had remained in obscurity. In addition, the emergence of women as
subjects of study received a powerful stimulus from the newly developing feminist
movement, which looked into the past to discover the background and justification
of its struggle. This second factor not only gave women’s history its characteristic
militant tone but also contributed to guiding the research itself: its main objective
was to recover the historical presence of women from oblivion, to make women
historically visible, and to transform them into legitimate subjects of historical
study. This history takes the very concept of women as its primary analytical
category, as it works from the assumption that women are given or natural subjects
with a specific experience of the social world. This theoretical framework led to
a history consisting of descriptive pictures of the social situations and activities of
specific women. However, it is also a history that tends to concentrate on those
periods and events of the past in which women demonstrated their collective iden-
tity and rebelled against their subordinate position, whether in fighting for the right
to vote, participating in political life, or integrating into the working-class move-
ment. The Second Republic and the civil war stand out among these periods of
change, and the first works on women’s history published in Spain are devoted to
them.53
At first women’s history occupied a marginal position, but from the 1980s on-
ward it developed rapidly: the first study centers were created, a multitude of
seminars and conferences were held, and history journals started to welcome ar-
ticles on the subject. In the following decade, the first specialized journals, such
as Arenal (1994), appeared, the history of women was integrated into the university
curriculum, and the number of works on the subject grew until it exceeded the
output of many other fields. Women had to be considered in any general work of
history, and the accumulated research led to the publication of the first overviews
of the subject. More important, women’s history has experienced its own expansion
of subject matter and changes in theoretical framework over the years. The adop-
tonomous Communities,” in Spanish History since 1808, ed. Adrian Shubert and José Álvarez
Junco (London, 2000), 315–30, “What Is Spanish Nationalism Today? From Legitimacy Crisis
to Unfulfilled Renovation, 1975–2000,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 5 (2001): 719–52, and
“A State of Many Nations: The Construction of a Plural Spanish Society since 1976,” in The
Social Construction of Diversity: Recasting the Master Narrative of Industrial Nations, ed. Chris-
tiane Harzig and Danielle Juteau (New York, 2003), 284–307.
52
José Álvarez Junco, “La nación en duda,” in Pan-Montojo, Más se perdió en Cuba, 405–69.
53
Rosa M. Capel, El sufragio femenino en la II República (Granada, 1975); and Mary Nash,
Mujeres libres: España, 1936–1939 (Barcelona, 1975).
tion of the concept of gender has led historians to question the notion that women
constitute a universal subject and gradually to replace it with a historical concep-
tion of female identities. As a consequence, the compensatory empiricism of the
initial stage has given way to an increasingly analytical history based on the his-
torical shaping of female identities. This transition from women’s history to gender
history has been partial and fragmentary, however. Many historians still use the
previous theoretical framework, and though they might use the term gender, they
usually employ it as a synonym for women or sex.54 Moreover, the concept of
gender is combined with older concepts in many research works, so that while
gender may often be admitted and even welcomed on the theoretical level, it is
rarely applied to specific historical analyses. While claiming that gender identity
is a cultural construct, any analysis of the cultural construction of subjects is
avoided. Following the perceptive analysis of Pablo Sánchez León, one might
therefore argue that Spanish history still has not confronted or resolved the conflict
between social history and feminist theory—namely, the opposition between a
theoretical framework that presupposes the existence of a universal feminine sub-
ject and another that affirms the social and historical character of all identities,
including the female one.55
In any case, the transition has happened, and this has made it necessary to
reformulate and reinterpret some traditional subjects of study and to cover new
ones. That the essentialist concept of women is declining is shown, for example,
in the history of the labor movement and female work, in which historians have
considered the idea that gender identity operates as a basic factor in the articulation
of people’s practices.56 This decline has obliged historians to revise their interpre-
tation of the causal relationship between the feminist movement and the change
in women’s situation. Previously, given that feminism was conceived of as the
supreme expression of female identity, the transformation of women’s situation
was attributed entirely to feminism. However, on conceiving of female identity as
a historical construct and reconsidering the association between feminism and fe-
male identity, historians began to pay attention to all women’s collective action,
including conservative female organizations. What historical analysis has shown
is that, in spite of defending the traditional role of women, these organizations
contributed, in practice, to modifying that role by facilitating women’s access to
the public sphere and enabling them to perform new functions, as occurred, for
54
An example of the enduring nature of traditional women’s history is Josefina Cuesta Bustillo,
ed., Historia de las mujeres en España: Siglo XX, 4 vols. (Madrid, 2003).
55
Pablo Sánchez León, “Todas fuimos Eva: La identidad de la historiadora de las mujeres,” in
Del sexo al género: Los equı́vocos de un concepto, ed. Silvia Tubert (Madrid, 2003), 161–213.
56
Mary Nash, “El mundo de las trabajadoras: Identidades, cultura de géneroy espacios de
actuación,” in Cultura social y polı́tica en el mundo del trabajo, ed. Javier Paniagua, J. A. Piqueras,
and V. Sanz (Valencia, 1999), 47–67; Pilar Pérez Fuentes, Vivir y morir en las minas: Estrategias
familiares y relaciones de género en la primera industrialización vizcaı́na, 1877–1913 (Bilbao,
1993), and “El trabajo de las mujeres en la España de los siglos XIX y XX: Consideraciones
metodológicas,” Arenal 2, no. 2 (1995): 219–45; and Lina Gálvez-Muñoz, “Breadwinning Pat-
terns and Family Exogenous Factors: Workers at the Tobacco Factory of Seville during the In-
dustrialization Process, 1887–1945,” International Review of Social History 42 (1997): 87–128.
1014 Cabrera
example, in the case of Catholic women’s associations.57 This also occurred in

other cases of female political participation, such as the nationalist struggles.58
Over the years there has been a considerable broadening and diversification of
subject matter in women’s history. Historians have continued to study suffragism,
political action, and the labor movement.59 However, an infinite number of new
themes have been added, including education, salaried and domestic work, the
politics of reproduction and maternity, and scientific debates on femininity.60 At
the same time, and in line with the trend described above, women’s history has
focused more and more on the period of Franco’s regime. Historians have looked
into aspects such as education, official and religious speeches on women, the ideo-
logical construction of female prototypes, the politics of maternity and the family,
and the regime’s own female organizations, especially the Sección Femenina (the
female branch of Falange).61
From the 1980s onward, and above all during the 1990s, Spanish historiography
has continued broadening its scope of study to include all aspects of human activity
and a wide range of historical actors, such as the popular classes and those living
on the fringe of society. Among the new subjects it has considered are everyday
life, popular culture and leisure,62 poverty and social welfare, the family, riots,
57
This is the original conclusion of Inmaculada Blasco, Paradojas de la ortodoxia: Polı́tica de
masas y militancia católica femenina en España, 1919–1939 (Zaragoza, 2003). On this point, in
general, see Mary Nash, “Experiencia y aprendizaje: La formación histórica de los feminismos
en España,” Historia social 20 (1994): 151–72.
58
Mercedes Ugalde, Mujeres y nacionalismo vasco: Génesis y desarrollo de Emakume Abertz-
ale Batza, 1906–1936 (Bilbao, 1993), and “Dinámica de género y nacionalismo: La movilización
de vascas y catalanas en el primer tercio de siglo,” Ayer 17 (1995): 121–53.
59
Concha Fagoaga, La voz y el voto de las mujeres: El sufragismo en España, 1877–1931
(Barcelona, 1985); Pilar Folguera, comp., El feminismo en España: Dos siglos de historia (Madrid,
1988); and Mary Nash, Mujer y movimiento obrero en España, 1931–1939 (Barcelona, 1981).
60
Pilar Balları́n, La educación de las mujeres en la España contemporánea, siglos XIX y XX
(Madrid, 2001); Rosa M. Capel, El trabajo y la educación de la mujer en España, 1900–1930
(Madrid, 1982); Mary Nash, Mujer, familia y trabajo en España, 1875–1936 (Barcelona, 1983);
Cristina Borderı́as, Evolución de la división sexual del trabajo: Barcelona, 1924–1980 (Barce-
lona, 1984), and Entre lı́neas: Trabajo e identidad femenina en la España contemporánea; La
Compañı́a Telefónica, 1924–1980 (Barcelona, 1993); M. Gloria Núñez Pérez, Trabajadoras en
la Segunda República: Un estudio sobre la actividad extradoméstica, 1931–1936 (Madrid, 1989);
Carmen Sarasúa, Criados, nodrizas y amos: El servicio doméstico en la formación del mercado
de trabajo madrileño, 1758–1868 (Madrid, 1994); and Nerea Aresti, Médicos, donjuanes y mu-
jeres modernas: Las ideas de feminidad y masculinidad en el primer tercio del siglo XX (Bilbao,
2001).
61
Mary Nash, “Pronatalism and Motherhood in Franco’s Spain,” in Maternity and Gender
Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s, ed. Gisela Bock and
Pat Thane (London, 1991), 160–77; Rosario Sánchez López, Mujer española, una sombra de
destino en lo universal: Trayectoria histórica de Sección Femenina de Falange, 1934–1977 (Mur-
cia, 1990); Carme Molinero, “Mujer, franquismo, fascismo: La clausura forzada en un ‘mundo
pequeño,’” in Historia social 30 (1998): 97–117; Inmaculada Blasco, Armas femeninas para la
contrarrevolución: La Sección Femenina en Aragón, 1936–1950 (Málaga, 1999); and Aurora
Morcillo, “Shaping True Catholic Womanhood: Francoist Educational Discourse on Women,” in
Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, ed. Pamela Radcliff (New
York, 1999), 51–63, and The Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain (DeKalb,
IL, 2000).
62
Luis Castells and Antonio Rivera, “Vida cotidiana y nuevos comportamientos sociales (el
anticlericalism, delinquency, peasant resistance, sexuality, prostitution,63 and, most

recently, the history of concepts.64 Many of these subjects belong to the social field.
However, this expansion has essentially been guided by cultural considerations
and by a desire to broaden historical studies beyond the favored themes of tradi-
tional social history. Numerous Spanish social historians have devoted themselves
to this task, inspired first by British historians (from E. P. Thompson to Raphael
Samuel) and, more recently, by French cultural historians, many of whom are
Hispanists. The latter have made a decisive contribution to the flourishing, for
example, of the history of sociability, a field of study that Spanish historians,
following authors like Maurice Agulhon, have begun to explore in fertile ways.65
It is evident, however, that the growing interest in culture is not limited to the
simple task of increasing the variety of research subjects and complementing tra-
ditional social history. Research into cultural phenomena is often a symptom of a
change in historians’ theoretical focus, and in this case it is specifically a critical
reaction against traditional social history itself. Challenging the assumption that
culture is a by-product or passive reflection of the social context, some historians
began crediting it with an active role in the shaping of consciousness, identity, and
Paı́s Vasco, 1876–1923),” Ayer 19 (1995): 135–63; Luis Castells, ed., El rumor de lo cotidiano:
Estudios sobre el Paı́s Vasco (Bilbao, 1999); Manuel Pérez Ledesma, “Las clases populares,” in
La época de la Restauración, 1875–1902, coord. Guadalupe Gómez-Ferrer (Madrid, 2002), 706–
44; and Jorge Urı́a, Una historia social del ocio: Asturias, 1898–1914 (Madrid, 1996), “Lugares
para el ocio: Espacio público y espacios recreativos en la Restauración española,” Historia social
41 (2001): 89–111, and Urı́a, ed., La cultura popular en la España contemporánea (Madrid,
2003).
63
Pedro Carasa Soto, Pauperismo y revolución burguesa (Burgos, 1750–1900) (Valladolid,
1987), and “La historia y los pobres: De las bienaventuranzas a la marginación,” Historia social
13 (1992): 77–99; Mariano Esteban de Vega, De la beneficencia a la previsión: La acción social
en Salamanca durante la Restauración (Salamanca, 1991), and “La asistencia liberal española:
Beneficencia pública y previsión particular,” Historia social 13 (1992): 123–38; Pilar Muñoz
López, Sangre, amor e interés: La familia en la España de la Restauración (Madrid, 2001); Rafael
Vallejo, “Pervivencia de las formas tradicionales de protesta: Los motines de 1892,” Historia
social 8 (1990): 3–27; Emilio La Parra and Manuel Suárez Cortina, eds., El anticlericalismo
español contemporáneo (Madrid, 1998); Manuel Pérez Ledesma, “Studies on Anticlericalism in
Contemporary Spain,” International Review of Social History 46 (2001): 227–55; Pilar Salomón,
Anticlericalismo en Aragón: Protesta popular y movilización polı́tica, 1900–1936 (Zaragoza,
2002); and Francisco Vázquez Garcı́a and Andrés Moreno Mengı́bar, Sexo y razón: Una geneal-
ogı́a de la moral sexual en España, siglos XVI–XIX (Madrid, 1997).
64
Javier Fernández Sebastián and Juan F. Fuentes, eds., Diccionario polı́tico y social del siglo
XIX español (Madrid, 2002). In 2002, the fifth International Conference of the History of Concepts
was held in Spain.
65
Jordi Canal, “La sociabilidad en los estudios sobre la España contemporánea,” Historia con-
temporánea 7 (1992): 183–205, “Espacio propio, espacio público: La sociabilidad carlista en la
España mediterránea en la etapa de entresiglos,” in Sociabilidad fin de siglo: Espacios asociativos
en torno a 1898, ed. Isidro Sánchez Sánchez and Rafael Villena Espinosa (Cuenca, 1999), 125–
49, and “La sociabilidad en los estudios sobre la España contemporánea: Una revisión,” in So-
ciabilidad en la España contemporánea: Historiografı́a y problemas metodológicos, ed. Elena
Maza Zorrilla (Valladolid, 2002), 35–55; Luis P. Martı́n, “Nuevos actores en polı́tica: Las socia-
bilidades en la España contemporánea,” Studia historica: Historia contemporánea 18 (2000):
201–24; Elena Maza Zorrilla, “Sociabilidad e historiografı́a en la España contemporánea,” Ayer
42 (2001): 241–52; and Jorge Urı́a, “Los lugares de la sociabilidad: Espacios, costumbre y con-
flicto social,” in Historia social y ciencias sociales, ed. Santiago Castillo and Roberto Fernández
(Lérida, 2001), 201–24.
1016 Cabrera
experience. This is the change in theoretical perspective that has given rise to the
new cultural history, and it distinguishes cultural history from what is simply a
history of culture. The difference is apparent, for example, in studies on sociability:
for more traditional historians of culture the aim was essentially to bring to light
a previously neglected element of historical reality, whereas for the new cultural
historians it was a matter of rethinking the shaping of collective identities, such as
that of the working class. The critical questioning of the explanatory model of
traditional social history and the consequent rise of the new cultural history con-
stitutes one of the distinctive features of recent Spanish historiography. Before
looking into this change further, however, I would like to consider another dis-
tinctive feature.
Recent years have witnessed a relative decline in social history, as its advance
has slowed and possibly come to a halt. Not only are there fewer and fewer young
historians who accept its tenets, but some of its former adherents have abandoned
it as well, having come to doubt the explanatory capacity of its theoretical para-
digm. This decline has led to a strengthening of revisionist currents and a revital-
ization, after decades of retreat, of traditional political history. I should clarify that
I refer not simply to the history of politics, but to political history understood as
a theoretical focus that attributes a causal independence to political and ideological
action and to the rational choice of agents in shaping historical processes. This is
the theoretical viewpoint adopted and defended by, for example, Mercedes Cabrera
and Fernando del Rey Reguillo in relation to the period of the Restoration. They
not only deny that there was a causal connection between political conduct and
social position but also, and more importantly, reject the notion that caciquism and
the Restoration political regime were expressions of the power of the ruling class.66
This movement, with its criticism of social history, has resulted in the rehabilitation
of human action (supported, to different degrees, both by the new cultural history
and by revisionism). As a consequence, some authors speak of a crisis in social
history.
The cultural turn in Spanish historiography is still an embryonic and minority
phenomenon, but it has already taken root sufficiently to allow one to state that it
has entered a new phase in its theoretical development. The new cultural history
involves, as I have just indicated, a critical reformulation of the materialist ex-
planatory model of traditional social history, with a resulting revalorization of
culture and of the action of individuals in the explanation of historical processes.
From the cultural history viewpoint, historical subjects are implicit in the social
sphere, but they are neither explicitly constituted as such, nor do they act as such,
until they acquire a conscious existence. This acquisition does not occur sponta-
neously; it requires an awareness-building process that is carried out in the cultural
terms available at the time. Starting from this assumption, the new cultural histo-
rians no longer center their attention just on the social position of individuals but
also focus on the cultural and symbolic universe through which individuals ex-
perience the social world and project their activities. As Manuel Pérez Ledesma
66
Mercedes Cabrera and Fernando del Rey Reguillo, “De la oligarquı́a y el caciquismo a la
polı́tica de intereses: Por una relectura de la restauración,” in Las máscaras de la libertad: El
liberalismo español, 1808–1950, ed. Manuel Suárez Cortina (Madrid, 2003), 289–325.
argues, culture has to be considered as an essential variable (in the sense that the
economy was formerly considered) in explaining collective identities and their
actions, since “culture plays a decisive role in the behavior of historical subjects.”
This is a matter not of excluding objective causes but of recognizing that all social
reality is constructed by individuals with the cultural tools that are available to
them. It is no longer possible, according to Pérez Ledesma, to continue maintaining
the traditional separation between reality and individuals’ perception of it, and
even less possible to consider the cultural framework for perceiving reality as a
simple superstructure. Social phenomena, previously considered as existing objec-
tively prior to subjects, are now considered the result of constructions made by
subjects, as in the case of nations, classes, or peoples.67 This line of argument is
also pursued by Rafael Cruz, who insists that the formation of social movements
and collective action can only be explained by taking into account the meaning
that participants give to events, to themselves, and to the world in general, as it is
that meaning that makes it possible for individuals to come together to define their
interests, intentions, and courses of action as a group. For Cruz, meaning is as-
signed according to the cultural resources, systems, and tools available, since it is
by those means that people perceive, understand, interpret, and experience social
relations, including their own existence and that of others. It is these cultural re-
sources, systems, and tools that provide the programs or maps that guide their
conduct.68
This shift in the theoretical focal point from social structures to the cultural
experience of individuals underlies, no doubt, the interest of Spanish historians in
many of the new themes of research that have blossomed in the last decade. Sub-
jects like sexual identity, prostitution, and poverty have awoken this interest be-
cause they are specifically cultural, rather than simply natural or social, phenom-
ena. Collective protest actions and the individuals that lead them have attracted
attention not just because they are the effects of social inequalities but also because
they involve the unfolding of complex networks of meaning. Types of sociability
and popular culture have acquired historical relevance because they constitute
spaces in which identities are forged. The same reasons lie behind the recent surge
of biographies among historians who favor the new cultural history. Of course,
biography has always been cultivated in Spanish historiography, and they have not
always focused on the prominent individuals of traditional history. Excellent bi-
ographies have also been written by adherents of social history.69 What distin-
guishes the new biographers, however, is their unequivocal theoretical reformu-
lation (as described above) of the connection between the individual and society,
between social determinism and individual action, and between the public and
private spheres.70
67
Manuel Pérez Ledesma, “Presentación,” in Cultura y movilización en la España contempor-
ánea, ed. Rafael Cruz and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (Madrid, 1997), 10–11.
68
Rafael Cruz, “La cultura regresa al primer plano,” in ibid., 17–19.
69
For example, Santos Juliá, Manuel Azaña, una biografı́a polı́tica (Madrid, 1990); and José
Álvarez Junco, The Emergence of Mass Politics in Spain: Populist Demagoguery and Republican
Culture, 1890–1910 (Brighton, 2002).
70
Isabel Burdiel, “La dama de blanco: Notas sobre la biografı́a histórica,” in Liberales, agita-
dores y conspiradores, ed. Isabel Burdiel and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (Madrid, 2000), 17–47.
1018 Cabrera
The movement toward culture in Spanish historiography is evidenced not just

in new research subjects but also in subjects inherited from the previous histo-
riographical stage. In fact, studying how the treatment of these inherited subjects
has evolved is especially illuminating, since it brings into sharper focus the con-
tours of the change and the nature of the difference between social history and
the new cultural history. This is illustrated, for example, in the innovative study
of Javier Ugarte on the origins of the civil war.71 Ugarte starts from the premise
that to explain behavior one needs to take into account not only social reality
but also the perception that individuals have of it. Inspired by the German history
of everyday life, by authors such as Agulhon, and by anthropologists such as
Clifford Geertz, Ugarte claims that perceptions born of custom, myths, beliefs,
traditions, or religion are just as real as objective facts and that, therefore, social
phenomena must be considered not as predetermined structures but as historically
constituted entities, products of experience, action, and culture. To explain the
mobilization of people in favor of the 1936 coup d’état, Ugarte believes, the
most important thing is to reconstruct the symbolic universes and daily ways of
life of the participants and how these participants experienced, understood, and
construed meaning in their social relations. It was the application of these sym-
bolic mechanisms that enabled the mobilization and collective action of the popu-
lation and the creation of a nationalist popular movement in support of the new
regime. The appeals to mobilization were calls not simply to individuals but also
to previously existing community links, prior belief systems, and ancient forms
of symbolic identification. In the case of the provinces of Navarre and Vitoria
(the provinces Ugarte studied), the regime made use of the fertile memory of the
Carlist wars of the nineteenth century and its wealth of symbols: prophesies,
religious rites, war as ritual of purification, and the mysticism of martyrdom. It
was the efficient exploitation of these cultural and symbolic mechanisms through
the dense web of social networks that connected cities to the countryside that
explains the enthusiastic mobilization of the population in favor of the military
uprising.
Nonetheless, it is the recent changes in the debates on the bourgeois revolution
and the labor movement that best illustrate the extent and nature of the theoretical
reorientation of Spanish historiography. Regarding the revolution, some voices
have recently argued not only in favor of a more refined analysis and a more
sophisticated reformulation of the debate but have also proposed revising the
basic theoretical assumptions on which both had been based. According to these
historians, the comparison between the Spanish experience and an ideal type of
revolution needs to be abandoned in favor of comparisons with genuine historical
cases so that analysis would no longer be a question of what is normal or anom-
alous. They also stress the need to put aside the reified concept of the bourgeoisie
and no longer take it for granted that its mere social existence transforms it into
a historical subject. On the contrary, the subjective identities of individuals and
groups involved in the revolutionary process need to be established, since it is
71
Javier Ugarte Tellerı́a, La nueva Covadonga insurgente: Orı́genes sociales y culturales de la
sublevación de 1936 en Navarra y el Paı́s Vasco (Madrid, 1998).
these identities and not the social condition of individuals and groups that guides
and models behavior. Pérez Ledesma has argued, for example, that in nineteenth-
century Spain the concept of the bourgeoisie did not exist, and therefore there
can be no bourgeois subject or identity. And if there is no bourgeois identity, it
must be asked whether the bourgeoisie can serve as a subject of change, since
for a social group to function as a historical subject it must not only exist ma-
terially but also have a subjective consciousness of its existence. What has hap-
pened up until now, according to Pérez Ledesma, is that, in interpreting empirical
data to form an argument, historians have introduced a “metahistorical ingredi-
ent”—namely, the objectivist assumption that the bourgeoisie is the subject of
change.72 The implications of this theoretical rectification are obvious: if the
social existence of the bourgeoisie cannot be the causal basis of the liberal rev-
olution, then the revolution must be explained differently. Pérez Ledesma does
not succeed in formulating an alternative explanation, but his reasoning suggests
that any such theory must be based on an analysis of how identities are formed
by culture and on the experiences of the subjects involved.
An additional step in this direction has been taken by Marı́a Cruz Romeo, who
also believes in the necessity of entirely revising the research agenda of the Spanish
liberal revolution. According to her, the earlier prevailing theoretical perspective
had directed research toward certain aspects of reality that were predefined as
relevant and had avoided many others. However, the historical picture cannot be
completed simply by taking into account those aspects that have been ignored;
rather, the theoretical criteria for what constitute explanatory factors must be re-
defined. The result is that the aspects that had been avoided become crucial factors
in explaining the revolution. The most important of these factors, according to
Cruz Romeo, is the “liberal political culture,” since it was not just the foundation
of the social and moral authority of certain social groups and of the language of
the public and private spheres but also the basis for the codification of social
relations, the construction of political identities, and the shaping of liberalism itself.
Given that these factors have hardly been considered, the author suggests that,
although it seems paradoxical, the history of the Spanish liberal revolution is ac-
tually still in an embryonic state, because it needs to be studied all over again,
from the beginning, taking into account other causal factors. This has already been
undertaken in other countries, according to Cruz Romeo, in the work of such
authors as Keith Baker, Patrick Joyce, James Vernon, Eugenio Biagini, and Joan
Scott.73
Revisionism has also made a contribution to this debate in attacking the ex-
planatory model of social history. The revisionist arguments and reinterpretation
of the changes in nineteenth-century Spanish society are perceptively detailed, for
example, in the work of authors like Jesús Cruz.74 The essential argument, a Fu-
72
Manuel Pérez Ledesma, “Protagonismo de la burguesı́a, debilidad de los burgueses,” Ayer
36 (1999), esp. 86 and 89.
73
Marı́a Cruz Romeo, “Una historia incipiente: Los liberales en el reinado de Isabel II,” Ayer
44 (2001): 254–55.
74
Jesús Cruz, Gentlemen, Bourgeois, and Revolutionaries: Political Change and Cultural Per-
1020 Cabrera
retian interpretation, is that the Spanish liberal revolution was not a social revo-
lution; rather, it was exclusively political. In other words, the changes were not
the result of a confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy but
stemmed from the political initiatives taken by some socially heterogeneous elites
to modernize political, social, and economic life. The divergence of revisionism
from the social interpretation consists not in establishing the cultural links that
connect social reality with the forms of consciousness and identity but in denying
that such a connection exists and, in consequence, attributing absolute autonomy
to the action, ideas, and motivations of political agents.
The history of the labor movement also provides an eloquent record of the recent
evolution of Spanish historiography. Although it concerns a subject that is studied
less and less, new works have continued to appear, significant debates have taken
place, and its theoretical approaches have been renewed. The history of the labor
movement, as we have seen, originally arose within the paradigm of social history:
the first significant changes came about beginning in the 1980s, with the broad-
ening of subject matter beyond organizational and ideological aspects and labor
conflicts. The 1982 article by Alvarez Junco and Pérez Ledesma is usually con-
sidered a milestone of this early change in theoretical approach. In this article they
proposed replacing the prevailing institutional (and, often, politically engaged)
history with one that would consider the entire working class and its experiences
and then integrating this new history of the working-class movement into the
general history of social movements.75 Both authors criticized the essentialist and
teleological conception of the working class, which underrates the importance of
other manifestations of popular collective action that were less successful in the
long run. They also criticized the reductionist way in which class consciousness
was confused with revolutionary consciousness. This first reorientation of the his-
tory of the working class consisted, then, in a significant broadening of the field
of study and in advancing a methodology of history from below that made matters
such as conditions and lifestyles, working processes, associations, the role of ar-
tisans, social interaction, cultural activities and events, education, and symbols and
forms of protest and their rituals central themes of historical research.76
sistence among the Spanish Dominant Groups, 1750–1850 (New York, 1996), esp. the intro. and
chap. 8.
75
José Álvarez Junco and Manuel Pérez Ledesma, “Historia del movimiento obrero: ¿Una
segunda ruptura?” Revista de occidente 12 (1982): 19–41.
76
Examples of this approach are José A. Piqueras, El taller y la escuela (Madrid, 1988), and
“Trabajo artesano, industria y cultura radical en la época de la Primera Internacional,” in Paniagua,
Piqueras, and Sanz, eds., Cultura social y polı́tica en el mundo del trabajo, 165–209; Francisco
de Luis Martı́n, Cincuenta años de cultura obrera en España, 1890–1940 (Madrid, 1994); Fran-
cisco de Luis Martin and Luis Arias, Las casas del pueblo socialistas en España, 1900–1936
(Barcelona, 1997); Francisco Sánchez, “De las protestas del pan a las del trabajo: Marginalidad
y socialización del fenómeno huelguı́stico en Madrid, 1910–1923,” Historia social 19 (1994):
47–60; José Sierra, “Rough Characters: Mineros, alcohol y violencia en el Linares de finales del
siglo XIX,” Historia social 19 (1994): 77–96; Elena Maza, “Las clases populares en España:
Continuidad y transformaciones en su perfil asociativo, 1887–1930,” Investigaciones históricas
15 (1995): 297–314; Ángeles Barrio, El sueño de la democracia industrial: Sindicalismo y de-
mocracia en España, 1917–1923 (Santander, 1996); Alejandro Tiana, “Movimiento obrero y
educación popular en la España contemporánea,” Historia social 27 (1997): 127–44; and Rafael
This diversification of the subject matter favored and frequently accompanied

a more penetrating historiographical transformation, one that affected the essential
assumptions of the previous interpretative framework and, therefore, its explana-
tion of the identities and behavior of workers. To begin with, the broadening of
the field of study supplied new empirical evidence that made prior interpretations
untenable. Among the new evidence, for example, were the discoveries that the
working class had a heterogeneous composition, that conflict coexisted with con-
sensus and negotiation, that class identity was not the only existing identity, that
working-class demands arose not only at work, and that strikes involved only a
minority of workers and coexisted, for much of the time, with other forms of
popular protest. This new evidence has made it imperative to restrict the analytical
use of the concept of class and to take into consideration the role of other ties of
identity not connected to work (as investigated and explained by Carlos Gil An-
drés), such as community, neighborhood, kinship, and religion. It has also become
necessary to reconsider other forms of popular protest, such as riots and uprisings,
and to make the common people a relevant field of study.77
More important, some historians have combined this thematic diversification
with a profound revision of the main tenets of the traditional social history of the
working-class movement. As Alvarez Junco explained, this has involved a revision
of the assumption that collective action is carried out by individuals who occupy
a homogeneous social position and whose actions are motivated by shared material
interests and oppressive conditions. It has also required questioning a host of as-
sumptions: that the outstanding opposition class is the proletariat, that parties and
trade unions are the natural representatives of the interests of that class, that ex-
ploitation of workers is the cause of conflicts, that strikes are the crucial means of
pressure, that protests are part of a consciousness-building process, and, finally,
that victories imply advances in the process of emancipation.78 This rethinking has
resulted in a reformulation of the causal link between the labor movement and the
working class itself and, consequently, in a recognition that workers’ identity is
not shaped simply in accordance with their experiences at work but is also depen-
dent on cultural influences and the places where cultural interaction occurs. It is
precisely on this point where studies on sociability have contributed to the reno-
vation of the history of the labor movement, since it is in places of social interaction
(bars, socialist people’s houses, choral societies, literary and scientific societies,
etc.) where, as Jorge Urı́a explains, workers forge their conscious ties of identity,
outside trade union and political organizations.79
Ruzafa, Antes de la clase: Los trabajadores en Bilbao y la margen izquierda del Nervión, 1841–
1891 (Bilbao, 1998).
77
Carlos Gil Andrés, “Protesta popular y movimientos sociales en la Restauración: Los frutos
de la ruptura,” Historia social 23 (1995): 121–35, Protesta popular y orden social en La Rioja
de fin de siglo, 1890–1905 (Logroño, 1995), and Echarse a la calle: Amotinados, huelguistas y
revolucionarios (La Rioja, 1890–1936) (Zaragoza, 2000).
78
José Álvarez Junco, “Movimientos sociales en Espaǹa: Del modelo tradicional a la moder-
nidad postfranquista,” in Los nuevos movimientos sociales: De la ideologı́a a la identidad, ed.
Enrique Laraña and Joseph Gusfield (Madrid, 1994), 415.
79
Jorge Urı́a, “Los lugares de la sociabilidad: Espacios, costumbre y conflicto social,” 202.
Urı́a has researched this subject in “La taberna en Asturias a principios del siglo XX: Notas para
1022 Cabrera
This new way of looking at the genesis and nature of working-class identity is
illustrated, for example, in the work of Pérez Ledesma, who was inspired by au-
thors such as E. P. Thompson, William H. Sewell, Gareth Stedman Jones, and
Patrick Joyce.80 According to Pérez Ledesma, the working class—not as a socio-
logical category but as a historical subject—is not the automatic product of the
relations of production but a cultural and historical entity, a form of identity forged
by experience over time. This is the only feasible interpretation, in his view, be-
cause the working class as a social entity is very heterogeneous; its members
experience very diverse working circumstances, and thus their collective identity
cannot be constructed in their workplaces. For that identity to crystallize, their
shared experiences based on the relations of production had to be “complemented”
by other factors, such as traditions, language, visions of society, or even concepts
of class and people.81 What Pérez Ledesma questions is the previous assumption
that the working class was the result of industrialization and the influence of dif-
ficult economic and labor conditions combined with the spread of new ideological
currents. In fact, as he underlines, the main protagonists of the first labor movement
were not the new industrial workers, but traditional artisans and specialized work-
ers.82 This discovery that there was no direct link between industrialization and the
labor movement obliges us to revise the traditional paradigm and to adopt an
analytical perspective that takes into account “the cultural ingredients of the pro-
cess.” What requires clarification is how such a heterogeneous workforce suc-
ceeded in perceiving itself as a unit with shared interests and objectives that were
opposed to those of other classes.83 To explain this, historians need to examine
language, given that this is not simply a means of expression but also a genuine
shaper of experience and identities. Language is what provides the classificatory
and cultural categories, the cognitive structures, by which individuals become
aware of their social situation. Thus, it is necessary to reconstruct the genealogy
of terms such as class, people, proletariat, and exploitation, since it is these that
really have organized the identity of the working classes and their perception of
Spanish society and working relations and that, in consequence, have generated
and given meaning to their collective experience.84 In summary, Pérez Ledesma
argues that the identity of the workers and their perception of reality were the
result of a long process of accumulating experiences and learning new “linguistic
codes,” a process involving the creation and spreading of myths, rituals, and uni-
fying symbols. It was these codes and cultural categories that enabled the working
class to transcend and overcome its heterogeneity and forge an awareness of
unity.85
su estudio,” Historia contemporánea 5 (1991): 53–72, and “Cultura popular tradicional y disci-
plinas de trabajo industrial: Asturias, 1880–1914,” Historia social (1995): 41–62.
80
Manuel Pérez Ledesma, “La formación de la clase obrera: Una creación cultural,” in Cruz
and Ledesma, Cultura y movilización, 201–33.
81
Ibid., 202–3.
82
Ibid., 204.
83
Ibid., 204–6.
84
Ibid., 206–9, 221.
85
Ibid., 225–27.
In the case of labor history, the critical reaction against the previous social
paradigm has sometimes followed a course very different from the one I have just
described. Some labor historians share the objective of transcending a mere ex-
amination of organizations, leaders, and strikes and undertaking a more ambitious
history of the entire working class (as well as avoiding any politically involved
history). But, at the same time, these historians have abandoned all interest in the
question of identities and collective action and have reduced their object of study
to workers’ lifestyles and working conditions.86 This critical reaction has even led
some historians to declare that the working-class movement is not a relevant object
of study, since it is not an effect or expression of the existence of the working
classes but an artificial phenomenon unconnected to them, derived from the ex-
ternal influence of ideologies such as Marxism. For these historians, the only
worthwhile history is the history of labor relations.87
These are some of the main landmarks in Spanish historiography during the last
few decades. During this time, Spanish historians have essentially trodden the same
path taken by the discipline of history as a whole in the twentieth century, passing
through the same stages, exploring new fields of study, burying themselves in its
foremost debates, and bringing their theoretical, conceptual, and methodological
tools up to date. The result has been the development of an immense base of
knowledge on Spanish history, ranging from the great processes of economic,
social, and political transformation to the smallest details in the ordinary lives of
its inhabitants. If we compare historical research in the postwar period with con-
temporary research, what we see is a steep upward path packed with an ever-
increasing number of historians and works. This does not prevent many Spanish
historians from feeling that the journey has been accomplished in a rather hasty
fashion—the inevitable consequence of starting later than historians of other coun-
tries. A common regret is that during the main part of the journey, the methodology
of historical enquiry in Spain has lagged behind international historiography, which
has meant that Spanish historians have had to catch up with new tendencies before
fully exploiting older ones. For example, hardly had social history consolidated
itself in Spain when the new cultural history came along. And even today, when
cultural history is still in its infancy, there are already some historians who have
taken a further theoretical step and have begun to use the analytical concepts of
discourse and discursive construction.88 While this feeling that Spanish historians
are struggling to keep up remains, there is no doubt that the forward march con-
tinues; indeed, that feeling is itself unequivocal proof of it.
86
This is the case of Álvaro Soto Carmona, El trabajo industrial en la España contemporánea,
1874–1936 (Barcelona, 1989); José Rodrı́guez Labandeira, El trabajo rural en España, 1876–
1936 (Barcelona, 1991); and Guillermo Pérez Sánchez, Ser trabajador: Vida y respuesta obrera
(Valladolid, 1875–1931) (Valladolid, 1996).
87
This is the opinion of Ignacio Olábarri, ¿Lucha de clases o conflicto de intereses? Ensayos
de historia de las relaciones laborales (Pamplona, 1991).
88
This is the case of Coro Rubio Pobes, La identidad vasca en el siglo XIX: Discursos y agentes
sociales (Madrid, 2003), who claims that the Basque nationalist identity that formed in the nine-
teenth century was based on a cognitive construction of reality.

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Developments in Contemporary Spanish Historiography: From Social History to the New

* Translated for the Journal of Modern History by Edwin Tudsbery.

The Journal of Modern History 77 (December 2005): 988–1023

were later supplemented by El movimiento obrero en la historia de España (Ma-

imum level of organizational and ideological development and when workers’

studies of the repression have been accompanied by an intense debate on the

centered on caciquism. This was an essential element of the Restoration political

adopted new theoretical approaches that emphasize the importance of culture in

example, in the case of Catholic women’s associations.57 This also occurred in

anticlericalism, delinquency, peasant resistance, sexuality, prostitution,63 and, most

The movement toward culture in Spanish historiography is evidenced not just

This diversification of the subject matter favored and frequently accompanied

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