The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain

2. Bourgeois Conduct and the Making of Polite Society

ch a pter 2 Bourgeois Conduct and the Making of Polite Society S pain produced 44 courtesy and etiquette books in the eighteenth century—much fewer than the number of similar publications printed in England and France over the same period of time: 287 and 216, respectively. Yet, between 1820 and 1900, Spanish presses produced close to 300 volumes on self-improvement, rivaling the 335 and 403 in England and France, respectively.1 This marked acceleration in publications of this genre reflects an important social shift in nineteenthcentury Spain, as dominant groups began adopting the social conventions of modernizing Western societies. Most of the conduct texts that were published in Spain before 1850 were translations from French, English, and Italian, despite the fact that in previous centuries Spanish authors such as Antonio de Guevara and Baltasar Gracián contributed to European courtesy literature with originality and success. Articulating standards shared by a broader European society, this literature—referred to as urbanidad (urbanity)—offered a picture of modern gentility. By enunciating and prescribing rules of refined behavior in accessible publications, these new conduct manuals were central to the making of bourgeois society. This chapter studies the content of that literature and its contribution to the spread of the bourgeois conduct ideals in nineteenthcentury Spain. It focuses on what it meant to be a bourgeois in Spanish society, and how that meaning changed over the course of the nineteenth century. One of the developments of the cultural turn in historical scholarship has been the recovery of Norbert Elias’s thesis of the “civilizing process,” and the acknowledgment that courtesy literature offers rich evidence for studying the evolution of social conduct.2 Elias intrigued literary scholars with his analysis of self-restraint in early modern and modern European societies. His idea that manners were utilized by dominant groups to establish cultural systems and implement social control provided a useful model for analyzing literary texts, particularly the modern novel.3 Similarly, the creation and transformation of conduct imaginaries has been an essential thread in interdisciplinary approaches such as gender studies, feminist theory, and cultural studies.4 Historians of society, culture, and mentalité have also studied the evolution of courtesy for what it reveals about social behavior, symbolic meaning, and material culture. Since courtesy is a system of social conventions, changes of form and audience are meaningfully connected to social, economic, and political transformations.5 Recent scholarship on courtesy has largely omitted Spain from its transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary view. Among those who study the nineteenth century, perhaps the most prominent work on courtesy focuses on Victorian Britain and America. These studies, largely interested in ideology, have juxtaposed the Victorian value system with present-day moral decay.6 Contributions from the Continent tend to focus more broadly. For instance, the working initiatives sponsored by Alain Montandon at the Université BlaisePascal in Clermont-Ferrand have enriched the field by uncovering new cases within the European territory and contrasting them with the better known histories of courtesy in England and France. Spain is among the lesser-studied areas, and studies of Spanish conduct literature have been fragmented and limited in scope and only cover isolated periods of time.7 This chapter addresses this gap in the historiography of Spanish manners with a brief history of courtesy in the nineteenth century.8 From the Ideal of Courtier to the Ideal of Urbane Throughout the eighteenth century, Spain and its colonies practiced conduct patterns based on Italian traditions codified in Baldesar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528). Mercedes Blanco suggests that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Baltasar Gracián and Antonio de Guevara customized Castiglione’s model to create a distinctly Spanish form of courtier entirely focused on the nobility.9 In the eighteenth century, conduct manuals were still produced mainly to satisfy the demand of a select segment of society— the educational institutions (seminarios de nobles) and private tutors of noble families. Unlike England and France, there is no evidence in Spain of the existence of a growing audience that demanded literature of manners; Bourgeois Conduct and the Making of Polite Society • 21 22 • The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain urbanity texts were not yet a required component in the curriculum of primary and secondary schools. The most published authors of that period wrote to teach nobles how to behave in court circles, and the manners and values they articulated...