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6 THE CULTURE AND POLITICS OF HISPANIC LIBERALISM José Bravo, an outspoken liberal Spanish priest, composed a popular anthem of national resistance that paid tribute to Spanish valor in the face of tyranny. He dedicated his song to the “patriotic company . . . of military officials of Seville, brought together under the constitutional system .” While his clarion call to arms, published in Seville in 1821, may have been written originally during the War of Independence and revived during the Trienio liberal of 1820–23, the battle hymn nonetheless recalled the guerrilla leader Ascencio Nebot’s call to arms: “Long live Spain: long live the Constitution.” While Diego José de Cádiz celebrated the “Catholic soldier” as the icon of religious war, Bravo wrote verses enshrining the “constitutional soldier” as the archetypal Spanish hero who fought for the honor of the nation: “With union, strength and constancy / What tyrant will be able to defeat us? / The heavens part and you will see how he fights / The constitutional soldier.”1 Sung to unknown musical accompaniment, Bravo’s song encapsulates a moment in which liberal nationalism had reemerged triumphantly. Rather than interpret the Trienio teleologically, as an ineluctable slide toward the absolutism and civil strife of the “ominous decade,” this chapter focuses on recovering the liberal culture of the transatlantic Spanish Monarchy and its antecedents during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Liberal nationalist sentiment flourished during the wars of independence across the Hispanic Atlantic, and conservative discourses deployed by absolutists in many ways paralleled liberal visions that first put forward a civic national project. Liberals established the foundational narrative of nationalist ideology and culture of the time, creating a paradigm of popular nationalism that served as a template for all competing political forces. Eric Hobsbawm maintains that “the modern nation was part of liberal ideology.”2 In Spain from 1808 onward, narratives of popular resis148 The Culture and Politics of Hispanic Liberalism / 149 tance, giving agency to the general will of the people, rhetorically situated el pueblo at the center of political discourse. All subsequent ideologies had to contend with notions of popular sovereignty and had to justify their claims by speaking to individual rights and the vote of the nation. Liberalism had infused Spanish nationalist ideology from the outset. Fernando VII’s swift decree abolishing the constitutional government of the Spanish Monarchy in 1814 and the subsequent exile of prominent dissidents did not expunge liberalism in peninsular Spain or within the warring American provinces. To the contrary, the restoration of the Constitution of Cádiz in 1820 emboldened those previously silenced to embrace the liberal nationalism of the doceañistas. Liberals articulated an emotional attachment to the law and to ideals of civil liberty, which they traced to the glorious and sometimes tragic history of the Spanish people. They also glorified the heroic exploits of soldiers fighting to defend the nation, expressing the martial values of a nation born out of war. Couched in religious imagery and biblical metaphor, liberal nationalism found an outlet in the culture , the church, and the politics of the transatlantic Spanish Monarchy throughout the early 1820s. According to Alberto Gil Novales, “the second liberal experiment was a decisive phase” in the history of modern Spain.3 Rafael de Riego’s pronunciamiento (proclamation) on January 1, 1820, the first successful politically motivated military rebellion in the history of modern Spain, built on a number of failed conspiracies between 1814 and 1818. Most had been influenced or inspired by liberals, some of whom were Freemasons, and had been carried out by military officers attempting to restore the constitutional order.4 During the Trienio, patriotic societies diffused the radical ideology of liberalism, and a renascent free press served as a forum for increasingly polemical political debates. Yet popular support had not been mobilized to catapult new leaders to power. The success of Riego’s uprising , despite a lukewarm reception in southern Spain where his battalion had been based, sparked a movement in the north to reestablish the local governing juntas that had been so successful in 1808. Alongside these regional organizations, a popular nationalist culture of songs, poems, and catechisms reemerged in addition to sermons and political tracts that once again eulogized the heroic Spanish people and their representative national government. The revolution of 1820, which began in Cádiz when troops about to be deployed to Montevideo and the Río de la Plata rebelled, profoundly affected events across the Atlantic. Leaders such as Iturbide reassessed their [3.17...

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