Catalonia's Advocates: Lawyers, Society, and Politics in Barcelona, 1759-1900

3. The Liberal Profession: WAR, REVOLUTION, AND REPRESSION

3 The Liberal Profession War, Revolution, and Repression Do you swear in the form of law to God, our father, and his four evangelical saints to defend the Conception of our matron and the poor for free, and that you will use and proceed correctly in your office, and comply with all that is contemplated by the honorable magistrates in the Ordinances of this Royal Audiencia and other Orders and Royal Pragmatics? Oath administered to lawyers during the Old Regime S S (1744–1808, 1813–20) Do you swear to God, our father, through his four evangelical saints, to defend the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, our mother and matron, and to defend the political Constitution of the Monarchy, be faithful to the King, to practice correctly and faithfully the profession of Lawyer, to defend the poor for free, and to comply with the superior orders, decrees, and Ordinances of this Court? Oath administered to lawyers during the S S Constitutional Triennium (1820–23) Do you swear by God and by the evangelical Saints to defend the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin our matron: that you do not belong or have ever belonged to any Lodge or secret society of whatever denomination and that you do not Recognize the absurd principle that the People are arbiters who can vary the forms of established government; to be faithful to the King; to defend his right of Sovereignty; to undertake correctly and legally your office and to serve the Poor for free? Oath administered to lawyers during the S S Ominous Decade (1823–33)  The Liberal Profession S 69 The study of lawyers and revolution  has thus far focused exclusively on the French Revolution.1 Tocqueville first tried to solve the puzzle of why lawyers who had the “tastes and habits of aristocracy” and an “instinctive penchant for order” had “contributed singularly to overturning the French monarchy.” Although advocates had enjoyed a high status under absolutism,hereasoned,theyhadbeenexcludedfrompoliticalpower.When such a disjuncture occurs, “lawyers will be very active agents of revolution.”2 To Tocqueville, this rule applied not only to France but to other places as well; lawyers headed rebellions against authority when they did not have a role in making the laws they studied and used. Contemporary research has confirmed this depiction of a revolutionary bar with some qualification. Historians have discovered that the majority of high advocates, the practitioners in the seats of the parlements, were bewildered by events and either disappeared from public life or sidled into midlevel bureaucratic positions as a means of survival. A few became prominent political figures, but they were the exception. In contrast, the middle and lower rungs of the bar appear to have been more enterprising. Numerous lawyers and judges from district courts took advantage of opportunities, vaulted into positions of power, sat on local and national assemblies, continued litigating, and accessed coveted judgeships from which they had previously been barred.3 By focusing on Barcelona, we can add another building block to this intriguing , though understudied, subject. As a group, Barcelona lawyers were also revolutionary and exhibited a similar cleavage between less-prominent and younger men prone to activism and older and established advocates who, with much exception, tended to avoid becoming embroiled in politics. However, the history was not the same from one country to the next. While lawyers elected to the French National Assembly got caught up in the revolutionary moment—or the “ideal of the sublimity of the nation”4—and legislated against the interest of their own profession, events in Barcelona, and in all of Spain, never took off in such a utopian direction. In contrast, Spanish lawyersstrategicallymeldedprofessionalconcernsintothoseofthesovereign nation. From a comparative perspective, the study of Barcelona advocates is particularly illuminating, because Spain’s “liberal revolution” was, in fact, more representative of what took place throughout southern and western Europe. Continental revolutionaries and reformers found Spain’s formula of constitutional monarchy more viable than the radical republican ideal of Jacobin France or the United States. It is often forgotten that the word “liberal ” was coined in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars when delegates to the The Liberal Profession  70 S country’s first constitutional assembly (1810–14) proudly took on the name liberales and promulgated a constitution that served as a blueprint elsewhere. The study of lawyers in Barcelona, then, offers an instructive vantage point to explore the links between lawyers, revolution, and liberalism in...