Catalonia’s Advocates: Lawyers, Society and Politics in Barcelona, 1759–1900 (review)

Despite the important role that lawyers have played in the modern period, they have been surprisingly neglected in sociological and historical analyses of what used to be called the “bourgeoisie.” Classic studies have simply lumped them into a larger category of “elites” who were presumed to share basically the same class interests. From this perspective, their role was either to reproduce bourgeois hegemony or, more affirmatively, to act as rational agents of modernity, in Weberian terms. Jacobson’s meticulously researched social history dis-aggregates lawyers from these heterogeneous and functionalist categories, framing them as distinct corporate agents in the major developments of the “long” nineteenth century, from the Enlightenment to nationalism to the liberal and industrial revolutions.

In pursuit of this goal, Jacobson adopts Barcelona as the site for his case study of the continental bar. Barcelona participated in all of the major developments experienced by other European cities—a shared corporate trajectory for the profession, from the liberalism of the early nineteenth century to the conservatism and corporatism of the century’s end. What drove this evolution, argues Jacobson, was the unique corporate interests of the profession, as lawyers worked to adapt to changing power structures. Thus, many lawyers joined the liberal revolution because, as Toqueville once claimed, they wanted access to political power.¹ Moreover, Jacobson insists that lawyers did not simply join the revolution; they helped to shape the direction that it took, in particular, to forge liberalism into what he calls an ethos of the elite and educated. Once the elitist constitutional order had stabilized after the 1830s, the profession took a conservative turn, although Jacobson notes that historians have paid little attention to this trend. This conservatism took shape in the defense of their specific material and corporate interests, which focused on clients, courts, and fees, not markets, prices, and tariffs.

What is unique about the Barcelona case, however, is how the corporatism took a nationalist turn after the 1880s, largely as a result of legal conflicts about centralizing law codes. Although such legal conflicts existed elsewhere, only in Catalonia did they develop into an open conflict that fed the emerging “home rule” Catalanist movement. Once again, Jacobson persuasively suggests that lawyers inclined toward Catalanism not just because it suited their interests; they actively participated in the movement’s construction, which depended as much on their legal disputes as it did on the famed “literary renaissance.” For nationalism to move from literary/cultural celebration to political organization, it must appeal to interest groups who have something to gain by it, and who have the resources and prestige to vie for political space. Jacobson asserts that the civil-code compromise of the 1860s in Catalonia largely satisfied the mercantile or industrial bourgeoisie but not the lawyers, who eventually rejected the compromise and opened a battle in defense of Catalan law. This legal defense of Catalan identity preceded the more popular linguistic defense of Catalan, but the two arenas were linked in the nationalist (and jurist) Prat de la Riba’s 1895 manifesto. Given this context, it is hardly surprising that, in the first political Catalanist Union, 30 percent of the deputies were lawyers.

As the first social history of a continental bar, Jacobson’s study has much to offer those legal scholars, sociologists, and historians who do not have a specific interest in Barcelona or Catalanism. As such, it will undoubtedly serve as a model for future efforts to analyze the role of professional groups—lawyers, in particular—during the “bourgeois” century.