From the mid-nineteenth century to the Civil War of 1936, Madrid experienced notable social and physical changes that were provoked by economic and technological modernization. One of the ways in which the authorities tried to respond to Madrid's rapid population growth and the rise of social inequalities was through control of the urban space. An expansion of the city to the north, east and south, known as the Ensanche, and with a grid layout, made it easier to accommodate and police the growing population, to segregate rich and poor areas and to sanitize public space (Carballo, Vicente and Pallol 2013; McKinney 2010: 19–23; see the chapters by Pallol and Vicente in this volume). There were further problems that Madrid's authorities had to deal with, not least the rise of rural immigration and, with it, the spread of poverty and epidemics, particularly cholera (Fernández García 1986; Parsons 2003: 15–17; Cruz 2011: 154; Shubert 1991: 40; Fuentes Peris 2003: 10; Bahamonde Magro and Toro Mérida 1978: 42–43; Silvestre Rodríguez 2001; Carnicer 1986; Carballo, Vicente and Pallol 2013: 305; Pallol Trigueros 2013: 27–28). Seeing the poor on the streets provoked discomfort among the rising middle classes, who saw them as sources of disorder and disease (AMV 1899a; Fuentes Peris 2003: 135–36). Spurred on by social scientists and the developing media, the authorities used legal and police persecution against the poor, or confined them in workhouses (Llano 2017: ch. 10). Organ grinders did not fit into existing categories of poverty and were prime scapegoats among the poor, being accused of challenging and misappropriating the codes of conduct on which the rising middle classes predicated their lifestyle. This applied particularly to what the middle classes saw as their misappropriation and corruption of the honour code.

Scapegoating has been the most common way throughout history of designating a wrongdoer and turning society against him. Scapegoating often targets vulnerable individuals or groups and often follows an arbitrary course, so that ‘the borderline between rational discrimination and arbitrary persecution is sometimes difficult to trace’ (Girard 1986: 19). The scapegoating of organ grinders by the middle classes in nineteenth-century Madrid needs to be seen in the broader context of the scapegoating of the poor in the media and the social sciences.