¹ See for example Reddy, William, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge UK, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lang-ley, Lester, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 150–165 Google Scholar; Post, Ken, Revolution and the European Experience, 1789–1914 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), pp. 16–21,CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sabato, Hilda, “On Political Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” The American Historical Review, 106/4 (2001), pp. 1290–1315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² See for example Ringrose, David, Spain, Europe and the “Spanish Miracle,” 1700–1900 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp. 366f.Google Scholar; Moya, Antonio Morales “Introducción. La transformación del Antiguo Régimen: Ilustración y Liberalismo,” in Pidal, Ramón Menéndez Historia de España (Madrid: Espasa, 1998, t. 30), pp. 49–56 Google Scholar; Torres, Pedro Ruiz, “Del Antiguo al Nuevo Régimen: carácter de la transformación,” in Antiguo Régimen y liberalismo. Homenaje a Miguel Artola (Madrid: Alianza, 1994, v. I), pp.159–192 Google Scholar; Cruz, Jesus, Los notables de Madrid. Las bases sociales de la revolución liberal española (Madrid: Alianza, 2000), chap. 8.Google Scholar

³ The contribution of material culture and consumerism to the shaping of revolutionary identities has been pointed out in the case of Europe by Rietbergen, Peter, Europe: A Cultural History (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 323–327 Google Scholar; and in the case of America by Breen, T. H., “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolution of the 18th century,” Past and Present, 119 (1988), pp. 76–77 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Narrative of Commercial Life: Consumption, Ideology, and Community on the Eve of the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, L (1993), p. 472.

⁴ Brewer, John and Porter, Roy (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 2.Google Scholar

⁵ Among which England was, no doubt, the most evident. See McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John, and Plumb, J.H., The Birth of a Consumer Society. The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 33 Google Scholar; Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination. English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997), pp. 663–665.Google Scholar

⁶ Ilustrado and liberal literature between 1750 and 1850 is full of passages that reflect the admiration of the Spanish elites for the life styles and social and political achievements of some northern Euro-pean countries, mainly Britain and France. See Alonso, Manuel Moreno, La forja del liberalismo en España. Los amigos de Lord Holland, 1793–1840 (Madrid: Congreso de los diputados), pp. 49f.,Google Scholar the same author's Blanco White. La obsesión de España (Sevilla: Alfar, 1998) pp. 611–615; some of the contributions in the collective volume edited by Aymes, Jean René and Sebastián, Javier Fernández, La imágen de Francia en España (1808–1850), (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 1997)Google Scholar; and de Mesonero Romanos, Ramón, Recuerdos de un viaje por Francia y Bélgica (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 203, 1967), pp. 387f.Google Scholar

⁷ Herr, Richard, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958)Google Scholar; Elorza, Antonio (comp.), Pan y toros y otros papeles sediciosos de fines del siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1971), pp. 7–9.Google Scholar

⁸ For the terms of this controversy see Gaite, Carmen Marin, Love Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chap. 1Google Scholar; Haidt, Rebecca, Embodying Enlightenment. Knowing the Body in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature and Culture (New York: St Martín's Press, 1998), chap. 3.Google Scholar

⁹ Martín Gaite, pp. 21–22.

¹⁰ Rietbergen, , Europe, p. 326.Google Scholar

¹¹ Haidt, , Embodying Enlightenment, pp. 131f.Google Scholar; Martín Gaite, Love Customs, chap. II.

¹² Gaite, Martín, Love Customs, p. 27f.Google Scholar

¹³ The debate revolves around the idea of the existence or non-existence of a profound change in consumer habits among European populations during the second half of the 18th century. A recent inquiry into the terms of this historiographical controversy can be found in Clunas, Craig, “Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West,” American Historical Review, 104/5 (1999), pp. 1497–1511.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ In contrast to other regions within Spain and Western Europe, the probate inventories of Madrid, at least since the 17th century, provide appraised value of all goods recorded.

¹⁵ Sambricio, Carlos, “Sobre el proyecto y desarrollo urbano de Madrid en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII,” in Urbanismo e historia urbana de España (Madrid, 1985), pp. 489–500 Google Scholar; Plomeque, Eulalia Ruiz, “Ordenación y realidad urbana del casco antiguo madrileño en el siglo XIX,” in Urbanismo e historia urbana de España (Madrid, 1985), pp. 501–516 Google Scholar; Madrazo, Santos and Pinto, Virgilio (dirs.), Madrid: Atlas histórico de la ciudad, siglos IX–XIX (Madrid: Fundación Caja Madrid, 1997).Google Scholar

¹⁶ See, for example, de Mesonero Romanos, Ramón, “Las casas por dentro,” in Escenas matritenses (Madrid: Fernando Plaza, 1991), p. 88.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Seventeenth century literary sources are abundant in describing estrados; one of the most classic can be found in Zabaleta, Juan, El día de fiesta (Madrid: José M. Díaz Borque, 1977), p. 32f.Google Scholar; Deleito, José y Piñuela, , La mujer, la casa y la moda en la España del rey poeta (Madrid: Espasa, 1966), pp. 32f and 85f.Google Scholar; Burr, Grace H., Hispanic Furniture: from the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century (New York: Archive Press, 1964), p. 42.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Gaite, Martín, Love Customs, p. 42.Google Scholar

¹⁹ This lack of functionality in the distribution of household interiors is characteristic of most of Europe up to the 17th century, although it appears to be more persistent in peripheral areas such as Spain or Scotland. See Nenadic, Stana, “Household Possessions and the Modernising City: Scotland c. 1720 to 1840,” in Shuurman, Anton J. and Walsh, Lorena, eds., Material Culture: Consumption, Life-style, Standard of Living, 1500–1900 (Milan, 1994), p. 148.Google Scholar

²⁰ One of the main aspects that the enlightened minister Jovellanos emphasized when he remodeled his old provincial family estate in 1800 was, precisely, the conversion of former large spaces he considered too cold and austere into smaller comfortable rooms for private use. See de Jovellanos, Melchor Gaspar, Obras publicadas e inéditas de Melchor Gaspar de Jovellanos (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1952), vol. L., p. 204.Google Scholar

²¹ Alonso, Aguiló, María Paz, El mueble clásico español (Madrid: CSIC, 1987), p. 132.Google Scholar

²² Recent scholarship points towards the existence in Spain of a slow but sustained process of incorporation of new consumer habits since the 17th century. This long-term transformation intensified during the second half of the 18th century, but did not evolve into a “consumer revolution” until the first third of the 20th century. See the contributions by Xavier Lencina Pérez, Monserrat Durán, Lidia Torra Fernández, Máximo García Fernández, Fernando Carlos Ramos Palencia, Ramón Maruri, and Juan Carlos Sola in the collective volume edited by Torras, Jaume and Yun, Bartolomé, Consumo, condiciones de vida y comercialización. Cataluña y Castilla, siglos XVII–XIX (Avila: Junta de Castilla y León, 1999).Google Scholar The historical evolution of consumption in Spain fits better into Carole Shammas’ evolutionary pattern than into the paradigm of the consumer revolution. See Shammas, Carole, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) Google Scholarand “Changes in English and Anglo-American consumption from 1550 to 1800,” in Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods, pp. 177–305.

²³ McKendrick, Neil (et al.), The Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 9.Google Scholar

²⁴ See, for example, de Larra, Mariano José, Artículos completos (Madrid: Aguilar, 1951).Google Scholar

²⁵ Romanos, Mesonero, “Antes, ahora y después,” in Escenas matritenses, pp.101f.Google Scholar

²⁶ Hall, Thomas, Planning Europe's Capital Cities. Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Urban Development (Oxford: Chapman and Hall, 1997), p. 47 Google Scholar; Benevolo, Leonardo, The European City, (Oxford: Black-well, 1993), pp. 171f.Google Scholar

²⁷ Baldeón, Clementina Díez, Arquitectura y clases sociales en el Madrid del siglo XIX (Madrid: Siglo XXI), p. 132f.Google Scholar; Hall, , Planning Europe's Capital Cities, pp. 144–145.Google Scholar

²⁸ For parallel processes in other Spanish cities see Pons, Anaclet and Serna, Justo, La ciudad extensa. La burguesía comercial financiera en la Valencia de mediados del XIX (Valencia: Diputación de Valencia, 1992), p. 120f.Google Scholar; McDonogh, Gary W., Good Families of Barcelona: a Social History of Power in the Industrial Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 181f.Google Scholar

²⁹ Romanos, Mesonero, Escenas Matritenses, p. 90.Google Scholar

³⁰ See Marcus, Sharon, Apartment Stories. City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 17–18 Google Scholar; Bryden, Ingra and Floyd, Janet, Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior (Manchester UK: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 13f.Google Scholar

³¹ Quoted by Díaz-Plaja, Fernando, La vida cotidiana en la España romántica (Madrid: Edaf, 1993), p. 46.Google Scholar See also Romanos, Mesonero, Esceanas Matritenses, p. 259.Google Scholar

³² In Madrid's apartments, semi-public spaces served as a transition between the public and the private spheres. These spaces are indication that the traditional conception of the existence of sealed private interiors separated from their public realms needs to be reconsidered. Evidence in this article joins scholarship that argues for the connection between the public civic and the private household interiors. For the classic argument in favor of sphere separation see Perrot, Michelle, “At Home,” in Aries, Philippe and Duby, Georges (eds.) A History of Private Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), vol. 4, p. 341 Google Scholar; On the approaches arguing in favor of connection see Marcus, , Apartment Stories, p. 6.Google Scholar

³³ The concepts “front stage” and “back stage” are borrowed from Weatherill, Lorna, Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760, (London: Routledge, 1988).Google Scholar

³⁴ Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Madrid (AHPM), Protocolo (P.), 27896, p. 2116f.

³⁵ AHPM, P. 28758, p. 125f.

³⁶ AHPM. P. 27896, p. 2121f.

³⁷ As described by Teófilo Gautier, quoted by Díaz-Plaja, , La vida cotidiana, p. 50.Google Scholar

³⁸ See Davidoff, Leonor and Hall, Catherine, Family fortunes, men and women of the English middle class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Google Scholar

³⁹ Rybczynski, Witold, Home: a Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 42.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Some examples can be found in Pérez Galdós’ Fortunata y Jacinta, La de Bringas, Lo Prohibido, and Palacio Valdes, La Espuma.

⁴¹ José Garcia de la Torre was minister of Gracia y Justicia in 1820. AHPM, P. 25446, p. 118.

⁴² Perrot, , “At Home,” p. 342.Google Scholar

⁴³ AHPM, P. 27272, p. 1381.

⁴⁴ AHPM, P. 3573, p. 5522.

⁴⁵ AHPM, P. 28758, f. 1016.

⁴⁶ AHPM, P. 22848, f. 588.

⁴⁷ Romanos, Mesonero, Recuerdos de un viaje, pp. 251–255.Google Scholar