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Riot, regeneration and reaction: Spain in the aftermath of the 1898 Disaster
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Abstract
The crisis of legitimacy following Spain's loss of empire in 1898 combined with the effects of a longer-term crisis of modernization to undermine efforts to reform the political system and regenerate the social and economic life of Spain. Rising social agitation, middle-class movements for national regeneration, Catalan bourgeois nationalism and military reaction all interacted to block the development of a modernizing alternative to the Restoration regime. As a result, the gap between the established order and society grew wider and the potential for peaceful change diminished. Events in the first decade of the century thus established the pattern of conflict that was to dominate Spanish politics until the Civil War.
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References
1 The disaster engendered a huge bibliography of a varied kind: military and eye-witness accounts, polemical books about the wider causes of the War, and programmes for the regeneration of Spain. For contemporary accounts of causes written from different standpoints see: Casanova, Enrique Reig y, Sacrilegios y traidores, o la masonería contra la Iglesia y contra España (Madrid, 1910)Google Scholar. (This diatribe against the freemasons was preceded by a pastoral letter of the archbishop of Seville blaming them for the diaster (quoted in El Imparcial, 7 Aug. 1898)); Martínez, J. Rodríguez, Los desastres y la regeneración de España. Relatos e impresiones (La Coruña, 1899)Google Scholar; Luis, Morote, La moral de la derrota (Madrid, 1900)Google Scholar; Vital, Fité, Las desdichas de la patria (Madrid, 1899)Google Scholar; Ramiro de, Maeztu, Hacia otra España (Madrid, 1899)Google Scholar; Damián, Isern, Del desastre national y sus causas (Madrid, 1899)Google Scholar; DrMadrazo, , ¿El pueblo español ha muerto? Impresiones sobre elestado actual de la sociedad española (Santander, 1903)Google Scholar; Cortés, César Silió y, Problemas del día (Madrid, 1900)Google Scholar; Picavea, Ricardo Macías, El problema nacional. Hechos, causas, remedios (Madrid, 1899)Google Scholar. The bibliography of more recent analyses can be found in the endnotes that follow.
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11 A typical example was the image in a weekly magazine, after the Spanish fleet was sunk in the first engagement of the war, of ‘the healthy, greasy pig trampling on the wounded lion’: La Ilustración Española y Americana, 8 May 1898. For a typically racist view: Cortijo, Vicente de, Apuntes para la historia de la pérdida de nuestras colonias por un testigo presencial (Madrid, 1899), p. 4Google Scholar. The portrayal of the war in popular songs has been studied by Carlos García, Barrón, Cancionero del 98 (Madrid, 1974).Google Scholar
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51 Quoted in Rodríguez, Los desastres, p. 126. See also Cortijo, Apuntes, p. 39.
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58 ¡Cu-Cut!, 23 Nov. 1905.
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