Gentlemen Bourgeois and Revolutionaries: Political Change and Cultural Persistence Among the Spanish Dominant Groups, 1750-1850.

Right-wing Spanish nationalist historiography in its heyday from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century tended to apply the tourist slogan "Spain is different" to the history of the peninsula in the areas of interpretation and periodization. Professional historiography in the liberal and Marxist veins throughout the contemporary period sought, conversely, to interpret Spanish history in terms of broader comparative models, at the same time acknowledging the "failure" of Spain to conform fully to such models, for which increasingly variant explanations were provided. During the past decade - since approximately the mid-1980s - the most vital area of research on nineteenth and twentieth century Spain has been the fields of social and economic history. Contributions in this area have been both more original and more stimulating than those provided by political history and most other specialties, and they too have interpreted Spanish development along the lines of models used for western and southern Europe generally, but their most recent conclusions have increasingly challenged the concept of "failure," replacing it with the more broadly comparative category of slow or delayed development.

Both liberal and Marxist historiography understood the precocious breakthrough of political liberalism in Spain between 1810 and 1850 in terms of a "bourgeois revolution" approximately similar in origins to that occurring in France and certain other countries, but nonetheless failing to achieve full success and stability because of the weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie. Jesus Cruz challenges this interpretation on the basis of extensive research in social history first presented as a doctoral dissertation in 1992. He offers convincing evidence with regard to the political and economic elite of Madrid, who largely dominated early liberal politics, to demonstrate that no real "bourgeoisie" existed at that time in Madrid, and thus argues tellingly that there was no "bourgeois revolution" that could have "failed" or been even partially frustrated.

This research is based on a broad sample of 549 members of the Madrid elite during the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, with smaller subsets thereof employed to examine diverse elite professions and different generations. What this reveals is an elite drawn almost exclusively from various strata of the national and provincial aristocracy, and involved in public administration, landowning, banking, commerce, military affairs and politics. The economic interests involved were overwhelmingly traditional, yielding very scant evidence of the emergence of any new entrepreneurial bourgeoisie devoted to production as distinct from commerce, landholding and financial services. Even the financial services were very disproportionately devoted to traditional avenues and state bonds, though this was changing to a limited degree by the 1840s.

As a landowning elite these sectors had for some time been increasingly oriented toward the market and thus cannot be characterized as "feudal" or merely "pre-capitalist," but neither did they constitute a new-style, innovative "agrarian bourgeoisie," for new landholdings were generally integrated into the economic functions and culture of the existing elite. The disentailment of private, church and common lands, which began in the 1790s and continued sporadically (sometimes convulsively) for nearly a century, merely consolidated the existing patterns of land ownership or domination, rather than creating a new and innovative bourgeois agriculture. It should be pointed out that the above findings merely confirm and further elaborate earlier findings by David Ringrose concerning the economy of Madrid and central Spain and by Richard Herr and various Spanish historians regarding the results of disentailment.

None of this is used to deny that the language and juridical structure of Spanish liberalism was individualistic and meritocratic, but that it was a language used by an elite that was both established and in political and juridical affairs transformative at the same time. Liberalism was attractive to significant sectors of the Spanish elite for reasons that were intellectual, moral and patriotic, but that could also offer political and economic incentives. The new political elite had much more direct political influence than had the old elite under traditional monarchy, as well as significant new economic opportunities.

Cruz argues that it should be in no way surprising that nineteenth-century Spanish liberal politics tended to be elitist, corrupt, personalistic and frequently dominated by clientage and patronage. Most of these features had already been prominent among most sectors of the Madrid elite during the last generations of the old regime, forming part of a culture of patronage and family connections that had predominated among officeholders, merchants, bankers and other elite sectors prior to liberalism. Given the absence of any real socioeconomic "bourgeois revolution" of direct rationalization and new structures of business and entrepreneurship, it was not surprising that the same elite culture tended to predominate in the first generation of liberalism. There was no modern new bourgeoisie except in Barcelona and (later) Bilbao.

It should be emphasized that Cruz is not at all arguing that social conditions remained static in the Madrid elite during the first half of the nineteenth century. There was steady renovation and incorporation of new elites, but the latter tended to come particularly from the middle and lower ranks of the aristocracy of northern Spain (and notably Navarre and the Basque Country), and was rapidly and fairly completely absorbed into the traditional elite culture and its functional mores.

Nor is Cruz necessarily championing a unique Spanish Sonderweg into liberalism merely to refute either standard liberal or Marxist historiography. The various "paths" of all national or regional histories are in important ways "special" or "different." We might conclude that only in Belgium did the new entrepreneurial classes and capitalist elites function primarily as in England, and such a conclusion may in turn be a product largely of our ignorance of Belgian history.

Spain is thus "different" from England in the ways that most countries were different from England, though not necessarily because of the specific sociopolitical interpretations about the liberal elite typically espoused by liberal and Marxist historiography. Cruz argues, again convincingly, that the models involved have been too economistic, and have failed to investigate the sociocultural patterns of the elite, in this case already established in the eighteenth century and, with certain changes, carried over into the nineteenth century and beyond.

This is an unusually stimulating and original dissertation-book, based on extensive prosopographical research, that makes a distinctive contribution to the social history of Spain. It merits broad attention and should provoke extensive new discussion and research on modern elites in other parts of the country, as well.

Stanley G. Payne University of Wisconsin-Madison