Political Comedy and Social Tragedy Spain, a Laboratory of Social Conflict, 1892-1921

This book analyses the troubled and often violent path of Spain to modernity. During the nearly 30 years of history explored (1892–1921), the country appeared to be caught in a kind of Groundhog Day. It was rocked in the 1890s by an ill-fated colonial adventure and a spiral of anarchist terrorism and praetorian-led repression, mostly in Barcelona, which culminated with the murder of the Conservative prime minister Antonio Cánovas in August 1897. Twenty-four years later, Spain was undergoing a similar set of circumstances: a military quagmire in Morocco and vicious social warfare, with its epicentre in the Catalan capital, which resulted in the killing of then Conservative prime minister Eduardo Dato in March 1921. The chronological framework highlights the gradual crisis, but also resilience of the ruling Restoration Monarchy. Francisco Romero Salvadó pursues the thesis that this crisis could be largely explained by focusing on the correlation between two apparently contradictory conceptual terms, but which in fact proved to be supplementary: the extent to which the persistence of the political comedy embodied by an unreformed liberal but oligarchic order perpetuated a social tragedy. Notwithstanding the peculiarity of the author’s approach, this study rejects any notion of determinism or exceptionalism. On the contrary, Spain was not an extraordinary case within the European context, but constituted a laboratory par excellence of the turmoil which marked this age.

Dr. Francisco J. Romero Salvadó is a Reader of Modern Spanish History at the University of Bristol and Senior Research Fellow at the Cañada Blanch Research Centre of Contemporary Spanish Studies (LSE).