Book Description

This book commemorates the bicentenary of the landmark Spanish Constitution of 1812. Drafted by Spanish and colonial Spanish American liberals (and non-liberals) holed up in Cadiz as Napoleon’s troops occupied the surrounding hills, this war-time Constitution set out radically to redefine ‘the Spanish nation’ for a new age. In the event, it divided Spaniards and threw into sharp relief the question of Spain’s legitimacy in her American colonies. Cadiz 1812 is a defining moment in the modern history of the Spanish-speaking world. Bringing together specialists in the history, politics and culture of Spain and Latin America (the Cadiz text was a cultural and ethnic document as much as a politico-legal one), this volume represents the only large-scale commemoration in the UK of one of the world’s first liberal constitutional tracts. The point of the book, however, as of the conference and accompanying exhibition on which it is based, is not solely to reflect on the significance and repercussions of Cadiz 1812 on both sides of the Hispanic Atlantic at the time. The book also considers later interpretations of Cadiz 1812 and examines, in addition, other constitutions in the Spanish-speaking world beyond 1812. Subjects treated include: Spain’s crisis of absolutism; the Inquisition before the Constitution; liberalism and Catholicism; discourses of the 1812 Constitution; the question of sovereignty; political theatre during the Napoleonic invasion; Goya; the Spanish crisis in the British press; Lord Holland and Blanco White; Pérez Galdós’s Cádiz; futuristic literary representations of Spain’s nineteenth-century crisis; political and philosophical echoes in Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – in Cúcuta, Mexico, Argentina and Cuba; and, finally, politico-philosophical echoes in Spain – in the Liberal Triennium, in the mid-nineteenth century, in the Spanish Second Republic, in 1978, and in 2011 in the midst of the financial (but it is also a constitutional) crisis. The volume includes a specially-conducted interview with Spanish politician Alfonso Guerra, one of the figures behind the Spanish Constitution of 1978.