1713-1813: els límits d’un cicle

Abstract

If the year 1808 has been seen as a symbol of the foundational moment that political revolution meant in Spain, the years 1813-1814 can be seen as a symbol of the moment when the three processes identified by this paper came to their end: the process that started one hundred years earlier with the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, whose main element was the decrees of the Nueva Planta; the one unleashed around 1793 amid the echoes of the French Revolution, whose main elements were the first crisis of the Ancien Regime and the weight of the counter-revolution; and lastly, the one that started with the Napoleonic occupation of Spain and the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, with the main element being political revolution, which then seemed attainable. The year 1813 may symbolize these three cycles, not only because it marks their common chronological end, but above all because of their interest for historical analysis, since they should be treated together, given their dialectic character and often contradictory dynamics.

Thus, while the years 1813-1814 may be taken as the threshold of restaurationism, brought about by revolutionary frustration, they can symbolize much better some of the key factors making a return to the previous order impossible. Therefore, if the end of the cycle of the Nueva Planta marks the failure of the model intended by the Bourbon monarchy one hundred years earlier, our cyclic approach sheds light on the crescendo trend of the said failure from the 1790s onwards; it also marks the impulse given to the said trend by the war against revolutionary France and the effects of the French Revolution during 164 lluís the 1790s; and it shows how important the disrepute and breakdown of the Spanish monarchy were. This was, then, a result brought about not only by the Bourbon monarchy’s own «merits» but also by the revolution as experienced at local level and by the political projects related to the Cortes of Cadiz of 1812.