Democracy and social protest in rural Andalusia in the nineteenth century. Notes on a process of political modernization

Abstract

This chapter is based on the idea that democracy was an ideology and a sociopolitical movement partially excluded from the liberal state-building process in Spain during the nineteenth century. This process followed the standards of a conservative model that left any possibility of gaining access to power to insurrection. However, exclusion did not prevent the articulation of a democratic movement that is becoming increasingly better known, thanks to advances in historiographical research. Based on the analysis of the popular uprisings that took place in southern Spain in the 1850s and 1860s, this chapter proposes a re-reading of rural social protest. Beyond their interpretation as an expression of class struggle or as primitive or pre-modern sociopolitical movements (understood as pioneers of agrarian anarchism), episodes such as those that took place in El Arahal (Seville) in 1957 or in Loja (Granada) in 1961 are the most significant expressions of a much broader, complex and multifaceted movement in its social and political dimensions. These social expressions show how democracy was a response by rural society to the consequences of the development of liberalism in rural areas, and how it was the experience of these protests that ended up dividing the democratic movement itself.