Civil Governors and Public Order in Nineteenth-Century Spain: The Case of Barcelona

Abstract

The civil governor (initially ‘Political Chief’) was a key player in the deployment of the Spanish liberal state. On the one hand, his status as a government agent in the province (the new territorial demarcation since 1833) gave him capital importance in the construction of a centralized state that was to forge a single unified nation. On the other hand, his competence in public order gave him the responsibility of managing conflicts and, consequently, to promote social cohesion. However, the inability to develop a civil administration of Public Order not subordinate to military authority, which, in the new liberal context, retained some powers that it had exercised during the Old Regime, resulted in the militarisation of the most conflictive place in the Spain of the nineteenth century, Barcelona, which became a territory systematically subjected to political exceptionality. And when a large part of the elite sought the protection of the army, the conflict radicalised, causing high human, social and political costs, which stimulated, as a reaction, the emergence of a federalist culture as an alternative to top-down domination, centralism, and repression.