Ideologeme “revolución” in the political discourse of Spanish Carlism

Abstract

The article examines the use of the ideologeme “revolution” in the Carlist political discourse. Spanish Carlism, which is one of the oldest political movements in modern Europe, appeared in 1833 and opposed liberal reforms in Spain. Throughout its history, the Carlists positioned themselves as consistent opponents of revolutionary ideology. The aim of the study is to conduct a systematic analysis of the texts of Spanish Carlism and to identify the specifics of the use of the lexeme “revolution” and similar lexical units. To achieve the stated goal, 229 programme documents of the Carlist movement were analysed. The time frame of the study is 1833–1936. The lower temporal boundary is the Carlist uprising against the government in Madrid, which led to the First Carlist War. The upper temporal boundary is the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). In the analysed texts, 108 uses of the lexeme “revolución”, 39 of the noun “revolucionario” and 16 of the adjective “revolucionario” were singled out. Using the methods of contextual and critical discourse analysis we traced the change in the emotional colouring of the ideologeme in question. Since the Carlists were opponents of revolutionary movements, for them this notion served to create an image of the enemy, but over time the emotional colouring of the ideologeme in question decreased. In the analysed texts there is an opposition between the ideologeme “rebellion”, which has positive connotations, and the ideologeme “revolution” with negative connotations. At the genetic stage of the history of Karlism (1833–1876), a mixture of elements of religious and political discourse is observed.