«Advanced sentinel of the European federation». Transnational revolutionary expectations in the Spanish First Republic

Abstract

This text deals with an interpretative re-dimensioning of the Spanish First Republic’s establishment from a perspective concerned with its transnational implications. The expectations of democratic realisation of supranational scope that the event aroused among European republicans allowed us to destabilise the strict national meaning of the failed process of the republic’s consolidation. At the same time, they reveal the horizon of political possibilities opened up by the democratic imaginary in 1873 concerning the different revolutionary geographies elaborated since the mid-nineteenth century within the framework of the republican cultural tradition. Based on a contextualised analysis of the European and Spanish democratic press of the time, complemented by diplomatic sources, I argue that, after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the Republicans interpreted the proclamation of the First Republic in Spain as the last hope for democracy in Europe. This interpretation was specifically popular among republicans in south-western Europe, who were indebted to a long revolutionary tradition of sovereignty which, in the political and cultural context of 1873, nurtured the ideal of the federation of Latin peoples as the first step towards the future realisation of the United States of Europe. From this perspective, the triumph and consolidation of the Spanish federation coul be seen as a fundamental achievement for a new European order that would counteract the monarchical and militarist hegemony of the northern powers.