Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes”: Agrarian Movements and Agrarismo in Spain, 1882-1917 Juan Pan-Montojo Autonomous University of Madrid ABSTRACT his text studies the birth of agrarian organizations and agrarism in Spain, between the 1880s and the social mobilization at the end of the Great War, underlining the communitarian and class-based representations that articulated the discourses of agrarian associations. he analysis of agrarian views of rural society and agriculture is introduced by a general summary of the European intelectual traditions upon which they were founded and the conditions that enabled these traditions to acquire growing inluence toward the end of the nineteenth century. he chapter closes with an evaluation of the reasons for the failure of an agrarian political project in Spain similar to those found in other countries, and assesses the efects of agrarismos on the plural “nationalization” of rural society in the early twentieth century. Este texto explica la génesis de las organizaciones agrarias y del agrarismo en España, entre la década de 1880 y la amplia movilización social al término de la Gran Guerra, centrándose en las representaciones comunitarias y clasistas alrededor de las cuales articuló sus discursos el asociacionismo agrario. El análisis de las visiones agraristas de la sociedad rural y la agricultura está precedido por una mirada general sobre las tradiciones intelectuales europeas en las que se fundaron y sobre las condiciones que les permitieron adquirir un nuevo protagonismo a inales del siglo XIX. El capítulo se cierra con la evaluación de las razones de la rustación de un proyecto político agrario en España, semejante a los existentes en otros países, y del impacto de los agrarismos sobre la “nacionalización” plural de la sociedad rural en el primer siglo XX. Between the end of the 19th century and the Great War, a growing literature reported on and lamented the end of rural communities as they had existed “throughout history”. Viewing rural communities in terms of static, territorial, personalized relationships and institutions, ethnologists, anthropologists, geographers and historians, along with academics of other disciplines, as well as literary authors, all sought to ix images of a world, urban as well as rural, that according to Durkheim or TönRepresentations 110 Juan Pan-Montojo nies was disappearing to give way to a new society. he signiicance and inevitability of this socio-cultural transition was interpreted in many ways. It was, however, openly rejected by those who sustained an organicist view of the world, and claimed that the death of the various types of communities was tantamount to a crisis of civilization. he creation and difusion of these representations of the rural coincided, and not by chance, with the foundation of a wide range of agrarian associations in all western European countries: the Société des Agriculteurs de France, the Bund der Landwirte, the Asociación de Agricultores de España, the Land League or the Boerendbond, among others. he new organizations difered greatly in terms of the point of view of their social bases, their doctrines, their political programmes, their structures and organization as well as their impact upon agrarian policies: Nevertheless, they all tended to share the idea that agriculture was not just another economic sector. Instead, it constituted a, if not the, core element of society. Furthermore, they claimed that agriculturalists or farmers or peasants (however named and however deined in a time in which these names and deinitions were highly contentious) were not merely an aggregate of professional groups or social and economic classes, but the members of a moral world that should act as the reservoir of national values. A changing reservoir, we could add, since the formation of these associations was in itself a symptom of the modernization, indeed, radical transformation of rural society. he aim of this chapter is to analyse the development of the various agrarian movements in Spain within this broader context. Attention is paid to two key factors. Firstly, their growing pluralism, despite the existence of a common overall name, agrarismo, and secondly, the variable and generalized mix of communitarian and class-based views of society that underpinned all agrarismos. No general political movement emerged in Spain under the banner of agriculture, but the diferent agrarismos were key elements in the reconstruction of new local communities, the technical modernization of the countryside, and the evolution of 20th-century ventures in nationalism. FROM THE COMMUNITY OF COMMUNITIES TO SOCIETY AND BACK At the beginning of the 19th century, the local sphere, most frequently deined by parish boundaries, was the main social space for most Spaniards. Relations tended to have special density within this narrow human environment that ofered common resources to its members and demanded from them permanent allegiance to its defence against outsiders1. Beyond the limits of the parish there were other neighbouring parishes. he circle of parishes within which relationships were more frequent changed depending on the geographical location, but ive to six walking hours (measured in leguas, or leagues) was considered to be the maximum distance of normal mobility and therefore of direct links between illiterate villagers2. Beyond these local spheres there were provinces, kingdoms, the Monarchy and Christianity, institutions and social horizons that conditioned the face-to-face world in which the neighbours lived. Long-distance Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 111 permanent or temporary migrations were by no means unknown among the peasants: annual journeys to Portugal or Castile enabled the reproduction of the domestic economies of northern Spain and dense networks of migration linked the Iberian Peninsula to all regions of the Americas3. Contacts such as these extended to village society. Networks reaching hundreds and even thousands of kilometres away, brought with them a constant low of cultural artefacts. However, only the elite of aristocrats, the high clergy and royal servants, who ruled over many villages and established alliances and personal linkages with their peers in diferent parts of the country, or the merchants who traded along regional or sea routes and lived in the few large cities of the Empire, acted in a constant and conscious way within a coniguration they variously called Spain, the Spains, the Monarchy, the res public. Yet, even in the case of the imperial elites this expansive social world was read in a fragmentary manner: irstly as a result of provincial and regional identities and, secondly, due to the corporations that framed other social conigurations, such as the noble and clerical estates (subdivided into orders, dioceses etc.), guilds, chartered companies, and other bodies. he cultural and religious elites of the Ancien Régime had synthesized their view of the Monarchy’s broad social coniguration through a metaphor inherited from medieval theology: the state was a body with its own independent organs that were connected and governed by the head, the crown4. his powerful metaphor expressed a broadly shared understanding of society as a divinely ordained community of communities structured in a complex, asymmetrical, and hierarchical way. Against this and other communitarian visions of the world, the Enlightenment, understood in its broader sense as the reformist thought of the 18th century, opposed a new understanding of human nature, which had its roots in Greek and Roman Antiquity, but had been renewed and developed by various authors from the Renaissance onward. he Enlightenment looked to self-conscious and autonomous individuals, freed from prejudiced opinions, as the natural centre of society and the ideal for a future world. Individualistic anthropocentrism underpinned the emergence of a new, cultural model of man, which served as the foundation for the political projects undertaken by the Atlantic revolutions. he ideology of Liberalism, which emerged in the transition between the 18th and the 19th centuries, proclaimed the imminent destruction by progress of the primitive, barbarian, and uncivilized universe of communities. According to Liberalism, progress meant both the accumulation of wealth and the birth of a new autonomous man, who would be guided by rational and critical self-interest, the homo clausus, as Norbert Elias has baptized this myth of modern times5. Individualistic representations of society did not replace previous “holistic” or communitarian views: the former were grated onto the latter and then developed from the foundations of these partly concealed older values6. Spanish liberals on both sides of the Atlantic relected this hybrid understanding of society that melded the old communitarian and the new individualistic world views. heir foundational political texts referred to citizens, that is to say, to male adults who did not work for others on a permanent basis, as well as to pueblos [villages] and to their inhabitants, the vecinos (literally “neighbours”), instead Representations 112 Juan Pan-Montojo of to the people (pueblo) and its individual members, as the basic political elements of the country7. As the process of cultural and political change led by liberalism picked up pace in the irst half of the 19th century, its doctrinal opponents throughout Europe reconstructed an alternative view. he organic representation of society that had prevailed in the political culture of the Ancien Régime, was revived by anti-Enlightenment and anti-liberal Romanticism. Conservative and reactionary Romantics approached society as a body of bodies or living organisms constantly subject to change. While they did not deny the possibility of social reforms, they did suggest that growth could not be accelerated through radical changes, and that society was a historical creation that could only be altered in a gradual way. For this reason they proclaimed the superiority of all existing communities against any project of social engineering, as Burke explained in his Relections on the French Revolution. Taking this as a point of departure, two counterrevolutionary French authors, Bonald and De Maistre, redeined the organic conception of social life using the metaphor of the human body to describe society. Like the human body, society had its own personality, independent of its parts, which had evolved through a long and gradual process of development that could be neither speeded up nor interrupted by voluntary decisions. Society was composed of diferent organs, smaller micro-societies, such as families, guilds, local communities, and pays or lands governed by their old privileges. It made no sense, they argued, to consider the individual outside of these interlocking organs. “Not only is it not true that individuals constitute society; society is the one that constitutes individuals through social education” pointed out Bonald, while Joseph de Maistre, using more provocative language, stated: “man does not exist in the world. I have seen in my life Frenchmen, Italians, Russians... I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian: but man, I declare, I have never encountered him in my life; I do not know if he exists”8. A clear continuity is apparent between the organicist anti-individualism of Bonald and de Maistre and French Catholic thinking throughout the nineteenth century, particularly within traditionalist political culture and, despite certain ambiguities, in Comtian sociology9. Frédéric Le Play, the French engineer and sociologist, proposed a social economy, understood as a combination of scientiic economics, law and political theology, whose purpose was the maintenance and consolidation of the family and local and social ties, in order to ensure that these basic organs of society survived the conlicts brought about by industrialism10. In France these concepts of society, along with related proposals to support intermediate groups and even reconstruct them wherever they had been destroyed, represented a minority position within the public sphere. However, on the other side of the Rhine organicism in all its varieties found its real intellectual fatherland. Adam Müller, from his very irst publications at the beginning of the 19th century, stood out as one of the most inluential authors of what has been called organicist neo-feudalism11. For him the revolutionary project of constructing a new society of individuals upon the ruins of the intergenerational chain, the severed links with land, and the privatisation of behaviours, in other words the abandonment of existing communities, threatened to Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 113 lead post-revolutionary Europe to an end similar to that of ancient Rome. Challenging and bringing to a halt Anglomanie and the social engineering of the revolutionaries, was the ultimate aim of his conspicuous works. Müller, who tried to shape a new anti-Smithian national economics, rejected Prussian conservative reformism inasmuch as it had a large Enlightened component. He became the father, together with Niebuhr and Dahlmann, of a promising stream of German anti-liberal organicist thinkers. Although a minority among the cultural elites of the German-speaking world, the nevertheless powerful reactionary circles of Vienna and Berlin found in the writings of the group Müller headed a permanent source of inspiration. Moreover, organicism not only inspired Germany’s nostalgic die-hards of the Ancien Régime. Its themes and metaphors also nurtured a Herderian nationalism that spread well beyond the ranks of anti-liberalism. he consideration of the medieval period as a Golden Age was a common ingredient of German nationalism in the Vormärz. A shared historical mythology was created and idealized medieval communities and corporations igured as a central feature of the Central-European humanist tradition. As Heide Wunder has underlined, “Germanists” (including linguists, ethnologists, jurists and historians) found in the High Middle Ages what “their time had taken away from them: a united nation; das Volk; a powerful political organization, the Empire; an economic formation free of conlicts, an agrarian communism that seemed to unite without contradictions liberty, patriarchal rule and economic security”12. For many liberals, the Germanic heritage supplied the tools for a revolutionary project. It was both democratic and national, independent of France and England, and nationalist, and thus favourable to the construction of a single national state for the Germans. Medieval mythology not only fulilled this function, it also acted as a bridge to the political conservatism that was needed to build a viable nationalist political project. “Germanism”, together with das Volk, the corporations, the land communities, and the brotherhoods of freemen, provided the basis for a long-lasting discourse. One of the most outstanding authors within this Germanist intellectual movement was the jurist Otto von Gierke, who in his extensive writings defended the real liberties of communities and corporations as an alternative to the formal freedom of individualist liberalism. In this defence he devoted a lengthy work to the Genossenschat, a term used for brotherhoods under the Ancien Régime that he re-utilized for a new institution, cooperatives. his ofered him a formula for the renovation of the old “total” socioprofessional corporations in contrast with the associations of partial interests13. In addition to Gierke, numerous academics referred back to the “original” institutions of the Germans to defend the existence of a certain primordial German communitarianism. Signiicantly, the latter was not necessarily seen as incompatible with liberal or democratic projects so long as liberalism was not identiied with individualism. he formation of the nation-state in Germany and Italy and the race for empire were accompanied by a profound transformation and difusion of nationalism throughout Europe during the inal three decades of the 19th century14. he transformation was diverse and complex but it included the strengthening of a nationalism deeply rooted Representations 114 Juan Pan-Montojo in the prior stage of romantic nationalism. Sternhell has termed the product of this transformation “tribal nationalism”15, but it would be better described as organic or organicist nationalism. Like the old reactionary and anti-liberal thought it deployed the organicist metaphor of society and a cultural understanding of the nation, akin to Herderian nationalism. However, it reinterpreted all these concepts in the light of Darwinism. he nation was understood as a living organism, in which the whole was superior to and intrinsically diferent from the mere sum of its basic elements. It was moreover viewed as an organism struggling for survival with other organisms. Charles Maurras and his party Action Française were, ater the vivid debate ignited by the Dreyfus Afair, the most inluential representatives of this nationalism in France. he new way of conceiving the French nation ater its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, and during what Digeon has termed the “German crisis of French thought”16, established a model of great inluence in all Europe. While this model did not stress ethnic elements as much as Central-European nationalism did, it nevertheless shared with it a holistic view of the nation. However, the French version did not take the nation for granted and demanded that it be actively constructed17. French nationalism presented itself as an integral nationalism, which intended all aspects of social life to be directed by the autonomy and hierarchy of “natural organisms” that integrated society18. In the long run this sort of nationalism defended corporatist doctrines at the social and political level. It also made the moral claim that national members were beholden to a new “organic solidarity”, to use Durkheim’s concept, even though very oten this new solidarity as it was described was more akin to the mechanical one, typical of “communities” in the inluential typology of Tönnies19. Organicism was by no means the exclusive vision of right-wing groups and nationalists. French solidarisme, British guild socialism, German Kathedersozialismus and Spanish krausismo, all shared a similar conception of society. Despite the fact that nationalist theorists were the most active defenders of the vision of national society as an organism and stressed the importance of recognizing and strengthening organic groups in order to regenerate a society characterized as decaying or anomic, the organic vision of society was popular among diferent and even opposed groups of the Western intellectual elites at the in-de-siècle. As a result organicism spread as a vision of society to an ever wider audience. he impact of this post-individualist view of society and the preaching of post-individualist political solutions based upon “natural” groups (especially nations or corporations) responded to the sensation of social crisis, which had arisen from the growing political power of class identities and the social conlict that accompanied political change. Such conlict, it was oten thought, involved a class struggle fostered by the rural areas’ loss of economic and demographic weight and by their adoption of urban political and social practices. 19th-century liberalism, as some of the most widely read liberal thinkers of the in-de-siècle explained, had very little to ofer as a remedy for the social conlicts that seemed to be a permanent feature of urban and industrial societies. he dangers of collectivism (as developed by socialist and anarchist thinkers) and secularism prompted the Catholic Church to abandon its passive resistance to liber- Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 115 alism. On the one hand it led new Catholic movements to update old rituals, such as pilgrimages to Rome or to the new centre at Lourdes, and on the other it copied a large part of its rivals’ repertoire of tactics for social mobilization and organization, for example the campaign of the Sacred Heart, demonstrations, newspapers, and associations. A similar response, although smaller and more dispersed, also emerged among the various Protestant churches. However, unlike the Protestants the Catholic Church developed a single discourse that encompassed its views on society and social doctrine, and which transformed its counteractive anti-modernism into a proactive social proposal. Corporatism was one of the central pillars of the third way, between liberal capitalism and atheist collectivism, defended by the Vatican from Leo XIII onwards. According to the papacy only a revival of the old socio-professional corporations, inspired by desire for a just share of wealth and supported by social relations based upon the provision of protection and justice by those in power, in return for deference and respect from the subaltern classes, could ensure the sort of social peace and harmony that would resolve the class struggle and overcome the unstable world liberalism had created. Rural society was one of the central concerns of these new discourses on the value of communities and corporations. Villages and hamlets were the living traces, it was argued, of a pre-individualist society. As Riehl had explained in the 1840s the peasantry was the estate (Stand) par excellence in 19th-century Germany, as all the other estates had been eliminated by the triumph of individualism. According to Riehl the “good peasant” only existed as a group and, because of it, peasants understood society and the State exclusively “through their community”20. Riehl’s theses must be read in the context of the extensive debate on the village community and its origins initiated by the Baron of Haxthausen’s publication of an account of his travels in Russia between 1847 and 1852. A range of academic studies soon followed and broadened the debate. hese ranged from historical studies of the origins of communal institutions to ethnographic and anthropological studies on European, Asian and Latin American village communities21. hese academic studies produced broad generalizations on the history of communal property and communal institutions that either defended their preservation as correctives to the problems created by individualism22 or as the basis for a new society23, while others criticized them as an obstacle to progress24. Pro-community views spread during the in-de-siècle period, as diferent conservative and radical groups saw these communitarian identities – national, racial, local or professional – not as obstacles to progress, but rather as endangered entities that ofered a clue to social peace. Identities and institutions were supposedly threatened by three factors: the new social customs of the expanding cities; the strong class identity of the “proletarians”; and the profound crisis of European agriculture25. he agrarian delation caused by the internationalization of agriculture, which contemporaries referred to as the Great Depression, severely damaged the economic position of all groups that derived their income from agriculture in the 1870s and 1880s. he answers to this irst wave of globalization included migrations, altered relations among the diferent rural Representations 116 Juan Pan-Montojo and agrarian groups, and new economic policies. In particular farmers and landowners adopted a wide set of new organizational and technical changes as a means of redeining their relationships with each other, with the market, and with the State26. During the implementation of these vast changes, which thoroughly transformed agriculture, rural communities were rediscovered and placed at the centre of public discourses as a valuable social heritage in their own right. At the same time certain groups perceived and idealized them as a dying phenomenon. By so doing most pro-communitarian literature, as Tönnies explicitly declared, was in fact turning the rural community into an ideal-type, a social artefact that had never existed, and which relegated all existing communities to shadows of a glorious past. Whatever the intellectual weaknesses of these representations of rural communities – and contemporary authors were the irst to denounce and criticize them – they supplied many elements for the creation of a shared family of concepts for the expanding agrarian associations. THE LATE DISCOVERY OF RURAL COMMUNITIES IN SPAIN he intellectual opposition to what Rafael Altamira called in 1890 the “individualist revolution” appeared relatively late in Spain. he persistence of strong opposition to liberalism and the delayed and gradual introduction of the new legal institutions and social discourses of constitutional monarchy were probably the key factors behind this absence. “Oicial” liberal culture had had – according to prominent representatives of the political elite – at best a supericial impact on the “real” culture of the country, especially that of the rural country. Legitimism, under the banner of the “Carlist” dynasty, remained a strong movement, capable of posing a continuous threat to the liberal State even into the 20th century. Its doctrine was constructed around several simple, albeit solid, political myths and images that included an emphasis on local liberties, traditional authorities and Catholic supremacy. hese were presented in opposition to what was denounced as liberal economic and social chaos27. Political muscle went hand in hand with doctrinal dependence on the Catholic Church; in fact, apart from hegemonic liberalism (including its radical republican version), the Catholic Church and a small number of lay Catholic authors were the only real intellectual opposition to Legitimism until the 1870s. he theoretical poverty of the anti-liberal Weltanschauung was matched by the almost complete absence of any kind of “ruralism” both within and beyond the frontiers of liberalism. 19th-century literature depicted the pueblos as loci of barbarism, a land awaiting conquest by urban values and civilization and modernization through the spread of education and the introduction of new technology and practices. he legislative programme of the Liberal Revolution, which suppressed seigneurial rights and jurisdictions, abolished traditional corporations and their privileges, transferred Church lands to private owners and promoted the construction of the nation-state between 1808 and 1845, had only a gradual impact upon the countryside28. In fact, until the general privatization of common lands ater 1855, along with the construction of the railways, partly Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 117 inanced through the sale by auction of the nationalized village lands during the 1860s, agriculture and rural society seemed to lag far behind the transformations experienced in the urban areas and coastal regions. Writers represented villagers in more or less sympathetic terms: for some they preserved Catholic virtues, for others they personalized a national essence. However, it may be noted that rural dwellers played no active role in essays and novels. Some commentators, especially those within a persistent tradition of agrarian liberalism, considered agriculture the strategic sector for the nation’s development. But whatever the value ascribed to the countryside and its economic activity, peasant cultivators were described as a primitive element requiring transformation in order for Spain to play a role among the civilized nations. he rural inhabitants with their “routines” and “prejudices”, the supposed enclosed village communities – despite the persistence and even increase of geographic mobility – and their inability to understand the very nature of progress and introduce technical innovations, were all seen as major obstacles to growth. Following the short democratic parenthesis of 1868-1874, and once the sale of the common lands and the integration of the national market began to have an impact upon rural life, the vision of the countryside started to change. Literary works of the 1870’s, like the ones of Pereda, Palacio Valdés or Antonio Trueba, tried to drawn a new picture of the countryside, parallel to the one presented by the Portuguese Júlio Dinis in A morgadinha dos cannaviaes and Eça de Queirós in A cidade e as serras, and much closer than any previous ruralist pages to those images that had been produced in Central Europe from the middle decades of the 19th century onward. Pereda, who in his early works described the people and social relations of the city of Santander and showed a certain contempt for the rural world around it, increasingly focused on the countryside in his work. his transition culminated in his most popular novel, Peñas arriba, published in 189129. he protagonist, a Doppelgänger of the author, arrives from Madrid in a remote village in the Cantabrian mountains to ind a model community led by the local lord of the manor, Tablanca. One of the characters of the novel, a medical doctor who symbolizes modern science, uses the organicist metaphor to depict this social relationship: he great achievement of Tablanca... from immemorial times has been the uniication of the aims and wills of all for the common good. he manor and the village are one body, healthy, robust, full of vigour, whose head is the lord of the manor. hey are all for him and he is for all them, as the most natural and necessary thing. To dispense with the manor is the same as beheading the body; and thus all the numerous and constant services rendered by one and by the others are not considered favours but functional acts of the whole organism30. Pereda’s contemporary, Palacio Valdés, in La aldea perdida [he Lost Hamlet] described a full-ledged classical Arcadia, destroyed by the mines and the miners, who brought with them violence, class struggle, irreligion, and ugliness31. hese novelists were not alone in their task. Jorge Uría has shown how beginning in the late 19th century, in northern Spain historians, folklorists and ethnologists tended to portray the peasants in an environment comparable to the “bucolic atmosphere of Representations 118 Juan Pan-Montojo Latin literature”32. heir visions were coupled to a new interest in the common lands and the communities that managed them, which were perceived as threatened institutions that had fulilled and should continue to fulil in the future an extremely relevant function in the maintenance of social equilibria in the countryside. Rafael Altamira’s Historia de la propiedad comunal [History of Communal Property], published in 1890, presented common lands and collective institutions as barriers against both radical capitalism and communism (“an extreme type of individualism”). He saw in the common lands a type of property compatible with liberalism, but with an added value in relation to private property: In the communities, love of property is not weaker than in the case of a single, more egoistic owner. here is just another subject, who instead of an individual is a group, which thus adds all the advantages of the association, of the community of interests and of blood and moral ties, which are, in very many cases, the only element of social culture they show33. Rafael Altamira’s basic ideas owed much to his indirect knowledge of Gierke’s works. hey were further developed by Joaquín Costa, a friend of Altamira and a lawyer from a peasant family. Costa devoted his journalistic, political, and academic writings, produced between 1868 and 1908, to the defence of peasant agriculture. A mythical foundation of a national “land constitution”, which Costa developed in opposition to liberal agrarian policies, led him to identify a Spanish collectivist tradition that dated back to pre-Roman tribes. his anachronistic reference to the remote origin of his own communitarian position was the preamble to a dramatic warning; he predicted that unless the “public economy of the Vacceos” (an Iberian tribe) and its communitarian institutions were reconstructed, “rivers of blood” would low in Spain34. With Colectivismo agrario en España [Agrarian Collectivism in Spain], from 1897-98, and his 1902 Derecho consuetudinario y economía popular en España [Customary Law and Popular Economy in Spain], Costa concluded both his reconstruction of the genealogy of agrarian communitarianism, and his analysis of rural communities in the Iberian Peninsula in terms of their economic organization, legal institutions and political management. Together these books were to have a huge impact on Spanish academic and agrarian circles up until the Civil War. he public presence of this agrarian populism, similar to the one led by the Russian narodniki at the other extreme of Europe (even though the Spanish variant was much more clearly rooted in the radical liberal tradition), cannot be separated from another change that seemed neutral in political terms, but conirmed the existence of a new social perception of the rural world. Peasants had hitherto been nearly invisible in the writings of agricultural engineers, a profession created in 1855 to direct the scientiic transformation of agriculture35. For this technical elite the only possible protagonists of progress had always been the propietarios (landowners). his term included irstly, those with enough land to rent and thus able to live on this income without needing actually to work the land, and secondly, from the 1880s onwards the agricultores (agriculturalists), who because of their education won the status of “professional” farmers. Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 119 Except when discussing the labour force, rural engineers referred to peasants as a sort of counter-example to the desired agriculturalist: peasant cultivators were considered illiterate, conservative, poor, and opposed to technology. However, ater 1898, agricultural engineers began to articulate in their publications and oicial projects the idea that agrarian policies should address the whole of rural society and not only the minority of privileged groups which until then had been singled out as the sole agents of agrarian modernization. Engineers expected landowners to go back to the land to live side by side with their social inferiors to enlighten them and guarantee social and public order, as the agricultural engineer Rodrigáñez had irst proposed in 188636.Aside from maintaining moral and social order, Rodrigáñez and others airmed that the landowners’ task was the creation of a “farmer of the 20th century”, educated, capable of adapting to technical change and guided in his farm management by the “data of detailed accounting”37. he time was over, continued Rodrigáñez, in which it suiced that “a small group of persons were familiar with the bases of rational cultivation”; it was necessary to establish a chain of associations that took “modern ideas to the rural population”38. Many, and most likely most agricultural engineers saw themselves as the active protagonists of the spread of modern ideas among the rural populace. Following 1898 an expanding corpus of agricultural literature emerged to aid the engineers in their eforts to train cultivators. Agrarian encyclopaedias39, rural newspapers40, specialized books or pamphlets, moral tales for the peasants41 and other rural publications were printed throughout the country. his was a phenomenon with few precedents, and must be seen in conjunction with another innovation: the development of a new type of agrarian association. AGRARIAN ASSOCIATIONS IN SPAIN: THE CREATION OF A NEW INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK he new ruralist ideas, which were nearly always pro-peasant and very oten pro-communitarian or pro-collectivist, provided a doctrinal impetus for the emerging Spanish agrarian associations. Nevertheless, the development of such associations did not coincide with this ruralist turn nor did it determine its basic features. he associations began in the 1880s as a means of creating political organizations in the agrarian sector, with the aim of defending it against the political inluence of industrial groups. During the Great Depression, they were thought of as lobbies, albeit lobbies based upon indirect massive popular support. Since individual landowners did not concentrate production in the same way as industrialists did, agricultural lobbies could compete with industrial and commercial elites only by claiming to represent the interests of the rural population. It is true, however, that the new associations in their search for their own political voice ended up shaping a new political discourse that utilized all the clichés and commonplaces of ruralism. Beginning in the 18th century a wide network of agricultural associations and societies had appeared in diferent European countries. hey were usually formal groupings of Representations 120 Juan Pan-Montojo landowners and big farmers who proclaimed their interest in the technical progress of agriculture and transferred to the agrarian sector and the rural world the new urban modes of socialization. hey organized formal sessions, contests, experiments and lectures, created journals, established libraries or ran experimental ields, and in so doing tried to legitimize in a diferent way their ownership of property and role as landowners in the countryside. hese pioneering agricultural societies had a limited impact in Spain, where they were few in number, small in membership, and not all that active. he Great Depression spread the development of a new type of associations all over Europe and the Americas. Organizations with openly political aims, especially the public protection of agriculture via tarifs and state subsidies, were founded. hese new associations, starting with the Société des Agriculteurs de France and following with the German Bund der Landwirte, difered from earlier ones in terms of objectives as well as strategy: they not only addressed the elites – and especially the landed aristocracy, which they called on to play a new active role in society42 – but they also tried to incorporate the bulk of the rural population within their programmes. In 1881 an association of agriculturalists was created in Madrid: the Asociación de Agricultores de España [AAE, Association of Agriculturalists of Spain]. It was created by a group of agricultural engineers, senior oicials of the Ministerio del Fomento [the ministry in charge of economic activities and education] and nearly a hundred landowners, including some 20 aristocrats. he success of the new association was limited. Its maximum membership, reached seven years later, included just over 500 member, very few when compared with the almost 10,000 members of the Royal Agricultural Society, a British association of the old type, or with the nearly 300,000 claimed by the Bund der Landwirte (BdL) and the Société des Agriculteurs de France (SAF), both new mass organizations. While the AAE was the irst agrarian organization of national scope to be created in Spain, for years its horizons barely went beyond the narrow limits of the capital city. Under the leadership of engineers, parliamentarians, and large landowners who lived in Madrid, it tried to obtain the support of provincial elites for a project that sought actively to inluence legislation under the banner of the technical and productive modernization of agriculture. To this end it closely followed the examples of the new European associations, and especially the French SAF. However, its lack of success was due to the Association’s inability to obtain suicient backing for its plans. hese depended above all on redirecting in its own favour the existing networks of clients that served as the foundation of the political system, rather than running the risk of breaking them up through new types of social mobilization. Despite its failure, the creation of the AAE had important consequences. Among other things, it introduced a new term in the political culture of late 19th-century Spain: agricultor [agriculturalist]. Before the AAE’s foundation landowners played the leading role in all discourse relating to agriculture. However, the AAE’s concept of agriculturalist, with its professionalizing connotations, contained a critique, more implicit than overt, of rentier behavior and absenteeism, as well as the inclusion of cultivators among the protagonists of agrarian transformations. he fact that those who coined and used the new term were members of the political Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 121 and social elites lent considerable difusion to the new conception of social roles in agriculture which it fostered. A second consequence of the AAE’s formation, and even more clearly of its failure, was the government’s decision in 1890 to establish an oicial agrarian institution: the agrarian chambers. In contrast with the chambers of commerce, which were provincial institutions whose members included the majority of those obliged to pay the industrial and commercial tax, and so in efect were a province’s most committed industrialists or merchants, the agrarian chambers covered no speciic territory. Any local or supralocal association that accepted the oicial regulations could be recognized as such. hese rules structured the chambers so as to reinforce the hegemony of the most important taxpayers of the land tax. hus control over the chambers lay in the hands of landowners, not cultivators. Membership was not required of all land taxpayers, nor was there any mandatory contribution to the inancing of chambers. he lack of compulsory membership and iscal resources of its own along the lines of the chambers of commerce, meant that agrarian chambers were voluntary and self-inancing institutions, endowed with certain oicial rights. he number of agrarian chambers gradually grew and with them spread the new professionalizing discourse that the AAE had pioneered. However, progress was burdened by the rigidity of state norms, and by the chambers’ oicial character, which was not compensated for by political inluence or by access to funding. he experience of these organizations was very uneven, and their real achievements depended very much on local factors. Most of them had a limited inluence on all ields. Nevertheless, they were not just ornamental. hey difused the discourse of agrarian modernization, a discourse that enhanced the value of cultivation as a productive activity and the value of cultivators as economic and social actors. Furthermore, they changed the connotations of “association” as an instrument of social change, and conferred upon it a new respectability. his fragmented map comprising the barely active AAE, a couple of regional associations, some local agrarian clubs and the agrarian chambers underwent major changes at the end of the Cuban War in 1898. he easy defeat of the Spanish navy by the United States led to a crisis of legitimacy of the liberal State that was to prove a turning point in Spanish history. he irst decade of the 20th century saw widespread political mobilization in the countryside. Strikes and violent boycotts in the South and the appearance of new local associations of peasants in the north and the centre, where middle or small owners and leaseholders prevailed, showed that the rural areas were “awakening”, or in other words, starting to act politically in a way that increasingly resembled urban environments43. he emergence of these new movements and organizations, partly as a consequence of a general transformation of collective action in the country ater the end of the war, increased the elites’ interest in rural organizations. he years between 1900 and 1917 saw diverse attempts to organize and direct rural mobilization. he fear created by the irst timid socialist and anarchist rural actions as well as the much more active republican penetration in the countryside prompted a sector of the major landowners, and especially the rural elites connected to the Catholic Church, to commit Representations 122 Juan Pan-Montojo themselves to the creation of a mass associative movement. Signs of this new attitude included not only the proliferation of pamphlets and articles that praised agrarian associations as the way to ‘material progress’ and ‘moral regeneration’, but also the passing of the Law of Agrarian Unions (sindicatos agrarios) in 1906. With this norm the ruling Liberal and Conservative parties ofered iscal and political incentives for the foundation of unions, that is to say of associations of cultivators. hus, the Spanish Monarchy followed, albeit ater two decades of delay and marked by a very cautious attitude, the path the hird Republic in France took in the 1880s. here the monarchist opposition had taken advantage of the legislation regarding agrarian unions to transform public action and social relations in the villages; republicans recognized their success and followed their opponents in the active promotion of syndicats agricoles. Despite the loud defence by the former of a traditional society threatened by modernization, this unionization meant a clear break with traditional patterns of representation or management of village afairs. Spain’s political elites were not prepared to go as far as the monarchic ones in France. hey foresaw the negative consequences of such a move, and realized that despite its conservative intentions such a mobilization could mean risking the patron-client relations on which the entire political system was based. It was only when the pressure of other social agents became especially intense that Spanish politicians dared to relinquish their obstructive policies and back fuller application of the law they had passed in parliament44. Notwithstanding the obstacles with which the political system hindered the expansion of the organizations it had legalized and wished to promote, the number of local unions, and the range of federations or associations that they then formed into, grew very rapidly prior to 1917. here were two key groups of protagonists in this progressive expansion: on the one hand, the urban associations of landowners and professionals linked to agrarian activities (such as lawyers, veterinarians, doctors, engineers); on the other, a section of the clergy and Catholic laymen, who were personally connected to ecclesiastical activities through brotherhoods, charities, or the patronage of local rites. he 1909 revival of the Asociación de Agricultores de España provided the former group with a loose but clear central nexus of a wide network of regional, provincial, and local associations. he Church, ater a long period of setbacks, succeeded in 1917 in federating most Catholic unions in the Confederación Nacional Católico-Agraria [CNCA, National Catholic-Agrarian Confederation], which became the broadest agrarian movement in Spain, both from the point of view of members and territorial extension45. In addition to these two groups, republican and even anarchist militants explored the possibilities of agrarian unions in some areas of the country, chiely in the rural zones surrounding the mining valleys of Asturias and in the outskirts of cities such as Vigo, Corunna, and Barcelona. Most of the unions of rural labourers inspired by anarchism or by the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Party) remained outside the legislative framework created by the 1906 Law. In any case the Socialists tended to pay minimal attention to the agrarian question until ater the Russian Revolution. Whereas societarismo, the name given in Galicia to the unions created by peasants who Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 123 had lived in Spanish or Latin American cities (especially Buenos Aires, Havana and Montevideo) or by industrial workers who lived in the villages, shaped a discourse that regarded peasants simultaneously as a class and as members of rural communities, the unions promoted by urban circles or by the Church found inspiration in an ideal of a rural/agrarian global community, understood as a community of communities. Nevertheless, neither could the former leave aside some of the ideas of communitarian ruralism, nor could the latter do without the deeply rooted class vision of society. Class and community became in fact permanent concepts of the plural discourses of Spanish agrarism. COMMUNITY, CLASS, AGRARISMO AND THE STATE he institution of the “village community”, in the sense of a locally based social grouping with a capacity for self-suiciency, presided over by an egalitarian poverty, organized around common economic resources, ruled by group norms, and dating to the era of “primitive communism”, was irst discussed as a concept in 19th-century literature46. his literature, as has been noted, saw village communities as endangered by capitalism and, in more general terms, by modernization, which either turned communities into obsolete institutions or undermined their bases. hey thus required special measures to protect them. he 19th-century critics of this view basically rejected in diferent ways the claims of antiquity and linear evolution dating back to pre-historical times, of a primitive communist society that had been destroyed by successive political systems. hey did not, however, deny the “fact” that these communities were, for better or for worse, in their inal historical phase, and would very soon disappear. he new conception of the village community as a virtuous yet reactionary remnant of a bygone golden age was incorporated into and developed by the new public discourses on agriculture. Agrarian associations thus devoted themselves to the double task of preserving the moral virtues of the rural communities and updating them through a general modernization of the countryside. he discourse in favour of rural communities was an urban phenomenon, which was eventually received and partially appropriated both by leaders of the village communities and by agrarian elites in the years before the Great War. he French retour à la terre [return to the land] was echoed by a Spanish literature that proclaimed that the population was “languishing or perishing in the city”; “the damned city, the fearful city, with its poisoned air, with its rotten food, with its vices that annihilate and its worries that kill, with its hustle without end or rest, destroying the nerves and ageing the heart”. In its view, people should resist the lure of the city and either go back to the countryside or remain in the ields47. he virtues of the village, shared by commoners and elites, were praised in a growing literature by writers ranging from bishops to anticlerical republicans such as Pérez Galdós48. However, despite the display of eulogistic appreciation of village communities and their traditions, support was by no means unconditional nor uncritical. While the existence of village communities and their moral superiority was universally accepted, the defence of communal property was very oten absent, if not Representations 124 Juan Pan-Montojo criticised. Yes, collective action was called for, but collective organization of production was not always welcome. Furthermore, “communitarianism” was not the only integrating element of agrarian or ruralist discourses: in a seemingly paradoxical process the new organic and corporatist views reached the villages, at least in Spain, at the same time as class-based understandings of society. Meanwhile, the old liberal discourse of individual entrepreneurship and innovation as the path to economic and social development was extended to include the hitherto neglected cultivators. he convergence of modern projects, under the aegis of tradition – but not all traditional – or under the aegis of modernization – but nevertheless justiied in the name of the survival of pre-existing society – created a contradictory albeit eicient set of incentives for social mobilization. Agrarian unions founded from below, in the villages and by villagers, saw themselves not only as representatives of a speciic economic activity, but as representatives of their local community, even though not all community members were involved in agriculture. hey created a “we” that was full of communitarian meaning. Hamlets or villages became the protagonists of a discourse that centred around a territorial community, venturing beyond the parish or municipal limits only in so far an identity of the countryside could be deined against the urban world. In northern and central Spain, where small-scale ownership prevailed and villages were equally small, everybody within the parish or village was supposed to adhere to the sindicato and those who did not could face personal boycotts49. Sindicatos were instrumental in the symbolic reconstruction of collective identity, since they underlined the diferences between a village and its neighbours lacking unions or possessing unions with diferent political orientations. By establishing new common goods and forms of social relationships, they reshaped and reairmed community solidarity towards the outer world50. he leaders of the local agrarian unions appealed to the common good or to a sense of pride in belonging to the village, but they hardly ever theorized about their speciic communities, which were taken for granted in their speeches or publications51. Associations led by landowners or professionals, who reside in cities rather than in the countryside, adopted names that underlined their provincial or regional scope and their professional or economic specialization. hey ofered protection and beneits not to all inhabitants but to individual members, and used their connections to lobby for collective goods and political inluence for agriculture and not for any local community. he associations’ dues, common purchases of inputs, centralized organization in capital towns, meetings, social gatherings and other channels of communication all revealed that they were underpinned by a narrow understanding of labradores or agricultores, even though they claimed to represent the entire agricultural sphere. However, these “modern” lobbies were eager to revive anti-urban commonplaces that opposed rural interests and values to their urban counterparts52. he rejection of cities and city life and the praise of the virtues of the countryside were recurring themes in the rhetoric of both speeches and articles, despite the fact that the leading members were more oten than not urban residents, and frequently had hardly any connection with the countryside or with agriculture apart from Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 125 collecting their rents or making summer visits to their estates. It was these urban residents who used the new vocabulary of “natural communities”, opposing them to the artiicial State, and demanded the construction of “organisms” to stop social decay, and even longed for a “collective soul to defend the very sacred interests” of agriculture, considered to be “primordial to the existence of the nation”53. here were not only contradictions between the economic or professional commitments of associations and their appeals to local and moral communities or to communitarian practices. here were also potential clashes between the avowed unity among agriculturalists and the constant recognition of class division. La voz del campo [the voice of the countryside], la voz de los pueblos [the voice of the villages], la representación de la agricultura [representation of agriculture]: these slogans coined by the organizations to denote the fundamental union of a movement that called itself agrario or agrarista, coexisted with plural but always hierarchical visions of the rural populace. In the imagination of the leading national organizations such as the AAE, the Instituto Agrícola Catalán de San Isidro, the Asociación de Labradores de Zaragoza or the Asociación de Ganaderos del Reino, rural society was harmoniously structured in a hierarchical order accepted by universal consensus among its members. As Halperín has shown in the case of the Sociedad Rural Argentina, large landowners in Spain considered themselves the top of the social ladder and “burdened” with the duty to lead those beneath them along the path of progress, guided by the common material interests of agriculture. In this important task landowners had the right and the duty to deine and demand certain policies, even when they apparently required sacriices of society as a whole54. Torres Cabrera, a leading agrarista from Córdoba (Andalusia) described agriculture as a society hierarchically divided in three layers: landowners, agriculturalists, and labourers. His vision roughly matched the contemporary British construct of a rural world of landowners, farmers, and farm-workers. Obviously these three layers of the “agrarian class” were not equal, whatever meaning may be ascribed to equality: Understand that in the agrarian class there are hierarchies as there are in heaven... he tasks of the ones and the others cannot be the same, but they are all equally necessary. Consider the worker as the small son who does the easier jobs and learns to grow up to reach manhood. Consider the agriculturalist as the father who guides the son and administers the estate of both. Consider the landowner as the representative of the ininite Providence, who keeps watch in the countryside and in the towns, who foresees the inclemencies of the weather, who ordains legislation to foster production and avoid hunger, who lives or should live next to the labourer to be acquainted with his needs and next to the politician to know the needs of the Fatherland55. he leading members of agrarian organizations shared the aristocratic vision of Torres Cabrera, although it was not normally expressed in such archaic and paternalistic terms. Jesús Cánovas del Castillo, recently appointed general secretary of the AAE, most probably had a similar view in mind when he suggested in an article of 1912 that the organization had to be able to recruit the support of the “agrarian middle class”, “the type of farmer who takes no other part in production except the direction and oversight of his estate, thanks to his social condition or resources, and who normally lives in agricultural villages”56. he Catholic Federations and the National Catholic-Agrarian ConRepresentations 126 Juan Pan-Montojo federation not only developed a class-based discourse but also hoped to create a massive movement of peasants that could stop lay unions in the countryside. In their recommendation of “mixed unions” (sindicatos mixtos), uniting employers, small peasants and landless workers, Catholic leaders foregrounded their recognition of rural classes. In the long term they aspired to the abolition of class divisions through the reconstruction of communities. Yet to achieve that, they recognised that leadership by those who have “some value” in the villages, either because of their “social and economic position” or their “culture and enlightenment”, was needed to found the local unions that would stop class struggle57. Nevertheless, the possibility of Catholic militants establishing pure workers’ unions in the region of large estates signalled the extreme pluralism of economic structures and social identities. Pure workers’ unions were a temporary solution: turning labourers into small owners was the key to overcoming class identities and reestablishing harmonious relationships. Only where relatively egalitarian village communities existed could the good rural world be found. But there again, even in the areas where small ownership prevailed and poverty levelled out social inequality, mixing “classes” was by no means easy. Small peasants were neither “proletarian nor bourgeois” but an “intermediate force, and intermediate forces can never succeed”, lamented an aluent republican peasant from northern Castile, who explained that despite sharing the problems of small owners, labourers did not want to join in their unions58. It is evident that class, both as a term and a concern, exerted a more signiicant presence in all texts than community, brotherhood, or corporation. However, this fact did not mean that class identities made communitarian projects irrelevant. Local ties were strong enough in certain regions to force socialists and anarchists to join agrarian unions or for rural organizations to deine themselves as representatives of the real members of the village/people, a moral community, as opposed to the local elites. It should in fact be noted that the division, evoked here for analytical reasons, between the local organizations and those of the “agriculturalists” is somewhat misleading: many local unions were members of larger professional organizations and understood themselves as associations of many diferent communities. Apart from some concrete cases, it was also quite diicult to distinguish associations created from within and below from those originating from without and above. Inside, outside, above, and below are terms that would make sense if there were a pre-existing social cartography by which to deine them. However, such a cartography would chart a static rural world that by no means existed in 19th-century Spain. Agrarian unions and associations were thus oten used to erase or bridge such diferences, to include outsiders in local networks, or to reconnect locals with broader horizons. EPILOGUE Agrarismo, the term that all agrarian organizations except for the explicitly socialist or anarchist ones eventually used to refer to their own movement, was founded, as Vizconde de Eza has signalled, upon both a distinctly peasant (campesina) “base” and Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 127 “upon a rural civilization”59. Yet who were the members of that distinctly “peasant” base and the voices of “rural civilization”? Until 1917, which saw the Russian Revolution and the beginnings of a deep social crisis in Spain, the agrarios and the state tried to reconcile class and community in a catch-all project that would prove unable to survive the experience of a dictatorship (1923-30) and a democratic regime (1931-1936). Reestablishing communities’ ties around agrarian organizations and reconstructing a deferential society in those regions where inequality was extreme, through a mixture of social engineering and paternal concessions, in order to create a uniied agrarismo or agrarian movement led by rural and agrarian elites, was a programme doomed to failure. It failed thanks to the fragmentation of rural elites, the division between lay and Catholic programmes, and in particular, the heterogeneous nature of agrarian social structures and village communities that together proved a major obstacle to the forging of a common communitarian identity. Existing rural communities lay in the way of the creation of a new agrarian community, while existing class identities undermined the formation of an agrarian class opposed to the other national classes. he result was a plural rural society that acted in diverse ways and which did not match either the project of turning a world of dying communities into a revolutionary class opposed to the rich and to the rural cultural elites, or the project of preserving and restoring an endangered network of conservative communities through their doctrinal and material modernization. Agrarismo was in reality agrarismos. While the agrarismos did not achieve their dreams of a united rural society, they did fulill other tasks. hey transformed the relationship between rural society and the agrarian markets, contributing to the commoditization of farms and the introduction of new technologies. hey paved the way for new social habits and means of communication; sport associations, popular clubs and local newspapers grew alongside agrarian unions. hey also promoted novel political attitudes among peasants. All associations and unions managed to renew the ties between rural society and the state. Instead of the 19th-century territorial solidarities based upon defence against central political power and its demands (taxation, conscription, land regulations), the new associations and unions ofered a territorial, sectorial or class solidarity either against the market, or in search of a better position in the market. Underpinning this development was the permanent request of governmental protection. hus the state was turned from foe into protector, or at least a desired protector. he beneits promised by state legislation-- tax exemptions, access to credit, technical support, and arbitration in labour disputes-- ofered, irstly, new collective goods that could substitute the institutions which had disappeared, such as common lands or cooperative work. hey also supplied political mediators with new resources, which forced unions to seek or construct supra-local alliances and to create a varying repertoire of protest and collective action. In so doing the agrarismos contributed to integrating local communities into a wider imagined community or, more precisely, into wider and conlicting imagined communities, as they substituted various views of the pueblo [people] for the 19th-century pueblos [villages]. Representations 128 Juan Pan-Montojo NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 On peasant communities and their communitarian representation of the world in early modern Castile, see J. Izquierdo Martín, El rostro de la comunidad. La identidad del campesino en la Castilla del Antiguo Régimen, Madrid 2001. Five to six leguas from the place of residence was the distance beyond which travellers were supposed to carry passports, according to law in late Ancien Régime Spain. See Ley 5ª, tit. IX, lib. IX of the Novísima Recopilación, a compilation of legislation published in 1805 (reprinted in 1976). On northern migrations of peasants in the eighteenth-century, see R. Domínguez Martín, El campesinado adaptativo. Campesinos y mercado en el Norte de España, 1750-1880, Santander 1996, pp. 104-120. For bibliographic references wedded to a daring interpretation of transatlantic migration, see J. Fradera, Las ronteras de la nación y el ocaso de la expansión hispánica, in J. Pan-Montojo (ed), Más se perdió en Cuba. España, 1898 y la crisis de in de siglo, Madrid 2006, pp. 486-491. E.H. Kantorowicz, he King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political heology, Princeton 1959. N. Elias, Was ist Soziologie?, Munich 1970, chapter 4. On the relationship between individualism and “holism”– the author’s label for what others call communitarianism – see L. Dumont, Homo aequalis II. L’idéologie allemande. France-Allemagne et retour, Paris 1991. See F.X. Guerra, El soberano y su reino. Relexiones sobre la génesis del ciudadano en América Latina, in H. Sábato (ed.), Ciudadanía política y formación de las naciones. Perspectivas históricas de América Latina, Mexico City 1999, pp. 33-61. L. de Bonald, Oeuvres Complètes, Paris 1859, p. 123, and J. de Maistre, Du Pape et extraits d’autres oeuvres, Paris 1964., p. 162. J. Prévotat, La culture politique traditionaliste, in S. Berstein (ed.), Les cultures politiques en France, Paris 2003, pp. 37-72.. A. Neurisse, L´économie sociale, Paris 1983. K. von See, Freiheit und Gemeinschat. Völkisch-nationales Denken in Deutschland zwischen Französischer Revolution und Ersten Weltkrieg, Heidelberg 2001, p. 26. H. Wunder, Die bäuerliche Gemeinde in Deutschland, Göttingen 1986, p. 141. O. von Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschatsrecht. I. Rechtsgeschichte der deutschen Genossenschat, Berlin 1868. he irst of his four volumes on cooperativism presents some of the central theses of this author. See the synthetic vision of these changes in E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge 1992, chapter 3. Z. Sternhell, he Birth of Fascist Ideology rom Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, Princeton 1994, p. 9. C. Digeon, La crise allemande de la pensée rançaise, 1870-1914, Paris 1959. Nevertheless, the existence of an ethnonationalist, and even racist, German nationalism, as opposed to French constructivist nationalism, is questionable. Fichte underlined the importance of education for the nation, whereas Frencha uthors wrote a good part of the modern foundational works on racism. On the French and German conceptions of the nation and their diferences and common elements, see the synthesis of P. Milza, Les cultures politiques du nationalisme rançais, in S.. Bernstein (ed.), Les cultures politiques en France, Paris 2003, pp. 335-376. “Integral” became one of the clue terms to characterize the new nationalism. In Portugal, the movement inspired basically by Action Française and founded in 1914 by A. Sardinha, A. Monsaraz and H. Raposo called itself “integralismo” (C. Barreira, “Três nótulas sobre o integralismo lusitano (evoluçao, descontinuidades, ideologia) nas páginas da Naçao portuguesa, 1914-1926”, in “Analise Social”, 1982, 18, 72-74, pp. 1421-1429, and M. Braga da Cruz, O integralismo lusitano nas origens do salazarismo, in Monárquicos e republicanos no Estado Novo, Lisbon 1986, pp. 13-74). Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 129 19 F. Tönnies, Gemeinschat und Gesellschat, Darmstadt 1972 [1935]. 20 W.H. Riehl, Land und Leute. Die Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Social-Politik. I., Stuttgart 1867 (6th edition; original edition 1853), p. 116 21 A full revision of the literature on the village community can be found in C. Romero, La polémica europea sobre la comunidad aldeana (1850-1900), in “Agricultura y Sociedad”, 1990, 55. 22 For example, Maine, Altamira, Laveleye... 23 Tkachev, Vorontsov, Danielson, Bakunin, Kropotkin… 24 Marx, Kovalevski, Seebhon, Kautsky… 25 K. Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Grossstadtfeindschat, Meissenheim am Glan 1970, gives a detailed account of these “fears” and their mobilizing efects in Germany. 26 he Great Depression as a irst globalization process in K.H. O’Rourke, J.G. Williamson, Globalization and History: he Evolution of a 19th Century Atlantic Economy, Cambridge (MA) 1999. 27 On Carlism, the Spanish legitimism that developed following the dynastic conlict at the death of Fernando VII, its pretenders, political evolution, conspiracies and three military uprisings (the Carlist Wars of 1833-40, 1846-47 and 1872-76) plus its contribution to the nationalist side during the Civil War of 1936-39, see the synthetic work of J. Canal, El carlismo, Madrid 2000. 28 On the huge bibliography published on the Liberal Revolution in Spain, the best available overview in English is provided by Isabel Burdiel and María Cruz Romeo, in their Old and New Liberalism: the Making of the Spanish Liberal Revolution, 1808-1844, in “Bulletin of Hispanic Studies”, 1998, pp. 105-120, which can also be supplemented by Burdiel’s Myths of Failure, Myths of Success: New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Spanish Liberalism, in “Journal of Modern History”, 1998, pp. 892-912. 29 C.Fernández-Cordero Azorín, La sociedad española del siglo XIX en la obra literaria de José María Pereda, Santander 1970. 30 J.M. de Pereda, Peñas arriba, Madrid 1988, p. 239, original ed. 1895. he text I have translated reads in Spanish: “La gran obra de Tablanca [...] desde tiempo inmemorial ha sido la uniicación de miras y de voluntades de todos para el bien común. La casa y el pueblo han llegado a formar un solo cuerpo, sano, robusto y vigoroso, cuya cabeza es el señor de aquélla. Todos son para él y él es para todos, como la cosa más natural y necesaria. Prescindir de la casona equivale a decapitar el cuerpo; y así resulta que no se toman por favores los muchos y constantes servicios que se prestan la una y los otros, sino por actos funcionales de todo el organismo”. 31 J. Uría, he Myth of the Peaceable Peasant in Northern Spain: Asturias 1898-1914, in “International Labor and Working-Class History”, 2005, 67, pp. 100-124. 32 Uría, Myth cit., p. 107. 33 “En las comunidades, el amor a lo que es su dominio no cede al del más egoísta propietario. Únicamente varía el sujeto, que es un grupo en vez de un individuo, añadiendo así todas las ventajas de la asociación, de la comunidad de intereses y de los lazos morales y de sangre, que son, en muchas, el único punto de cultura social que muestran”, in R. Altamira, Historia de la propiedad comunal, Madrid 1981 [1890], p. 67. 34 A reference and a warning that were included in his lecture, “Viriato y la cuestión social en la España del siglo II antes de Jesucristo”, cited in A. Ortí, En torno a Costa, Madrid 1996, pp., 166-7. On the evolution of the agrarian writings of Costa, see the introduction by Alfonso Ortí and Cristóbal Gómez Benito to his Escritos agrarios. Volumen I. Escritos de juventud, Huesca 1998. 35 On agricultural engineers, see J. Pan-Montojo, Apostolado, profesión y tecnología. Una historia de los ingenieros agrónomos en España, Madrid 2005. 36 C. Rodrigáñez, La vida en el campo, Madrid 1886, p. 14. 37 Id., El labrador del siglo XX, Madrid 1900. p. 155. Representations 130 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 Juan Pan-Montojo Ibid., pp. 37-38. Such as the Biblioteca Solariana. See M. Cabo Villaverde, Prensa agraria en Galicia, Ourense 2002. See for instance J. Rosell, Amor al campo o Antonio y Anita, modelo de labradores. Novelita moral y nociones de industria rural, Barcelona 1906. M. Malatesta, Le aristocrazie terriere nell’Europa contemporanea, Rome - Bari 1999. Lectures, public contests and oicial inquiries revealed the fear created by this sudden mobilization of the rural world. For a general description and summary of the literature on the new phenomenon that received the name of cuestión agraria (agrarian question) see R. Robledo, Economistas y reformadores españoles: la cuestión agraria (1760-1935), Madrid 1993. S. Garrido, Alentar y obstruir. Las vacilaciones de la política estatal sobre cooperativismo en los inicios del siglo XX, in “Noticiario de Historia Agraria ”, 1994, 7, pp. 131-154. J.J. Castillo, Propietarios muy pobres. Sobre la subordinación política del pequeño campesinado (La Confederación Nacional Católico Agraria, 1917-1942), Madrid 1979. In relation to Spain see R. Domínguez Martín, De l’aldea perduda a l’aldea recuperada: el mite de la decadència de la comunitat pagesa a Cantabria, in “Recerques”, 1998, 36, pp. 53-80, and El mito de la comunidad campesina: ¿crisis de un agente social, o crisis de un concepto dentro de las ciencias sociales?, in Concepcións espaciais e estratexias territoriais na historia de Galicia, Santiago 1993. “Languideciendo o pereciendo en la ciudad”, in the prologue by E. Gante to J. Rosell, Amor al campo cit., p. 8; “la ciudad maldita, la ciudad temerosa, con su aire envenenado, con sus alimentos podridos, con sus vicios que aniquilan y sus preocupaciones que matan, con su ajetreo sin in ni descanso, que destruye los nervios y envejece el corazón” ( J. R. Coloma, El campo, Madrid 1928?, p. 5). hese are just two examples of an extended commonplace in the contemporary literature. See El absentismo agrario by the bishop of Segovia in “Vida rural. Almanaque agrícola de El Norte de Castilla”, 1923, pp. 176-180, and B. Pérez Galdós, Rura, in “El Progreso Agrícola y Pecuario”, 1901, 7, 1, 226. M. Cabo, O agrarismo, Vigo 1998, pp. 46-49, supplies various examples of these practices. On the symbolic construction of diferences among communities, see A.P. Cohen, he Symbolic Construction of Communities, London - New York 1985. For local political alignments of agrarian unions see Uría, Myth cit. In that sense they conirm Bauman’s view regarding the absence of self-analysis in any real community: Z. Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, London 2001. For a detailed synthesis of the topics and genealogy of this literature, see K. Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Grossstadtfeindschat cit. Federación Agrícola Catalano-Balear, Als Agricultors, Barcelona 1905, 28-VII, cit. in J. Planas Maresma, Cooperativisme i associacionisme agrari a Catalunya: els propietaris rurals i l’organització dels interessos agraris al primer terç del segle XX, doctoral dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2003, p. 43, and J. Pratdesaba, De Re social, in “Revista de la Cambra Oicial Agrícola Ausetana”, 7 december 1920, cit. in ibid., p. 200. “Collective soul” [alma colectiva] in M. Matesanz, Lo que signiica la unión de aspiraciones e intereses, in “Vida rural. Almanaque agrícola de El Norte de Castilla”, 1923, p. 181. T. Halperín Donghi, José Hernández y sus mundos, Buenos Aires 1985, pp. 251-2. La Agricultura y Córdoba, 1901, p. 284, cited in R.M. Almansa Pérez, Familia, tierra y poder en la Córdoba de la Restauración, Córdoba 2005, p. 259. La apatía de los agricultores, in “Boletín de la Asociación de Agricultores de España”, 1912, 42. Movimiento agrario. Recuerdos de una asamblea, “Diario Regional”, 1911, 12, 11, cited in P. Calvo Caballero, Asociacionismo y cultura patronales en Castilla y León durante la Restauración, 1876-1923, Valladolid 2003, p. 94. Reconstructing “Communities” and Uniting “Classes” 58 59 131 “Un campesino”, Las bellezas del campo para gentes de los pueblos y de las ciudades, Valladolid 1922. Vizconde de Eza, Agrarismo, Madrid 1936. BIBLIOGRAPHY Barral P., Les agrariens rançais. De Méline à Pisani, Paris 1968. Bergmann K., Agrarromantik und Grossstadtfeindschat, Meissenheim am Glan 1970. Cabo Villaverde M., O agrarismo, Vigo 1998. Castillo J.J., Propietarios muy pobres. Sobre la subordinación política del pequeño campesinado (La Confederación Nacional Católico Agraria, 1917-1942), Madrid 1979. Cornu P., Mayaud J.L., L’agrarisme question d’histoire urbaine? Approche comparée da la construction des “campagnes” dans la France et l’Allemagne de l’ère industrielle, in Caron J.C., Chavaud F. (eds.), Les campagnes dans le société européens. France, Espagne, Italie (1830-1930), Rennes 2005. 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