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The queen, the woman and the middle class. The symbolic failure of Isabel II of Spain

2004; Routledge; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0307102042000257601

1470-1200

Isabel Burdiel,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Quoted in A. Munich, Queen Victoria's Secrets (New York, 1996), 11. This article was written as part of the research project DIGICYT-BHA-2002-00708. 2 Diario Mercantil de Valencia, 19 December 1843. 3 I have discussed the radical character of the Spanish Liberal revolution in Isabel Burdiel, ‘Myths of failure, myths of success: new perspectives on nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism’, Journal of Modern History, lxx (December 1998), 892–912. For a view that instead emphasizes the elements of continuity between the Old Regime and liberalism see Jesús Cruz, Gentlemen, Bourgeois, and Revolutionaries: Political Change and Cultural Persistence among Spanish Dominant Groups, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1996). 4 R. Schulte, ‘The queen – a middle class tragedy: the writing of history and the creation of myths in nineteenth-century France and Germany’, Gender and History, xiv (August 2002), 266–93. 5 Quoted in A. Munich, op. cit., 8. 6 As a not particularly brilliant example, see the efforts made by Louis-Philippe of Orleans to imitate as best he could what he believed was the image of a typical bourgeois. His famous umbrella, his suit and his wig became stereotypes of that very special way of representing royalty. His solitary walks in Paris, without an escort, exposed him to a repeated series of attacks that a good bourgeois would have avoided by staying at home. T. Zelding, France, 1848–1945, vol. i, Ambition, Love and Politics (Oxford, 1973), 415. 7 W. Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867). I have used the edition published by Fontana Press, 1993, with an introduction by Richard Crossman. In his classic study Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, N.J., 1980), Clifford Geertz analyses the function of the exemplary symbolic centre that the monarch occupies; part of what he proposes is useful even for advanced societies of the same period. Although I cannot develop this aspect now, I think it is worth reflecting about the relationships existing between the shaping of the modern state (predominantly in a monarchic form of government) and the modern definition of a moral person identified as a self : the responsible, male, property-owning citizen who was the implicit subject of all liberal order, including the symbolic order that he required of the state in general and the monarchy in particular, the idealized representation of his own private moral and cultural values. 8 Bagehot, op. cit., 87 and 88. 9 Daily Telegraph, 30 April 1868. Quoted in M. Homans, Royal Representations. Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago, 1998), xxvii. 10 Windsor Castle, 6 April 1850, in T. Martin, Life of the Prince Consort (London, 1880, 7th edn), 259–60. 11 Queen Victoria was crowned in June 1837 and reigned until her death in January 1901. Isabel II came to the throne on 10 November 1843. She was dethroned by the revolution of 1868 and died in Paris in 1904. 12 As Dorothy Thompson writes, ‘among the changes in the manner of life of the royal family which took place during Victoria's reign, none is more striking than the change in sexual, marital and family behaviour generally’: Queen Victoria. The Woman, the Monarchy and the People (New York, 1990), 15. 13 Lord Salisbury, House of Lords, 25 January 1901. 14 The comparison with Queen Isabel II provides an opportunity for discussing the evaluation by Margaret Homans in this respect: ‘She could manipulate her image, to the extent that her culture made it possible for her to do so; yet many of her representations were made by others. Her resemblance to a bourgeois wife, mother, and later widow was a fiction created both by impressive tricks of deliberate representations and by a certain inevitability in Victorian culture. The degree to which her deliberate choices were involved in constructing this imposture (or what “choice” could mean in such a situation) and the degree to which it was constructed for her by social forces operating independently of her can never be fully established’, Homans, op. cit., xxi. 15 Quoted in G. C. Grey (ed.), The Early Years of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort. Compiled under the direction of Her Majesty, the Queen (New York, 1967), 183. 16 I am using the oxymoron formulated by Edoardo Grendi in, for example, ‘Micro-analisi e storia sociale’, Quaderni Storici, xxxv (December 1977), 506–20. 17 After the death of Prince Albert, the close intimacy between the queen and her Scottish servant John Brown aroused much talk but, unlike what happened in Spain, the rumours did not go beyond the close circle of the court and its immediate surroundings. The Derby Diaries for the late 1870s are full of references to the ‘eccentric favours’ that John Brown received from the queen: sleeping in her antechamber, the obligation that the princes and the court should treat him as a gentleman, etc. The Earl of Derby also echoes the rumour of a possible secret marriage (which he utterly dismisses), but he insists on the constant awkwardness that the presence of the Scottish servant involved: ‘The Q. divides her ministers into two classes, those who will accept Brown as an acquaintance & talk familiarly with him, & those who will not’ (op. cit., 30 December 1877, 74); Derby was always in the latter category, and his opinions about the queen could not be (privately) more ill-humoured. 18 M. Raymond (ed.), Queen Victoria, Leaves from a Journal: A Record of the Visit of the Emperor and Empress of the French to the Queen, and of the Visit of the Queen and H.R.H. the Prince Consort to the Emperor of the French (New York, 1961), 13. 19 E. de Borbón, Memorias de Doña Eulalia de Borbón. Infanta de España (Barcelona, 1935). 20 B. Pérez Galdós, ‘La Reina Isabel’ in Memoranda. Quoted from the Obras Completas (Madrid, 1961), vol. vi, 1416. 21 Public Record Office (subsequently PRO), Foreign Office (subsequently FO) 72/844, no. 48. Otway to Clarendon, 16 July 1854. 22 For a more extensive reflection on Isabel II, see Isabel Burdiel, Isabel II. No se puede reinar inocentemente (Madrid, 2004). 23 Marqués de Miraflores, Apuntes histórico-críticos para escribir la historia de la revolución en España (London, 1834), vol. i, xviii. 24 It may perhaps be worth recalling that Isabel II was not only the first constitutional queen of Spain but also the first woman to occupy the throne since Isabel la Católica who, incidentally, always reigned (in practice and symbolically) alongside her husband, the Catholic King Fernando of Aragón. 25 El Español, 2 January 1846. 26 J. Balmes, Obras completas (Madrid, 1950), vol. vii, 725. 27 Bulwer to Palmerston, 8 July 1846. PRO (F), 72. Spain), Documents 83.1 and 83.2. 28 P. de Luz, Isabel II, reina de España (Barcelona, 1937), 122. Those doubts (and the effects that they caused on the queen) were public and discussed at length, nationally and internationally, from the outset. 29 Comment attributed by Miguel Morayta to D. H. L. Bulwer, British ambassador in Madrid during the years of Isabel II's marriage; see M. Morayta, ‘Sobre las Bodas Reales’, Appendix iii to Book xlvii of his Historia General de España (Madrid, 1893), 1120. The veiled but constant references to Francisco de Asís's ‘lack of physical condition’ – in addition to his supposed homosexuality – seem to indicate that he suffered from hypospadia, a condition frequently associated with impotence, alluded to with some accuracy in the popular rhyme ‘Paquito Natillas/ es de pasta flora/ y orina en cuclillas/ como una señora’ (Little Paco Custard/ is made of pasta flora/ and urinates squatting/ like a lady). Or else in the other attribution, of less importance for royal procreation: ‘Isabelona/ tan frescachona/ y don Paquito/ tan mariquito’ (Sturdy Isabel/ so robust/ and little Don Paco/ such a pansy). 30 El Correo Nacional, 8 August 1847. 31 Quoted in P. Luz, op. cit., 135. This conversation, with slight variations, was first transcribed by Ildefonso Bermejo in La Estafeta de Palacio (Historia del último reinado). Cartas trascendentales al rey Amadeo (Madrid, 1871), vol. ii, 612, later reprinted by other nineteenth-century authors such as Antonio Pirala or Miguel Morayta. 32 El Correo Nacional, 8 August 1847. 33 Meanwhile, Asís, ‘weak with men and arrogant with women and lacking the spirit for a manly resolution, limited himself to odious, pertinacious mortifications, which made him increasingly more hateful’: Morayta, op. cit., 1193. 34 El Correo Nacional, 8 August 1847. 35 Morayta, op. cit., 1193. Although I cannot go into this matter now, I think it is worth noting that Louis-Philippe and Isabel II's own mother, Queen María Cristina, thought that they could get round the treaties of Eu by trusting in the sterility of the royal couple and marrying the queen's younger sister to the Duke of Montpensier, the son of the French king. There was even covert speculation that Isabel II might die young as a result of her poor health in childhood. 36 Quoted in C. Llorca, Isabel II y su tiempo (Madrid, 1984), 108. 37 de Luz, op. cit., 135. The accuracy of the words quoted, taken from the famous conversation between the king and the minister Benavides, or even their complete inaccuracy, is not important for what is of interest here: the public transmission, and political repercussions, of a particular image of the private life of Isabel II and her husband. 38 Pascual Madoz to Sr General D. Martín José Iriarte, Madrid, 18 March 1847. Archivo de la Real Academia de la Historia, Colección Pirala, Legajo 9/6848. 39 Problems that even involved Sagasta himself, years later, when he had to answer a summons by the exiled queen to avoid the circulation of her private correspondence in the 1870s. In this connection there is an interesting document in the Archive of the Prefecture of Police in Paris, dated 4 December 1876, Rapports de Correspondance, Madrid 1873–1886, Section B, Box 316, Number 3. 40 General Narváez seems to have had plentiful information about all this, as also did the queen's own mother, as can be gathered from their private archives. The first source is in the Real Academia de la Historia and the second (although only partially catalogued) in the Archivo Histórico Nacional of Madrid. 41 Telegram from Turgot to Walewski, 29 July 1857. Quoted in de Luz, op. cit., 202. 42 Paris, 18 January 1868. Archivo de la Real Academia de la Historia, Colección Narváez–II, vol. 20, docs 10 and 11. 43 R. Crossman, Introduction to the edition published by Fontana Press, London, 1993, of Bagehot, op. cit., 33 and de Luz, op. cit., 239. 44 Isabel II's unpopularity – brought about by her irregular private life – was not initially constructed ‘from below’ but was basically fed ‘from above’. It is not at all coincidental that the most openly irreverent – and graphically brutal – work about Isabel's entourage was produced by two artists who were protégés of the Moderates and protected by Narváez: Los Borbones en Pelota by the Bécquer brothers; recent edn (Madrid, 1991). 45 Probably the most apt comparison on this level is with the ‘sister’ monarchy of Louis-Philippe of Orleans. Its fall preceded that of the Spanish monarchy, although Louis-Philippe undoubtedly had much more scope for political manoeuvre than Isabel II ever had. See J. B. Marganadt, ‘Gender, vice and the political imaginary in postrevolutionary France. Reinterpreting the failure of the July Monarchy, 1830–1848’, American Historical Review (December 1999), 1461–96. For the interesting and not very well-known case of Belgium, see: J. Stengers, L'action du Roi en Belgique (Brussels, 1996). 46 The consolidated tradition of feminist criticism makes these statements obvious and excuses the more general bibliographic references. For the specific question of the political and generic implications of the shaping of the Liberal public sphere see the dossier ‘The public sphere in the eighteenth century’ in the journal French Political Studies, xvii, 4 (Autumn 1992), 882–956, with articles by Daniel Gordon, David A. Bell and Sara Maza. With regard to Spain and the debate about the prevalence or not of the middle-class ideal of femininity during the first half of the nineteenth century, see, for example, C. Jagoe et al., La mujer en los discursos de género. Textos y contextos en el siglo XIX (Barcelona, 1998); S. Kirkpatrick, Las Románticas. Escritoras y subjetividad en España, 1835–1850 (Madrid, 1991); A. Blanco, Escritoras Virtuosas. Narradoras de la domesticidad en la España Isabelina (Granada, 2001); and G. Gómez-Ferrer, Hombres y Mujeres: El difícil camino hacia la igualdad (Madrid, 2002). The weakness of the new middle-class values are insistently pointed out in N. Aresti, ‘El ángel del hogar y sus demonios. Ciencia, religión y género en la España del siglo XIX’, Historia Contemporánea, xxi (2000), 363–94. In direct connection with the image of Queen Isabel II, see the article by Sarah L. White, ‘Liberty, honor, order: gender and political discourse in nineteenth-century Spain’ in Victoria L. Enders and Pamela B. Radcliff, Constructing Spanish Womanhood. Female Identity in Modern Spain (New York, 1999), 233–57.