Spanish Anticlericalism’s Long Decade, 1898–1910

Abstract

The antagonism between clericals and anticlericals over the course of the first decade of the twentieth century was heightened more so than at any other time during the Restoration. These years saw numerous examples of popular anticlerical mobilization, such as the demonstrations after the Madrid premiere of Benito Pérez Galdós’ Electra in 1901 and the “Tragic Week” of the summer 1909, which resulted in the destruction or vandalism of eighty churches, convents, and clerical residences in Barcelona.¹ After the defeat in the Spanish-American War, radical republican discourse emphasized “the [M]anicheist division between the good people and the wicked representatives of clericalism.”² Republicans, especially, were characterized by “the obsession with blaming all the evils of the country on a clerical conspiracy aimed at controlling Spain by means of its previous moral and material ruin; and the orientation of the people’s wrath toward clericalism as the only, or main, enemy.”³ By 1900 and throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, republican anticlericalism had made deep inroads into the revolutionary left, which was now often willing to work or plot with radical republicans such as Lerroux, and which had been exposed to a steady flow of anticlerical paraphernalia designed to make them feel aggrieved with the regime.