Long live the King and down with the government!” We are in Madrid, but not on Ferraz Street in the midst of the protests and riots of those opposed to Pedro Sánchez's pacts with the independence parties. Nor in any of the concentrations that the PP has called for today throughout Spain. It is March 23, 1766. Thousands of Madrid residents destroy street furniture on their way to the residence of the Marquis of Esquilache. They accuse Charles III's Italian Prime Minister of the bread shortage and demand that there be only Spaniards in the king's government.
“Long live Spain! Death to the camarilla!” No, we are not around the national headquarters of the PSOE either, but in front of the Royal Palace of Aranjuez. It is March 18, 1808. The people protest against the French policies of Manuel Godoy, the king's favorite. The next day Charles IV abdicates in favor of his son Ferdinand VII. The prime minister, attacked, insulted, injured by the mob, ends up in prison.
“Both are popular riots, induced by sectors of the aristocracy. There is a confluence of interests, with a national rhetoric and against foreign influence,” historian David Martínez Fiol explains to La Vanguardia. “Today we would call them escraches in the residences of the leaders. The moments are very different, but the current ultranationalist discourse is also directed against a prime minister, Pedro Sánchez,” adds the History professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Riots and riots are common in the contemporary history of Spain, and in its capital in particular. Josep Burgaya, professor of History and Economics at the University of Vic, points out that the main difference with today is that "then they were motivated above all by economic misery, and today the demand is entirely political." Often, however, the ruling class took advantage of the unrest to bring down a party, a government or a monarch, as reported in El Madrid Revolución y Rebel. Riots, coups, revolts (2019) by writer Ángel Sánchez Crespo.
Apart from the capital revolts, there have also been in other Spanish cities. Especially in the anti-state center par excellence, Barcelona. Between 1835 and 1843 in the most populated city in Spain and in the process of industrialization, with the Carlist wars in the background, the economic recession and the instability of the governments in power, discontent fueled several riots, considered the first popular uprisings against the State. liberal. Roses de Foc from Barcelona. The great explosions of anger in the Catalan capital during a century (2023) makes it clear that periodic protests during the 19th and 20th centuries were more the norm than the exception. The author, journalist Andreu Farràs, points out that it was common for this anger to overthrow governments and favor dismissals or resignations of ministers.
“Violence in the street is systematically found in many periods in the history of Spain. In the Tragic Week it is total and uncontrolled. People use furniture, cobblestones and whatever to make barricades and burn sixty churches,” argues Martínez Fiol, author of The Revolution of July 1909 (2019). The lower classes rebelled against the mobilization of troops to fight in Morocco because they could not pay the fee to be exempt. The anticlerical and antimilitarist revolt left more than 160 dead and 140 injured in the Catalan capital alone, nearly two thousand people prosecuted, sixty sentenced to life imprisonment and a dozen executed.
Along with the protests against the governments and with the aim of changing the Restoration regime, such as the revolutionary strike of 1917, at the beginning of the 20th century, anti-Catalan demonstrations proliferated. “For Spain and for Spain, we will give until the last breath of our lives!” Barcelona, winter of 1919. Plainclothes soldiers and police go out to chase, beat and, in some cases, murder, young Catalanists on the Ramblas. “This segment gathered in the Spanish Patriotic League was confronted with the incipient separatism for the symbolic and physical dominance of the city center,” says Josep Pich, professor of History at the Pompeu Fabra University, who researches these confrontations.
But it is in Madrid where the large demonstrations against the attempt to approve the first Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia take place. The Madrid press plays an important role. El Liberal, El Heraldo de Madrid and El Imparcial begin an anti-Catalan campaign, which leads to the closure of businesses and a demonstration of one hundred and twenty thousand people shouting against a Catalan hacienda. “No depleted national treasury, no tax privileges.”
Pich points out that “the mobilizations of the right and the extreme right, and of progressive Jacobin Spanish nationalism, have not been exceptional when their centralized and standardizing model of Spain has been questioned.” From the period of the Second Republic, he gives as an example the press campaign and the popular mobilization, filling bullrings in Madrid, during the debates in the Cortes for the approval of the Statute of 1931.
In the 1930s the streets of many Spanish cities were boiling. Protests and strikes, revolutionary or not, were constant. The zenith of the mobilizations of this period is July 18, 1936, when part of the military left the barracks to take to the streets and the revolutionary and union forces responded by doing the same. “In the contemporary history of Spain, the most striking thing is the control of the city, not the rural area. The domain of the street is the expression of modernity,” says Martínez Fiol.
During the Franco dictatorship, the Spanish population had to remain silent. The transition, on the other hand, was a fertile period for disparate parties, unions and groups to make themselves heard. So much so that in the spring of 1976 Triunfo magazine attributed the phrase “the street is mine” to Manuel Fraga. Although Carlos Arias Navarro's Minister of the Interior does not seem to have ever uttered it.
According to the study Political violence and social mobilization in the transition (2009) by Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca and Paloma Aguilar, 21% of the demonstrations in 1977 took place in the Community of Madrid, with 71% of the population participating. . In the Basque Country, 25% took place. Catalonia, on the other hand, saw only 10% and 55% participation. The image of a capital of order and focused on business, politics and administration does not correspond, therefore, to reality.
Nor is the appearance of the extreme right in the political game new to hinder progress in the democratization process, generate instability and pressure parties to stop political decisions contrary to their ideology. The study The political violence of the extreme right during the Spanish transition (2012), by researcher Juan Manuel González Sáez from the University of Navarra, demonstrates this. Between 1975 and 1982 the extreme right murdered more than fifty people in Spain.
What, then, is the thread that over two centuries unites the riots, riots, insurrections and violence mentioned? Jaume Claret draws up a hypothesis. “When people need to express their disagreement on the street, there is a problem of intermediation and democratic quality.” The History professor at the Open University of Catalonia states that “as a society strengthens itself democratically and its intermediation mechanisms work, people withdraw from the streets and cease to be the agora of unrest.” The protests in Madrid this week do not point, however, to Spain going in this direction.
