Borderless Revolutions and Exile Politics: Organizing and Curtailing Spanish Political Opposition (1848–1849)

Abstract

The Iberian peninsula has long been regarded as an exception to the 1848 revolutionary upheavals. The case of Spain, where political opposition to the liberal conservative government was curtailed by an improvised ‘constitutional’ dictatorship, seems like an illustrative paradigm to this view based on Iberian exceptionalism. However, a transnational approach to the articulation of a renewed political opposition during the springtime of 1848 challenges this exceptionalism and nuances the apparent apathy of Spanish political activism regarding the European revolutions. This article aims to reconsider the Spanish ’48 from a re-spatialized perspective, stressing the agency of exiled communities and conspirative networks and their repeated attempts to subvert the political status quo south of the Pyrenees. To do so, it draws mainly from consular and diplomatic sources. A focus on exiled communities, this article argues, not only challenges the idea of exceptionalism, but also connects political activism with hitherto neglected phenomena such as illegal arms trafficking or the configuration of transnational solidarity networks between legitimist clusters. On a similar note, this focus contributes to a better understanding of the way in which state-sponsored intelligence services tried to curtail and neutralize this catalogue of conspirative networks based on clandestine mobilities. Moreover, this article highlights the need to approach 1848 from a perspective that deconstructs and blurs nation-based accounts of the revolutionary cycle.