Transforming Spanish families in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Reflections about the Muñoz-Borbón’s marriage

Abstract

This paper deals with the relationship between elite families and the political-social transformations that
occurred in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Spain. Families had to adapt to the new political, social and economic conditions that arose with the State-building. Different processes of upward social mobility facilitated the emergence of a renewed elite that began to have bourgeois values and that created its own family pattern: the conjugal family, where the weight of feelings and affections became more evident. This process will be analyzed through a case study.