To be a Queen in constitutional Spain: symbolic legitimatization and delegitimatization of the national monarchy

Abstract

Monarchy suffered a process of transformation throughout the 19th century in order to find its place into constitutional regimes. The sources of legitimization changed, so that apart from traditional and dynastic legitimacy, there were added other instruments derived from its function of symbolic representation, also from social cohesion and from national identity, which were grounded on new models of royal conduct. In the monarchic nineteenth-century the narrative figure of the queen, regnant or consort, becomes the central image of the royal family and the expression of gender and family stereotypes of bourgeois stamp: i.e. the «lady of the house» and the models of pious, charitable and virtuous mother and wife. This study is based on a compared analysis of two queens who succeeded one another, Isabel II and M.ª Victoria de Saboya, and reports how some of the mechanisms that intervene in the symbolic construction of monarchic constitutional legitimacy operated. In both cases an instrumentalisation of the charismatic legitimacy in successive propaganda campaigns is observed. Nevertheless, none of these queens managed to construct an irreproachable image as a feminine model of their time. Furthermore, they did not either manage to reinforce the symbolic legitimacy of the institution in order to consolidate their permanency on the throne.