Weapons forged by our rivals. Catholic mobilisation in the Liberal Age (1812-1874)

Abstract

This article outlines the history of the Spanish Catholic petition drives from 1812, when Catholic activist collected twenty thousand signatures against the abolition of the Inquisition, to 1869, when they gathered three million signatures opposing freedom of religion. This last campaign, albeit with some irregularities in the procuring of names, produced the most considerable amount of signatures to a petition of nineteenth-century Spain. The research is built upon newspapers, printed leaflets, records of parliamentary debates and parliamentary and Vatican archival collections. Contrary to other nineteenth-century drives, Spanish Catholic petitions usually accepted signatures of women and children, thus clashing with the virile understanding of citizenship embraced by the dominant liberal culture. By paying attention to this and other peculiarities, this article aims to reconstruct the cultural understandings that, in dialogue with the experiences of Catholics of other countries, the Spanish activists developed in order to make use of mass-signed petitions and addresses, a form of doing politics that many understood as belonging to the world of Jacobinism and liberalism. The main conclusion is that Catholic activism played a crucial role in the inscription of the social movement, here understood as a peculiar form of doing politics, into the political culture of nineteenth-century Spaniards.