Fracasología

 I read this book, on the recommendation of another blogger. It's written from a right-wing perspective of traditional Spanish nationalism. The argument is that with the change from the Austrian to the French (Bourbon) dynasty at the beginning of the 18th Century, the Spanish intellectual elite became self-hating. The Hapsburg achievements were suppressed in historiography. The "black legend," invented by other colonial powers hypocritically to downplay their own colonial atrocities, was adopted by the Spanish intellectuals themselves. 18th Century Spanish literature is derivate of the French, despite the glories of Golden Age Spain. The ruling intellectual class was "Frenchified." Moratín was trying to impose French neoclassical ideas onto Spanish literature, but in an age when the rest of Europe was in the throes of romanticism!  Moliere was buried outside of sacred ground, because theater people were automatically excommunicated. But Lope de Vega had a hero's funeral.  

All thiscame to head when the French tried to impose a Napoleon heir onto Spain, and a war was fought for independence. Now the principle of national sovereignty becomes more important among the liberals than adherence to French enlightenment ideas. 

Roca Barea doesn't like the generation of 1898. She points out that it wasn't, in fact, a response to the war of 1898. Posing Spain as a "problem," furthermore, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the naming of Spain as a problem that makes Spain a problem.  Other nations at the same time experienced a crisis of "decadence," but only in Spain was this attributed to the cultural inferiority of Spain itself. France can be in horrid state, and also have a serious of failures, but French intellectuals will always maintain the glory of their own intellectual traditions. No other country has put itself in a subordinate position like this, wanting to be an intellectual colony of another.  

The Generation of 1927 has no fear of being Spanish. They shed this complex completely.  She also like Flamenco because it was a response to the imposition of Italian music. 

There was a rush to Germanify Spanish thought, as an antidote to the constant drumbeat of Frenchification. Max Weber was really big, and "Krausismo." Protestantism was the driving force of capitalism, so the Catholic South of Europe was going to be behind economically, per Weber. Roca Barea is anti-protestant (generally) and against Catalan and Basque nationalism.  Krausismo is an educational movement named after a German thinker who is fairly minor in Germany itself. 

This book goes against the whole ideology of my field, which is that Spain represents failed modernity. Remember that the subtitle of Spanish Cultural Studies edited by Graham and Labanyi is "The Struggle for Modernity." But Hapsburg Spain was modern for its time, and the Spanish empire was powerful. 

There are many good moments in the book. The skewering of Buero Vallejo's Un soñador para un pueblo, for example. A reformist minister tries to suppress the traditional garb of Madrid (long capes and wide-brimmed hats) and there is a popular uprising (riot) against him.  Buero Vallejo's sympathies are with the reformist, enlightened figure, Esquilache, of course, but he appears in this book as a corrupt figure rather than a heroic one. 

Another moment: Stanford university eliminates the name of a street named after Junipero Serra. But the founder of Stanford University, Leland Stanford Sr., as governor of California, exterminated Indians, rather than merely converting them as Father Serra had done. 

That I agree with this book at some points does not make me right wing. I just think you have to read a lot of sources from different perspectives. I've long thought that the struggle for modernity narrative was flawed, that the idea of a missed enlightenment or missed romanticism were flawed cultural narratives.  

One problem is that the bad, retrograde Spain that is merely a figment of the imagination of liberal Spanish intellectuals began the Spanish Civil War.  There are too many arguments from hypocrisy, the tu quoque fallacy. The tone of the book gets tiresome. It is a polemic rather than a balanced approach. The writing is sometimes sloppy, and many points are belabored. 

Maybe the black legend should be applied to all of European colonialism.  Singling out Spain is not correct. I always remember that the British expelled the Jews in 1290, long before Spain did, and there were not Jews in Britain until the age of Cromwell.