SOCRES · Social Republicanism in XIXth c. Spain

The SOCRES project will investigate the ‘Cantonalist’ revolution, a Spanish socio-republican insurrection which burst out in 1873 in Cartagena, a military harbour in the South East of Spain. Though quite similar to the well-known Paris commune (1871), the Cantonalist insurrection was later totally forgotten, in contrast with its French counterpart. By documenting this experience of a social republicanism built ‘from below’, the SOCRES project hopes to shed new light on the history of political thought. It will also challenge the clichés about the political backwardness of Southern Europe and about the political ‘apathy’ of Spanish society till 1931. In the SOCRES project, a strong attention will be dedicated to the role of exiles, deportees, migrants and seamen in the global diffusion of socio-republican ideas at that time. It will lead to a connected history of 19th-c. Spain, showing that political and cultural movements in the metropolis had both roots and echoes in the colonies (mostly Philippines and Cuba), and in the rest of the world.