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This introductory chapter critically examines the historiography of Spanish decline in the seventeenth century. It considers the survival of the monarchy in the reign of Carlos II, identifying an alternative explanation for the success: the resilience of the Spanish imperial structure in that era.

This chapter situates Burriel in the context of Spanish Enlightenment historiography. Specifically, it focuses on the state-supported practice of church history, which took on an increasingly political and nationalist tone in the wake of debates about the falsos cronicones and the tradiciones jacobeas. Although many in Spain aspired to a modern method of history writing, this remained an ideal because of the political dangers of debunking prized national myths. Mayans, who practiced modern historical criticism, failed to obtain government support, while Feijoo and Flórez, who were more conservative, flourished under royal patronage. Sarmiento, typically for the time, aligned the Visigoths with the Spanish Bourbons in his program of decoration for the Royal Palace in Madrid. The chapter concludes with a presentation of Burriel’s vision for the cultural renewal of Spain (the “Apuntamientos”), and of his treatise on Spanish paleography, which dwells upon the history of Toledo and its liturgy.

The Revolutions of 1820-21 that ended the political dialogues that had started in the South in the time of Bourbon reformism and Enlightenment, gained new articulation during the short-lived Republic and during French rule. As in the rest of Europe, the consequences of Napoleonic rule in southern Italy were contradictory. Prolonged warfare and commercial recession created an unwelcoming environment for reform. Nonetheless, these were years of rapid and often violent changes. The demands for constitutional government heard during French rule and briefly realized in Naples and Sicily in 1820-21 addressed problems posed by the Napoleonic reconstruction of the Ancien Régime monarchies — autocracy, the balance between central and local power, political representation, and national identities. The years of French rule also revealed the fragility of the Kingdom's autonomy and the internal problems posed by the poverty of the economy. Above all, the forms of agrarian paternalism had in the South been undermined, but not yet replaced by effective forms of bureaucratic government. In much of the rest of Italy those changes were still to come, but after 1821 the Neapolitan Bourbons were engaged in attempts to secure their own dynastic survival, embarking on policies that caused conflict with Great Britain and the southern landowners. Unwilling or unable to follow the House of Savoy in making concessions to the liberals after 1849, their fall in 1860 was the consequence of political isolation and Austria's defeat in 1859. These political upheavals increased the conditions of insecurity, but the new state showed more interest in addressing the symptoms than the causes of the precocious and painful yet incomplete transformations taking place in the Old South.

The contrasting fates of the Bourbons and Habsburgs, are revealed by the contrasting episodes of October 1789. These are instructive about the culture of power and the power of culture in the late 18th century. It is demonstrated here that in their various ways, and with varying degrees of success, rulers had come to terms with changing conditions. Only in France was the failure almost total. Two episodes in the last decade of the old regime demonstrated the monarchy’s chronic inability to make culture work in its cause. The success of the Horattii and David’s subsequent career as a revolutionary exemplified the failure of the French establishment to adjust the previous century’s cultural institutions to modern requirements. The alliance between regime and public unleashed a combination of culture and power far more potent than anything Europe had yet seen. They tested the monarchies to the very brink of destruction.

During most of the nineteenth century, France was governed by non-republican regimes that were hostile to the ideals of the French Revolution. Consequently, the manner in which the Bonapartes, the Bourbons, and the Orleans put into practice the age-old ceremony of the state funeral differed from that of the republicans, but it also took on a different shape in each regime. In order to gain access to the commemorative policy of these regimes, it was enough, during the nineteenth century, to enter the Panthéon that was ‘no longer a monument, but a thermometer’. Other monuments and edifices, such as the Invalides and the July Column, became important burial places during the nineteenth century, but they could never compete with the Panthéon, whose honourable past conferred on it a special aura. This chapter focuses on the state funerals given to kings and emperors during the years 1800–1870, covering Napoleon Bonaparte's reign in the First Empire, the return of the Bourbons to power, the July Monarchy, and the Second Empire under Napoleon III.

This chapter begins with the opening of the constitutional convention in Jackson in August of 1890. The president of the convention was Judge S. S. Calhoon, one of the Bourbons. The rest of the chapter explains the power of the Bourbons in the state, who they were, what they believed, and why their Reconstruction experiences heavily influenced them. In addition to Calhoon, the chapter introduces Governors John Marshall Stone and Robert Lowry, Senator Edward Walthall, and Justice L Q C Lamar, all of whom fell within the Bourbon camp. The Bourbons believed that the elites should be in control, that economic progress was limited and therefore should flow to them, and that African Americans should be utilized rather than pushed out of the state.

This chapter examines the Baratillo’s role in Enlightenment-era reforms to Mexico City’s public administration and built environment. While New Spain’s Bourbon rulers took a number of steps to transform the physical and social worlds of Mexico City’s poor, the government never targeted the Baratillo—a site that was synonymous with crime, license, and plebeian sociability. To understand this apparent contradiction, the chapter examines the politics of urban reform in eighteenth-century Mexico City, which saw royal, viceregal, and local authorities jostle for control over urban public spaces.