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This chapter explores the development of Spanish national identity from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of Francoism. Spanish nationalism has been adopted by different political ideologies and used as a tool of social control by a variety of regimes. In the first three quarters of the 19th century, Spanish nationalism was used to consolidate liberal revolution. Between 1875 and 1930, Spanish nationalism became a counter-revolutionary tool. During the Second Republic, Spanish nationalism was used as an instrument to promote democracy and social reform. Francoism was a backlash against this democratic Spanish nationalism; the dictatorship used an authoritarian Spanish nationalism to halt democracy and socio-political reform while it attempted to carry out an economic modernization of the country.

This chapter discusses the dismissal of commissaire de police, the nightmare of révocation. The Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, bringing about a change in regime and, in the latter case, the Second Republic, also brought inevitable political purges. However, policemen also faced dismissal because they lacked professional competence, fell into disrepute for perceived moral failings (drunkenness, indebtedness, homosexuality, etc.). The risk of denunciations, anonymous and otherwise, is also considered.

This chapter provides an overview of the career profiles of Italian legislators over the entire sample period 1948–2008. In particular, it documents the extent to which the characteristics of Italian legislators (such as their age, gender, education, occupation, and income prior to entering the Parliament) have changed over time and highlight the major differences between the First and the Second Republic. To provide a term of comparison, it also contrasts the profiles of Italian legislators and their evolution over the post-war period to those of the members of the United States Congress.

The end of the revolutionary decade opened a period during which the freedom of expression of the republican opposition was severely curtailed. The hostility of the authorities toward public gatherings and demonstrations became even greater, and using an ‘innocent’ public occasion as a pretext for a political meeting became common practice for the republicans. The most celebrated example of this usage was the Campaign of Banquets that led to the fall of Louis-Philippe. In contrast with either integrative or exclusive funerals, which were ceremonies of power, subversive funerals were used by the opposition and were directed against the ruling regime. The other republican funerals that took place in the nineteenth century before the advent of the Third Republic were organized by the revolutionary regimes of the Second Republic and the Paris Commune. This chapter examines the subversive and revolutionary funerals in France from 1800–1870 encompassing the Bourbon Restoration period, the Second Empire, the Second Republic, the Paris Commune, and the Revolution of 1848.

Chapter One analyzes the career of Francesco Valori and the nature of and motives for his alliance with Savonarola. Francesco and Savonarola first encountered each other as opponents, the former advocating an elite‐dominated oligarchic republic and the latter lobbying for a more broadly‐based and inclusive popular republic. It provides a narrative of the main political events surrounding the expulsion of the Medici and the establishment of the Second Republic and argues that Francesco maintained a distinction between Savonarola's vision of moral reform and his vision of governo largo political reform. The former he followed faithfully and actively; the latter he rejected in favor of his own vision of governo stretto.

My third chapter considers one of the greatest successes of the cross-cultural dialogues I treat: the interwar wave of the New Biography, which emerged in Spain as la nueva biografía during the country’s liberal moment. In the years of la nueva biografía (1928–34), a fantastic array of Spanish authors, both famous and undiscovered, produced what have been called “vanguard biographies” in experimental, impressionistic styles inspired both by Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and by revolutions in interwar Spanish fiction. I read Marichalar’s remarkable, entertaining biography, The Perils and Fortune of the Duke of Osuna (1930), as a reworking of Strachey’s critiques of nineteenth-century imperialism and hypocritical liberalism. Further enacting the modernist break with the previous century, Marichalar first conceives of his translating Strachey as a cosmopolitan enterprise, then builds in his own work an irony-laden portrait of Spain’s historical failures around his demystifying account of the life of a profligate aristocrat. Osuna was published, too, during the final days of Spain’s period of dictatorship and monarchy, stretching through the founding of the pro-European Spanish Second Republic in 1931. At this moment, Republican reformers looked both within and beyond Spain in their attempt to establish Europe’s most progressive democracy. Avant-garde authors who were part of this “new liberalism,” as it was called, adapted the cosmopolitan genre of the New Biography in order to remake a state seen by the continent as hopelessly feudalistic.

This chapter examines the nature of education under the Second Republic, and the subsequent demise of President Ratsiraka's vision during the transitional period of the early 1990s. It first presents a detailed overview of schooling in the Sambirano Valley, which shows the effects of French colonial pedagogy. It then assesses the quality of education in this region, before it finally explores the inequalities of schooling in Madagascar.

In the initial post-war years the regime suppressed November 11th as part of a project to denigrate the Second Republic (1918–39), and cast Piłsudski in a very negative light — this to make the post-1944 communist regime appear the better. This era was ended in 1956 when a relaxation of restrictions on free speech accompanied the regime change with the rise of Gomułka. On the 40th anniversary the Party made an effort to commemorate the day but remove its Piłsudskiite aspects, something the Sikorski regime did during the war. By 1968 the Party essayed a major re-conceptualization of the date. Party historian Henryk Jabłoński tried to mark the 11th while claiming it was a victory, but an incomplete one. The Party press still offered the Bolshevik Revolution and the brief socialist government of Ignacy Daszyński in Lublin in 1918 as preferred anniversaries.However, an alternative discourse was emerging beyond Party control. This featured demonstrations in large cities on the 11th, and references to Independence Day in the underground press. This phenomenon became much more evident on the 60th anniversary in 1978. The Party's traditional view of November 11th visibly began to crumble. The Party was in ideological crisis as to how to react. Positive articles about both Piłsudski and the 11th appeared in the press. Independence Day was referred to as ‘momentous’. The Party jettisoned its traditional position of silence or excoriation.Mass demonstrations appeared in the country, many began on the 10th — an interwar tradition. Some of these were broken up by police. On the other hand, some governmental bodies actually participated in the celebrations. The Party was obviously in an ideological quandary.The underground press began to muse over whether one could be a Piłsudskiite in this era and concluded, for the most part, that Piłsudski was the symbol of the opposition. Piłsudski became the patron saint of Solidarity; even Lech Walesa's mustache provided a link to Piłsudski. The Party tried to appropriate Piłsudski in its film Polonia Restituta which combined a positive portrait of the Marshal with the editing out of November 11th. It was part of the Party's fitful efforts to embrace either the date or the man, but not together as part of a genealogy of independence.By the mid-1980s the Party had decided to appropriate both Independence Day and Piłsudski, much to the anger of the opposition. This effort culminated in 1988 when the sejm declared that November 11th was Independence Day and the Warsaw city council urged its rapid re-institutionalization lest its meaning be forgotten. Books celebrating Piłsudski and the Legions appeared everywhere as did stamps and coins — some official, others not—with Legionnary or Piłsudski symbolism. A large display in Wrocław linked November 11th to the genealogy associated with the 1918–39 Piłsudskiite explanation of Polish independence, appropriating the insurrectionary tradition and its assorted symbolic paraphernalia

This chapter discusses the turning point in the history of the jury in France from the Revolution to World War II, during the eras of the Second Republic (1848–52) and Second Empire (1832–70). It observes that while the primary response of the authorities to jury sanction nullification during the preceding period was to grant juries the power to rule on extenuating circumstances, the governments of the 1848–70 era (especially that of the Second Empire) responded primarily through wholesale correctionalization. The chapter notes that the rising conviction rates for the offenses the panels continued to try were another distinctive feature of the period, brought about by a combination of increasing recidivism and reforms that placed the panels under government control.

This chapter centers on Gibraltar and Tangier during the tumultuous 1930s. One a British colony and the other an international exclave, both towns were imperial strongholds that depended on Spanish and Moroccan labor. Economic crisis, along with the advent of the Spanish Republic of 1931, stirred working-class politics in both cities, pitting the predominantly working-class Spanish communities against European colonial elites over major municipal issues such as casino gambling and cross-border commerce. The resulting divide continued after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936. Despite official neutrality, European elites in both cities tended to favor groups associated with Francisco Franco’s rebellion against the Republic.

This chapter describes the events leading to collapse of the Second Republic. It identifies the initial turning point of the Republic as the emergence of the polarization and the beginning of systematic interference with parliament and the political process, all of which commenced in 1933. The discussions include the commitment of the Socialist leadership to the Azaña coalition government; the end of the Azaña government; the elections of November 1933; the Leftist attempt to annul the electoral results; the anarchosyndicalists' insurrection of December 1933; and president Alcalá Zamora's efforts to flout the regular parliamentary system.

This chapter discusses the events leading up to the revolutionary insurrection of 1934. Historians are nearly unanimous in viewing the revolutionary insurrection as the beginning of the decline of the Second Republic, and of constitutional government and constitutional consensus in Spain.

This chapter addresses the Jewish community of the Second Republic in Polish historiography of the 1980s. The problem of the ethnic minorities in the Second Republic – their socio-economic situation, their role in the political and cultural life of the country, their relations with the state – is one of the most neglected fields of post-war Polish historiography. The situation improved only slightly in the 1970s, minimally as regards the Jewish question; in Poland, this still remains the domain of highly specialized publications which do not reach the general reader. To be sure, the authors of synthetic or monographic studies concerning the history of the Second Republic have been unable totally to ignore the problem of the nationalities, although their approaches often give rise to reservations. For instance, when Andrzej Ajnenkiel published in 1980 the second volume of his political history of Poland, national minorities were treated sparingly. In describing the results of the 1931 census, the author briefly discusses the size and socio-professional structure of the Jewish population and the rising influence of the Zionist movement in the second half of the 1930s. Elsewhere, the Jewish population appears almost exclusively as the object of anti-semitic propaganda and pogroms organized by nationalists of both Polish and, more rarely, Ukrainian camps.

This chapter recalls the emergence and dissemination of academic and popular writing of Polish Jewish history by university-trained Jewish historians in interwar Poland, tracing the development of the field from its early beginnings in the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It discusses how Polish Jewish historians were driven by the hope that their work would have political implications beyond the Jewish community, by influencing Polish historical scholarship and Polish intellectual elites. In explaining the Jews and the so-called Jewish question to a Polish audience, national Jewish historians followed — without acknowledging it — in the footsteps of nineteenth-century integrationist authors. The chapter then highlights how they emphasized the Jewish connection to the country and the flourishing of Jewish culture in the periods of Poland's prosperity, and explores how they underlined the Jews' contribution to the country's economic development. The chapter looks at how historians played an active role in shaping the self-understanding of Jewish citizens of the Second Polish Republic into a decidedly Polish Jewish identity.

This chapter highlights the revolutionary moment from February to June 1848 and the difficulty of establishing the Second Republic in France that offers a particularly rich area of investigation. It describes 1848, which was the year of the third revolution since 1789 and has generated ample scholarship. It also mobilizes the most promising and the less convincing forms of counterfactual reasoning: causal or interpretative analysis, futures that were imagined or possible, paths not followed, and evaluation of changes, counterfactuals on the part of researchers and actors, and unique and multiple bifurcations. The chapter looks at the clusters of potentiality that constitute the 1848 movement. It begins with a banquet campaign that had been taking place for the last seven months across all of France, demanding that the king Louis-Philippe expand suffrage under the July Monarchy.