It is not a round number, it is not useful for the ritual that elevates an anniversary to the showcase of today. However, one looks at the date: 92 years ago today the Second Republic was proclaimed. This year, precisely, what is republican is being remembered –discreetly in some circles– because it marks the 150th anniversary of the brief First Republic, that stage whose iconography evokes an ideal country that, with not a few imitations of its French neighbors and a lot of Naivety, he intended to enter into the solid modernity to which many Europeans acceded before us.
By the way, some nineteenth-century jokes (with caricatures like daggers) today would be classified as offensive by the same politicians who take advantage of any gag to herd minutes of attention and spotlights, to see if –complaining– they can catch some more votes in the electoral campaign.
The bad press of the First Republic permeated the arrival of the Second Republic and that was always there, despite the hope that the new system generated in the popular classes and in intellectual circles. Today, the bad press of the period 1931-1936 flies over any debate on the future of the Crown, something parked, except for a small sector of the left and the Catalan and Basque sovereignists.
Curiously, the bad press of the monarchy since the restoration times seems to have vanished due to the magic of the transition. Not even the adventures of the emeritus king have managed to balance the historical reputational balance between the republican experiences and the Bourbon imprint in Spain, the white shirt of his hope.
Luckily we have the old, living document of what was. My father, 90 years old, knows some of the jokes that were told about Alfonso XIII and his father, Alfonso XII. By the way, in my house, we still have some silver duros with the effigy of those monarchs, even with the face of poor Amadeo de Saboya, that fleeting king that General Prim pulled out of his hat to try another (more civilized) form. ) to make Spain.
It is said that discussing the form of the State has ceased to interest the majority of the population. We don’t know them. The Center for Sociological Research (CIS) has not, by chance, asked about the monarchy for many years. Tezanos, president of the CIS, is a great humorist.
