It is not a round number, it is not useful for the ritual that elevates an ephemeris to the showcase of the present. However, one focuses on the date: today it is 92 years since the Second Republic was proclaimed. This year, precisely, everything that is republican is being remembered – discreetly in some circles – because it is 150 years since the brief First Republic, that period whose iconography evokes an ideal country that, with not a few imitations of its French neighbors and much ingenuity, he sought to enter the solid modernity to which many Europeans accessed before us.
By the way, some nineteenth-century jokes (with caricatures as daggers) today would be classified as offensive by the same politicians who take advantage of any gag to steal minutes of attention and focus, to see if – by complaining – they get some more votes in the electoral campaign .
The bad press of the First Republic permeated the arrival of the Second Republic and this always weighed, despite the hope that the new system generated among the popular classes and intellectual environments. Today, the bad press of the period 1931-36 overshadows any debate about the future of the Crown, something that is somewhat parked, except for a small sector of the left and the Catalan and Basque sovereignists.
Interestingly, the monarchy’s bad press since the Restoration seems to have evaporated under the magic of the democratic transition. Not even the adventures of the king emeritus have managed to balance the historical reputational balance between the republican experiences and the Bourbon footprint in Spain, the white shirt of his hope.
Luckily we have the old ones left, a living document of what was. My 90-year-old father knows some of the jokes that were told about Alfonso XIII and his father, Alfonso XII. At my house, we still keep some silver duros with the effigy of these monarchs, even with the face of poor Amadeus of Savoy, that fleeting king whom General Prim took out of his top hat to try another form (more civilized) than Spain.
It is said that discussing the form of State has ceased to interest the majority of the population. We do not know. The Center for Sociological Research (CIS) has, coincidentally, not asked about the monarchy for many years. Tezanos, president of the CIS, is a great comedian.
