Democracia : the cult of heroic self-sacrifice and popular mobilization in Southern Spain, 1849–1869

During the two decades between the foundation of the Partido Demócrata Español in April 1849 and the ‘Glorious’ revolution of September 1868, Democrat leaders used newspapers to create a mass following among the urban and rural pueblo. Apart from promoting their programme of political and social reform, editors of El Pueblo, La Discusión and La Democracia in a straightforward discourse, also strove to enlist readers' emotional engagement with national and international causes. They did so by publicizing examples of those who were or could have been interpreted as wrongdoers in relation to political regimes, and yet were interpreted otherwise in the causes they promoted. Thus figures such as Mariana Pineda, Tomás Brú, Sixto Cámara and José Garibaldi were evoked by Democrat propagandists to serve as exemplars of patriotic self-sacrifice and heroic martyrdom. The paper explores, first, how—in southern Spain—this cult of republican martyrdom and self-sacrifice was deployed by local leaders to enlist support (especially through clandestine Carbonari societies), and, secondly, how such appeals were received by the pueblo