La Nación en las Cortes. Ideas y cuestiones sobre la nación española en el periodo 1808-1814

Abstract

In the early 19th Century Spain had a strong and abiding ethnonational identity. Intellectual and political elites were well aware of this identity and their statements reflected it when the political crisis began in 1808. For this reason there was widespread and unequivocal unanimity in labeling the war against Napoleon’s armies as a «War of Independence». When the Cortes met, more politically elaborated versions of the national past emerged, and not always reconcilable assumptions about the political and religious effects of the national identity were at stake.