The Republican Subject and the Two Representations of the King: The Monarchy in Transition in Julián Marías’ La España real

Abstract

Among a number of jurists and military officers, Julián Marías joined thirty-nine senators designated by the King to participate in the formulation of the 1978 Constitution. In his public interventions, collected in La España real, Marías makes the case for the monarchy: the King was to produce the nation he represented and resolve political fragmentation as the head of that nation. At stake was a particular understanding of national representation subservient to neo-liberal modernization, foreshadowing the aesthetic-representational character of the political to secure legitimacy through symbolism and charismatic mobilization.

Key Words:

• Julián Marías
• Political representation
• Modernity
• Francoism
• Transition
• La España real
• Spanish Constitution of 1978
• Monarchy
• Nationalism
• Public Intellectuals

Notes

1 Julián Marías, Una vida presente (Madrid: Páginas de Espuma, 2008 [1^st ed. 1988]), 642.

2 Julián Marías, Una vida presente, 640. This event must have happened in October 1958, based on the mention of the Madrid premiere of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) in setting the scene. See Adolfo Prego, Informaciones, 28 October 1958, p. 9.

3 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed., with an intro., by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007 [1^st German ed. 1955]), 242.

4 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediæval Political Theology, preface by William Chester Jordan (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1981 [1^st ed. 1957]), 3, 4 & 391.

5 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988 [1^st French ed. 1986]), 302–03.

6 See ‘Discurso de Proclamación de Don Juan Carlos I como rey de España’, Cope, 17 June 2014, n.p.; available at <https://www.cope.es/actualidad/noticias/discurso-proclamacion-don-juan-carlos-como-rey-espana-22-11-1975-20140617_83867> (accessed 15 December 2023).

7 See ‘Discurso de Proclamación de Don Juan Carlos I como rey de España’. See also José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, Historia del poder político español (Barcelona: RBA Libros, 2017 [1^st ed. 2014]), 578.

8 Paul Preston, A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence, and Social Division in Modern Spain (New York/London: Liveright, 2020), 472–73.

9 Sophie Baby, El mito de la transición pacífica: violencia y política en España (1975–1982) (Madrid: Akal, 2018).

10 Álvaro Soto Carmona, ‘De las Cortes orgánicas a las Cortes democráticas’, Ayer, 15 (1994), 109–33 (p. 119).

11 Tatjana Gajić, Paradoxes of Stasis: Literature, Politics, and Thought in Francoist Spain (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2019).

12 ‘Ley Fundamental de 17 de mayo de 1958 por la que se promulgan los principios del Movimiento Nacional’, Boletín Oficial del Estado, 119, 19 May 1958, 4511–12; available at <https://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-B-1958-7949> (accessed 15 December 2023).

13 Gajić, Paradoxes of Stasis, 23.

14 Bartolomé Clavero, Constitución a la deriva: imprudencia de la justicia y otros desafueros (Barcelona: Pasado y Presente, 2019), 265.

15 Gajić, Paradoxes of Stasis, 62.

16 Villacañas Berlanga, Historia del poder político español, 558–59.

17 Villacañas Berlanga, Historia del poder político español, 570–606.

18 Miguel Herrero de Miñón, El principio monárquico: un estudio sobre la soberanía del rey en las Leyes Fundamentales (Madrid: Cuadernos para el Diálogo, 1972), 18; my emphasis.

19 Villacañas Berlanga, Historia del poder político español, 574–76.

20 Gajić, Paradoxes of Stasis, 7.

21 Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. Macey, 17.

22 Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2007), 94–95.

23 José Luis Pardo, ‘Políticas de la intimidad: ensayo sobre la falta de excepciones’, Logos. Anales del Seminario de Metafísica, 1 (1998–1999), 145–96 (pp. 176–77).

24 Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 93–94.

25 Marías, Una vida presente, 200–07.

26 Julián Marías, La España real (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1998), 441. Further references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the main text.

27 ‘The Monarchy must be destroyed’ (see José Ortega y Gasset, ‘El error Berenguer’, El Sol, 15 November 1930, p. 1 [quoted in Julián Casanova, The Spanish Republic and Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2010), 14]).

28 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Vieja y nueva política’, in Obras completas, 11 vols (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1966 [1^st ed. 1946]) I, 1902–1916, 265–307 (p. 273).

29 See Ortega y Gasset, ‘El origen deportivo del estado’, in his Obras Completas, II, El espectador (1916–1934), 607–24; and Marías, La España real, 87.

30 Ortega y Gasset, ‘Vieja y nueva política’ , 282; my emphasis.

31 Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1995), 265.

32 ‘The King does not govern, He rules’ (Adolphe Thiers, ‘Articles publiés dans Le National: de janvier à juillet 1830’, Revue Française d’Histoire des Idées Politiques, 5 [1997], 127–87 [p. 146; my translation]).

33 Julián Marías, ‘Intrahistoria de la Transición’, ABC, 19 June 2002; available at <https://www.abc.es/opinion/abci-intrahistoria-transicion-200206190300-108035_noticia.html?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F> (accessed 15 December 2023).

34 See ‘La gran renuncia’, ‘Nación y “nacionalidades” ’, ‘¿No es esto?’, ‘El Rey’, ‘El equilibrio de los poderes’, ‘El consenso’ and ‘La significación de las palabras’, collected in Marías, La España real, 428–52. Marías was an early sponsor of (and modest investor in) El País, led by José Ortega Spottorno (José Ortega y Gasset’s youngest son) and modeled after Ortega’s El Sol (1917–1939). Marías contributed more than eighty op-eds in its first two years of existence. See Marías, Una vida presente, 620–21.

35 See ‘El ejercicio de la libertad’, ‘Examen de conciencia’, ‘Constitución de una Monarquía nueva’, ‘El símbolo y la función’ and ‘La función social de reinar’, collected in Marías, La España real, 364–86.

36 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 263.

37 Carlos Varón González, ‘La niña y el soberano: género, sacrificio y poder en Ortega y Zambrano’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 54:1 (2020), 159–84 (p. 169).

38 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 100.

39 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983 [1^st ed. 1971]), 189.

40 Ernesto Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (London: Verso, 2014), 25.

41 Edward Said, ‘The Scope of Orientalism (1978)’, in The Edward Said Reader, ed., with an intro., by Moustafa Bayoumi & Andrew Rubin (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 93–113 (p. 105).

42 This is also the case of Franco’s early adoption of regal paraphernalia shortly after Civil War, albeit with a different purpose. While he saw clearly the convenience of a theologico-political paradigm to exert and hold on to power, he aimed back at restoring or bringing back sovereign power to return the nation to its essence. See Francisco Ferrándiz, ‘Francisco Franco Is Back: The Contested Reemergence of a Fascist Moral Exemplar’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 64:1 (2022), 208–37 (pp. 209–10). Julián Marías, as we will see through the rest of the essay, aims at its ‘modernization’.

43 Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, 77.

44 Étienne Balibar, La Crainte des masses: politique et philosophie avant et après Marx (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1999). See also Villacañas Berlanga, Historia del poder político español, 16.

45 Gajić, Paradoxes of Stasis, 7.

46 Already in Villacañas Berlanga, Historia del poder político español, 20. See also José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, La revolución pasiva de Franco (Madrid: HarperCollins Ibérica, 2022).

47 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. & notes by G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 59–60.

48 Julián Marías, La España posible en tiempo de Carlos III (Barcelona: Planeta, 1988), 182. Also cited in Marías, La España real, 246.

49 Marías, La España posible en tiempo de Carlos III, 182.

50 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 3.

51 Quoted in Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 7.

52 Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, 3–4, 6 & 217.

53 Juan Carlos Rodríguez, Teoría e historia de la producción ideológica: las primeras literaturas burguesas (Madrid: Akal, 2017 [1^st ed. 1974]), 29–38.

54 Gajić, Paradoxes of Stasis, 7 & 29–32.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.