Republicanism and Anticlerical Nationalism in Spain

This book focuses on the “anticlerical industry”--the mass-production of anticlerical newspapers, novels, cartoons, and other propaganda forms produced by republican muckrakers, journalists, and politicians, especially José Nakens--in order to demonstrate the centrality of anticlericalism to the debates regarding alternate forms of government in Spain, and competing visions of Spanish identity in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. Utilizing anticlericalism, radical republicans sought to call into question the legitimacy of the monarchy by tying it to what they argued was a corrupt and abusive Catholic Church and clergy in the hopes of paving the way to the coming of a lasting Republican polity.