This book provides an entry point to the most cutting-edge lines of research on popular political mobilisation in Europe. It brings together leading scholars from Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands and Spain. The chapters explore the connected dimensions of popular participation within different countries and across borders, covering the topics of iconoclasm, popular acclamations, street politics, associations, petitions and electoral agitation. Focusing on the role of disenfranchised citizens and women, this collection broadens the themes of traditional political historical research that has identified political participation with the right to vote and struggles for political inclusion, and brings a wide array of formal and informal political practices to the centre of nineteenth-century European life. A must-read for scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students wishing to explore multiple dimensions of the history of political engagement and politicisation.

Acknowledgments -- Map of Southern Europe -- Introduction: Southern Europe and the making of a global revolutionary South -- Conspiracy and military careers in the Napoleonic Wars -- Pronunciamentos and the military origins of the revolutions -- Civil wars: armies, guerrilla warfare and mobilization in the rural world -- National wars of liberation and the end of the revolutionary experiences -- Crossing the Mediterranean: volunteers, mercenaries, refugees -- Re-conceiving territories: the revolutions as territorial crises -- Electing parliamentary assemblies -- Petitioning in the name of the constitution -- Shaping public opinion -- Taking control of public space -- A counterrevolutionary public sphere? The popular culture of absolutism -- Christianity against despotism -- A revolution within the Church -- Epilogue: Unfinished business. The Age of Revolutions after the 1820s -- Chronology -- Bibliography -- Index.

This book offers a ground-breaking approach to royalism and popular politics in Europe and the Americas during the Age of Revolutions. It shows how royalist and counterrevolutionary movements did not propose a mere return to the past, but rather introduced an innovative way of addressing the demands and expectations of various social groups. Ordinary people were involved in the war and adapted the traditional imaginary of the monarchy to craft new models of political participation. This edited collection brings together scholars from France, Spain, Norway, and Mexico, to provide a transatlantic comparative perspective. It is a must-read for scholars and students looking to discover the lesser-known side of the Age of Revolutions, and the motivations of those who fought in the name of the king.

Focusing on the processes of political socialisation and democratisation that took place in Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book brings together specialists who propose the need to rethink the contemporary history of democracy in Spain to build a new narrative. To do so, the authors go down to the local level, where they are able to trace a political culture that forged the foundations of a process of political "modernization" much more complex than what conventional historiography has conveyed, even though it was not always transferred institutionally to the national level. The idea of a rural Spain that was backward, apolitical, violent and unprepared for democracy gives way to a more interesting history which, while recognising the peculiarities of the country and the important limitations to democracy, shows examples that could help build a new narrative closer those of other neighbouring countries. Aimed at contemporary historians interested in Spain and Europe, the book also addresses the debates faced by other social scientists on the concept of democracy. This dialogue between history, sociology and political science is particularly present in a special final chapter featuring a discussion of democracy and its application to Spanish history.

Religion and politics have historically clashed in modern Spain but the complexity of the controversial and sometimes violent relationships between Catholic values and modern political regimes continue to ride a precarious line of spiritual accommodation versus public policy. Leading experts on religious Spanish tradition and recent historiographic findings set out to define and interrogate grey areas in the last two centuries beyond the reductive conventional notion of an ever-warring "Two Spains." The Soul of the Nation unravels the role of religion in the country's public life following the imperial crisis of 1808 when the Catholic Monarchy put the role of the Church at heart of political and cultural debates.

This book investigates the consecutive shifts between three types of intermediary institutions in the European context: Corporatist, Neo-corporatist and Governance institutions. It does so by combining insights from European Political Economy; European Integration and governance studies; and, socio-legal studies in the European context.

This book investigates the narrative of nationhood during the Italian Risorgimento and its ability to reach a new and wider audience. In Italy, an extraordinary emotional excitement pervaded the struggle for national independence, suffusing the speeches and actions of patriots. This book shows how this ardour borrowed the tones, figures and spectacular nature of the melodramatic imagination feeding the theatre and literature of the time, and how it could resonate with a largely uneducated audience. An important contribution to the new historiography on the Italian Risorgimento and on nineteenth-century nationalism in Europe, it offers a fresh perspective on the public sphere during the Risorgimento, focusing on the transnational links between political mobilisation and the growth of new media and burgeoning mass culture.