Re-imagining Petitioning in Spain (1808–1823)

Abstract

This article examines collective petitioning in metropolitan Spain during the Age of Revolution, focusing on the practices and discourses that framed petitioning as a meaningful form of action. There was a deeply rooted tradition of petitioning in old regime Spain, which was part of the ordinary bureaucratic workings of the crown and also provided a legitimizing framework for rioting in specific contexts. The collective experimentation in popular participation after the 1808 Napoleonic invasion transformed petitioning. Petitioning was first reconceptualized in accordance with the emerging language of rights and popular sovereignty. Activists and commentators had some awareness of the use of public petitioning in Britain, and once the representative Cortes met in Cadiz in 1810, public petition drives on public issues became part of the political culture. At the same time, the need to legitimate unconventional forms of action in the context of a crisis in the state converted petitioning into an all-embracing right. The right to petition, not only encompassed signed protest texts but also legitimated the old tradition of petitioning by riot and further was used to justify provincial rebellions, juntas, and military pronunciamientos. In comparative terms, this article highlights the elasticity of the language of petitioning during the Age of Revolution and cautions against narrowly associating it with one particular form of collective action or historical trajectory.

A Nation of Petitioners

“…34 While revolutionary moments provide evidence of mass, collective, public petitions across a variety of national contexts, cycles of revolution and reaction disrupted the institutionalisation of public petitions as a mechanism for sustained interaction between the represented and their legislatures. 35 In the case of the Frankfurt Parliament, which sat from 1848 to 1849, it received 17,000 petitions from across the German territories, which contained a greater population than the UK at this time -a figure bettered by the already cited number of petitions submitted to the Commons in the 1847-1848 session. 36 The petitions to the Frankfurt Parliament contained 3 million signatures, while there were a total of 4.6 million signatures recorded in the SCPP Reports for the 1847-1848 session.…”

These oppressions won’t cease: The political thought of the Cape Khoesan, 1777-1879, An anthology

“…Interest in political petitions is at an all time high. 7 In 2019, Social Science History dedicated its entire third issue to "The transformation of petitioning" with articles examining petitioning practices in nineteenth-century Spain, 8 in Early Colonial India, 9 and in chartist petitioning in Britain, 10 for instance. Two decades earlier, the International Review of Social History similarly devoted a supplementary issue to the potential of petitions as a social history source.…”

“What Value Should We Attach to All These Petitions?”: Petition Campaigns and the Problem of Legitimacy in the Nineteenth-Century Netherlands

“…However, while organized petition campaigns were associated with revolutionary politics until at least 1840, thereafter they gradually became a part of regular political life. The Dutch case highlights two general trends in the nineteenth century that can be seen as well in Britain, the United States, Spain, and colonial India: the rise of petitioning on political or public issues, and the development of organized, singleissue, mass-petition campaigns (Carpenter and Topich 2015;Jaffe, 2019;Miller 2017;Palacios Cerezales, 2019). These developments were highly contested in the Netherlands as elsewhere, not least because they were often thought of as "foreign."…”