A dynamic European metropolis, Madrid was very marked by the economic crisis of 2007. The historian Bartolomé Bennassar looks back on its development and its political role since the Middle Ages, in a true biography of the Spanish capital.
With this History of Madridthe great specialist in modern Spain that is Bartolomé Bennassar adds to his work a very complete biography of the Spanish capital. The story, presented chronologically, goes back to the origins of a “ city among others », even before it begins its exceptional destiny as a capital.
The great quality of the work is that it treats in a balanced and very well-documented manner, in the light of recent research, all periods since the Middle Ages (the excellent chapter “ Madrid before 1561 » in the form of a prologue) until today. Nowadays, Madrid appears to be a dynamic European metropolis, but strongly marked by the Spanish economic crisis that appeared in 2007.
Capital of power
The real subject of this fresco is the construction, over the long term, of a capital. Madrid, simple geometric location in the center of the territory of Spain ? On closer inspection, the installation of political power in 1561 in this place was not simple, and not immediately followed, for example, by that of the Spanish noble elite.
This type of legitimacy is built over time, and Bartolomé Bennassar, anxious to bring a global meaning to the succession of facts, shows precisely how this city accumulates numerous functions, and how, with supporting statistics, the Madrid population lives from the exercise or presence of power. He concludes: “ Philippe’s choice II which made Madrid the capital of the monarchy, a choice which owes nothing to any popular movement or the action of a few aristocratic families, ended up making the people of Madrid the great actor in history » (p. 444).
The accession to a major cultural role was also very gradual, as was the entry into modern politics of a city so strongly marked by the Ancien Régime and imperial power. With the Dos de Mayo uprising in the Puerta del Sol square (May 2, 1808) against the Napoleonic occupation, the people of Madrid made a thunderous irruption into history. It is also on site, at the Prado Museum, that this riot and the repression which followed, immortalized by Francisco de Goya in two monumental canvases, are visible today. Bartolomé Bennassar also shows the history of Madrid through that of this great museum, from the royal collections and today an obligatory tourist stop.
For the XIXe century, the chronicle of events takes over a little, and is one with the major work of the Madrid realist writer Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920). Promoted as the seat of political power, it is in this role that Madrid was tested throughout its trajectory. Echoing the Dos de Mayo, pompously commemorated every year, resistance to the 1936 coup d’état gave Madrid a new dimension to XXe century. The last republican position to fall, it was viewed with suspicion by the national-Catholic regime of Franco, then became somewhat by default one of its emblematic places, after a repression and a reconstruction having as objective the repression of all traces .
It is through this unsaid Madrid and this erasure of the urban landscape that the civil war is today paradoxically present in the Spanish collective memory. The current proliferation of tourist guides indicating the remains and testimonies of besieged Madrid perhaps fills this oversight… But Bartolomé Bennassar continues his story, and explains to us how, after the death of Franco, Madrid was both the place of democratic restoration and the scene of the attempted coup d’état of February 23, 1981.
Seed growth and cosmopolitanism
Sometimes contested, Madrid was never called into question in its role as capital, despite the long impoverishment, now healed, of the contemporary era. Often considered artificial, mediocre or disappointing by travelers who have stopped there, this city is today a large European metropolis, attractive, modern and seductive.
Is history, which has been able to turn things around so well, only a glorious accumulation? ? A historian’s reading cannot be so linear: a late university metropolis but today incontestable, Madrid has never been able to equip itself with a force of religious command. The agglomeration also retains all the after-effects of a very rapid growth, which saw it increase, during the last century, from 1 to 6 million inhabitants (urban region).
But it is not the physical growth of the city – its extension, its neighborhoods, its urban planning – that interests Bartolomé Bennassar the most. This follows the urban development of Madrid without mythologizing the town planning of the Bourbons of the XVIIIe century, nor that of extension (ensanche) of 1857, nor even the Gran Vía (1910) and its spectacular architectural heritage. Neo-classical architecture, the real estate boom of Francoism, the shanty towns and the large complexes under construction until 2007 are discussed adequately, but quickly. ; we will emphasize, for these more urban aspects, the strong but somewhat vague formula of a city “ born from space » (p. 443). We will all the more easily forget the uniform and charmless neighborhoods, cut up by highways, which have swallowed up in each direction the rustic landscapes around the expanding capital.
The rivalry with Barcelona, a port and economic metropolis, another major theme of Spanish historiography, is relatively little treated, as is the role of Madrid in the Spanish urban system. However, it is surprising that it is in the decentralized framework of the “ State of autonomy » (the Spanish regions resulting from the 1977 Constitution) that Madrid has widened the gap with the other conurbations of the country, and taken the final stages of a capital (literally : “ capital “) today at a world level. A more detailed cartographic file would have been useful to perceive this.
It is more urban society and the daily life of city dwellers that interests this History of Madrid. We must recognize its high quality. Growth then decline of the convents of XVIIe At XIXe century, construction and transformation of monuments and representative buildings, state of the streets and progress in sanitation, cohabitation of the rentier bourgeoisie and the people castizo and proletarian, or even the presence of communities of foreign origin, from the French bakers from Cantal in Ancien Régime Madrid, to the Romanian and Ecuadorian employees who were victims at the Atocha station of the attacks of March 11, 2004: these are the facts that Bartolomé Bennassar collection in this evocative work of an intense and more cosmopolitan urban life than Madrid’s reputation dictates.
Fascinating pages on the famous mentideros of XVIIe century (translated here as “ parlors of lies » where the news and rumors arrived), the baroque and popular theater, the bullfight or even the moviewhich has recently also become the subject of history, will also make this book the friendly companion of a cultured discovery of Madrid.