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The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 in Spain: From the Epidemic to the Crisis of Liberalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2022
Abstract
This article analyses the political impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Spain, a hitherto scarcely explored subject. It first discusses the evolution and impact of the pandemic, focusing on political and social responses. It then shows how these responses were related to debates about the crisis of Restoration Spain's political system. Lastly, it analyses the long-term political impact of the influenza pandemic, showing how the demands of this period can be linked to policies and discourses during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, particularly regarding the links between the call for a ‘health dictatorship’ developed during the pandemic and the rhetorical use of medical language linked to authoritarian regenerationism between 1923 and 1930.
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References
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9 Interesting notes on the incorporation of local studies in Phillips and Killingray, Spanish Influenza, 18–19. Richard Collier, The Plague of the Spanish Lady (New York: Atheneum of Books for Young Readers, 1974) stands out for the author's use of individual testimonies to tell the story of the pandemic.
10 These volumes include Phillips and Killingray, Spanish Influenza; María Isabel Porras Gallo and Ryan Davis, eds., The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014).
11 Terence Ranger, ‘A Historian's Foreword’, in Phillips and Killingray, Spanish Influenza, xx.
12 Examples of studies that accord little importance to the pandemic include Jay Winter, The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Oliver Janz, Der große Krieg (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2013); Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Allen Lane, 2016).
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22 Maximiliano Fuentes Codera, Spain and Argentina in the First World War: Transnational Neutralities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021).
23 The summer crisis of 1917 was a triple crisis that destabilised the regime. It was provoked by Catalan regionalist movements in Barcelona, pressure from the military organised in the ‘Juntas de Defensa’ and a revolutionary general strike in August.
24 Francisco J. Romero Salvadó, The Foundations of Civil War: Revolution, Social Conflict and Reaction in Liberal Spain, 1916–1923 (London: Routledge, 2008).
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26 Francisco Cobo Romero, ‘“The Red Dawn” of the Andalusian Countryside: Reform and Counter-Revolution and the Spanish Left, 1917–1923’, in Romero Salvadó and Smith, eds., Agony, 121–44.
27 Pedro Gual Villalbí, Memorias de un industrial de nuestro tiempo (Barcelona: Sociedad General de Publicaciones, 1922), 165.
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29 Porras Gallo, Gripe, 65.
30 Charles E. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 279.
31 The Restoration political system restored the Bourbon monarchy after the failure of the First Republic in 1874 and ruled until 1931. Devised by the conservative politician Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the regime was based on the monarchy, liberal constitution and courts and a system of peaceful rotation between the liberal and conservative parties through rigged elections.
32 Emilio Sánchez Pastor, ‘La vida política’, La Vanguardia, 9 June 1918.
33 For example: Ariel, ‘Cotidianas’, La Vanguardia, 19 Sept. 1918.
34 Porras Gallo, Gripe, 77.
35 Beatriz Echeverri, ‘Spanish Influenza Seen from Spain’, in Phillips and Killingray, eds., Spanish Influenza, 173–90.
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44 Blacik, ‘Desinfección’, 263–4.
45 Román García Durán, Memoria de la epidemia gripal en la provincia de Valladolid en 1918 (Valladolid: Talleres Tipográficos Cuesta, 1920), 19. In the original Spanish, the author's rhetorical question is: ‘¿Puede darse mayor prueba del grado de incultura sanitaria de un pueblo?’.
46 Maurism was a right-wing political movement centred around the figure of Antonio Maura.
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51 Archivo General de la Administración (AGA), IDD (15)003.003, caja 81/09677/1, exp.1, 7 Oct. 1918.
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53 The Cuerpo de Carabineros was an armed force responsible for patrolling Spain's coasts and borders to stop fraud and smuggling.
54 ‘Las epidemias: en Barcelona’, El Día, 1 Oct. 1918.
55 Carlos Crehuet, ‘En la frontera española. El estado sanitario. La inquieta opinión: el viaje’, La Publicidad, 5 Oct. 1918.
56 ‘Notas de Andalucía. Llegada de obreros portugueses’, El Sol, 18 May 1919.
57 ‘El caso del Valbanera’, El Diluvio, 25 July 1919.
58 ‘El miedo a la gripe. Centenares de disparos contra el vapor “Fuerteventura”’, El Sol, 18 Feb. 1920.
59 Porras Gallo, Gripe, 113–4.
60 ‘El deure dels bons ciutadans. Parla en Rusiñol’, La Veu de Catalunya, 4 Nov. 1918.
61 Letter to the Sociedad Económica Barcelonesa de Amigos del País (SEBAP), 12 Apr. 1920, Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (ANC), Fons de la Societat Econòmica Barcelonesa d'Amics del País (SEBAP), U135, u1764; Carta, 26 May 1920, ANC, Fons SEBAP, U135, u1764.
62 ‘Una almoina, per l'amor de Déu’, La Veu de Catalunya, 25 Oct. 1918.
63 Rodríguez Ocaña, ‘La grip a Barcelona’, 147.
64 Manuel Ribé, Memorias de un funcionario (Barcelona: Marte, 1963), 71.
65 Diario de Sesiones del Congreso, 47, 31 May 1918, 1290.
66 ‘El estado actual de la epidemia: en provincias’, La Acción, 3 Oct. 1918; Josep Bernabeu-Mestre and Mercedes Pascual Artiaga, ‘Epidemic Disease, Local Government, and Social Control: The Example of the City of Alicante, Spain’, in Porras Gallo and Davis, eds., Spanish Influenza, 215–29.
67 Angel Smith, Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction. Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1898–1923 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 290–322; Romero Salvadó, Foundations, 123–256; José Antonio Biescas, ‘Incidencia de la I Guerra Mundial en la economía aragonesa’, Cuadernos Aragoneses de Economía (1975–6), 128–9.
68 ‘Una epidemia moral’, La Acción, 19 Oct. 1918.
69 Blacik, ‘Desinfección’, 251.
70 Alejandro Quiroga, ‘Nation and Reaction: Spanish Conservative Nationalism and the Restaration Crisis’, in Romero Salvadó and Smith, eds., Agony, 202–29.
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77 Davis, The Spanish Flu, 92.
78 Porras Gallo, Gripe, 141–3.
79 Ibid.
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81 ‘La tragedia de El Pobo’, El Imparcial, 11 Apr. 1916. A few months before the epidemic began, a doctor and member of the Congress of Deputies, Dr. Francos Rodríguez, requested a pardon for Alegre. Diario de Sesiones del Congreso, 27, 8 Aug. 1919, 886.
82 Blacik, ‘Desinfección’, 267.
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85 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Vieja y Nueva Política’, in José Ortega y Gasset, Obras Completas. Tomo I (Madrid: Taurus – Fundación Ortega y Gasset, 2004), 710–36.
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87 Davis, The Spanish Flu, 70–1.
88 José Ortega Munilla, ‘Por los héroes de la epidemia’, La Nación, 19 Oct. 1918.
89 José Ortega Munilla, ‘La Fiebre española’, El Día, 2 Oct. 1918; Miguel de Unamuno, ‘Comentario’, El Día, 4 Oct. 1918
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97 ‘Asamblea republicana’, La Voz, 5 June 1921.
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99 Gustavo Pittaluga travelled to France to study the influenza epidemic in 1918 along with two other doctors, Gregorio Marañón and Antonio Ruiz Falcó. Their report was published as Gregorio Marañón, Gustavo Pittaluga and Antonio Ruiz Falcón, Informe sobre el actual estado sanitario de Francia y su identidad con la epidemia gripal en España (Madrid: Imprenta del sucesor de Enrique Teodoro, oct. 1918).
100 Félix Lozano, ‘El problema político de la Sanidad pública’, La Voz, 3 Jan. 1921; Davis, The Spanish Flu, 81.
101 ‘Primer Congreso Nacional de Reorganización sanitaria. A las clases médicas. A la intelectualidad española. A los hombres de buena voluntad’, La Acción, 26 Jan. 1922.
102 ‘Por respeto a la vida del ciudadano: la dictadura sanitaria’, El Imparcial, 1 Sept. 1923.
103 Eduardo González Calleja, El Máuser y el sufragio: orden pública, subversión y violencia política en la crisis de la Restauración (1917–1931) (Madrid: CSIC, 1999); Albert Balcells, El Pistolerismo: Barcelona (1917–1923) (Barcelona: Pòrtic, 2009).
104 Cited in Ana de Sagrera, Miguel Primo de Rivera: el hombre, el soldado y el político (Jerez de la Frontera: Ayuntamiento de Jerez de la Frontera, 1973), 189.
105 Alejandro Quiroga Fernández de Soto, Making Spaniards: Primo de Rivera and the Nationalization of the Masses, 1923–30 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 36.
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107 José Álvarez Sierra, ‘D. Francisco Murillo y Palacios’, Unión Patriótica, 1 Nov. 1927.
108 Emilio Rodríguez Tarduchy, Psicología del dictador. Caracteres más salientes, sociales, morales y políticos, de la dictadura española (Madrid: Sáez Hermanos, 1929), 269–71.
109 Davis, The Spanish Flu.
110 José Manuel Sobral, Maria Luisa Lima and Paulo Silveira e Sousa, ‘And to Make Things Worse, the Flu: The Spanish Influenza in a Revolutionary Portugal’, in Porras-Gallo and Davis, eds., The Spanish influenza, 75–92.
111 Francisco Villacorta Baños and María Luisa Rico Gómez, Regeneracionismo autoritario. Desafíos y bloqueos de una sociedad en transformación: España 1923–1930 (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2013).
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