The Faith and the Fury: The Construction of Anticlerical Collective Identities in Spain,1874–1931

Abstract

This article explores the construction of anticlerical collective identities among Spanish workers from the late nineteenth century, outlining the ways in which the daily experience of the Church generated and intensified anticlerical sentiment. From the turn of the century, political, social and cultural changes sparked by industrialization and rural-urban emigration altered the face of ‘traditional’ Spanish popular anticlericalism; newly politicized workers increasingly identified the Church as part of the repressive machinery of the Restoration Monarchy’s political system. As workers struggled to fend off the ever-expanding central state’s intrusions into their domestic space and the Church’s influence over innumerable aspects of everyday life (including, crucially, its control of public spaces) they constructed their own, strongly anticlerical ‘workers’ public sphere’ grounded in alternative forms of socialization, cultural activities, and new secular rituals.