«Night dreams» and retropias in Spanish traditionalism

Abstract

This paper studies the retropias and utopias of retrospective inspiration in the Spanish traditionalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries. For this purpose, it takes into account the diversity of registers that characterizes the utopian phenomenon. During that period, reaction and action converged in counterrevolutionary thinking and fueled different forms of resistance. Faced with revolutionary utopianism, discourses of retropia were elaborated in which the past survived as both material and spiritual legacy, with some possible projection. Those discourses were founded on a reactionary mythology that justified purifying violence in defense of religion. Belligerence against liberalism and the increasing secularization of society became the hallmarks of Carlism and Traditionalism whose strategy was paradoxical: on the one hand, seeking a return to the past, on the other, willing to influence politics. All this through struggle for power within the Church and through the «recatolization» of society.