Being – and Staying – Famous in 19th-Century Spain: Baldomero Espartero and the Birth of Political Celebrity

Abstract

This article argues that Baldomero Espartero remained widely famous and popular for decades after the end of his active political career and his political failures. While the initial Espartero cult was created from above following his heroic victory at Lu-chana and consolidated after the Embrace of Vergara, the maintenance of the cult through the 1860s was largely driven from below. The article uses a range of sources: oral and family traditions, cheap books and images and, above all letters written to Espartero, to explore what was the first case of modern political celebrity in Spain.

History of celebrity branching out

“…While studies that focus on the celebrity status associated with a specific group tend to explore individual cases, research on political celebrity often takes a broader perspective to examine the social significance of celebrity mechanisms. For instance, while earlier research has convincingly outlined the role of celebrity in the emergence of liberal democracies in the West (Marshall, 1997), recent studies offer a more comprehensive understanding of this process, tracing its beginnings to the growing significance of personality in political life during the eighteenth century (Kennerley, 2018), the subsequent adoption of celebrity mechanisms by popular politicians in the nineteenth century (Morgan, 2021; Shubert, 2015), and further institutionalisation of mediatised political exposure at the turn of the twentieth century (Burdiel, 2022; van Waarden and Kohlrausch, 2021). In these studies, the intersections between politics and celebrity culture are often treated as systemic, revealing a high degree of interdependence between political life and the broader public sphere.…”

“…However, there has been a growing body of research that examines the manifestations of celebrity culture in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Europe beyond these regions. Historians of Spain have shown a prompt response to the concept, particularly in discussing the early modern era and the nineteenth century (Burdiel, 2022; Garcia‐Reidy, 2018; Shubert, 2015; Wood, 2012; Zanardi, 2012), followed by some delay by scholars from other Romance‐language countries (Papadia, 2020; Vieira & Guerra Santos, 2021).…”

Personificando la revolución. Espartero: carisma en la Revolución de 1840 y su llegada a la Regencia Embodying revolution. Espartero: charisma in the 1840 Revolution and his arrival to the regency

“…Ese sentimiento fue creciendo con el desarrollo de la guerra civil. De él no quedó al margen ningún ámbito de la sociedad española 15 , continuando en los años posteriores.…”