No other European country has been identified with Catholicism in quite the same way as has Spain. In this volume, a set of nine concise studies, edited by two accomplished scholars in Spanish Church-State relations, seek to elucidate the protracted but changing struggle over the place of the Catholic Church in Spain during the past two centuries: what the editors’ introduction calls ‘the staggering march from sacralization to politicisation in modern Spain’. The book’s organisation is essentially chronological, beginning with the debate on ‘Catholicism and Spanish identity’ first spurred by acerbic French commentary in the Encyclopédie Méthodique in 1782. The country had been exclusively Catholic under the Old Regime and nascent liberalism continued to uphold union of Church and State, and thus a position of religious intolerance, which first began to be questioned during the First Carlist War of the 1830s. A sharp split between liberalism and traditionalism was fairly common in nineteenth-century Europe, though the authors spend very little time on the comparative dimension, fairly typical of self-absorbed Spanish historiography generally.

A notable exception is the chapter ‘Religion and the nation’s future, 1845–68’, by Jesús Millán and María Cruz Romero, which interprets the renewed emphasis on Catholicism by conservative liberals after mid-century not so much as a residue but as a new project for the future, within the framework of European ultramontanism introduced by Pope Pius ix (1846–78). By the late 1850s and ’60s the centrifugal tendencies of modern liberalism and its representative politics convinced conservative liberal Neo-Catholics (as they were called) of the need for greater spiritual unity to bring political society back together in the future.

Though secularisation slowly expanded, most nineteenth-century liberals remained at least nominally Catholic, and not infrequently observant ones. The authors emphasise the broadening spectrum of sometimes hybrid attitudes during that era. The Spanish state remained intolerantly Catholic until 1869, despite providing one of the earliest examples of triumphant liberalism in general. After a semi-egalitarian interlude from 1869 to 1874, it returned to full union of Church and State, though the constitution of 1876 recognised freedom of strictly privatised, non-public religious practice. In her essay ‘Sons of the Gospel: religiosity and secularisation in nineteenth-century Spanish republicanism’, Ester García Moscardó stresses the centrality of Christianity in the moral imagination even of the republican left, which sought to disestablish the Church but often emphasised that they expressed ‘the true gospel’ and real Christianity. Traces of such an attitude would also be found even among incendiary revolutionary anarchists in a later generation.

The fifth chapter, by María Pilar Salomón Chéliz, treats what is often called the ‘Catholic revival’ of the later nineteenth century, examining the Church’s effort to combat secularisation through expanded rites and public presence and through more active new lay associations. This approach, however, failed to blunt increased anticlericalism among the growing leftist sectors of Spanish politics. A different approach was taken by the short-lived moderate authoritarian regime of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–30), which sought to marry political dictatorship with Catholicism, but the restrictions involved drew mounting opposition from both clergy and laity, ending in failure and opening the way for the Second Republic of 1931, Spain’s first system of nominal democracy.

By that time extreme anticlericalism formed the bedrock of left republican politics, not merely fully disestablishing the Church but trying to eliminate public expression of Catholicism, seeking to ban teaching by the clergy and restricting Catholicism to private activity only. Here the book begins to falter, for, rather than giving full attention to the main dividing line in Spanish affairs during 1931–3, the chapter on this period is devoted rather bizarrely to an excursus on ‘antifeminism’, precisely at the moment at which Catholic women became more publicly active than ever before. The main single antifeminist gesture in politics, the attempt by the political left to deny the vote to women on the grounds that they were too Catholic, is not treated.

The 1930s constitute the main battleground of contemporary Spanish historiography and here the volume fails badly to provide necessary context. Though Church and State framed the first major conflict of these years, the Republic opened the way to a full revolutionary process which went far beyond that, ending in the great Spanish revolution of the Civil War years (1936–9), the only mass violent collectivist socioeconomic revolution of modern Western Europe. This involved much more than anticlericalism, even though the assault on Catholicism was its most prominent single feature. The Church was treated as the very core of the old order, and was suppressed if anything to an even greater extent than in the Soviet Union, with nearly 7,000 clergy and many thousands of laity murdered, accompanied by massive destruction of churches and wholesale looting.

The military insurrection that began the main phase of civil war had no initial religious identity but invoked a stabilised conservative republicanism. It immediately had the effect of consummating the process it had sought to avoid, and found itself suppressing not a preliminary protorevolution, as had been calculated, but a full-scale revolution in which republican power had passed to the revolutionary organisations intent on the destruction of, among other things, Catholicism. The insurgent leaders quickly accepted the logic being created and married themselves to the Church, whose leaders grasped the only lifeline on offer. The new dictatorship of Franco was quite different from that of Primo de Rivera and waged civil war with an iron hand, attempting a new connubium of a sort of semi-Fascism and Catholic traditionalism. The close identification of Church and State that prevailed in Spain for the next three decades would eventually be dubbed by opponents as a unique form of ‘National Catholicism’ (playing off the term of ‘National Syndicalism’ that Franco had given to his initial socioeconomic system).

In his stellar social history of the Russan Revolution, A people’s tragedy, the British historian Orlando Figes notes that one of the key differences between the Russian and Spanish revolutionary civil wars lay in the much more successful mobilisation of religious commitment by the Spanish counterrevolutionaries. Unlike the apocalyptically incendiary Spanish anticlericals, Lenin managed shrewdly to postpone the main battle against the Russoan Church until after the civil war had been won. Here once more the comparative dimension is missing in the work under review.

As Franco sought to survive international ostracism at the close of World War II, he presented Spain’s peculiar combination of religious neotraditionalism and authoritarian modernity as having constituted ‘the most Catholic country in the world’ – something totally distinct from secularising ‘Fascism’. The elaborate pattern of public religiosity this produced is clearly and succinctly summarised in a chapter by César Rina Simón.

The transition to democratic constitutional monarchy following the death of Franco finally accomplished the peaceful disestablishment of Church and State, even though accompanied by special new accords that recognised a distinctive status for the Catholic Church and a renewed arrangement for limited financial support. In a sense, this was made possible both by the most important success and by the major failure of the preceding dictatorship. Under Franco there took place the definitive socioeconomic modernisation of the country, while the dictatorship conversely failed completely in its goal of cementing a neotraditionalist culture. To Franco’s chagrin, socioeconomic modernisation only encouraged the relative triumph of secularisation, so that the Francoist society and culture were disappearing even before the dictator’s life ended. The coup de grace was delivered by Vatican II, as a liberalised Church began to turn away from the long dictatorship. Franco could only lament in a handwritten remark in one of his last personal memorandums: ‘What a stab in the back.’

How Spanish Catholicism has responded to deepened secularisation and disestablishment is ably analysed in the concluding chapter by Vicente Jesús Díaz Burillo and Alicia Muñoz Ramírez. Most Spaniards still identify as in some sense Catholic but religious observance is in steep decline. The Church now relies increasingly on lay organisations but until recently has still sought a major voice on controversial issues. ‘Religious nationalism’, however, is now found rather more in the Catalan and Basque movements, and particularly in Basque nationalism, which has become a kind of ‘political religion’ of secular martyrdom and redemption. As the role of Catholicism in the Spanish nation recedes, however, no other coherent interest replaces it, and the current Spanish ship of state follows a rudderless course, the most fragmented of Western polities, albeit not subject to the violence of an earlier era. In preparing this survey of some of the key aspects of this journey, Alonso and Hernández Burgos have provided the English-language reader with a very helpful guide to its basic features.