Regenerationism

Regenerationism ( es, Regeneracionismo) was an intellectual and political movement in late 19th century and early 20th century Spain. It sought to make objective and scientific study of the causes of Spain's decline as a nation and to propose remedies. It is largely seen as distinct from another movement of the same time and place, the Generation of '98. While both movements shared a similar negative judgment of the course of Spain as a nation in recent times, the regenerationists sought to be objective, documentary, and scientific, while the Generation of '98 inclined more to the literary, subjective and artistic.

The most prominent representative of Regenerationism was the Aragonese politician Joaquín Costa with his maxim "School, larder and double-lock the tomb of El Cid" (''"Escuela, despensa y doble llave al sepulcro del Cid"''): that is, look to the future and let go of the grand triumphal narrative that begins with El Cid.

Origin

The word ''regeneración'' entered the Spanish language in the early 19th century as a medical term, the antonym of ''corrupción'' (corruption); over time it became a metaphor for the opposite of political corruption. It became a new expression of the longstanding patriotic concern with the decline of Spain, a concern first expressed by the '' Arbitristas'' in the 16th and 17th centuries, then by Enlightenment thinkers and Bourbon reformers in the 18th century, sometimes satirized in the form of so-called ''Proyectismo'' ("Project-ism") attacked by José Cadalso in his ''Cartas marruecas'' ("Moroccan Letters"). But late 19th century Regenerationism was specifically a reaction against the political system founded by Cánovas under the Bourbon restoration. Under Cánovas system, alternation between conservative and liberal parties was guaranteed by rigged elections. This made the late 19th century, after the last of the Carlist Wars, a period of an illusory stability sustained on the basis of massive political corruption. This false stability hid, for a time, the misery of the common people, the poor economic distribution of Spain's belated industrial revolution, caciquism, and the triumph of an economic and political oligarchy. Only Catalonia and the Basque Country had seen the sustained rise of an industrial capitalist bourgeoisie (early industrialization in Andalusia having largely failed). With the end of feudalism and, in particular, the fraud-ridden expropriation of ecclesiastical properties (''see, for example, Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizábal