Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces

This book is the first comprehensive study that reevaluates music’s role in the relationship between the French state and the Catholic Church at the end of the nineteenth century. As the divide between Church and State widened on the political stage, more and more composers began writing religious—even liturgical—music for performance in decidedly secular venues, including popular cabaret theaters, prestigious opera houses, and international exhibitions: a trend that coincided with Pope Leo XIII’s Ralliement politics that encouraged conservative Catholics to “rally” with the Republican government. But the idea of a musical Ralliement has largely gone unquestioned by historians and musicologists alike who have long accepted a somewhat simplistic epistemological position that emphasizes a sharp division between the Church and the “secular” Republic during this period. Drawing on extensive archival research, critical reception studies, and musical analysis, this book reveals how composers and critics from often opposing ideological factions undermined the secular/sacred binary. From the opera house and niche puppet theaters to Parisian parish churches and Montmartre’s famed cabarets, composers and critics from opposing ideological factions used music in their effort to craft a brand of Frenchness that was built on the dual foundations of secular Republicanism and the heritage of the French Catholic Church.

Text and Republican Government

Early conflicts over religious liberty and freedom of speech reveal that while we can agree on the Constitution’s text, we can profoundly disagree over the unwritten ideas we think the text represents. Debates about religion and free speech point to deeper unwritten principles that are at the very heart of America’s constitutional republic. The first debate deals with the prohibition on religious tests for office in Article VI. The second speaks to freedom of speech and press. In these early debates about religious liberty and freedom of speech, the antagonists agreed on the wording of constitutional text; they disagreed profoundly on the principles and political theory that underlie it in their understanding of America’s new republic. These early arguments reveal the importance of constructing constitutional meaning from the unwritten ideas that underlie the constitutional text.

Are Tax Cuts Supporters Self-Interested and/or Partisan? The Case of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

In late 2017, the first unified Republican government in 15 years enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Why did so many citizens support a policy that primarily benefited people richer than them? The self-interest hypothesis holds that individuals act upon the position they occupy in the income distribution: richer (poorer) taxpayers should favor (oppose) regressive policy. Associations between income and policy preferences are often inconsistent, however, suggesting that many citizens fail to connect their self-interest to taxation. Indeed, political psychologists have shown compellingly that citizens can be guided by partisan considerations not necessarily aligned with their own interests. This article assesses public support for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Using data from the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study as well as contemporaneous ANES and VOTER surveys to replicate our analyses, we show that self-interest and partisanship both come into play, but that partisanship matters more. Personal financial considerations, while less influential than party identification, are relevant for two groups of individuals: Republicans and the politically unsophisticated.

War of Canudos

The War of Canudos was fought in the northeastern desert-like backlands (sertão) of Brazil at the end of the 19th century between the community of Belo Monte/Canudos and Brazil’s recently established republican government. The leader of Canudos, a charismatic man known as Antônio Conselheiro, was considered a holy man by his followers and exemplified many of the beliefs and practices of folk Catholicism in the region. While he wandered the backlands for many years, rebuilding churches, pronouncing sermons, and living a deeply ascetic life, he entered into conflict with authorities following the passage from monarchy to republic in 1889, a secular form of government that lacked authority in his eyes. Once Conselheiro settled in a hamlet in 1893, baptizing it Belo Monte, the settlement became a center of attraction and grew quickly, draining labor and threatening the power of neighboring landowners. After two small Bahian expeditions sent to fight with the inhabitants of Belo Monte (called Canudos by outsiders) were routed, news of the community and its leader spread like wildfire in both the Bahian press as well as newspapers in the country’s center of power in the southeast. The failure of a third and larger military expedition sent by the federal government turned Canudos into a media event, leading to songs, caricatures, conspiracy theories, and even carnival costumes. While the community did not arguably pose any real threat to the still nascent republic, it became symbolized as such in the media. A fourth and much larger military expedition finally destroyed the community after months of siege. While the war continued to exert an outsized presence in a variety of media, including poems, memoirs, novelizations, and testimonials, its status as a singular and epic event in Brazilian history was cemented with the publication of Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões four years after the end of the conflict, a book based on the author’s experience as a war correspondent for a São Paulo newspaper. The consecration of Os Sertões as one of the foundational texts of Brazilian nationality, however, poses a challenge for understanding the War of Canudos outside the optics and intelligibility established by da Cunha’s text.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE OF THE CHUVASH ASSR COUNCIL OF MINISTERS’ APPARATUS IN THE 1980s

The article examines the changes that occurred in the organizational structure of the apparatus of the Chuvash ASSR Council of Ministers in the 1980s. The Council of Ministers, as the supreme executive and administrative body of the state power of the republic, played a significant role in all spheres of public life, and the quality of decisions made and their subsequent implementation in this difficult time for the country largely depended on its apparatus. The source base of the study was primarily previously unpublished resolutions of the Republican government, which approved the changed staffing structure of the Chuvash ASSR Council of Ministers’ apparatus. The central role in the apparatus of the republican government was occupied by the General Affairs Department, which included branch departments and other structural subdivisions. According to the results of the study, it was concluded that during most of the 1980s, changes in the organizational structure of the apparatus of the Chuvash ASSR Council of Ministers were minor, they were limited to the transfer of individual functions from one branch department of the General Affairs Department to another with the corresponding renaming of departments. However, in the years of perestroika, under the conditions of growing political and economic reforms, the apparatus of the Chuvash ASSR Council of Ministers underwent a significant transformation, which was reflected in the adoption at the turn of the 1980s–1990s of new normative legal acts – the Regulations on the Apparatus of the Chuvash ASSR Council of Ministers, the staffing structure of the Council of Ministers’ Apparatus and job descriptions for employees of the Council of Ministers’ apparatus. In so doing, the leadership of the country and the republic demonstrated their readiness for significant changes, albeit within the framework of a centrally planned socialist system.

Local Government, Passive Defense and Aerial Bombardment in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–9

The bombardment of civilians from the air was a regular feature of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. It is estimated some 15,000 Spaniards died as a result of air bombings during the Civil War, most civilians, and 11,000 were victims of bombing from the Francoist side that rebelled against the Republican government, supported by German and Italian aviation that joined the rebellion against the Republic. In Catalonia alone, some 1062 municipalities experienced aerial bombardments by the Francoist side of the civil war. In cities across Spain, municipal and regional authorities developed detailed plans for civilian defense in response to these air campaigns. In Barcelona, the municipality created the Junta Local de Defensa Passiva de Barcelona, to build bomb shelters, warn the public of bombings, and educate them on how to protect themselves against aerial bombardment. They mobilized civilians around the concept of ‘passive defense.’ This proactive response by civilians and local government to what they recognized as a war targeting them is an important and under-studied aspect of the Spanish Civil War.

The End of the Ottoman Empire and the Emergence of Nation-States

This chapter discusses the end of the Ottoman Empire, looking at three case studies which illustrate the pattern of change seen in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to nation-states. Greece, the first Ottoman territory to gain independence (1830), set precedents in establishing government by non-natives, introducing religious and legal institutions based on European models and working single-mindedly to instill national identity in its population. Almost a century later, King Faysal I (r. 1921–1933) of Iraq followed a similar path, albeit under British direction. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1922 and offered a slight variation on the pattern in that it built on selected legacies from the late Ottoman Empire. It was the only post-Ottoman country founded primarily by internal effort rather than by European intervention, and the national identity it worked to entrench in the population drew upon the political ideas of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which had dominated Ottoman government from 1908 to 1918. Despite that continuity, the republican government pursued the agenda of tearing down Ottoman institutions and rebuilding state and society as national projects. Such nation-building ultimately succeeded, producing its own instabilities; in new post-Ottoman countries such as Greece, Iraq, and Turkey, social and political re-engineering aroused resistance within the population.

Britain and the Paraguayan Dictatorship, c. 1820–1840

Post-revolutionary Spanish America barely features in existing scholarship on nineteenth-century British political and social thought. But the region was widely discussed, and raised distinctive issues about republican government, the effects of colonial rule, and the operation of absolute power. This article examines how the British debated the autarchic dictatorship erected in newly independent Paraguay. Their attempts to make sense of this spectacular experiment in government, and its architect Dr Francia, helped to crystallize public attitudes towards the condition of Spanish America in the 1820s and 1830s. Francia's broader significance, however, was as a token in wider debates about the proper limits of republican and constitutional principles, and about the merits of arbitrary directive rule in less developed polities. For his admirers, he cast light on how other comparable regimes had gone wrong.

Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys: Granada to Salamanca (1999)

This chapter follows Michael Portillo’s pilgrimage to his late father’s native Spain as part of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys. Luis Gabriel Portillo was a poet and law professor who stayed loyal to the Republican government when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. A liberal intellectual and a Catholic idealist, he refused to carry a rifle at the front for fear of killing one of his brothers, five of whom were enlisted on the Nationalist side. Instead he ran messages as a courier and acted as a political instructor to the troops. In January 1939, shortly before Madrid fell to Franco, he escaped across the Pyrenees, reaching England as an asylum-seeker. For two decades he was unable to set foot in Spain. Michael’s moving Telemachan odyssey took him back to the land of his father’s heroes, to the village of his formative years, to the front line of the civil war, and to the ancient university city of Salamanca, the Ithaca of which Luis dreamt during his long years in exile. The chapter also looks at examples of Luis Portillo’s deeply nostalgic poetry of exile, from his published volume Ruiseñor del destierro.