La Nación y las Españas. Representación y territorio en el constitucionalismo gaditano

This new book by Marta Lorente provides both a rigorous and colorful synthesis of her outstanding research over the last decade. In particular, it summarizes and illustrates the groundbreaking book she coauthored with Carlos Garriga three years ago on the Cadiz Constitution, in which they thoroughly revise the ordinary commemorative interpretation of the Gaditana as a pristine source of European constitutionalism (a Spanish simile for “programmatic” or “projectual” (M. Fioravanti) constitutionalism, like the earlier French one), which would install a new political paradigm of a State limited not only by the separation of powers and by the framing of a written text that shaped institutions and political practices, but also by the pre-eminence of individual rights over State prerogatives. The main point of the authors is not that the Gaditana—like all the contemporary constitutions of continental Europe—did not enshrine an order of rights that overrode the law of the state. Their revision is far more radical: the Cadiz Constitution, rather than being the inaugural milestone of a political era, was instead the epigenous event of a vanishing paradigm—the jurisdictional paradigm—typical of the corporatist monarchy that was now beginning to relinquish power, but which was still pervasive in the public sphere.