ABSTRACT
After 1875, a strain of counterrevolutionary Integrism developed in Restoration Spain. This variant of Catholic thought had political, theological, and devotional forms and rested on the belief that religious questions underlay all others. The origins of political revolution were thus not political at all: The struggle was eschatological, the origin Satanic. Theories of sacrificial violence developed by Joseph de Maistre and Donoso Cortés transformed the contemporary theological imagination and expiatory cults promulgated the notion of ‘mystical substitution’ whereby individual suffering was given freely for the salvation of another. The cult of the Sacred Heart became the main vehicle for integrist Catholicism, particularly after Margaret Mary Alacoque’s beatification in 1864. A violent anticlerical praxis also developed in Spain, where iconoclastic violence was seen as ‘proof’ of the Satanic enemy and the cosmological nature of the underpinning struggle.
