ABSTRACT
Romantic writers beginning with Washington Irving and Theophile Gautier, and the royalist volunteers who travelled to Spain from all over Europe during the Carlist wars, would complete this picture in the mid-nineteenth century. A number of factors thwarted the success of the nation-building process undertaken by liberal elites. Patriotism had taken to the stage at the beginning of the century linked to liberal revolution, and for several decades the idea of patria seemed to be in open conflict with the monarchy. During the second half of the nineteenth century traditional Catholic thinkers seemed to understand the importance of the new nationalist rhetoric and began to elaborate a patriotic canon opposed to the liberal version. The independence of the last colonial territories was only viewed as a personal loss by those intellectual and political elites who had worked so hard in the nation-building process: journalists, writers, politicians, lawyers, professionals.
