Carsten Humlebæk and Ulla Grøn :
'The genesis of "las dos Españas" - Notions of the Nation in Spain 1808-1975'

19th century Spain was a chaotic affair: in addition to civil and colonial wars, constitutions were written and discarded again, and revolutionary periods alternated with reaction. All in all, however, the structures of society did change in liberal direction. The liberals were the first to build a nationalist mythology from the 1840s, followed by the conservatives a few decades later, who were stressing the catholic essence of Spain. Both, however, shared the sense of backwardness disagreeing only on the means with which to cure it. The Restoration from 1875 to 1923 stifled the weak liberal tendencies in exchange for corruption and nepotism, and this development accelerated during the 1920s and 1930s with the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the Second Republic ending in the Civil War 1936 – 1939. Whereas the Second Republic had been dominated by the liberal nationalist project, the Franco regime, which followed after the Civil War, was the most direct heir to the conservative nationalist project, which was to dominate Spain until 1975.