Polítics de Lleida. El poder local i les seves mutacions a través del temps (1716-1868)

The aim of this book is to present the analysis of the social biography of power in the city of Lleida from a long-range point of view that would go from 1716, the year in which the Bourbon absolutist government began, until 1868, when the process of the bourgeois revolution ended in Spain. The sociological uniqueness of Lleida is an example of the adaptation of social groups in Catalan cities to the new power of the Bourbon reform. However, in parallel, those changes were the starting point of a new struggle to acquire influence, since the privileged group controlled the power throughout the whole period, and the rest could only access it in a second-rank position when they were created or through revolutionary assaults that had a very short chronological validity during the period of time studied. The city of Lleida becomes, in our research, a historical character that expresses the power of the dominant group and where the main families fought in order to confirm their social hegemony.

After the experience lived by the population during the Bourbon absolutism (1716-1832), the Liberal Revolution (1833-1868) ideologically determined the content of two social blocks, the conservative and the progressive one, which faced each other to achieve the political control of the community from the moment in which the regime change was accepted from a state point of view. We face a struggle that was already detected before in absolutist municipalities, in which both blocks had begun to be configured through the representative experience that some lived, the elite of the privileged from the most important positions of the councillor and general attorney trustee, that generally in the liberal era gave its support to the conservatives, and the others, the rest of the population, from the common representative positions and the town trustee, who supported in their majority the progressive ones.