Title

'Bullanga', a new word for a new liberalism

Description

From 1837, the word 'bullanga' was used repeatedly to portray uproar, mutiny, or revolt in a pejorative sense. Joaquín del Castillo y Mayone, journalist and Romantic liberal writer, in his work Las bullangas de Barcelona (1837), was the first to use it to describe the seven revolts that took place in Barcelona between 25 July 1835 and 4 May 1837. In using this word, the liberal reform process was dissociated from popular violence. The success of the term was unprecedented and it was quickly used disparagingly to describe the popular riots as a violent and uncontrolled action of the populace, in which there were no traces of liberalism. In the following decades the concept was popularised through different literary genres (theatre, novel, poetry, and history) and to a lesser extent journalistic genres (press or brochures).

The decade from the 1840s to the early 1850s was marked by the hostility of moderates to any sign of a liberal revolutionary spirit, multiplying the propaganda against the revolution that turned the revolutions into 'bullangas'. This popularity caused the words 'bullanga' and 'bullanguero' to appear in the dictionaries of the Catalan and Castilian languages. In the Diccionari de la llengua catalana ab la correspondencia castellana i llatina of Pere Labérnia of 1839 it appears for the first time as a synonym of mutiny, uproar, or tumult, while in the Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española it appears in 1843 as synonymous with 'Bullaje' which meant 'the contest and confusion of many people’, while the bullanguero was identified as a ‘troublemaker and friend of the mutinies’. Thus, 'bullanga' served to denigrate popular revolts as violent and as without purpose or clear leadership. Orderly liberalism or non-revolutionary liberalism (moderantism and parts of progressivism) had invented the concept of the bullanga to limit the access of the popular classes to the radical policies and practices of the revolutionary and radical liberalism of the 1820s and 1830s.

Contributor

Jordi Roca Vernet

Temporal Coverage

25 July 1835

Date

1835-07-25

Spatial Coverage

Barcelona, Spain

Subject

groups

ideologies

liberalism

rhetoric

words