THE AGE OF REVOLUTION IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL - Spain and Portugal: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 44

far more enemies by his activism than his predecessors had ever raised
by their idleness. A growing republican movement focused on removal
of the monarchy as the salvation of the Portuguese people without a
very coherent ideological or practical plan for what was needed or what
should be done. In 1908 the king and the crown prince were shot dead
as they rode through Lisbon. Although the surviving younger son
became Manuel II, his regime became an insignificant footnote to the
history of the Braganças. Swept away in the upsurge of republicanism,
he went into exile in 1910, and Portugal ended nearly 800 years of
monarchy.
SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE CULTURE IN THE
EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES
The collapse of Spanish political dominance in Europe at the end of the
17th century was accompanied by the deterioration of its cultural hege-
mony. Just as the French Bourbons imposed their principles and prac-
tices in the political realm, so French cultural models became the norm
in 18th-century Spain. Royal academies of language and history and
the National Library in Madrid now replicated those in Paris. Play-
wrights, of whom the most distinguished was Leandro Fernández de
Moratín, essayists, and poets all took their lead from the powerful
neighbor north of the Pyrenees. In art, as well as literature, there were
few pretenders to the distinction attained by the great men of the
Golden Age. Only Francisco de Goya with his shrewd portraits of the
royal family and their courtiers and his shocking drawings illustrating
the horrors of war raises Spanish culture of this period from a mediocre
level.
Despite their heroic struggle against Napoléon's military dictatorship
in the first decades of the 19th century, Spaniards remained under the
cultural mastery of France during succeeding generations. Romanti-
cism, exemplified by the poets José Espronceda and Gustavo Adolfo
Bécquer was followed by the realism favored in the novels of Benito
Pérez Galdós ( Doña Perfecta, Episodios nacionales ), Emilia Pardo Bazán
( Los pazos de Ulloa ), Juan Valera ( Pepita Jiménez ), and Vicente Blasco
Ibáñez ( La barraca, Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis ). Spain, ironically had
now become a source of picturesque settings for French dramas such as
Hernani and operas such as Carmen.
Portugal, too, succumbed to the French cultural predominance in the
18th and 19th centuries. Only in the late 1800s, in the novels of José
Maria Eça de Queirós ( Os Maias and O crime do Padre Amaro ) did Portugal
offer a truly significant contribution to European literature.