标题：La Nación y las Españas. Representación y territorio en el constitucionalismo gaditano, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2010. ISBN: 978-84-8344-173-2
摘要：This new book by Marta Lorente provides both a rigorous and colorful synthesis of her outstanding research over the last decade. In particular, it summarizes and illustrates the groundbreaking book she coauthored with Carlos Garriga three years ago on the Cadiz Constitution,2 in which they thoroughly revise the ordinary commemorative interpretation of the Gaditana as a pristine source of European constitutionalism (a Spanish simile for “programmatic” or “projectual” (M. Fioravanti) constitutionalism, like the earlier French one), which would install a new political paradigm of a State limited not only by the separation of powers and by the framing of a written text that shaped institutions and political practices, but also by the pre-eminence of individual rights over State prerogatives. The main point of the authors is not that the Gaditana—like all the contemporary constitutions of continental Europe—did not enshrine an order of rights that overrode the law of the state.3 Their revision is far more radical: the Cadiz Constitution, rather than being the inaugural milestone of a political era, was instead the epigenous event of a vanishing paradigm—the jurisdictional paradigm—typical of the corporatist monarchy that was now beginning to relinquish power, but which was still pervasive in the public sphere. In this new book, one can find several paragraphs that summarize a decade of historiographic work, undertaken by the author and by some of her colleagues, mostly in Madrid and Seville.4 The arguments which sustain her thesis are based upon a methodology of research concerning the Spanish constitutional history, recognized not only as new, but also as leading to substantial interpretive innovations. As the Gaditana was not a mere piece of paper approved by a constituent assembly after the debates published in the Cortes’ proceedings, but, on the contrary, led to a complex process for the reception of its text both by the community and by the officials it addressed, studies on the history of the Cadiz Constitution must necessarily include, along with the history of the creation of a text, also the history of its reception and enforcement through the traditional institutions that were still in place. Consequently, research into this question has to descend from the level of the text’s political discussion and redaction in the Cortes to the more modest and also less spectacular level of everyday political praxis recorded at the level of the archives. This change in the field of research is the best way of highlighting the traditional legacy of the novel constitution.
