Dos Mayo And The Puerta del Sol: Forever Linked in Popular Imagination

Other historians have been more circumspect about the ultimate meaning of the day’s events. For Pamela Radcliff, “It is likely that very little of the popular insurrection was inspired either by Spanish nationalism or by political ideology….” Yet an internal dynastic crisis in early 1808 had already created an environment rife for enhanced public engagement. As Radcliff further relates, public frustration with the Spanish monarchy’s austerity measures that year prompted, “a moral and then political indictment” of the regime of Charles IV.

French occupation took advantage of this national crisis of political legitimacy, but creating in the process opportunity for the collective action of a newly engaged Spanish public. Spaniards then unilaterally transferred this “moral and…political indictment” to the French occupiers, showing great civic pride in the process. In collective memory, then, the May 2 anniversary has since largely been associated with civic agency, especially in Madrid.

Some of Madrid’s plazas, streets, and neighborhoods take their names from events of the historic date, including the Plaza Dos de Mayo, which retains remnants of the Spanish military barracks destroyed during the fighting; Calles Velarde and Daoiz, named for Spanish military heroes who participated in the uprising; and the neighborhood of Malasaña itself, named for local heroine Manuela Malasaña, a young seamstress who gave her life in the name of freedom, according to legend. All these places signify Spanish resistance, courage, and resourcefulness in war. Yet only one space is associated specifically and perennially with this “civic and constitutional path;” since 1808, the Puerta del Sol has become synonymous with Spanish civic activism.

A brief consideration of the Puerta del Sol’s modern history offers a case study in how spaces and places acquire symbolic meaning through a complex process known to researchers as the social construction of space. For the cultural anthropologist Setha Low, “the social construction of space is the actual transformation of space—through peoples’ social exchanges, memories, images, and daily use of the material setting—into scenes and actions that convey meaning.”  Such transformations have taken place in Madrid generally and the Puerta del Sol specifically through a long and continuing process dating to the sixteenth century.

When Felipe II made Madrid permanent seat of the Spanish Monarchy in 1561, the city underwent a long process of urbanization to make it a capital suitable for the Empire. Expansion projects added infrastructure and new neighborhoods throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Puerta del Sol, a prominent city gate since the fifteenth century, acquired its signature structure, the Real Palacio del Correos (now the Presidencia de la Comunidad de Madrid) in 1768. In 1857 the square was established “Kilómetro Cero” from which Spain’s six radial roads originate. By the nineteenth century, Madrid was well established as the material center of Spanish commercial and political life.

But the city, and especially the Puerta del Sol would truly become the heart of an imagined community of Spaniards during the Peninsular Wars. During the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, the plaza was the site of battles between Madrid’s residents and French troops, immortalized by Francisco Goya in his painting El 2 de Mayo. The heavily armed French regulars and their mercenary allies were held off by Madrileños armed only with knives, shovels, and clubs, in skirmishes which introduced the term “guerilla warfare” to the military lexicon. Though ultimately defeated in the battles, Madrileños had established a tradition of civilian defense of their public spaces from tyranny and occupation, while famously giving Napoleon a “Spanish ulcer.”

This episode would have a profound impact on all of Europe. Napoleon’s professional army had proved nearly unbeatable on battlefields across Europe dating to the French Revolutionary Wars. The events of Madrid provided a template for hamstringing French armies through irregular battle tactics that would later be adapted and employed by British, Russian and Prussian High Commands in the Napoleonic Wars.

Though the initial guerilla tactics of May 2nd took place in various sites across Madrid, the Puerta del Sol would remain the symbolic heart of the Spanish resistance. According to the Spanish artillery officer Manuel María Esquivel, an eyewitness to the May 2 events, the plaza was the principal site of public protest even before the fighting began. During the occupation, French commanding officer Joachim Murat would inspect his troops Sunday mornings in front of the Real Palacio de Correos, providing opportunity for the onlooking Spaniards to voice their opposition. As Esquivel relates, on 1 May 1808 the Puerta del Sol filled with Madrileños early in the morning, who had come to protest the French occupiers directly.

When these demonstrators were forcibly moved by French troops, they “booed Murat lustily,” prompting him to reenforce the plaza with additional troops and canons, setting the stage for a more violent response from Madrileños the following day, May 2. Occupying French forces were posted throughout Spain. But the symbolic site of their occupation was the Puerta del Sol, forever to be associated with resistance following the events of May 2.

Through a further process that David Harvey has called, “the urbanization of consciousness” Spaniards have since come to think of Madrid as the heart of Spain, and of the Puerta del Sol as the heart of Madrid. This has been reenforced through the city’s urban planning projects, and especially the creation of early systems of public transportation. The first tram lines began service in 1871 and featured Puerta del Sol as a principal hub of the system. Though development of the Gran Vía in the early twentieth century provided a rival city center in a commercial sense, the Puerta del Sol would remain predominant in a social sense. (A case in point is that the iconic Tio Pepe , constructed in 1936, was installed not along the Gran Vía but in the Puerta del Sol, where it has since remained).

The plaza was also adopted by labor organizations as the predominant site of political and civic action in the late nineteenth century. Political activism has thus continued to be associated with the square, (and indeed, Spain’s current ruling political party the Partido Socialista Obrero Español was founded in 1879—on the May 2 anniversary—in the Casa Labra café, still located just off the plaza on Calle de Tetuán).

Popular association with resistance made the Puerta del Sol the obvious place for Madrid’s proclamation of the Second Republic on 14 April 1931, when Spaniards collectively rejected the tyranny of dictatorship and Monarchy in favor of democracy. Exhausted with the arbitrary rule of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship of 1923-1930, Spanish intellectuals and activists mounted a public campaign demanding democratic reform. Facing public pressure and a loss of confidence from his own generals and his patron, King Alfonso XIII Primo resigned in January 1930. The following year, municipal elections on 12 April served as a de-facto plebiscite on the Monarchy. In this election, parties backing the Monarchy were swept by Republican-Socialist parties demanding a Republic.

On 14 April, the King absconded to France, and the Republic was proclaimed in various municipalities late that morning. At 3:30 that afternoon in Madrid, according to the historian Santos Juliá, the tricolor flag of the Second Republic was first unveiled on the mast of the Palacio de Comunicaciones in the Plaza de Cibéles. When Madrileños dining on the terraces of the Calle Alcalá witnessed the flag, they gathered on the Paseo de la Reforma, and, in Juliá’s words, “remained for a moment with mouths agape, not knowing what to do, until, their perplexion turned to enthusiasm, all decided to go—unconscious perhaps that they were repeating an ancestral Madrileñan ritual—from Cibéles to the Puerta del Sol, where by 4:30 there was an enormous confluence of people.”

“Public enthusiasm for the Republic spilled into the capital’s streets as Madrileños traveled from all corners of the city to participate in the celebration. As Juliá relates, “automobiles sporting red bandanas drove down Calle Alcalá, while workers from Lavapiés dressed in blue monos, students from San Bernardo wearing tricolor cockades, professional women from Salamanca adorned in Phrygian bonnets, and soldiers from local barracks” all descended on the Puerta del Sol to celebrate the Republic. In another moment of civic and constitutional pride, Spaniards of all demographics performed and experienced democracy in the mutual recognition of citizenship.

Puerta del Sol was thus also socially constructed as synonymous with Spanish democracy. This was apparent in 1932 when General José Sanjurjo attempted to overthrow the Republic in a short-lived coup attempt. In response, Madrileños gathered en masse in the Puerta del Sol to protest. Nationally syndicated photographs of the event captured demonstrators with single clenched fists thrust in the air, soon to become the international symbol for antifascist action, and an echo of the sentiment of May 2, 1808.”

The May 2nd anniversary has not always been a unifying moment for all Spaniards, however. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the memory of May 2nd has been appropriated by political parties of both left and right for partisan gain. Indeed, for the novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte the “cólera,” or hatred that expressed itself on May 2, 1808, has sometimes since been turned inward against perceived enemies in a “Two Spain’s” trope. The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 would reveal the limitations of May 2nd as a unifying force.

The Puerta del Sol would endure a darker history under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, when the General Directorate of Security would occupy the Real Palacio de Correos building, the basement of which would be used for detention (and worse) of suspected opponents of the regime. Madrid’s previously bustling public spaces were delimited in what the historian Michael Richards has called, “A Time of Silence.” Under Francoism, the plaza would become a site of surveillance, rather than one of celebration or agency.

Still, the continuation of older traditions, such as the consumption of 12 grapes to ring in the New Year under the clock tower of the Real Palacio de Correos would ensure that the plaza was occasionally filled in civic ceremony. Televisión Española’s live coverage of the event since 1962 provided images once again associating the Puerta del Sol with Spanish civil society, giving the space renewed social meaning.

Thus, if the memory of May 2nd has sometimes been contested, its geography has not. The Puerta del Sol is once again a space associated with a progressive Spain of civic action, largely the domain of the political left.

In the twenty first century, the plaza has once again been the site of moral indictment against perceived injustice on a mass scale, as in 2011’s 15-M anti-austerity protests, and the more recent No Tyrants demonstrations.

As both a site of protest and a space for human agency, the Puerta del Sol remains forever linked in collective memory with the events of May 2nd.