Social Transformation: Population, Class, and Labor Movements

Social Change

1. Population Growth

Population growth was important, increasing from 10 to 18 million inhabitants. Despite this, the old demographic regime persisted, with high mortality rates, especially among children, and low life expectancy. Rural exodus also occurred, although less significantly than in Europe, with the rural Spanish population remaining at 70%.

2. Transition to a Class Society

The emergence of a class society was based on economic differences:

• Nobility: Lost their tax privileges and criminal immunity but maintained titles, land, prestige, and political influence.
• Clergy: Reduced in number and lost its rich heritage but maintained its ideological and moral control over the population, especially women.
• Gentry: Landowners, financiers, industrialists, senior military officers. They were the main beneficiaries of economic change and mimicked the life of the nobility, often intermarrying.
• Middle Class: Professionals (lawyers, doctors), owners, merchants, civil servants. A fundamentally urban sector identified with liberal ideas, although they were a minority.
• Popular Urban Groups: Craftsmen, with numerous traditional workshops. Domestic workers were very important, especially women, and urban trades (coachmen, water carriers).
• Proletariat: Factory, mine, and construction workers were still few in number, and their living conditions were very harsh.
• Peasantry: 70% of the population, with significant differences between landowners and over 5 million landless laborers living in miserable conditions.
• Marginalized: The poor (the sick, disabled, widows) who had no alternative to begging or crime (Vagrancy 3%).

3. The Start of the Labor Movement

Working and living conditions were very harsh: child labor, long working hours, open fires, lack of social protection. These conditions resulted in:

• The appearance of the labor movement in its early stage: The first conflicts and riots in the 1830s were Luddite actions in Alcoy and Barcelona, and early formation of mutual aid workers' associations.
• Consolidation of the labor movement: Extension of rights and freedoms of association and assembly; diffusion of ideas from the First International founded in 1864; suppression of anarchism and direct action, which had more influence in Catalonia and Andalusia. Marxism was introduced into the Spanish working class, particularly in Asturias, Madrid, and the Basque Country. Pablo Iglesias founded the Socialist Party in 1879, and the UGT (General Workers' Union) was created in 1888.