Royalists at the borders. A transnational political threat in the 1830s

Based on the analysis of the clandestine crossings of the Franco-Spanish border by Carlist leaders during the First Carlist War (1833-1840), which opposed the Spanish counter-revolutionaries and the liberal government in Madrid, this article uncovers a transnational royalist threat in Western Europe in the 1830s, and looks at how states responded to this threat in a number of ways and at several scales. The article first shows how this royalist threat was organised, through clandestine political circulations of counter-revolutionary leaders made possible by illegal networks and strategies and through the solidarity between French, Spanish and Portuguese counter-revolutionaries, in a context of fragility of the liberal regimes recently installed in these three countries. This threat, which stemmed from the persistence of a strong counter-revolutionary current in Europe at the time, posed a diplomatic challenge to European states. On the one hand, it meant that the liberal regimes had to fight insurrectionary and illegal movements that received support from the absolutist states of the rest of Europe. On the other hand, it implied that these liberal states develop instruments of repression on a transnational scale to fight more effectively against these movements, despite the tensions they generated. On a national scale, states also learnt to ward off this political threat by developing tools for surveillance, territorial management and repression. The French case clearly shows the centrality of border areas in the creation of these mechanisms, a centrality that can be explained by the role they played in the structuring of this royalist threat. By combining cross-border, national and diplomatic scopes, the study aims to offer an enriched reading of the political processes that marked Europe in the 1830s, through an analytical prism that can be applied to other spaces and periods.