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Abstract:
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"It is hard to imagine many countries so similar and dissimilar - at times amici/nemici all at once - as France, Italy and Spain. In addition to physical proximity and characteristics, they share common
linguistic and cultural roots, have for the most part genuflected at the same altar, and assimilated, emulated and, at times, sought to avoid each another's customs, institutions and ways of life. Seldom
severed for long periods, the movement of ideas, people and goods between them has proceeded over the centuries through mutual consent, rivalry, imitation, alliance, dynastic or territorial aggrandizement and
force. The network of relations became more fixed, but no less complex to understand, with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and their political and economic reverberations. A Neapolitan Bourbon monarch and Neapolitan advisers in the eighteenth century helped to make Spain a nation state, but it was Napoleon's brother who was truly the first king of Spain. Before becoming king of France in 1830, Louis Philippe sat as a peer in the Sicilian parliament. The Spaniards fought against the Napolepnic state being created in France and Italy but undertook to create a more centralized and more egalitarian constitutional arrangement of their own in 1812, in the process giving the world the term 'liberal' and setting a precedent for a military veto to constitutional and institutional reforms (the so called pronunciamientos) that was to afflict Spanish public life until the Franco regime."
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