Teresa González Aja

Resumen Tras la Guerra Civil, en España se establece un nuevo régimen, que tiene como eje central la figura de Franco. Dentro de la imagen que el franquismo quiso dar, jugó un importante papel, al igual que en todos los regímenes totalitarios, la imagen id alizada del hombre. ...

he first third of the twentieth century more or less coincides with the reign of Alfonso XIII, in which extremely important changes occurred in Spanish politics and society. The institutional framework was modified, there was economic growth and the union movement developed. During this first third of the century Spain experienced a process of broad modernisation, but it was a modernising process that failed. The King was by no means unaffected by this modernising process. Brought up from birth for such an important change, his mentality throughout his reign was that of a constitutional monarch with all the limitations of the mentality prevalent in that era, including the possibility of a temporary dictatorship. During his political life, the King was surrounded by an aristocratic and military environment with which he fully identified. Politically powerful, he decisively influenced the lives and institutions of the Spanish people. As the representative of a nation, he became a model to follow but also a model to criticise. His image was that of a sportsman, soldier and statesman. In general the public recognised all these images and each one of them increased or decreased the popularity of the King in ways that are not easy for the historian to decipher. What interests us here is to analyse this man in his sportsman-soldier guise as more than just a symbolic figure; that is, to study his conduct as king within these two environments. The sources used embrace both the legislation generated during his reign in relation to the armed forces and to the organisation of sport, and the magazines of the era in which we can see the image of the King that reached the general public.

Motorcycling in Spain was a minority sport from its very inception. However, the emergence of certain personalities, especially Angel Nieto, and their subsequent successes attracted the attention of high-ranking government officials who began to take an interest in it. Relatively quickly they identified the sport as a convenient method of advancing propaganda for the regime. The iconography associated with a sports hero, someone who began with nothing only to overcome great suffering and attain fame and recognition through sheer willpower, carried considerable symbolic resonance. Such sporting stars represented a set of values that state departments considered useful, and for which they did not hesitate to use both the press and even educational institutions to advance a relationship, as they saw it, between success in motor sport and the well-being of the nation. The subsequent emergence of a democratic system of government in Spain brought with it considerable levels of freedom, which in turn would have a profound impact on sport, including motorcycle racing. It would allow circuits to be built, foreign bikes to be imported into the country and a new type of sports star to emerge, one who now owed his/her success not alone to his/her own efforts but also to the considerable sporting infrastructures that existed in the ‘new’ Spain.

... was hindered by two fundamental blows which would be the origin of its eternal political frustration: the execution of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera in the ... It is a well-known fact that official chastity made it obligatory not only to wear a swimming costume on the beach, but also a ...