The conquest of the masses. The origins of state propaganda in the interwar Spain, 1917-1936

This paper investigates the legislation and institutions which paved the way to the domestic and foreign state propaganda in Spain between 1917 and 1936. Amid the public debates on the legitimacy of propaganda that spread all over Europe and the United States after the First World War, our aim is to analyze the deep transformation in the relationship among the state and the mass media, specially the press, that also took place in Spain during the interwar period –in other words, a long-term turn towards an increase of the governmental constraint on the public opinion through the censorship and, more significantly, a conscious willingness to have a massive influence on the citizenship thanks to techniques such as official press cabinets, newspaper funding practices or news agencies. The main value of the Spanish case lies in the fact that this changing atmosphere overlapped with the succession of three totally different regimes –Restoration, Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, Second Republic– that, however, shared part of the motivations and institutional responses to the challenging inclusion of the masses in the way of making politics.