About the Book:This book focuses on the “anticlerical industry”–the mass-production of anticlerical newspapers, novels, cartoons, and other propaganda forms produced by republican muckrakers, journalists, and politicians, especially Jos Nakens–in order to demonstrate the centrality of anticlericalism to the debates regarding alternate forms of government in Spain, and competing visions of Spanish identity in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. Utilizing anticlericalism, radical republicans sought to call into question the legitimacy of the monarchy by tying it to what they argued was a corrupt and abusive Catholic Church and clergy in the hopes of paving the way to the coming of a lasting Republican polity.