Women Warriors and National Heroes: Agustina de Aragón and Her Indian Sisters*

Abstract

Born into a Brahmin family around 1827, she married the ruler of the princely state of Jhansi when she was fourteen. [...]the events leading up to the revolt of 1857, little about her life is actually known. Perhaps the first example was the statue of Voltaire commissioned by members of the "Enlightened" elite as homage to the hero of the Republic of Letters, their own imagined community.91 There are also differences between the Spanish and Indian heroes, but these are embedded within the broad similarities and derive from local specifics, such as the existence in India of caste or the availability of female divinities, which can make certain questions either more problematic or more easily resolved.

The eighty prints of Francisco Goya's Disasters of War present a panorama of virtually unrelieved horror and barbarism. French and Spaniards, men and women, soldiers and civilians: all are perpetrators and victims of savage violence. There is very little that is redeeming here. One exception is print 7 (Fig. 1). A single woman in a white dress, bodies at her feet, stands beside a cannon, which she is about to fire. Goya's lapidary caption, "Qué valor!" (What bravery!), provides a very rare positive comment.

The woman in the print has her back to us, but she is far from anonymous. Unlike the other scenes Goya portrays, either of generic violence or actual events involving nameless-and faceless-people, the protagonist of print 7 has a name, and one that has a distinguished place among Spain's pantheon of national heroes. She is Agustina de Aragón.

The topic of hero cults in modern Europe has attracted considerable attention lately: special issues of European History Quarterly in October 2007 and July 2009 are but two indications.1 Within this literature, the role of gender has been repeatedly highlighted. Historians have shown that, in the European context, heroes have been "overwhelmingly male" and that "most national hero cults in modern Europe emphasized male virility and strength while the unheroic 'other' against whom the narrative was principally directed was often feminized."2 They have also pointed out that "war, along with revolution[,] unsettled gender norms in ways that could not be undone" and produced the apparently paradoxical trends of the establishment of complementary and separate spheres of male and female activity, alongside the presence of women engaged in a range of public activities during the war."3

The literature on heroes is now going beyond studies of individual nations to look at the broader European context. As Robert Gerwarth puts it in his introduction to the recent special issue of European Historical Quarterly devoted to hero cults and the nation, one of the editors' objectives was to begin to develop "a more integrated, Europeanized perspective on the politics of the past."4 This article proposes to carry this project one step further by considering one European woman warrior and national hero, Agustina de Aragón, in a comparative frame that extends beyond Europe. The article consists of four parts. The first part discusses Lakshmibai, a woman warrior from India's First War of Independence against the British in 1857 who became an official national hero. The second briefly explores the emergence of another parallel but explicitly alternative figure from that same conflict. The third part explores in detail the changing representations of Agustina de Aragón within Spain over the two centuries since her exploits in Zaragoza. The final part compares Agustina's fate as a woman warrior and national hero to the two Indians and examines the ways in which the construction and use of hero cults in a European country resemble and differ from those in a non-European one.

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The official pantheon of heroes of India's First War of Independence of 1857 has always featured one woman, Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi. Born into a Brahmin family around 1827, she married the ruler of the princely state of Jhansi when she was fourteen. Until the events leading up to the revolt of 1857, little about her life is actually known. That changed in 1853, when her husband died. The only living male heir was an adopted son; applying the recently introduced Doctrine of Lapse, which imposed the British practice of male primogeniture, the British governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, refused to accept him as the new rajah, declared the kingdom lapsed, and put it under British rule. Lakshmibai was given a pension and allowed to retain the palace as a personal residence, but her "protracted campaign of diplomacy" against Dalhousie's actions, including retaining a British lawyer, proved fruitless.5

When the rebellion broke out in May 1857, Lakshmibai was leftas the effective ruler of Jhansi. How she initially responded to this situa- tion has been hotly contested, at the time and since. Did she support the rebel sepoys based in Jhansi right away and share responsibility for the massacre of British civilians that took place there? Or, as she herself wrote to the British, did she act under duress and do her best to be a placeholder for them until they could reestablish control? In any case, by early 1858 the British considered her a rebel leader and were offering a reward for her capture. Lakshmibai certainly led the defense of the city against a siege by the British that started in March 1858. When the British finally captured Jhansi, she managed to escape, with her adopted son strapped to her back, thus avoiding the vicious retribution the British wreaked on those they deemed responsible for the earlier massacre. She then played a key role in the seizure and subsequent defense of Gwalior, where, sword in hand and dressed as a man, she was killed on the battlefield.6

Lakshmibai did not fall into oblivion after the events of 1857, and she did not need institutionalized politics to make Indians remember her. Well before nationalism emerged as a political movement, the Rani was the subject of verbal and visual representations that show she "quickly became a cult heroine"7 (Fig. 2).

Almost immediately after the defeat of the uprising, Lakshmibai was memorialized as a hero in poems and ballads. In many of these she is identified with one or more Hindu goddesses. For example,

Though Lakshmi you are Durga

Like the Ganga you purify all evil . . .

In war you are Bhairavi and Chamunda . . .

You are Kali,

Forgiving and protector of kindred,

Death-axe to the British enemy.8

Paintings and murals of the Rani, often showing her in battle, were common in private spaces such as homes and temples, away from British eyes. Joyce Lebra-Chapman calls them "underground political art." She describes one of these murals as follows:

The Rani appears among scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata covering the long wall of entire room in an upper-class Jhansi resi- dence. Dome at the turn of the century by a craftsman, the style is popular . . . The brightly coloured paintings show the Rani in two scenes. In one she is astride a horse, in battle . . . She is accompanied by rows of armed foot soldiers, some with swords others with guns or cannon. Flowered borders enclose the scene. In the other scene she is shown seated in a palanquin, which would have been the normal mode of travel for an upper-class woman in purdah.9

Lakshmibai was powerfully, although not uniformly, taken up as a hero by Indian nationalists. According to Prachi Deshpande, "In the dominant Indian nationalist narrative, she has emerged as a heroic mother battling for her son's patrimony, an iconic figure in the gen- dered representations of the modern Indian nation."10 Gandhi's rhetoric and choice of symbols pointed to women as mothers, producers of homespun and inclined to passive resistance. Lakshmibai, like the goddess Kali, who embodied different, contradictory behaviors, was not among his referents.11 In contrast, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian National Congress leader and the first prime minister of independent India, took a different view: in his Glimpses of World History, which he wrote from jail in 1934, he identified her as the "one bright spot against [the] dark background" of the 1857 rebellion: "Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, a girlwidow, twenty years of age, who donned a man's dress and came out to lead her people against the British. Many a story is told of her spirit and ability and undaunted courage."12

The more radical end of the nationalist movement also used Lakshmibai as a hero. From 1905 to 1919 nationalist politics experienced what is known as its extremist phase. Radicals, led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, split the Indian National Congress in 1907, returning only in 1919. In the early years of this period, "from 1905 to 1910 [Lakshmibai's] image was taken out on floats during the Ramlila festival to the irritation of the British police."13 Vinaya Damodar Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence, 1857, was written in Marathi and banned by the British even before it was published, a ban the British never lifted. The Rani of Jhansi looms large in this radical nationalist history, the subject of an entire chapter and part of another. For Savarkar, she was one of the "Revolutionary leaders," but she was much more than that: "the central figure of the fight . . . . The central idea, the impersonation of Swaraj . . . the incarnation of liberty . . . . She was the concentrated essence of all virtues . . . The flame of patriotism was always burning in her heart. And she was proud of her country's honour and pre-eminent in war. It is very rarely that a nation is so fortunate as to be able to claim such an angelic person as a daughter and queen. That honour has not yet fallen to the lot of England."14

Later in his life, Savarkar moved from Indian nationalism to Hindu nationalism, what is now known as Hindutva, a term he is believed to have invented, and is considered the intellectual father of the BJP and RSS.15 In this context, the fact that his book was written in Marathi takes on additional significance. The Marathas have their own historical identity and their own heroes, of whom the most important is Shivaji (1630-1680), who is celebrated for founding the Maratha kingdom and defending it against the Moslem Mughal empire. Maratha military success was based on the use of light cavalry, which gives added resonance to representations of the Rani on horseback.16

The appeal of Lakshmibai to radical nationalists continued into the next generation. Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army, which fought against the British during World War II, included a Rani of Jhansi regiment that was composed of some 1,500 young women: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians, drawn from the Indian population in Southeast Asia. Speaking in Singapore in July 1943, Bose called for "a unit of brave Indian women to form a death-defying Regiment who will wield the sword which Rani of Jhansi wielded in India's First War of Independence in 1857." The regiment was commanded by Dr. Lakshmi Swaminathan, a thirty-year-old obstetrician based in Singapore. (Bose later named her minister in charge of women's organization in his provisional government.) The regiment actually did go on campaign, in the spring and summer of 1944.17

Just as British rule was winding down, Vrindavanal Varma published his historical novel Queen of Jhansi (1946). As well as being a prolific novelist, Varma, who came to be called "India's Walter Scott," was a nationalist lawyer who was active in local politics in Jhansi. Queen of Jhansi proved to be "one of the most influential nonscholarly" works on the revolt in Jhansi and even found a regular place in the school curriculum of independent India.18 Both Harleen Singh and Prachi Deshpande have recently analyzed the novel, and, although their readings have different emphases, they coincide on two points. First, Varma presents Lakshmibai as a nationalist heroine: "a forerunner of Swaraj" in Singh's phrase. Under her rule, Jhansi was "a space of inter-religious harmony," a model for the future India the Indian National Congress sought to build.19 Second, Varma managed to create a warrior queen who did not subvert dominant ideas of either womanhood or widowhood. Her interest in things military and involvement in the defense of her kingdom did not prevent her from sponsoring "women oriented festivals" or finding "the time to cook special dishes and feed her son amid all the strategic planning." The effect of her presence in battle was softened by Varma's identifying her with the goddess Durga, and her death brings identification with Sita, the mythical model of "subservient Hindu femininity."20 On the crucial issue of proper behavior for a widow, Varma "drew on a century-long, moderate, reformist Hindu discourse that advocated ascetic widowhood as a desirable, and suitably progressive, middle ground between the radical poles of immolation (sati) and the right to remarriage."21

Independent India has enshrined Lakshmibai as an official national hero. It has issued postage stamps in her honor: one on the centenary of the 1857 revolt and another in 1988 to commemorate the First War of Independence. Both portray her in what would become the standardized manner: on horseback and wielding a sword. The National Institute of Physical Education, created in 1957 and located in Gwalior, is named after Lakshmibai "as a tribute to her role in the glorious freedom struggle." And a promotional video produced by the Indian Ministry of Tourism in 2007, the 150th anniversary of the First War of Independence, urging people to "discover the roots of democratic India," begins with a picture of Lakshmibai and the caption "Some fought with swords."22

S. N. Sen's official history of the revolt, Eighteen Fifty-seven, which was published by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1957, devotes an entire chapter to Lakshmibai and her role in the events.23 His is a measured account, as befits an academic historian, and he carefully weighs the evidence surrounding her actions, especially her ini- tial relationship with the rebellious soldiers and the point at which she decided to fight the British. Sen describes the Rani as "a highspirited woman [who] was not going to be chastised" by a neighboring ruler who invaded Jhansi. She faced the British siege of Jhansi having previously "prudently laid waste to the countryside" in an attempt to deprive the British forces of supplies. When her city did fall, in March 1858, this "excellent rider" was able to escape on horseback, covering twenty-one miles in a night. She died at Gwalior, "on the battlefield a soldier's death." In Sen's view, the Rani had not conspired with the rebels before the revolt and turned against the British because "their torturous diplomacy" drove her to do so. The British made her the scapegoat for the Jhansi massacre, but their "vilification" is outweighed by the "thousands of unsophisticated villagers [who] still sing of the valour and the virtues of the woman who held her own against her . . . enemies to fall under a British bullet."24

Lakshmibai has retained her importance as a national heroine, crossing into new media as they emerged. There have been at least three movies made about her, two in Hindi and one in Telugu, and a television series aired starting in August 2009.25 She has even made it onto YouTube: Rajshri Media, "the digital entertainment arm of the Rajshri group" of film and television studios, has produced a fifteenminute animated biography of the Rani as part of its series "Ancient Heroes of India." In this version, Lakshmibai is not only a great military leader and patriot-her dying words are "carry on the fight. The days of freedom are not far away." She is also a democrat: after being deposed by the British, she calls a conference and is "unanimously elected" as ruler.26

Sen's mention of the songs of "unsophisticated" villagers leads to another portrayal of Lakshmibai: as a point of reference for the "postcolonial resistance" of those Indians who have not greatly benefitted from independence.27 This is the Lakshmibai of Mahasweta Mahasweta's novel The Queen of Jansee, published in Bengali in 1956.28 Mahasweta was well known as an advocate of minority rights; her novel, which is critical of the Indian state, draws on folk traditions as well as conventional historical sources. The most famous of these ballads goes:

How valiantly like a man fought she,

The Rani of Jhansi

One every parapet a gun set she,

Raining fire of hell,

How well like a man fought the Rani of Jhansi,

How valiantly and well!29

Mahasweta also deals with the question of widowhood. Lakshmibai's conduct as "a royal Hindu woman of the Brahmin caste" who chose neither to commit sati or "to shave her head and retire from public life" is "aberrant" in Indian terms.30 But for Mahasweta, the Rani's widowhood is an opportunity for "her personality to mature," and the context of the rebellion provides the occasion for "an alternative, uncontainable version of femininity." In the introduction to the English translation of the novel, she said that "Frankly, I felt her widowhood liberated her in many ways."31 This Rani falls outside the established expectations for widows, as she falls outside other established expectations.

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Mahasweta's Lakshmibai is not a standard nationalist hero; she is a figure who remains alive in popular oral culture as a challenge to "the sanctioned history of the state and evidence to the conflux of alternative traditions."32 But India's extraordinary complexity, which adds caste divisions to those of class, gender, region, and religion, is such that no single figure has proven capacious enough to channel all the country's alternative traditions. The political mobilization of the Dalits has produced Jhalkaribai, a parallel, mirror-image alternative figure; as a result, there are now two competing women warrior-heroes from the events of 1857.

Jhalkaribai is not merely another hero, a companion to Lakshmibai; she is a counter-hero in a zero-sum game. She is the name the subaltern speaks.33 The emergence of Jhalkaribai as a heroine is part of what Dipesh Chakrabarty describes as "a veritable festival of 'tradition invention'" by lower-caste groups which has given rise to numerous "combative narratives."34 This phenomenon is the latest chapter in the transformation of what Rabindranath Tagore called the "enormous public enthusiasm for history" into "so many history wars" as "enthusiasm for the past was fast transformed into partisan passions" by the emergence of mass politics in the 1920s and 1930s.35 It is also an outstanding example of the recent heightened politicization of history in India, although the Hinduization of history textbooks under the previous BJP government is much better known.36

As the story is told, Jhalkaribai was a member of the kori caste, and her husband was a soldier in the army of Lakshmibai's husband. The two women got to know each other and became friends. They also had identical physical appearances. When the British approached Jhansi, it was Jhalkaribai who urged the Rani to resist, and when the city was about to fall she convinced her to flee, pretended to be the ruler, and was able to deceive the British. It was Jhalkaribai who died while the Rani managed to escape and live on in hiding.

The popularity of Jhalkaribai as a Dalit hero is primarily a product of the political mobilization of the lower castes of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar under the auspices of the Bahujan Samaj Party (Majority People's Party) since 1984. The party called for "a new literature which would highlight the problems of the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward castes. It should be concerned with building a society based on equality, justice, freedom and fraternity. It should instill courage, self-respect, and generosity by exploration of history of the relevant communities. For this, biographies of those saints and heroes who played important role in the Dalit struggle for liberation are important."37 The BSP even created a research wing, with branches at the district level, devoted to "popular historical memories and dalit heroes."38

The result has been the "mass production and distribution of cheap booklets" which, according to Badri Narayan, "even the poorest can afford."39 They are written "in simple colloquial Hindi and [in] various literary genres," and draw on folk tales and other elements of Dalit popular culture, such as songs. History has a central place in this literature, but it is a history that emphasizes the Dalits' role in the struggle against the British. Dalit histories turn the received story of 1857 on its head. Their heroes "are presented as the real heroes of 1857," while the contributions of the canonical heroes, such as Lakshmibai, are minimized or even questioned entirely. The images of her on the covers of these booklets even employ the same standardized pose that is used to represent the Rani (Fig. 3).

Jhalkaribai is the subject of a "vast number of popular Hindi tracts, written by various authors, and cultural invocations of her, including comics, poems, plays, novels, biographies, nautankis, and even magazines and organizations in her name." In these renderings, Lakshmibai is not the "model nationalist ruler" but "a weakling . . . reluctant to fight the British, and in fact, is shown as a British supporter and agent."40 This is part of a larger assault on the "'Hindu'. . . history which is oppressively hegemonic in Indian social life" and which even includes a rejection of Gandhi, whose "campaign against untouchability and calling them harijans are viewed as attempts to impose a constructed identity guided by the interests of the dominant section of society."41

This rewriting of history is much more than an academic exercise. It is an integral part of a process of building Dalit self-identity as the basis for autonomous political agency, and it has had considerable success. The BSP has used figures such as Jhalkaribai as a way to connect with its potential voters; its success derives from the fact that these figures were very much alive in Dalit memory and oral culture. As with Lakshmibai, but to a much greater degree, the hero existed and could be wielded by formal political actors; she did not have to be manufactured. The result was "an icon-based politics which suited the collective memory of the people of the region."42 Jhalkaribai and the other female heroes of 1857 have been employed by Mayawati, the woman who leads the BSP in Uttar Pradesh and has been the state's chief minister on a number of occasions since 1995. Mayawati constantly used these women as references, and for a while the party portrayed her as their incarnation.43 Jhalkaribai's name has also been used by feminists in northern India: Bundelkhand University in Jhansi has a Veerangana Jhalkari Bai Center for Women's Studies and Development.44

Charu Gupta has observed that not only are women represented in the new Dalit histories of 1857, these "female icons, engaged in radical armed struggles, far outnumber dalit men." These narratives generally depict the women as having been brave from childhood and expert riders, swimmers, and archers; as being moral, noble, and "super nationalist"; and dressed in "'masculine' attires, with their bodies all covered up" but at the same time classically beautiful.45 Certainly, Dalits in general seem to have less trouble with the more "masculine" elements of their heroines than do upper castes with Lakshmibai, as events surrounding the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence in 1997 showed. In northern India, the anniversary was the stage for dueling heroines. Jhalkaribai was honored in some places, and Lakshmibai in others, but the two were never celebrated together.

Both these characters are parts of the same story, but they are remembered and honored separately and in different forms by the communities to which they belonged. The celebrations around Rani Lakshmibai were mostly organized by the BJP and RSS and were largely attended by upper-caste communities. The celebrations around Jhalkaribai, in contrast, were organized by the BSP and attended by lower-caste communities. 46 Moreover, the qualities which were celebrated were very different. Lakshmibai, the heroine of the Hindu nationalist BJP and the RSS (National Volunteers Organization), was cast strictly in terms of "upper-caste feminine traits of sacrifice and self-effacement." The BSP's Jhalkaribai was her polar opposite: "In a village adjoining Jhansi, a play on the life of Jhalkaribai was being staged. In the play as soon as Jhalkaribai cut the head offa British soldier, the audience applauded and began shouting . . . 'Hail Jhalkaribai.' The village where this took place was a Dalit village predominantly inhabited by the Koris, the caste to which Jhalkaribai belonged."47

What stands out about Lakshmibai and Jhalkaribai as women warriors and national heroes? Most striking is that in many ways, they are the same person, but one seen from two very different social positions. This reflects their own social origins: one a Brahmin and a queen, the other a Dalit. They were involved in the same actions, a struggle against British imperial rule and, in the Dalit telling, the fact that they were physically identical allowed Jhalkaribai to impersonate the Rani and die in her place. Both have been represented in standardized images. Both were remembered by Indians in their own cultural forms, such as paintings and ballads, before they were adopted by politicians and turned into national or caste heroes. The fact of a woman warrior does not seem to have been an issue for Dalits, but gender-more precisely widowhood-did matter for those who promoted Lakshmibai. They dealt with this by invoking religious referents. Finally, the fact that the figure of Jhalkaribai has thrived attests to the inability of the official woman warrior-hero of 1857 to appeal to all Indians.

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Up until the moment she fired the cannon, Agustina de Aragón was engaged in the recognized role of women in early modern European siege warfare. Sieges were considered attacks "on the community, and as on other occasions when the community required protection, such as food riots," women took an active part.48 This view is shared by Irene Castells, Gloria Espigado, and María Cruz Romeo in their introduction to a recent volume on Spanish women during the war against Napoleon. The power vacuum caused by the invasion and the rhetoric about "the Spanish people" made a space for women, who were stimulated by the political and cultural implications of the conflict: religion and family as well as the monarchy. "For this reason, and from the beginning, the press, manifestos, proclamations, the artistic representations of the events of the War recalled women's exploits at the same time as they shaped an idea of the nation. A process of glorifying heroines began then."49

However, very few European women were subsequently elevated to their country's pantheon of national heroes.50 Agustina de Aragón was immediately celebrated for her role in the defense of Zaragoza against the French in 1808 and has retained a place as a national icon, perhaps the only individual Spanish woman to do so. (The other women who played key roles in the defense of Zaragoza were recognized and rewarded for their heroism at the time and appeared in works of art, such as Casta Alvarez and María Agustín, quickly faded into oblivion. So too did the all-woman Santa Barbara Company that fought to defend the city of Gerona against a French siege.)51 The recent bicentenary celebrations of the events of 1808, which produced a comic- and even a Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Agustina -de-Aragon/126322070592) about her-showed that Agustina remains alive in Spanish culture.

The high point of Agustina's importance and popularity came in the century between 1850 and 1950, when she was the subject of innumerable history paintings, light operas, and two movies. The celebration of the first centenary in 1908 gave Agustina's public profile a major boost. Zaragoza was the "epicenter" of the celebrations and the only place in the country to receive funding from the national government. Most of the events emerged from local initiatives, and the celebration reflected the struggle between Catholics and liberals and republicans. The Church made a major effort to infuse the centennial with a religious flavor, and it succeeded quite well.52 King Alfonso XIII and most leading politicians were in the audience when Canon Florencio Jardiel gave the eulogy for the heroes of the sieges and connected patriotism with religion: "Patriotism is the bulwark of religious faith, crowned by the holy [Virgin of the] Pillar, and sealed with that which is greatest and most fecund on this earth, martyrdom." For his part, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Zaragoza described the struggle against Napoleon as "a religious crusade more than patriotic war."53 The celebrations also stressed local heroes, especially the women, and here Agustina had pride of place. Her act of glory filled one face of the monument to the heroes of the siege that was inaugurated in the presence of Alfonso XIII, and he presided over the transfer of her remains from the cathedral to a specially constructed mausoleum in the church of Our Lady of the Portillo.

During the Spanish Civil War, Agustina was used as an example by both sides. For the Republic, including the communists, she was "the first militia woman on Iberian soil, a woman who bequeathed to Spaniards her example of fighting heroically for our freedoms." One Communist Party leaflet from December 1937 called on the women of Madrid, as "descendants of agustina de aragon," to "inspire your partner, your sons and your brothers, even if you give your all to the crude struggle." For the nationalists she was an icon of the national struggle against the foreign invader, comparable even to General Franco himself:

Agustina de Aragón, the heroine of the First National Uprising General Francisco Franco, leader of the Second National Uprising.54

* * *

What did Agustina de Aragón do to become famous?55 In June 1808, a French army under General Lefebvre undertook a siege of the city of Zaragoza in northeastern Spain. Despite being vastly outnumbered and seeing much of the city laid to waste by the French assault, a junta under the command of Captain General José Palafox resisted the siege and compelled Lefebvre to liftit. Among the residents of the city was a young woman by the name of Agustina Saragossa y Domènech. Born in Barcelona in 1786, Agustina, with her young son, had gone to Zaragoza in the spring of 1808, following her husband, a junior artillery officer. Women played an important role in defending cities against sieges, especially carrying water and other provisions to the men who were fighting. Agustina was occupied in these tasks when the heroic moment presented itself.56 One British observer described Agustina: "Her countenance is mild and feminine; her smile pleasing and her face altogether the last I should have supposed to belong to a woman who had led troops through blood and slaughter and pointed the cannon at the enemy."57 General Palafox arrived at the scene shortly after Agustina's exploit, giving her a decoration and inducting her into the artillery as a soldier. He later ordered medals struck: these read "Defender of Zaragoza" and "Award for Valour and Patriotism," and Agustina wore them and military uniform until her death in 1853.58

Historians rarely have the privilege of hearing women such as Agustina de Aragón express themselves in their own words, but in August 1809 she recounted the exploit that made her famous in a petition to the king.59 She "leftBarcelona for the capital of Aragon at the begin ning of June, 1808" and arrived "when it began to be attacked by the French." She immediately became involved in the defense of the city, taking up the usual women's role of encouraging the soldiers by "serving wadding for the guns and other supplies." When the French began to bombard the Portillo gate, Agustina "puts herself among the Artillerymen, gives them relief, helps them and says 'here there are women when you have nothing left.'" Then came the key moment.

Only a short time had passed when the sargeant who was in command in place of another officer who had been taken away dead, fell, shot in the breast, as well as almost all the other Artillerymen, due to a Grenade and the bullets flying around, as a result of which the battery was rendered useless and open to attack. Indeed, an enemy column was already closing in when, the Exponent grabbed a linstock and, moving through the dead and wounded, fires a 24-gauge cannon with such effect that the surprise of this sudden event roused the few remaining Artillerymen and with them she sustained fire until reinforcements arrived from another gate obliging the enemy to undertake a shameful and hurried retreat.

Shortly afterward, "General [Palafox] decorates her with the title of Artillerywoman and a salary of six reales per day."

This was the incident that Goya and numerous others subsequently portrayed, but it was not the end of Agustina's service. She continued to work "this battery and the others where the French charged." In addition she would leave the battery "to help where it was most needed, with ammunition, food and other things." When Palafox saw her at this work "he gave her two medals with the legends Defender of Zaragoza and Reward for Valour and Patriotism." With her "patriotic enthusiasm" still strong, Agustina remained in the city when the second siege began at the end of December 1808, and she continued to act valiantly. "The Exponent, stopping in the midst of so much danger . . . took two guns from dead soldiers and presented the lot to the Commander of her battery." Only the "cruel disease" that hit the city could do what the French had been unable to: "make her desist from her determination to resist such vile scum." Agustina was on her sickbed when she heard the news that the city had finally fallen: "She gets to her feet, gets dressed with help and, with her five-year-old son who was in the same condition as she, tries to escape but falls into the hands of the enemy, and one of them says 'this is the Artillerywoman.'" She and her son were forced to march with the other prisoners. They managed to escape but the child died soon afterward "from the force of the disease, the march and lack of resources to attend to him." Agustina made it to Teruel, where the governor gave her travel documents for Seville, and two generals provided introductions to people there. "Sire, In view of these and other acts of which the Artillerywoman Zaragoza, along with the whole Nation, cannot but be proud, what should she not expect from the generosity with which Your Majesty knows how to reward valour and the purest patriotism?"60 The petition bears a marginal note signed by Palafox confirming that what Agustina says in the document is true: "for her valour she deserves the titles she uses and is worthy of the favour she requests."

Agustina's account is long on details of her exploits; indeed those in the second siege receive more attention than her famous firing of the cannon during the first.61 It is, in contrast, short on her motivations. The French are frequently described as "the enemy" and once as "vile scum." Patriotism is mentioned twice. More ideological motives, such as defense of religion or the legitimate king, are totally absent. And personal motives, including romantic love or defense of family, are equally scarce. Indeed, Agustina's references to her young son are minimal and tangential. Even his death is mentioned in a totally matter-of-fact way.

This was not the only time Agustina spoke through a petition to the powers that be. She lived for almost fifty years after her heroic moment, and she was far from shy about using her service in the war to request compensation.62 She was an active agent in advancing her interests, and the military authorities took her very seriously, as the copious documentation makes clear. (To begin with, her file describes her as: "Branch: Infantry, Title: Heroine, Rank: Junior Lieutenant.")63 Thus, in 1814, she wrote to King Ferdinand, newly returned to Spain after his enforced stay in France, requesting additional funds because her salary was not enough to support her. The king granted her an additional one hundred reales per month.64 In 1822 she successfully requested that her salary be increased, in line with laws passed in 1820 and 1822, and following the death of her husband in 1823 she sought, and received, two payments that were owing to her. A petition in 1827 requested that her salary not be subject to the standard 12 percent deduction for the Montepío Militar. This request was denied, on the grounds that she was "sufficiently well compensated," but she petitioned again, this time successfully, in 1847. Then in 1852, she requested an exemption from the 15 percent deduction levied on retirees and that she be declared to be on active duty. The military authorities agreed that such a "singular woman, who overcame the limits of her sex, immortalized her name, identifying herself with the most glorious exploit of our modern history" should receive the sought-after exemption. The following year, she petitioned again, complaining that the exemption was not being honored by the military authorities in Ceuta, where she was living. Her final petition, again successful, came in 1853 when she requested that her salary be raised to that of a lieutenant.

In her successive petitions, Agustina also alluded to her motives, and in the process revealed some ability in maneuvering through Spain's complex and changing political landscape. Her original petition, addressed to the king, although he was captive in France, mentioned only patriotism and hatred of the French. (In his memoirs, Palafox claimed that as she lit the cannon, Agustina cried, "Long live Spain! Long live my king Ferdinand VII!" It would have been to her advantage to have included this in her petitions to Ferdinand, had she in fact said it.)65 In her petition of 1814, however, Agustina announces her "decided love for your royal person" and says that she had been moved by the desire to "Be useful to Your Majesty and to the just cause being defended in 1808." "The just cause," a wonderfully ambiguous phrase that. Writing to Isabella II in 1845, Agustina refers to her "innate patriotism" and her desire to "be useful to her King and her Fatherland."66

Agustina was far from being the only woman who took part in the defense of Zaragoza, nor was she the only one who was recognized at the time for her contributions or memorialized in visual representations. These began to appear almost immediately. The commander of Zaragoza, José Palafox, was unusually attentive to public relations, and after the first siege had been lifted he invited a number of artists, Goya among them, to the city. Juan Gálvez and Fernando Brambila also went, and the visit led to the "hugely popular" The Ruins of Zaragoza, which was one of the very first artistic renderings of the sieges. Their album consisted of twenty-four prints of the siege, followed by twelve "portraits of the principal heroes and heroines, chosen from among the most distinguished personalities of the first siege," among them Agustina and three other women heroes: María Agustín, Casta Alvarez, and the Countess of Bureta, as well as a battle scene titled "The Women of Zaragoza in Combat with French Dragoons."67 Yet it was Agustina alone who stuck in the national memory and achieved the status of national hero, while the others were all but forgotten.68 She remained a popular subject throughout the nineteenth century and into the present, and she has been represented in a wide range of media, both visual and otherwise: painting, sculpture, music, theatre, fiction, advertising, movies, and, most recently, comic books.

The answer to "why Agustina?" is elusive. In part it lies in timing. The upsurge in Agustina's popularity coincided with the takeoffin interest in the national history. The publication of Modesto Lafuente's multivolume Historia General de España, which began in 1857, marked what José Alvarez Junco has called "a veritable collective obsession" for history writing in Spain, one that engaged a multi-generational group of intellectuals and produced "the canonical version of the past in national terms."69 And this national version of the past needed heroes. The novelized biography by Agustina's daughter, Carlota Cobos, appeared at precisely this moment, in 1858, and benefitted from the patronage of Queen Isabel II as well as the author's sense of public relations in donating her receipts from sales to the army that was fighting a colonial war in Morocco.70

Another possible factor was the political malleability of Agustina's act. She became, to use Marina Warner's words about Joan of Arc, "a diviner's cup, which reflects on the surface of the water the image that the petitioner wants to see."71 This was very useful in a country whose political history in the century and a half after 1808 was turbulent, to say the least. It also derives from the complex motives behind the war against the French. Although it became consecrated as the War of Independence, with the implication that Spaniards were united in a single goal, this was far from the case, as José Alvarez Junco has shown.72

Finally, there was the nature of Agustina's heroism. The interest in national history extended to the arts, especially painting, and Agustina's moment, a single, highly dramatic act, lent itself perfectly to visual representation.

Agustina benefitted from the tremendous surge in importance of history painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, a surge prompted by the inauguration of the Exposiciones Nacionales de Bellas Artes (National Exhibitions of Fine Arts) in 1856. According to one art historian, these exhibitions were responsible for history painting "filling the place leftby religious painting." The prize money offered certainly supports this claim: the winning painting in the history category received 90,000 reales, compared to 35,000 for religious paintings and only 17,500 for landscapes.73 Over the life of the exhibitions, artists entered 625 works with historical themes, of which 52 dealt with the War of Independence. Of these, the sieges of Zaragoza, with eleven paintings, were the favored theme, eclipsing even the uprising of 2 May 1808 in Madrid, and Agustina was "the most frequently repeated icon in all the work about the sieges."74

This iconography was highly standardized: other than in Goya's work-and the Disasters of War were not known until 1863-Agustina is shown from the side with her face plainly visible, either in profile or facing the viewer. The only significant difference was whether or not a priest was included, and in this regard the outliers have been by two foreign artists. In his Defence of Zaragoza, David Wilkie, an English- man, puts a priest in a prominent position, crouching close to Agustina, engrossed in writing while she fires the canon.75 The French artist Augustin Burdet makes the priest more prominent still: standing next to Agustina, cross raised and pistol in his belt. While clergy did play a role in the resistance to Napoleon, and some even became guerrilleros, the fact that no representation by a Spanish artist includes them suggests that Wilkie and Burdet may well have been motivated by either the common foreign view that Spaniards were a particularly priest-ridden people or the Romantic image of the warrior priest.

Agustina firing the cannon is the moment shown in virtually all the visual representations (Fig. 4). Only a couple of portraits, both of which show her in uniform, do not refer to it. Even Juan Gálvez's 1810 portrait, which does not portray the battle but puts Agustina in a pastoral setting, has her leaning against a cannon with dead bodies at her feet. Similarly, a portrait by Agustina's granddaughter, Agustina Atienza Cobos, which was painted in 1885, shows her standing next to a cannon far from any battle, but this time she is wearing a military tunic.76

What was true of painting was also true of monuments. Agustina's moment appears on the monument to the sieges of Zaragoza, and it is also the subject of the monument in Fulleda, her parents' hometown. Mariano Belliure's 1902 statue in the Zaragoza city hall is a partial exception. It does not show Agustina firing the canon but does make reference to it. The statue, which one commentator described as a "strange contrivance," consists of a bust of Agustina perched atop a vertical canon covered in wreaths.77

The images have power, but they do not speak to Agustina's motivations. What was it that drove her to cross the line that separated the "normal" behavior of women during a siege from the man's role of direct military action? Other forms of representation-history writing, fiction, theatre, and film-address this question, but they provide two conflicting answers. The Agustina we find here is driven either by the feminine motivation of love or the masculine motivation of patriotism.

Agustina has been written about in both history and fiction, although the line between the two is not always clear, and the result has often been to create a figure that was very different from the actual woman. The first important account came from Palafox, the commander at Zaragoza, and he attributed her heroic act to a motivation he himself invented: Agustina was moved to act by the death of her lover, an artillery sergeant. This fiction would have a long afterlife, starting with Lord Bryon:

Her lover sinks-she sheds no ill-timed tear; . . . .

Who can appease like her a lover's ghost? . . .

Yet are Spain's maids no race of Amazons

But form'd for all the witching arts of love.

This version was repeated by Emilio Castelar in a book on Spanish women published shortly before he became president of the First Republic in 1873. Before describing Agustina's actions, he says that Aragonese women in general "undoubtedly have something manlike about them." Yet, "her first impulse was that of a woman: seeing the sergeant whom she loved dead at her feet" she grasped the fuse from his hands and fired the cannon "with genuine fury."78

The historical novel La ilustre heroina de Zaragoza, o la célèbre Amazona de la Guerra de la Independencia by Agustina's daughter, Carlota Cobo, provides a very different picture. The book drew on historical sources as well as conversations with Agustina herself to create a protagonist who is a real Romantic heroine, with "a physiognomy marked by pain, a beauty that predicts hardships and an appearance that demands respect. She is generous and is never moved by materialistic motives."79 Instead, she is a patriot first and foremost, although one who fights for a traditional Spain and its conservative ruler, Ferdinand VII.

The latest literary Agustina is very different from all her predecessors. The protagonist of the 2009 comic by Fernando Monzón and Enrique Mendoza is very much a twenty-first-century heroine who bears a much greater resemblance to Lara Croftof the Tomb Raider video games and movies than to her own previous incarnations. The authors describe their Agustina as "Far removed from the archetype of a docile, complacent wife, she embodies values that in literature have traditionally been associated with male characters: taking the lead rather than staying in the background, courage rather than the need to be protected . . . . She is a woman with a burning desire for freedom, prepared to fight for it till the very last breath." In this ver- sion, Agustina's historic heroism is the reaction of a moment, "no decision. It is a reflex." After Zaragoza, she joins the guerrillas and becomes their leader, giving orders to the men in her unit. After an attempt to capture Napoleon's brother, King José, goes awry, she is captured by the French, but manages a daring escape and rides offinto the sunset.80

Agustina has also been the subject of at least two zarzuelas, the specifically Spanish form of light opera. The first, Sebastián Alonso Gómez's Agustina de Aragón, debuted in Zaragoza in June 1907, just before the centenary of the siege. This Agustina is motivated primarily by love, for her husband, for her father, and her friend's love for a French sympathizer. The opera begins with Agustina's wedding. A messenger arrives ordering all men under forty to report to the city for military duty. Agustina tries to convince her husband not to go but finally relents, telling him to go "to kill and if necessary to die." Her husband is soon killed; Agustina then goes in search of her father and follows him to the Portillo gate. When he dies manning a canon, she steps up and fires it, shouting, "Father, you are avenged!" There is also a romantic subplot: Agustina's friend María is in love with Belfort, who has been arrested as a French spy. Agustina agrees to help free him because, as she proclaims: "What heart can be unmoved when love is invoked!" She succeeds, but Belfort breaks his promise not to participate in the attack on the city. Religion has an important role in this zarzuela. The messenger who calls the men to the army says that it is "Our Captain, La Pilarica" [the little Virgin of the Pillar], who "calls us to her defence." And when Agustina agrees to help Belfort she places her hope in the assistance of "La Pilarica."81

The second zarzuela, Agustina de Aragón (La Heroína del Pilar), also debuted in Zaragoza, but half a century later. This Agustina is a very different type of woman: she is driven not by romance but by patriotism, which she places even above religion. She first appears in scene 13, bandaging Pedro, a wounded artillery sergeant. When she has finished she tells him that she has done her duty "as a woman and a Spaniard." Later, she talks of fighting for Spain and for the Fatherland, and when a nun makes a group of women kneel and pray for the Church Agustina adds "and for Spain." Before the big battle, Pedro asks Agustina for a kiss but he is rebuked: if she has to kiss a man, she tells him, "it will be when I'm dead or at the foot of the altar." After General Palafox promotes Pedro, Agustina does fall in love with him. The operetta ends with Agustina telling a group of French officers to let Napoleon know that:

There is in Spain a fierce and strong people

That knows how to fight to the death . . .

Tell him that, after winning this campaign

The living who defeated him,

With their bodies will block the road

Of Your Emperor! . . . This is Spain!82

The War of Independence has also been a popular topic for filmmakers, both Spanish and foreign.83 Two of these films are about Agustina. The first was made in 1928 by Florian Rey, one of the dominant figures of early Spanish movies, a screenwriter and director committed to building a national cinema. Rey was particularly interested in history as the subject for his work, and his Agustina was one of the first history films made in Spain. Rey was commissioned by a group from Aragon, who provided the backing for the production based on a script that Rey himself wrote.84

Only a few minutes of this film remain, but its messages can be reconstructed through the "novelized version" that was published in La novela semanal cinematográfica in 1929. García Carrión finds Rey's version to be "somewhat peculiar." Starting with the siege of Zaragoza, Rey "Introduces a melodramatic vein, the love story between a Spanish woman and a Frenchman, and the conflicts between duty and emotion that affect the protagonists . . . This is essential for the development of the character of Agustina because it allows an exploration of her double condition as woman and soldier, which then articulate the film's overall narratives: Spanish national exaltation and a discourse of peace with France."85 The message is that Spaniards acted unanimously to defeat the French and that civilians were the real heroes.

Gender is central to the film. The battle scene is the climax, and Agustina emerges as the personification of "the Spanish nation in arms . . . the representation of Spanishness." General Palafox appears to make her an officer, after which she dresses in military uniform. But the roles of woman and patriot do not go together easily. Agustina is shown as a mother, and at a key moment her maternal feelings trump her patriotic ones: she frees the French soldier with whom her daughter was in love. Palafox pardons this act of treason when he accepts her explanation that for a woman there is a "law stronger than the law of war."86

The second movie about Agustina, the 1950 version directed by Juan de Orduña and starring Aurora Bautista, the Spanish box office star of the day, is much better known. It was one of a large number of history films made in the early Franco period that presented the regime's National Catholic view of the nation's past. In this Catholic charge, as well as a strong folkloric vein, it resembled Rey's film, but it differed from it in a number of key ways. Where Rey sought to promote French-Spanish friendship, Orduña is strongly anti-French. And while both films include an important-and fictional-love interest, one that conflicts with patriotic duty, they resolve the conflict in opposing ways. The 1950 film shows Agustina going to Zaragoza to join her fiancé. When she arrives, she finds that he is pro-French, which leads her to break offtheir engagement and take part in resisting the siege. Here she again meets Juan, the guerrilla leader who had saved her from being raped by French soldiers. They fall in love, but Juan is killed in battle. Unlike Rey's Agustina, Orduña's puts patriotism ahead of love. In a striking inversion of the usual gender roles, she is "better than the men at putting the political before the personal: both Agustina's lover and her fiancé . . . state that their political decisions are motivated by love for her, while she repeatedly takes political decisions on patriotic grounds knowing they threaten the lives of the men she loves."87 The film ends with Ferdinand VII giving her a medal and declaring "You are the symbol of all the heroes of Spain."

What, then, are the salient characteristics of Agustina de Aragón as a woman warrior and national hero? Initially, Agustina was only one of a number of women who were celebrated for their military actions during the defense of Zaragoza, but they soon faded into obscurity while her reputation grew over time. Put another way, the repeated representation of Agustina's moment in a range of media, many of which were commercial and others of which were official or aspiring to become official, manufactured her as a national hero. If she had an autonomous life in the popular memory, this has been lost. Agustina came from the lower classes, not from the social elite. She became famous for a single military act in a war against a foreign invader, and the visual representations of this act quickly became highly standardized. Agustina's heroic moment has been invested with numerous political meanings, although this political charge has disappeared over the last forty years. Spaniards from absolutists to communists have been able to embrace her, and none have felt the need to find an alternative. Finally, the fact of a woman warrior itself posed a problem for many, one they dealt with by assigning Agustina gender-appropriate motives, particularly romantic ones, which had, at best, a dubious basis in available evidence.

* * *

How do the Indian and Spanish cases of women warriors and national heroes compare? There are both similarities and differences, and on balance the former outweigh the latter.

The similarities first. All three women, Agustina, Lakshmibai, and Jhalkaribai, acted and became celebrated for their roles in independence struggles: the two Indians in the armed resistance to rule from a distant imperial center; the Spaniard in a war against a foreign invader that had imposed its own ruler and political system on her country. Agustina resembles Lakshmibai and Jhalkaribai in the way she has been represented visually. The images are very different, of course- Agustina firing a canon, the Rani and Jhalkaribai on horseback wielding a sword-but the imagery of each has been standardized, with each woman portrayed almost exclusively in a single pose. (There are many fewer images of Jhalkaribai, but these too have been standardized. Since Dalits consider Jhalkaribai to have been the Rani's alter ego, she too is represented on horseback, sword in hand.) The two women are also similar in their resilience. They have remained points of reference in their countries into our own time and have found a presence in emerging new media.

Agustina, like other European heroines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was an ordinary woman, not a member of the social or political elite. This was not the case for Lakshmibai, who was queen. As a result, Indian nationalists, many of whom were also republicans struggling against an empire ruled by a monarch, were in the paradoxical position of choosing a royal figure as one of their earliest heroes. However, the Rani's Dalit competitor, Jhalkaribai, who came as far from the elite as possible, resembles Agustina in her social origins.

The three women are also similar in that they have all carried a political charge. Where the difference enters is in the recent evolution of that charge. Lakshmibai has entered the realm of popular culture, but she also remains a political figure. If anything, her political importance has increased in recent years as the political mobilization of the Dalits has both challenged established political parties and produced, in Jhalkaribai, an alternative hero. For her part, since the 1980s, Jhalkaribai has moved in the opposite direction, from the realm of popular culture to the realm of politics. This political competition is a product of India having caste divisions in addition to the more common ones of region, class, and religion. Absent these, Lakshmibai might well have become a single, shared, and uncontentious national icon. Agustina too was used for political purposes, but the political meaning of Agustina's act was sufficiently vague that she could be taken up by a wide range of groups in the turbulent politics that characterized Spain during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth: from Catholics to communists and republicans to Francoists. Since the end of the Franco regime, however, the political connotations appear to have dropped away, leaving a national icon and a popular culture figure.88

Finally, having to reconcile the existence of women warriors with gender norms was a problem in both countries, although it was problematic in different ways. In India, the problem was less gender per se than it was widowhood. Indians, or at least Hindus, have cultural resources that allow them to absorb the fact of women warriors. The Hindu pantheon includes a number of goddesses who are represented with weapons, and Lakshmibai was directly identified with a number of them. One, Durga, is known as the slayer of demons and is often portrayed riding a lion. The problem came not from the fact that Lakshmibai was a woman but that she was a widow, a role that bore strong expectations.

Spaniards do have an equivalent religious figure: the patron saint of the country, known as the "Moorslayer," is always portrayed on horseback and in battle. However, this is a man, St. James. During the siege of Zaragoza, there was a popular song that went:

The Virgin of the Pillar says

She does not want to be French

She wants to be a captain

Of the Aragonese forces.

The twentieth century saw the practice emerge of giving some Virgins the rank of captain general, the highest in the Spanish armed forces. It began in 1908, with Zaragoza's Virgin of the Pillar, but became much more common during the Franco regime. The Virgin of Nuestra Señora de los Reyes in Seville, the Virgin of Victory in Melilla, the Virgin of Almudena in Madrid, and the Virgin of Fuencisla in Segovia have all received this honor since 1939. These military Virgins were created too late to offer a religious model, so retaining a woman warrior as a national hero has meant Spaniards have had to find other ways of reconciling a violation of fundamental gender norms. They have tried to resolve the conflict by "domesticating" Agustina, assigning her motivations such as love and religion, which were characteristically female, even when this had no documentary basis and meant ignoring the actual facts of her life, including the rest of her military activities, of which she herself was so proud but which would not fit these explanations.

There is one significant difference between the two cases. The memory of both Lakshmibai and Jhalkaribai had been kept alive by ordinary Indians before they were taken up by official institutions or by people involved in "European-style" politics. In the case of Jhalkaribai, this existence lasted well over a century. This was not so with Agustina. While her heroic act was real enough, as a national hero she was an entirely manufactured figure. She had no chance, really: she was being used for propaganda purposes almost before the dust of Zaragoza had settled. On the other hand, nineteenth-century Spain did witness the cultlike popularity of the military and political figure Baldomero Espartero. When Espartero returned to power following eleven years of absence from politics, the British ambassador in Madrid noted that, "as with Napoleon in France, his portrait is universal in the hovels of the poor, and it is the only one."89 This aspect of Agustina's career as a hero stands out precisely because of the contrast with the very different Indian experience.

This comparison reveals striking overall similarities in the process of creating memory and representation across two such distant and different political and cultural settings. These similarities suggest that heroes are another of the components of the modular nationalism proposed by Benedict Anderson,90 but not, however, part of the eighteenth-century nationalism that was adopted in the Americas; they came later. Agustina de Aragón was a forerunner of a new kind of European hero, one that could only exist after the people, however that word was defined, became at least in part the source of political legitimacy-which meant the French Revolution at the earliest. Before this, heroes were royals or their military or political servants. To find heroes elsewhere would have been subversive. Perhaps the first example was the statue of Voltaire commissioned by members of the "Enlightened" elite as homage to the hero of the Republic of Letters, their own imagined community.91

There are also differences between the Spanish and Indian heroes, but these are embedded within the broad similarities and derive from local specifics, such as the existence in India of caste or the availability of female divinities, which can make certain questions either more problematic or more easily resolved. The comparison also suggests that historians of Europe would be well served by looking beyond our own continent. This would allow us to work with historians of other parts of the world to help develop a globalized perspective on the politics of the past. And if our gaze is a provincial rather than a metropolitan one, it will allow us to examine the European cases more critically and enrich our own local and regional studies.

Footnote

* I want to thank Antonio Cazorla, Jesus Cruz, Aitana Guia, Arthur Haberman, Douglas Peers, Lucy Riall, Chris Schmidt-Nowara, and Enric Ucelay da Cal for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

1 October 2007 on gender war and the nation in the period of the Revolutionary wars, and July 2009 on hero cults and the nation. The issue on war and gender includes an article on Agustina de Aragón: John Lawrence Tone, "A Dangerous Amazon: Agustina Zaragoza and the Spanish Revolutionary War, 1808-1814," pp. 548-561. There are also monographs such as Lucy Riall's Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007) and Robert Gerwarth's The Bismarck Myth: Weimar Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a Spanish example, see Adrian Shubert, "Espartero: del ídolo al olvido," in Agitadores, conspiradores y revolucionarios, ed. Isabel Burdiel and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (Madrid: Espasa, 2000), pp. 183-208.

2 Gerwarth, "Introduction," EHQ 39, no. 3 (July 2009): 385.

3 Karen Hagemann, Karen Aalestad, and Judith Miller, "Introduction," EHQ 37, no.

4 (October 2007): 504, and Hagemann, Aalestad, and Miller, "Preface," EHQ 37, no. 4 (October 2007): 499.

4 Gerwarth, "Introduction," EHQ 39, no. 3 (July 2009): 383.

5 Harleen Singh, "Rani Lakshmibai, Queen of Jhansi and the 1857 Rebellion: Colonial and Postcolonial Representations" (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2002), p. 34.

6 Ibid., pp. 35-42.

7 C. A. Bayly, ed., The Raj: India and the British, 1600-1947 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990), p. 246.

8 Cited in Joyce Lebra-Chapman, Rani of Jhansi: A Study in Female Heroism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1986), p. 131.

9 Ibid., pp. 138-139.

10 Prachi Deshpande, "The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive: Lakshmibai, Jahnsi and 1857," Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 3 (2008): 856.

11 Ibid., pp. 49-50.

12 Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967), p. 428.

13 Bayly, The Raj, p. 246.

14 V. D. Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence (Bombay: Sethani Kampani, 1947), pp. 463, 482, 493. One of the three pictures of Lakshmibai in the book is of a postcard dated 10 May 1910 issued "in Memory of the Martyrs of the Indian War of Independence." The text on the back concludes: "We vow to follow in the footsteps of Rani of Jhansi, the Goddess of Liberty" (p. xxiii).

15 Savarkar is also suspected of planning the assassination of Gandhi. Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 63.

16 I want to thank Douglas Peers for bringing this point to my attention.

17 Carol Hills and Daniel C. Silverman, "Nationalism and Feminism in Late Colonial India: The Rani of Jhansi Regiment, 1943-1945," Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 4 (1993): 741- 760; Joyce Chapman Lebra, Women against the Raj: The Rani of Jhansi Regiment (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008); Historical Journal of the Indian National Army, National Archives of Singapore, http://www.s1942.org.sg/s1942/indian_national_army/ breaking.htm.

18 Deshpande, "Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive," pp. 856-857; Singh, "Rani Lakshmibai," p. 201.

19 Singh, "Rani Lakshmibai," p. 191; Deshpande, "Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive," p. 860.

20 Deshpande, "Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive," p. 861; Singh, "Rani Lakshmibai," pp. 210-211, 229.

21 Deshpande, "Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive," p. 862. Singh says that the Rani's behavior as a widow was "aberrant" in Indian terms. "Rani Lakshmibai," p. 261.

22 http://www.lnipe.gov.in/public_html/thelnipe.html; http://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=1lA2nW4hRLo, emphasis added.

23 S. N. Sen, Eighteen Fifty-seven (Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1957), pp. 266-296.

24 Ibid., pp. 283, 287, 289, 295, 296.

25 Deshpande, "Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive," p. 856 n. 1; http://www.jkr .zeetv.com/. The series website describes it as "the story of an ordinary girl who went on to become an extraordinary ruler. Her defiance against the British is exemplary even today. The fervor that she aroused gave birth to various leaders and revolutionaries who finally freed our nation from the British. The show attempts to bring forth the various facets of this remarkable woman which are yet unknown to people. The Rani is shown as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter, as a warrior and essays all the roles with equal aplomb. The show is a tribute to her bravery, gallantry and patriotism." The site also has a poll in which people can answer "yes," "no," or "can't say" to the question "Do you think that Jhansi Ki Rani is the epitome of woman power in India?"

26 http://www.rajshri.com/Video/Tales-Of-Rani-of-Jhansi-English. On YouTube at http: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLYJ0JaDnJw.

27 Singh, "Rani Lakshmibai," p. 244.

28 Ibid., p. 231. An English translation was published in 2000.

29 Cited in ibid., p. 257.

30 Ibid., p. 261.

31 Cited in ibid., p. 2.

32 Ibid., p. 255.

33 Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). On subaltern history, which originated in India, see Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Actually, the subaltern speaks more than one name-Udadevi and Mahardevi as well-but I will focus on Jhalkaribai here. Badri Narayan, Women Heroes and Dalit Assertion in North India: Culture, Identity and Politics (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006), p. 26. In most cases, these Dalit heroines of 1857 have been taken up by the individual castes to which they belonged; Jhalkaribai "has been appropriated, eulogized and celebrated by all dalit groups, irrespective of divisions between them, and has become a symbol of unity of all dalits." Charu Gupta, "Dalit 'Viranganas' and Reinvention of 1857," Economic and Political Weekly, May 2007, p. 1742.

34 Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Public Life of History: An Argument Out of India," Public Culture 20, no. 1 (2008): 159-160.

35 Cited in ibid., pp. 145, 150.

36 See Vinayak Chaturvedi, "Vinayak and Me: Hindutva and the Politics of Naming," Social History 28, no. 2 (2003): 155-173.

37 Badri Narayan, "Heroes, Histories and Booklets," Economic and Political Weekly, October 2001, p. 3924.

38 Ibid., p. 3929.

39 Ibid., p. 3926.

40 Gupta, "Dalit 'Viranganas,'" pp. 1739-1742. The abstract for one of these pamphlets, Viranga Jhalkari Bai by Mohandas Nemishray (2001), reads: "The booklet describes the heroic deeds of Jhalkari, born on November 22, 1832 to a proud Dalit (Kori) caste parents in Bhojla village near Jhansi. She got married to Puran, a Kori sepoy in Lakshmibai's army. Her valiant act of killing a leopard when just 12 year old made Puran to marry her. Jhalkari gained the confidence of Lakshmibai during visit to palace and was made commander of women wing of latter's army. In March 1854 Lakshmibai was dethroned by Britishers. In 1857 with the help of mutineer sepoys of Meerut and Delhi she regained her throne. Once again Jhansi Fort came under fierce attack but this time Jhalkari engaged the army and managed safe escape of Lakshmibai. She attained martyrdom killing many Britishers. Jhalkari had her detractors in not only other castes but her own caste too who once even ostracized her. The author digs at the historians for denying rightful place to Jhalkari among top freedom fighters of country simply because she was a Dalit." http://www.dalitresourcecentre .com/Virangna_Jhalkari_Bai.htm.

41 Narayan, "Heroes," p. 3928. For a strong critique of this Brahmin hegemony, see Kancha Illayiah, Why I am NOT a Hindu, http://www.islam4all.com/main.htm: "While conducting the anti-colonial struggle, brahminical leaders and ideologues did not attempt to build an anti-caste egalitarian ideology. On the contrary, they glorified brutal Hindu institutions. They built an ideology that helped brahminical forces reestablish their full control which had, to some extent, been weakened during the political rule of the Mughals and the British. In the building of brahminical nationalism, Raja Rammohan Roy, at one stage, and Gandhi, at another, played key roles in recreating 'upper' caste hegemony." A version of this book appeared as "Productive Labour, Consciousness and History: The Dalitbahujan Alternative," Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 168-169.

42 Narayan, Women Heroes, p. 27.

43 Ibid., pp. 22, 31, 110-111. This use of a heroine of the past was not invented by Mayawati: in one of her campaigns, Indira Gandhi was presented in a film as the reincarnation of Lakshmibai. Curiously, both women had the same birthday. Lebra-Chapman, Rani of Jhansi, p. 149.

44 The center's mission is "to act as catalyst for promoting and strengthening women's studies through teaching, research, curriculum, field and extension work, training and continuing education etc. Its main focus is to undertake teaching, research and action in a holistic way and incorporate questions arising out of this new perspective into every discipline. The Center aims to carry out work not only in the above areas, but also in the areas of food processing, herbal plants, gender equity, economic and self reliance, girls' education, population education, issues of women rights, laws, social exploitation, awareness activities, etc. As a special case, the Center would be paying extra attention to the areas of Food Processing and Herbal Plants and would strive to identify the areas in this field where women entrepreneurs would be able to set up their own individual units." http://www.bujhansi .org/_acad/_insti/_wsc/wsc-home.html.

45 Gupta, "Dalit Viranganas," pp. 1741-1742, 1743. Gupta also points out that the meaning of these representations for Dalit women today are not straightforward. Very few, if any, of these popular histories are written by women, and the images they provide "often remain simplistic . . . [and] offer incomplete projections to which not many dalit women can fully relate." At the same time, Dalit women have been using "these figures to question representations of dalit women in general, as well as their oppression in real life" (pp. 1743-1744).

46 Narayan, Women Heroes, p. 113.

47 Ibid. More recently, the Hindu nationalist BJP has been attempting to win lowercaste support in northern India by "saffronizing" Dalit heroes and turning them into anti- Muslim figures. Jhalkaribai so far seems to have remained untouched by these developments. Badri Narayan, Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilisation (Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009).

48 John David Hopkin, "Sieges, Seduction and Sacrifice in Revolutionary War: The 'Virgins of Verdun,'" EHQ 37, no. 4 (2007): 531. Also J. A. Lynn II, Women, Armies and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 164- 165.

49 Irene Castells, Gloria Espigado, and María Cruz Romeo, "Heroinas por la patria, madres para la nación: mujers en pie de guerra," in Heroínas y patriotas. Mujeres de 1808, ed. I. Castells, G. Espigado, and M. C. Romeo (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2009), pp. 22-23, 43.

50 Joan of Arc is undoubtedly the most famous example, but there are few others. On Joan of Arc see Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (London: Vintage, 1986), and E. E. Dolgin, Modernizing Joan of Arc (London: McFarland and Co., 2008). Even among mythical founder figures, England's Queen Boadicea is in the distinct minority. Stefan Berger, "On the Role of Myths and History in the Construction of National Identity," EHQ 39, no. 3 (2009): 495. Women could be symbolic figures, however. The classic examples are the figures of Liberty and of Marianne, symbol of the French Republic. The outstanding artistic representation is Delacroix's homage to the Revolution of 1830, Liberty Leading the People.

51 If we can talk of local, as opposed to national, pantheons, there is the figure of Manuela Malasana in Madrid.

52 Javier Moreno Luzón, "Fighting for the National Memory: The Commemoration of the Spanish 'War of Independence' in 1908-1912," History and Memory 19, no. 1 (2007): 75-80.

53 Cited in Ignacio Peiró Martín and Pedro Rújula López, Trabajo, Sociedad y Cultura. Una Mirada al Siglo XX en Aragón (Zaragoza: Publicaciones Unión, 2000), p. 282.

54 Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, Fuera el invasor (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2006), pp. 87-88, 232-233; Enric Ucelay da Cal, "Agustina, la dama del cañón," in Castells, Espigado, and Romeo, Heroínas y patriotas, p. 211. See also, Mercedes Carbayó-Abenázar, "Shaping Women: National Identity through the Use of Language in Franco's Spain," Nations and Nationalism 7, no. 1 (2001): 86.

55 Agustina's fame was not limited to Spain. Lord Byron dedicated some lines of his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to her, and her exploit was also painted by the British artist David Wilkie: The Defence of Saragosa (1828). Given the British involvement in the war against Napoleon, this might be expected. More surprising is that in 1813 a young German woman would refer to the exploits of Spanish women as an inspiration: "I have been a soldier for four weeks now! . . . In my innermost being I was convinced of committing no bad or hast act; one need only look to Spain and the Tyrol, and the conduct of their women and girls!" Karen Hagemann, "'Heroic Virgins' and 'Bellicose Amazons': Armed Women, the Gender Order and the German Public during and after the Anti-Napoleonic Wars," EHQ 37, no. 4 (2007): 507. Knowledge of Spanish resistance spread to Austria through the Spanish consul in Venice, Alberto de Mexino. Forced to flee that city because of his anti-French position, he went to Graz. His knowledge about the guerilla struggle in Spain was the basis for Spain and Tyrol Shall Wear Chains, a pamphlet written by Adolf Bauerle, a sympathizer with the uprising in the Tyrol, and which was widely distributed in Austria. Otto W. Johnston, "The Myth of Andreas Hofer: Origins and Essence," in Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, pp. 123-124.

56 For a brief biography of Agustina, see John Lawrence Tone, "Agustina Zaragoza" in Amazons to Fighter Pilots: A Biographical Dictionary of Military Women, ed. Reina Pennington (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003), 1:21-22. For recent studies of the war against Napoleon, see Ronald Fraser, Napoleon's Cursed War: Popular Resistance in the Spanish Peninsular War (London: Verso, 2008), and Charles Esdaile, The Peninsular War: A New History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

57 Cited in Fraser, Napoleon's Cursed War, p. 165.

58 In a recent book, Ricardo García Cárcel claims, unfortunately without indicating his sources, that Agustina also occasionally wore a false moustache. El sueño de la nación indomable: Los mitos de la Guerra de Independencia (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2007), p. 174. In an article in the Madrid newspaper El Mundo, Antonio Bernabeu cites a contemporary of Agustina who said that she liked to put on a false moustache. El Mundo, Crónicas, 19 August 2007, http://www.elmundo.es/suplementos/cronica/2007/617/1187474408.htm.

59 Agustina Saragossa, personal file, Archivo General Militar, Segovia. The following quotations are from this same document. Emphasis added. Agustina signed the petition but it was almost certainly drafted by someone else, presumably a lawyer or notary. Still, it contains touches one would not expect to find in a document addressed to the king and that may well be the sound of Agustina's own voice. "Ask yourself, Sire, who fired the first rounds at the Carmen battery . . . Ask yourself who put herself at the head of our troops when they tried to dislodge [the French] . . . Ask yourself, Sire, what this Artillerywoman did when she repeated the same attack three or four days later . . ."

60 Agustina does not mention this in her petition, but during her stay in Seville, she was something of a celebrity; she met Wellington, who gave her two pistols, and Lord Byron.

61 In her various petitions covering almost fifty years, Agustina consistently referred to her service during the two sieges of Zaragoza and the siege of Tortosa.

62 These petitions and related documents are in her personnel file, Celeb., Caja 176, exp. 4, Archivo General Militar, Segovia.

63 Agustina's grandson Francisco de Paula Atienza y Cobo was an army officer and is listed in the files as "Grandson of the Heroine Agustina of Aragón,'" ibid.

64 This petition was accompanied by a statement by Miguel de Lili e Idiaquez, who was commander of Tortosa in 1810. He said that Agustina presented herself to him, stating her desire to continue "serving the Fatherland" and that she served on one of the batteries until the city surrendered, displaying "serenity and valour."

65 Cited in García Cárcel, El sueño, p. 173.

66 The petitions did not end with Agustina's death. Her daughter Carlota Cobos requested and was granted a life pension by Queen Isabella in 1859, and in 1877 Carlota wrote again requesting payment of money that was owing to her mother when she died. Then in 1895, her grandson, Francisco Cobos, wrote to the army and the parliament on behalf of two of Agustina's granddaughters, who were suffering financially; they were both granted a pension of two pesetas a day by King Alfonso XIII.

67 Cecilio Gasca, ed., Album de los Sitios de Zaragoza (Zaragoza, 1905), p. ix. The defense of Zaragoza was also immediately glorified in other media as well. As early as 1809, audiences in Madrid could see performances of Gaspar de Zavala's play, Los patriotas de Aragón. There were also numerous epic poems. García Cárcel, El sueño, p. 168 n. 10.

68 Not entirely forgotten, though: the Aragonese artist Marcelino de Unceta painted a portrait of Casta Alvarez in 1875. The mausoleum in which her remains were interred in 1908 was not for Agustina alone: it was called the Panteón de las Heroínas, and here she rejoined the other women who had stood out in the defense of Zaragoza.

69 José Alvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa: La idea de España en el Siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 2001), pp. 201-202.

70 Simón Palmer and María del Carmen, "Agustina de Aragon novelada por su hija," in Homenaje a Elena Catena (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 2001), p. 487.

71 Warner, Joan of Arc, p. 7.

72 Alvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa.

73 Jesús Gutiérrez Burón, "La Fortuna de la Guerra de la Independencia en la Pintura del Siglo XIX," Cuadernos de Arte e Iconografía, 1989, p. 350; Alvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa, p. 251.

74 Gutiérrez Burón, "La Fortuna," pp. 350-351; Christian Demange, El Dos de Mayo (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2004), p. 111; Gutiérrez Burón, "La Fortuna", pp. 353-354; Carlos Hermosilla, "Los sitios de Zaragoza," p. 325. Given Agustina's popularity, it is surprising that there appear to be no photographs of her. According to Carlos Hermosilla, the War of Independence was the most painted event during the nineteenth century. "Los sitios de Zaragoza en la pintura española del Siglo XIX," Actas del III Coloquio de Arte Aragonés (Huesca: Diputación Provincial de Huesca, 1985), p. 318.

75 Enric Ucelay da Cal argues that Wilkie's Agustina is "highly sexualized, the negation of the embodiment" of the nation. Ucelay da Cal, "Agustina, la dama del canon," pp. 204-205. In this, though, she would not be much different from Liberty in Delacroix's famous Liberty Leading the People.

76 The portrait by Atienza Cobos was given to the city of Zaragoza and now hangs in the mayor's office. Following a restoration, which included removing the painter's signature, it was attributed to another artist.

77 Cited in Zaragoza y los sitios (Zaragoza: Alvarez Hermanos, 1952), p. 35. This image has such power that it came to be used for other purposes. It was one of a series of patriotic moments used by the Fuentes Parrilla company at the turn of the century to advertise its sherry. The sheet music for Justo Blanco's jota (Aragonese dance) "Agustina de Aragón," published in 1893, was illustrated with a drawing of Agustina firing the canon; the dead soldiers at her feet were accompanied by a crossed rifle and guitar. It appeared on the poster for both the 1928 and 1950 movies about Agustina. In the 1970s, the Lladró company produced a ceramic figure of the scene. Most recently, on the occasion of the bicentenary of 1808, Spain issued a four hundred euro gold coin with Agustina's moment portrayed on the front; General Palafox was relegated to the obverse. The 1968 postage stamp on which Agustina appears does not show the cannon but does include the pose from Gálvez's portrait.

78 Emilio Castelar, "La mujer de Zaragoza," in Las mujeres españolas (Madrid, 1872). Later in the nineteenth century, when morals became stricter, the lover was often replaced by a husband. Writing in 1868, Carlos de Rada says Agustina acted with "noble love for the Fatherland and love for her chosen one in her heart." He then added religion: after firing the canon, she invoked the Virgin of the Pillar. Agustin Coy Cotonat directly rejects Palafox's version; Agustina was not moved by the death of a lover but "solely and exclusively by the duty of a wife and patriot." Carlos de la Rada y Delgado, Mujeres Célebres de España y Portugal (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1942), p. 164; Agustín Coy Cotonat, Agustina Saragossa Domenech (Ceuta: José Guerra, 1914), p. 103.

79 Palmer and del Carmen, "Agustina de Aragon," p. 490.

80 Fernando Monzón and Enrique Mendoza, Augustina (Zaragoza: 1001 Ediciones, 2009).

81 Sebastián Alonso Gómez, Agustina de Aragón (Madrid: R. Velasco, 1907). Much of this is invented. Agustina was already married and a mother when she arrived in Zaragoza, her husband was a serving soldier, and her father was not in the city during the siege.

82 Federico de Mendizábal, Agustina de Aragón (La Heroína del Pilar) (Madrid: Imp. Taravilla, 1965).

83 Ramón Perdiguer lists more than thirty films, with the first having been made in Italy in 1910. "La Guerra de la Independencia española en el cine," Los Sitios de Zaragoza, January 2005, pp. 10-15. The British television series about Sharpe is set in the War of Independence.

84 Marta García Carrión, "Por qué me habéis soldado si no podía dejar de ser mujer. El mito de Agustina de Aragon en su primera recreación cinemtaograáfica," in Castells, Espigado, and Romeo, Heroínas y Patriotas, pp. 133-135. The identities of these backers is not known, but García Carrión suggests that they were "surely related to the social and intellectual circles which dominated daily official culture in Zaragoza" (p. 134).

85 Ibid., p. 137. Rey's film champions one of the competing visions of Spanish identity: conservative and, above all, Catholic. The weight of religion was evident even before audiences entered the cinema. The poster showed Agustina wearing a cross, and in the film itself, her outsized cross is very visible. A priest has a major role in the movie, and Agustina is shown as religiously, even divinely, inspired: in one scene, the Virgin of the Pillar, the patroness of Zaragoza, appears to her, and this apparition prompts her to act. The film presented a Spanish nationalism that also drew on regional identities. Rey emphasized the Aragonese nature of the resistance, using the word baturra, which was evolving from meaning simply a farmer from the region to referring to the region as a whole; he has his actors dressed in identifiably Aragonese clothing, and shows the people of the city celebrating their victory with the famous regional dance the jota.

Rey was Spain's most popular filmmaker during the Second Republic of the 1930s; in 1935 he released Nobleza Baturra, in which Aragonese folklore was central. On the way in which regional sentiment could contribute to a Spanish nationalism, see Ferrán Archilés, "Hacer región es hacer patria: La region en el imaginario de la nación española de la Restauración," Ayer, 206, pp. 121-147. Agustina herself was the subject of a dispute between Aragonese and Catalans over her origins. In 1914, Agustín Coy Cotonat, an army captain, published a book in which he disputed claims that Agustina was born in Zaragoza. She was, he argued, born in Barcelona of Catalan parents, so that "the blood which ran in her veins was clearly Catalan . . . she is a pure-blooded daughter of Barcelona." Agustina Saragossa Domenech: Heroína de los sitios de Zaragoza (Ceuta: José Guerra, 1914), pp. 4, 90. This argument took place within the frame of Spanish nationalism and was not part of the Catalan nationalism that was emerging as a political force at this time.

86 García Carrión, "Por qué me habéis soldado," pp. 147-148.

87 Jo Labanyi, "Feminizing the Nation: Women, Subordination and Subversion in Post- Civil War Spanish Cinema," in Heroines without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 1945-51, ed. Ulrike Sieglohr (New York: Continuum, 2000), pp. 175-176. Agustina was not the only such female protagonist in early Francoist cinema. Strong women were common, at least in the historical films, something surprising for a regime that had systematically turned back the clock on the status of women. It was women who embodied typically male virtues, not men, who were given the role of representing the nation. See also Jesús Alonso López, "1808-1950: Agustina de Aragón, estrella invitada al cine histórico franquista," in La Guerra de la Independencia en la Cultura Española, ed. Joaquín Alavrez Barrientos (Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores, 2008), pp. 379-400. The Franco regime was not consistent in this respect. Women "wielding swords not needles" appeared in collections of exemplary women's lives directed at schoolgirls, and Agustina was one of the most popular. However, these women were "represented as taking up arms because their husbands, or other male figures, are either absent, wounded, or recently dead. However bravely . . . they were forced into their historic role by circumstance, not perceived choice." Jessamy Harvey, "Domestic Queens and Warrior Wives: Imperial Role-Models for Spanish Schoolgirls during the Early Francoist Regime (1940s-50s)," History of Education 37, no. 2 (2008): 289-290.

88 In January 2010, she was used to describe a female police officer who was serving with the United Nations in Haiti and died in the earthquake. El País, 20 January 2010, http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Rosa/era/solidaria/siempre/estaba/dispuesta/ colaborar/elpepiint/20100120elpepiint_3/Tes. One exception, which came just as the regime was about to disappear, was Francisco Umbral's denunciation of Agustina as an ultra- Catholic reactionary. Cited in Castells, Espigado, and Romeo, Heroínas y Patriotas, p. 49.

89 Cited in V. G. Kiernan, The Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), p. 47.

90 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

91 Dena Goodman, "Pigalle's Voltaire Nu: The Republic of Letters Represents Itself to the World," Representations 16 (1986): 86-109.