The first systematic exposition of Romantic ideas in Spain was that undertaken by the German bibliophile and scholar Johann Nikolaus Böhl von Faber (i 770–1836), a naturalised Spaniard who had settled in Cadiz. Böhl's espousal of Romantic theory was to involve him in a fierce literary polemic with José Joaquín de Mora (1783–1864), a family friend of long standing. Arising as it did in the years immediately following the Peninsular War and therefore in the wake of the constitutional parliament of Cadiz, it was perhaps inevitable that the dispute acquired political implications, an element of the controversy which has just as inevitably coloured later assessments of its nature and significance.

In his presentation of Romantic ideas, Böhl relied upon the principles of historicism. By historicism, I mean the ‘historical sense’ adumbrated in Germany by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who opposed the belief in universal laws and ideals which had formed an essential part of philosophy in the Classical tradition, and instead sought to promote an individualising attitude that placed greater value upon the local and temporal conditions of human existence. The immediate outcome of such a trend was nationalism: a new appreciation of the concept of the nation-state, the idea of the creative forces inherent in the people, of the intimate relationship between individual and national community, and of the organic connection between the present and the past.