Diversidad dentro de un orden. Privatización, producción forestal y represión en los montes públicos españoles, 1859-1926

The forest policy enacted in Spain from 1859 to 1926 was very ambitious. It sought to privatise the vast majority of lands that had belonged to the state and, at the same time, created a new public forest patrimony, whose management went through a growing privatisation of forest uses. Therefore, applying it in territories that were diverse from a natural, economic, and social point of view brought about public contempt, was the source of conflict. and made the ensuing repression inevitable. The orientation of this repression was not left to chance. On the contrary, it was complementary to the privatisation process of the property and to access for the public to use the forest. To prove this claim, this article considers what we believe to be appropriate instances of both. On the one hand, we present the cited privatisation process within its time and space dimensions and we establish the patterns of productive specialisation of the forest that continued to be public. This process constitutes the main driving force for the privatisation of their uses and is, from our point of view, relevant to understand how the repression was oriented. On the other hand, after reviewing the problems related to the surveillance of public forest lands in the cited period, changes in criminal law on forests included, we consider the distribution, also from a spatial and temporal perspective, of the complaints reported by the Civil Guard between 1877 and 1910. We end by analysing the issues presented.