148 sexenio and the return of the Bourbon monarchy did nothing to slow the pace of increasing social conflict (Bahamonde 155). Chronic underemployment continued in the 1870s, while Galdós was writing his early novels, with marginally effective attempts to control proletarian discontent and organization by the Church, by education, with its implicit ideological control (Bahamonde 156) 242 and by the paliative efforts of private bourgeois charity that were needed to augment the everinadequate Beneficencia (Bahamonde 157).
5) Degeneration in Galdós’s Madrid
It was in the changing, and often threatening, context of Galdós‘s Madrid that physicians and hygienists employed degenerationist ideas in an attempt to understand, and preferaby to limit, these potentially destabilizing tensions. The following sections will describe the main professional communities who employed degeneration discourse to come to terms with the social problems of the day. As the great majority of those who thought in terms of degeneration theory were of the educated middle-class, it was inevitable that the theory should be employed primarily to define and control the Other, the marginalized and the lower classes, and that the
implicit ideological control: Bahamonde quotes the ministro de Fomento, the conde de Toreno, who in the preamble to a royal decree establishing a school for arts and trades in 1876 commented, ―Que no solamente se atienda a la cultura e instrucción de los alumnos, sino también a su educación moral, para que los artesanos e industriales españoles sean buenos hijos, esposos honrados, modelos de padres de familia y amantes de una patria que no omite sacrificio de ninguna clase en obsequio a su dicha y bienestar‖ (Bahamonde 158), a clear link between education and the promotion of ostensibly bourgeois values. 242