pro-European character was very influential during the 20th century, particularly during the Second Republic, that welcomed his reformist ideals willingly. In 1939 the Institution disappeared, strongly repressed by the winners of the Civil War. Whatsoever, a decidedly modern thought was spread mainly between the bourgeoisie, class which will display the most important authors of the 20th century. Characteristics Modernism, studied as a literary or as an artistic-literary movement, appeared in the Hispanic world in the final decades of the 19th century and the first ones of the 20th century. It is seen today as a phenomenon with much more vast projections in space and time. A period of renovation in America and Europe was opened, which started from a common will of rejection towards the dogmas and principles of the society. The Modernist period or time begins and closes in dates that could be fixed towards 1880 and 1945, although precursory signs occurred before the first and they continued being observed after the last. In the politics, the forms of the modernist disobedience are reflected in a sentimental rather than intellectual inclination, towards the liberating creeds, socialism and anarchism. In their youth, people like Miguel de Unamuno and Leopoldo Lugones were attracted to socialism, whereas the anarchist doctrine seemed at first to attract Pío Baroja and Manuel González Prada. The aversion to the society that surrounded them (and not only, although of course also, the governments) urged them to look for inhabitable worlds, often invented. The indigenism and the exotism are the two slopes of the protest against the predominant meanness. The escapism and the denunciation of the bourgeois society are complementary aspects of an ambivalent attitude. The plastic writers and artists agreed in the negation, and even an officially conservative man like Antonio Gaudí projected in unusual architectures his escapist deliriums (arabicism of the Vicens House, in Barcelona, or purified gothicism of the Episcopal Palace of Astorga). Indigenism and exotism were not negative attitudes: they implied the affirmation of the inhabitable world; even more, of myths in which close truths of universal validity were declared. The Modernist authors were simultaneously positivists, by hostility to the established conventions, and antipositivists, by reaction against a system in which the spiritual tendencies did not have place. Trying to affiliate them with a philosophy is so impossible and absurd as trying to affiliate them with a party. From Plato and Pythagoras, mainly from