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Charles Tilly’s later work sums up, assesses, specifies and projects into the future the theoretical and empirical legacy of a life of study devoted to Historical Sociology. From his masterpiece opera prima, The Vendée, on to his latest Contentious politics, Tilly developed a vast array of theoretical concepts, which he provided with extensive and precise empirical referents (among them, we may cite: performance, collective action repertoire, political opportunity structure, mechanisms for mobilization and, finally, worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment). Today, these notions are located at the very core of the sociological/historical studies about political contention in early Modern Europe. Tilly’s preference for quantitative and comparative methods was subservient to his interest in giving account of, not the motivational Why?, but the objective How, When and What for of collective mobilization; not in explanatory ‘laws’ of historical change, but in analytically fecund descriptions of similar, but also unique historical episodes. This article adopts the methodological paradigm Tilly first developed when writing The Vendée, analytically updated throughout his later work, as theoretical framework for a new approach of the social and political mobilization that led to the first Carlista war. Specifically, the mechanisms for mobilization that provided material and human resources for the war effort are researched in three different Navarre villages –selected by their differing economic, cultural, and politically features.Las últimas obras de Charles Tilly recapitulan, evalúan, concretan y proyectan hacia el futuro el legado empírico y teórico de una vida dedicada a la sociología histórica. Desde su opera prima sobre la Vendée hasta Contienda política y democracia en Europa, Tilly desarrolló y dio amplio y preciso contenido empírico a un conjunto de conceptos teóricos que hoy vertebran los estudios del conflicto político al inicio de la modernidad europea (entre otros, actuación, repertorio de acción colectiva, estructura de oportunidad política, mecanismos de movilización y, finalmente el despliegue de respetabilidad, unidad, número y compromiso ‒WUNC, en su acrónimo inglés). Su predilección por los métodos cuantitativos y comparativos perseguía explicar, no el motivacional por qué sino el objetivo cómo, cuándo y para qué de la movilización popular; no buscaba ‘leyes’ del cambio histórico, sino descripciones analíticamente fértiles de acontecimientos históricos semejantes, pero singulares y únicos. El paradigma metodológico que elaboró por vez primera en La Vendeé, analíticamente actualizado a través de su obra posterior, sirve aquí como marco para un nuevo abordaje de la movilización social y política que condujo a la primera guerra carlista, específicamente, mediante el estudio comparado de los mecanismos de movilización de recursos materiales y humanos para el esfuerzo de guerra en tres municipios navarros de características económicas, culturales y políticas bien diferenciadas.

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