Joseph Bonaparte was arguably the best of the Bonaparte clan, and Napoleon undoubtedly hoped that the Spanish people would accept him as a welcome replacement for the feckless Bourbons. He was wrong. By the time that Joseph arrived at the frontier, a spontaneous revolt against the French invasion had already begun. The rising began in Madrid on May 2, in reaction to news that the royal family had left for France. General Murat put down a riot in the Puerta del Sol quickly and brutally, using the Mameluke cavalry that Napoleon had recruited in Egypt. Given the long Spanish history of conflict with Muslim forces, the sight of turbaned horsemen charging a crowd of men and women in the heart of Madrid had a shocking effect. The next day, Murat's soldiers executed the supposed leaders of the riot on the hill of Príncipe Pío, at the western edge of Madrid near the royal palace. Various Spanish artists would paint their interpretations of those two actions, but the versions that history remembers are two arresting canvases by Goya, which capture the events in all their horror. In The Charge of the Mamelukes on the 2nd of May, the mad look on the face of the horseman in the center of the composition, and the tangle of bloodied bodies and enraged citizens in front of him, evoke the violent movement, confusion, and savagery of the confrontation. By contrast, the composition of The Executions on the Hill of Príncipe Pío on the 3rd of May is eerily still, as a terrified man in a white shirt raises his arms in surrender, while a contingent of faceless uniformed French soldiers aim their weapons at him in perfect formation. The viewer is left to complete the action, imagining the white shirt splattered in blood and the man collapsing in death to join the bodies of comrades who have fallen all around him.
In all, some 400 Spaniards were killed in those two days, and the stunning news spread to all corners of the country in record time. Although Murat thought he had ended the rebellion by his swift actions and exemplary punishments, in fact he had ensured fierce resistance to the French occupation would continue. Following Spanish traditions that dated back to the Middle Ages, committees (juntas) of citizens formed in cities and towns all over Spain to organize a war against the French. Considering that Spain had no national government at the time, the organization of Spanish resistance was astounding and demonstrated both the resolve of the citizenry and their strong sense that they were in charge of their own destiny. The first junta was organized in the northwestern city of Oviedo in late May, and other juntas and local militias joined the cause over the next few months. The officer corps of the Spanish army provided military discipline in some of the units, but for the most part the militias functioned simply because they included men who had known and worked with one another all their lives.
Despite his earlier conduct, Fernando's captivity in France rallied most Spaniards to his cause, and they organized their fight in his name. At the outset, they could not hope to challenge the well-trained French army on its own terms. Instead, the citizens’ militias attacked isolated groups of soldiers wherever and whenever they had the opportunity, fighting a little war (guerrilla) with pitchforks and daggers against the guns and bayonets of the French. These unorthodox tactics had a demoralizing effect on the French as they moved farther into the countryside, and neither side gave any quarter to the enemy. Against all odds, a Spanish army organized by the juntas won a great victory against the French at Bailén in Andalusia on July 18–20, 1808. At the same time, Joseph Bonaparte was making his way toward Madrid from the north and becoming increasingly alarmed. As he wrote to Napoleon from Burgos on July 18, “It seems that nobody has wanted to tell the exact truth to Your Majesty…I am not frightened by my position, but it is a unique situation in history. I do not have one single partisan here.”1 Despite that gloomy assessment and the rebel victory at Bailén, the rebellion clearly needed outside help to oust the French.
A rag-tag Spanish army under General Palafox was the only major force between Barcelona and Madrid, and they managed to hold the city of Zaragoza through the summer and fall of 1808, aided by the heroic efforts of the citizenry. Meanwhile, the rebel leaders organized a supreme central committee of all the existing juntas, which in December declared itself the legitimate government of Spain, acting for the captive Fernando. The central committee signed a formal alliance with Great Britain in mid-January 1809, thus clearing the way for British troops to enter Spain and coordinate the war effort. They arrived too late to save Zaragoza, which fell to the French in February 1809. In all, the Spanish forces numbered some 35,000–50,000 men. The British would send 40,000–60,000 men to what they called the Peninsular War, and the French would eventually commit 200,000–300,000 men to the Spanish front, suffering enormous losses in numbers and prestige between 1808 and 1812, when Napoleon pulled them out to concentrate on the invasion of Russia. The French troops, confronting both conventional and guerrilla attacks, took their vengeance where they could, often at the expense of the Spanish population. Here again, the genius of Goya captured the moment, in his unblinking and deeply disturbing series of engravings called “The Disasters of War.” Even viewers numbed by images of the savagery of modern warfare find it difficult to contemplate the horrors he depicted, to which he was an eyewitness.
The dramatic events of the French invasion of Spain and its aftermath have inspired modern film directors as well as historians and artists, though not necessarily with the same attention to historical accuracy. The Naked Maja casts the love story of Goya (Anthony Franciosa) and the duchess of Alba (Ava Gardner) against the background of the war. The Pride and the Passion features a romantic triangle involving a beautiful peasant girl (Sophia Loren), a heroic militiaman (Frank Sinatra), and a newly arrived British naval officer (Cary Grant), in the aftermath of the surrender of Zaragoza. And The Mask of Goya explores the complicated nature of the artist (Javier Bardem) in the treacherous political atmosphere of the times. The first two films are notable mainly for some nice scenes of the Spanish landscape, though the scenes in The Pride and the Passion trace a hilariously confusing itinerary across northern Spain.
As the war continued across much of Spain, French troops managed to hold Madrid secure for Joseph Bonaparte, who reigned as José I, but whose kingship was contested from the start. He based his government on the first written constitution ever applied to Spain, written in Bayonne on July 6, 1808, by his brother Napoleon. Though both José and his constitution were foreign imports, imposed by force, they nonetheless attracted support from numerous members of the Spanish elite. These individuals included reform-minded bureaucrats who had given up on the Bourbons and sincerely believed that Spain should adopt the best legacies of the French Revolution. They also included opportunists who wanted to advance their careers under whoever held power.
Outside Madrid, while rebels continued the struggle to oust the French from Spain, rebel leaders created a Council of Regency to act in Fernando's name and organized elections for a new Cortes. The elected delegates convened in Cádiz in late September 1810. Although they were unified in their opposition to the French invasion, they represented a fairly wide spectrum of political opinion. About a third of the delegates were priests. The most radical delegates were known as the Frenchified faction (afrancesados) because of their admiration for the changes brought about by revolutionary France. Although they participated in the provisional government acting in Fernando's name, they made it clear that they did not trust the Bourbons to reform Spain. At the end of December, the Cortes appointed a commission of fourteen Spaniards and two representatives from the Indies to draft a constitution, supposedly based on medieval Spanish principles. The commission finished a draft by mid-August 1811, which the delegates debated for the better part of a year, before approving it on March 12, 1812. Reinforced by specific legislation such as the abolition of the inquisition, the new constitution was introduced into all of the areas outside French control, in the name of King Fernando VII. The areas controlled by the French already had a constitution, based on the French Revolution, and a king, imposed by the French. Moreover, the intellectual elite on both sides of the political divide claimed to be supporters of a modern, constitutional, parliamentary monarchy.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the Spanish population, still loyal to the “captive Fernando,” had little in common with the liberal reformers in Cádiz or the supporters of Joseph Bonaparte's government in Madrid. They remained conservative, traditional, religious, and fiercely independent. Rebel bands savagely attacked French troops whenever the occasion permitted, and they easily identified the havoc and disruption of their way of life with everything foreign, and especially French. They remained unwilling to accept Joseph Bonaparte as their king, but they also viewed the activities of the Cortes of Cádiz with suspicion. The constitutional changes espoused by various factions of the intellectual elite had little to do with their lives. Although they wanted social and economic justice, many of them seem to have trusted a traditional monarchy in the person of their “captive” King Fernando, rather than a revolutionary committee, to deliver them.
Spain's War of Independence formed part of the Europe-wide struggle against Napoleon. Though the brutal struggle affected Spaniards at all levels of society, British forces took the military lead. After several years of indecisive battles and continuing guerrilla attacks against the French, Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the duke of Wellington) led a combined army of British, Spanish, and Portuguese troops that defeated the French at Vitoria in July 1813. Joseph Bonaparte then decamped for France, but the war nonetheless dragged on until 1814.
With Napoleon's defeat, King Fernando VII, dubbed “The Desired One” (“el Deseado”), returned to Spain at the end of March, 1814. He soon proved to the liberal intellectuals of Spain that their doubts about him had been justified. Fernando immediately revoked the constitution of 1812, removed anyone who opposed him from the armed forces and the government, and set about trying to reinstall every aspect of traditional monarchical authority, as if the revolutionary upheavals of the previous quarter-century had meant nothing. Predictably, his actions angered the forces on the political left who had held the country together in his absence, as well as the leaders of the alliance against Napoleon. Yet Fernando also retained the services of many bureaucrats who had supported Joseph Bonaparte. Predictably, that angered his most loyal supporters on the political right. Fernando's blend of personal rigidity, political expediency, and outright stupidity thus marked his reign from the outset.
Many historians rank him as one of the worst monarchs in Spanish history, and his incompetent reign could not have come at a worse time. In the confused period during the Napoleonic invasion, political leaders in several areas in Spanish America had declared their independence from French-controlled Spain, either to support the provisional government represented by the Cortes of Cádiz, or to claim complete independence. In the years after Fernando established his benighted rule, most of the remaining areas of Spanish America decided that their interests would be better served as independent republics. Spanish America's independence movements stretched on for more than a decade, with each area in that vast region playing out its own political drama.
Without a navy, and with many of its most experienced military and administrative officials in America having joined the rebellions, Spain struggled to reassert authority. The upheaval in America had a direct effect on internal Spanish politics as well. Many army officers had come of age during the heady days of European revolution, and had fought the French under the authority of the Cortes of Cádiz. They disapproved of the reactionary policies of Fernando VII and had distinctly mixed feelings about fighting against their brother officers in the Americas. These liberal officers began to think of themselves as the most worthy defenders of the state, with a duty to intervene in politics and set the regime back on the path to good government. As one of the army units assembled in Cádiz late in 1819 to embark for America, their leader had other plans. On January 1, 1820, Captain Rafael Riego issued a proclamation (Sp. pronunciamiento) in defense of the constitution of 1812 and led his men to Madrid.
Riego's golpe de estado (coup d’état), the first in modern Spanish history, succeeded in the short term. King Fernando reinstated the constitution as the law of the land, and a new era of liberal legislation followed. It was spearheaded by the most radical of the “Men of 1812” (doceañistas), who had clearly lost faith in the Bourbon restoration. Unfortunately, the attitudes and programs of these exalted politicians (exaltados) were out of touch not only with conservative Spaniards, but also with their fellow liberal constitutionalists and the army officers who had put them in power. The situation became so volatile by 1822 that many feared that Spain would disintegrate into civil war.
Similarly radical developments elsewhere in continental Europe had led to a conservative Holy Alliance of France, Austria, and Russia. With the blessing of the alliance, in April 1823 French forces invaded Spain once again, this time joining with Spanish troops loyal to Fernando to rescue him from supposed captivity. Styled “the 100,000 sons of St. Louis,” they restored the king to power. Fernando made a deal with the French government in February 1824 to retain some 45,000 French troops in the country, based in Cádiz. The original term for this occupying force was only five months, but it was later made open-ended, a proof of the king's tenuous authority. In that same year, the rebellious American colonies won their independence and soon split into more than two dozen independent republics comprising nearly 20 million citizens. After more than 300 years, all that remained of the Spanish Empire in America were the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, although cultural and economic ties between the new republics and Spain continued.
When French troops finally left Spain in September 1828, the political landscape looked more placid. Although Fernando was hardly a model constitutional monarch, he had recognized the need to compromise with the liberal constitutionalists in order to stay in power and avoid further turmoil. He therefore supported fiscal and political reforms that served the interests of the conservative bourgeoisie – most notably the manufacturing elite in Catalonia and the banking elite in Madrid. In the process he offended the most conservative elements of Spain's church and state, including peasants defending traditional rights and privileges against the pressures of capitalist agriculture, and ultra-conservative clerics and aristocrats. Dubbed the apostólicos for their defense of ultra-conservative Catholicism, they rallied around the figure of the king's younger brother Carlos.
Because Fernando had no heir in the 1820s, despite three marriages, Carlos was the heir to the throne, and he and his supporters were willing to bide their time. But then Fernando was married a fourth time, to María Cristina, a Bourbon princess from Naples. When she gave birth to a daughter named Isabel in 1830, it provoked a succession crisis. Under the Habsburgs and their precursors, females had always had the right to ascend the Spanish throne if they had no brothers. The Bourbons had changed that, by bringing the succession rules of the Salian Franks to Spain. Under Salic law, Isabel had no right to succeed her father, even though she had no brothers. Instead, the king's brother Carlos still stood first in the line of succession, as long as the Salic law remained in effect.
Rather than let that happen, shortly before his death in 1833, Fernando revoked the Salic law to make Isabel his heir. Rather than accept the infant Isabel as legitimate queen, Carlos and the apostólicos launched a civil war – the first of the so-called “Carlist Wars” – determined to take power one way or another and to revoke the changes made by the constitutional monarchy. Although ostensibly defined by a dynastic struggle over which branch of the Bourbons should inherit the throne of Spain, the Carlist Wars in fact represented a much broader struggle over the very nature of the Spanish state. To the Carlists, the only legitimate bases for the state were the truths propounded by the Catholic Church. They favored autonomy for the Spanish church in religious matters, and a very close relationship between church and state overall.
The factions on the left of the political spectrum generally favored the liberal agenda that the Cortes of Cádiz defined during the Napoleonic war. The term “liberal” came to have various meanings in European politics during the nineteenth century. In Spain liberals defined themselves as free (libre) subjects of a constitutional monarchy, represented by an elected Cortes that shared power with the monarch. They believed the state should actively shape economy and society, guided by reason and the best new ideas regarding education and social legislation. Although most Spanish liberals in the early nineteenth century were not anti-religious, they favored a limited role for the church in education and society.
By contrast, many segments of Spanish society, emerging from the turmoil of the Napoleonic period and facing the unsettling social and economic changes of early industrialization, clung to religious traditions as their best hope in a hostile world. The factions on the right opposed the restraints that a constitution placed on the power of the monarch and on the role of the church. They favored traditional values, such as order, hierarchy, and morality, to guide the actions of the monarch and the state, with limited power for the individual in both the public and the private spheres. With regard to the role of the church in national affairs, they believed that religious values should inform every aspect of life, and that the economic basis of the church should be preserved, so that it could carry out the functions necessary for social stability.
During the First Carlist War, because the factions on the right supported Don Carlos, María Cristina, as regent for the three-year-old Isabel, had no choice but to embrace the agenda of the factions on the left. With both sides fairly evenly matched, the war lasted for six years (1833–9), and María Cristina had to accept radical measures to generate funds. These measures included closing down most monastic orders in 1835 and auctioning off their properties, as well as the secular property of the church in general. Viewed as an outrage by the factions on the right, these sales allowed the new moneyed classes to consolidate their economic power by becoming major landowners, and committed the monarchy irrevocably to the liberal political agenda. Further actions by the hard-pressed government included abolishing the tithe, which had supported the secular clergy since time out of mind, thus driving the wedge still deeper between traditional and liberal Spain. The government also wiped out various rights and privileges of the Spanish nobility, while leaving their landownership intact. Given that deeply held beliefs were at stake, the Carlist War was fought with exemplary brutality on both sides, to the extent that the international community became alarmed that it might spread.
To contain that threat, Isabeline Spain was included in the Quadruple Alliance formed in April 1834 by Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal. Defined as an alliance of constitutional monarchies against the reactionary states of Austria and Russia, the alliance allowed foreign intervention in Spain to ensure that the Carlists did not win. England sanctioned the formation of a military expeditionary force of some 10,000 men to fight in Spain, and they would remain from 1835 until the end of the conflict in 1839. In August 1839, the so-called “Agreement of Eliot” laid out conditions for the proper treatment of prisoners of war, and the Peace of Vergara ended the conflict, negotiated by the liberal general Baldomero Espartero and the Carlist general Rafael Maroto. Although the constitutional monarchy remained in power, Carlist army officers were reincorporated into the national army, and Navarre, the Carlist stronghold, retained its traditional rights and privileges. In other words, though the war ended, the underlying conflicts that spawned it remained unresolved.
A new constitution written in 1837 defined the Isabeline state, broadly based on liberal political principles. Nonetheless, it was not clear which socioeconomic groups among the liberal factions would gain the greatest advantages from the state. The wealthy capitalists of agriculture, industry, and banking were determined to retain their position and consequently favored a legislative agenda that would not jeopardize their ownership of former church lands or intervene unduly in the economy. The middling capitalists who owned shops, along with landowning peasants, some of the wealthier artisans, and educated professionals, generally favored a more active legislative agenda that would extend political participation. The turbulent political history of Isabel II's reign would be defined by the alternation in power of these two broad groupings in the context of a liberal, constitutional monarchy. The Carlists would remain far to the right, and the landless farmers and urban wage-workers would remain far to the left, excluded from political participation.
In the immediate aftermath of the First Carlist War, the activist arm of the liberals, who became known as the Progressives, forced the government to shift toward the left, in order to broaden political participation and individual freedoms. They instituted this change by means of an army proclamation in 1840, reminiscent of Riego's proclamation two decades earlier. The “sword-arm” (espadón) who issued the proclamation was General Espartero, who replaced the queen mother as regent for the child queen, but acting as a civilian rather than as an army officer. Espartero would use his authority to promote a program of modernization that tried to foster the loyalty of the high and middling segments of the bourgeoisie at the same time, promoting free trade and civil liberties.
Instead of unity, however, Espartero's program alienated both right and left of the limited political spectrum. Large landowners, bankers, and industrialists opposed free trade, which favored British interests, and they conspired with María Cristina and King Louis-Philippe of France to oust Espartero. Segments of the army were appalled by the latter's execution of General Diego de León in 1841 for plotting to kidnap the “captive” young queen. Advocates of greater civil rights, and workers who wanted the right to organize labor unions, met with similar intransigence from Espartero. At the end of 1842, when industrialists and workers in Barcelona joined forces to protest against free trade, Espartero ordered the bombing of the city and even shut down the Cortes.
In May 1843, General Ramón María Narváez, an army leader who championed the more conservative or Moderate (Moderado) political factions, issued his own proclamation just outside Madrid. General Espartero left Spain for exile in England, and Narváez took his place as principal adviser to the young queen. That same year Isabel officially came of age, at thirteen, and ruled thereafter in her own name, but under the heavy influence of Narváez. From 1843 to 1854, he would develop mechanisms that made the constitutional monarchy function efficiently, the cost being what the modern world would term “corruption.”
The constitution of 1845 set a more conservative tone than its 1837 precursor, enforced by a strong state bureaucracy at the national level and supported by a network of political bosses at the local level. The glue of state funds and patronage ensured the loyalty of the bosses, known cynically as caciques, the village headmen in parts of Spanish America in colonial times. With the management of these bosses, elections to the Cortes became a staged drama rather than an exercise in democracy. The paramilitary police force known as the Civil Guard (Guardia Civil), founded in 1843 as an arm of the government, swiftly put down any threats to civil order. The managed system of constitutional government in Isabeline Spain resembled similar systems elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe, most notably in England. They worked for the most part, and they kept the lid on social protest for the most part, but at the cost of engendering cynicism and a growing anger among idealists and activists who wanted to promote a real and honest democracy.
As queen, Isabel II demonstrated an odd combination of traits and behaviors. Largely to meet the needs of international politics, she was married at the age of sixteen (in 1846) to her first cousin, Francisco de Asís, the duke of Cádiz, rather than to someone of royal rank from outside Spain. In a double wedding, her younger sister, María Luisa Fernandina, married the duke of Montpensier, a son of the king of France. If things had unfolded as England and France planned, Isabel, closely tied to Britain, would have had no children, because her husband was widely known to be homosexual. After Isabel's death, her sister, closely tied to France, would have ascended the throne. Events proved otherwise. Although Isabel greatly admired the English Queen Victoria, her direct contemporary, her personal life was anything but “Victorian.” She would bear nine children, five of whom survived to adulthood, but her husband probably did not father any of them, though he acknowledged them as his own. Because Isabel was the reigning queen, there was nothing that her enemies, or the Montpensier faction, could do to challenge the legitimacy of the growing royal family.
Contrasting with this scandalous romantic history, the queen also demonstrated a fervent, sentimental, and even superstitious religiosity, surrounded by priests when she was not dallying with lovers. She displayed similar contrasts in her extravagant personal expenditures and her penny-pinching attitude as head of state. Perhaps the worst indictment of her rule is that she never seemed to understand the difference between her personal whims and wishes and her duties as a constitutional monarch to adopt the programs of Spain's elected officials. Vain, sensual, capricious, and foolish, she might have been a disaster for Spain in the days when monarchs held real power. As it was, in the modern world of the nineteenth century, she was a disaster mainly for the institution of monarchy itself.
With the stability created by Narváez's managed political system, the Spanish economy slowly modernized and industrialized. A relatively free press represented various political factions but posed no danger to the status quo. A Second Carlist War in 1847–9 affected little more than rural Catalonia, and the upheavals of 1848 elsewhere in Europe had no parallel in Spain, which already had some degree of political democracy, cynically managed though it was. With regard to church–state relations, Narváez's government negotiated a new Concordat with the Vatican in 1851, which gave the church more power, in exchange for the pope's all-important confirmation of the legal ownership of former church lands. In all, Narváez's system functioned well enough, although it solved none of the underlying tensions in Spanish society and bred cynicism because of its widespread corruption.
A new generation of progressive army officers grew increasingly restive under the system. In 1854 they issued a proclamation demanding better government, less corruption, more efficiency, and enhanced rights for citizens. When the government refused to resign, the plotters seized power violently, in a golpe de estado known as “La Vicalvarada.” General Leopoldo O'Donnell then joined with older Progressives, including Espartero, who had returned from England, to prepare a new constitution. The new government acted to speed up industrialization by providing subsidies for large projects including railroad construction (1855). The funds came from the sale of lands of the noble military orders and municipal commons and wastelands, which harmed small farmers who relied on access to those lands to supplement their own smallholdings. A law to limit liability for corporate partners (the Madoz Law, 1855) had similarly mixed results. Industrial workers in Barcelona argued that it should protect their collective right to organize unions, and the resulting unrest destabilized the government. It was brought down in a proclamation by one of its own, General O'Donnell, in July 1856.
O'Donnell's government reinstated the more conservative constitution of 1845. In the interests of stability, it aimed for a coalition of the most moderate of the Progressives and the most progressive of the Moderates. With the rivalries among the most powerful elements of Spanish society muted, all of their energies could be focused on developing the economy. In addition, by presenting a united front, those in charge of the economy could keep a lid on social unrest and workers’ demands for full economic and political justice. To a certain extent, O'Donnell and his administration succeeded, achieving greater efficiency with less corruption. On the other hand, it was clear that they made political decisions to favor those in power, and anyone who opposed the official agenda found the government increasingly repressive.
To raise funds, more municipal lands were sold, further privatizing what had previously been communal property. Like the earlier sales of ecclesiastical and other entailed lands, these new sales benefited the propertied classes and deprived poor farmers of access to land. Even with this new infusion of public funds, however, the government lacked sufficient capital to carry out major improvements to the infrastructure, and dared not risk alienating the propertied classes by increasing taxes. Given this dilemma, and to go forward with projects such as completing a national network of railways, the government borrowed foreign funds on the international market and encouraged foreign capital to flow into Spain.
Some historians have argued that these policies did little to develop the economy while widening the gap between rich and poor and allowing foreign goods to enter the Spanish market to the detriment of local production. Others argue that the policies were necessary for the industrial development of Spain, despite their negative aspects. There is no question, however, that the Spanish economy grew substantially in the mid nineteenth century. Even though Spain clearly lagged behind the major industrialized countries in Europe, such as Great Britain, the government's push to modernize the economy enjoyed limited success.
To modernize society as well, a Law of Public Instruction (1857) established government control of all schools, private as well as public. Thereafter, the state would set the curriculum, oversee examinations, and award degrees. Nonetheless, to mollify traditionalists, the law still privileged Catholic doctrine as the basis for Spanish education. These changes did not go nearly far enough for the most progressive voices among the intellectual elite. Increasingly, many of them favored a clear division between church and state, and secular values in place of the religious values of the past. Ironically, the most distinguished university professors also objected to the state's control of education. In the 1860s, professors who held senior positions demanded the right to control the curriculum and examinations, and above all to be free to express their opinions, regardless of what the government thought. This ferment of intellectual opposition occurred largely outside government circles, and a segment of the press took up their call for more thoroughgoing change.
The government also used the press to rally support and launched a series of overseas expeditions and minor wars, designed in part to foster national unity. In 1858–60, Spanish expeditions were sent to Cochin China (today, Vietnam) and Morocco, the latter resulting in the conquest of Tetuán, long a base for pirate raids against the Spanish coasts. In the period of the American Civil War (1861–5), Spain occupied Santo Domingo, lest it fall into other hands, and participated with France's Napoleon III in an expedition to Mexico (1861–2). Spain also fought with Peru and allied republics on the Pacific coast over access to the nitrate-rich deposits of bird guano on islands off the Peruvian coast, a valuable commodity. This so-called “Guano War” (1864–6) did little to enhance the country's prestige. Nonetheless, in the European scramble for colonies and colonial products that marked the mid nineteenth century, Spain was determined to maintain a presence.
The growing economy made these overseas adventures possible, and they were useful for the government as it faced increasing opposition at home. Unfortunately, the European economy as a whole entered a recession in 1866, related to disruptions in the supplies of raw cotton during the American Civil War. The situation was made worse by crop failures in the Spanish countryside. With the population exceeding 16 million, even a small shortfall in the harvest led to higher prices for food and bread riots in the cities. Despite increasingly repressive policies, the government of Isabel II could not withstand the crisis that unfolded in 1868. The queen was ill equipped to serve as a stabilizing force, given her scandalous romantic life and her failure to play the role of a constitutional monarch.
On September 19, 1868, another military proclamation in Cádiz demanded a change in government and “a Spain with honor.” General Juan Prim and General Francisco Serrano (duke of La Torre) acted for a diverse group of conspirators, many of whom were civilians. After a brief skirmish between the military rebels and the forces that remained loyal to the queen, Isabel II went into exile on September 30, though she did not abdicate. The conspirators then formed a provisional government and began shopping for a replacement monarch.
The search would not be easy. By then, a new generation of idealistic reformers, politicians, and intellectuals had become so alienated from the policies of the constitutional monarchy that some of them began plotting to create a republic. Disillusioned also with the notion that a strong central state could effect change, they shifted their goals toward decentralization, believing that the common people could best be schooled in representative government at the local and regional levels. And some of them, at least, angered by the power and intransigence of the religious establishment, moved toward the goal of a secular state, separate from, if not actively hostile to, the Catholic Church.
In the short term, the republicans could not take power, but the provisional government set up by the leaders of the coup nonetheless instituted several radical changes in the constitutional monarchy. First, they organized elections to a new Cortes, based on universal adult male suffrage. All males of twenty-five years and older could vote, which was the most inclusive electorate in the world at the time. The Cortes wrote a new constitution dated June 6, 1869, that placed all legislative power in its own hands. It retained the monarchy but defined it in advisory and ceremonial terms. As advanced as the new constitution was, it was bound to disappoint those who favored abolishing the monarchy and instituting a republic. Marginalized by the new constitution, republicans moved outside official political discourse to plot a seizure of power, an ominous sign for the future.
In the meantime, the provisional government headed by General Juan Prim, with General Francisco Serrano serving as provisional head of state, or regent, searched for a new monarch willing to reign under the terms of the new constitution. In Paris, Isabel II finally abdicated the throne in 1870, in favor of her son Alfonso. Any alternative candidate who agreed to become Spain's monarch would have to contend with challenges not only from the Carlists but also from Alfonso's partisans.
The political situation in Europe further complicated the search, which lasted for a year and a half. When the Cortes offered Leopold of Hohenzollern the throne, his acceptance provoked the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which France suffered a humiliating defeat and Paris, besieged by Prussian troops, collapsed into chaos and revolution with the Paris Commune (March–May, 1871). This “first workers’ revolution,” in the designation of Karl Marx, encouraged the socialist theoreticians of the International Workingmen's Association (1864–76, also known as the First International) to believe that a widespread socialist revolution was at hand. Spain's search for a new monarch took place in this highly volatile political and social atmosphere.
After Leopold of Hohenzollern withdrew his candidacy, the Cortes extended an offer to a son of King Victor Emmanuel II of the House of Savoy in Italy on November 16, 1870. To the relief of Spain's constitutional monarchists, he accepted. Designated Amadeo I, the new king arrived in Spain on December 30, only to find that his principal supporter, General Prim, had died at the hands of assassins that same day. Amadeo arrived in Madrid at the start of the New Year, and it is fair to say that his reign was doomed from the start. Although he accepted his role as a constitutional monarch and filled it with intelligence and care, Spain's political classes seemed to have no talent for fulfilling their responsibility to legislate and govern in the best interests of the country.
Amadeo's supporters, ostensibly the most powerful group in the Cortes, split into factions and failed to agree on a legislative program. Individuals out of power at a given moment spent their time conspiring to overthrow their rivals, rather than serving as a “loyal opposition.” Moreover, the constitutional monarchy as a whole faced continual challenges from republicans on the left and supporters of Alfonso XII on the right. As if that were not bad enough, rebellion in Cuba continued (1868–78), and the Carlists launched their third war in favor of the Carlist pretender in 1872. In addition to the financial strains that the wars caused to Amadeo's struggling government, ordinary Spaniards greatly resented the system of military conscription that took young men from their homes, and they did not support either war wholeheartedly.
Internally, and despite universal adult male suffrage, the political classes failed to resolve the issue of political rights for Spanish workers and peasants who owned little or no property. Factory workers provided the muscle for Spain's push to expand industrialization; rural wage-workers fed the country and enriched capitalist landowners, but they had no right to bargain collectively, and the state did little to protect them from unsafe and unfair working conditions. In Spain as elsewhere in the first century of industrialization, the propertied classes were also the political classes and they showed little inclination to sacrifice their interests in order to benefit the workers. Moreover, although radical republican intellectuals were prominent among Spain's political classes, they were as unresponsive to the problem of worker unrest as their colleagues.
Faced with this array of intractable problems, Amadeo I abdicated on February 11, 1873, after just two years on the throne. It is hard to fault him on this or any other aspect of his brief reign. The day after the abdication, the Cortes proclaimed Spain a republic, using heady and overblown rhetoric that compared their rebellion to England's Glorious Revolution of 1688. But “La Gloriosa,” far from transforming the Spanish political and economic landscape, lasted just eleven months and displayed the same dreary combination of uncompromising factional politics and governmental incompetence. One after another, four presidents scrabbled to the top of the political heap, dragging the executive power back and forth from left to center-right, focused on the question of how much power the central government should delegate to regional authorities. Estanislao Figueras, a moderate Catalan federalist, took power on February 11, 1873, but the more radical federalists replaced him the following June with Francisco Pi y Margall, a Catalan writer and public intellectual. Pi y Margall's tenure, which lasted only from June 11 to July 18, coincided with two major uprisings. The affiliates of the First International launched a brief attempt at socialist revolution in Alcoy (Valencia) on July 9; and the Cantonalist revolt that began on July 12 represented the extreme of federalist beliefs, aiming to reduce government to its most local level. Pi y Margall took the blame and Nicolás Salmerón replaced him, aiming to restore order. He failed, lasting in the presidency only from July 18 to September 7. Pulling the radical republic back toward the center, Emilio Castelar took power on September 7. With an immediate need to restore order, he collaborated with the army, which cost him the support of his colleagues in the Cortes. In short, the intellectuals who held power during “La Gloriosa” proved themselves incapable of fulfilling the minimal requirement of a government. They could not govern.
Given the failure of civilian politicians to address the needs of Spain or its citizens, army leaders once again concluded that they were the only force capable of putting the state back on track. On January 3, 1874, General Manuel Pavía marched into the fractious Cortes and essentially told the delegates to go home, as they were no longer in charge. For the rest of the year, General Francisco Serrano governed without a legislature, appointing a group of conservative but competent civilian ministers to run the country. The government immediately outlawed the labor movement, driving it underground. Although the radical revolts of 1873 did not recur, the Cuban rebellion and the Third Carlist War continued, draining funds and political confidence. Despite Serrano's contempt for the civilian leaders of what would become known as the First Republic, he agreed with them in rejecting the notion of a Bourbon restoration.
Behind the scenes, however, many of General Serrano's colleagues in the army had concluded that a constitutional monarchy, with a Bourbon restoration, offered the best chance to bring peace and stability to Spain, after nearly a decade of political chaos. Many civilian politicians, frozen out of power by General Serrano, agreed, among them Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (1828–97). A distinguished historian of Spain, Cánovas worked to gather support for a Bourbon restoration, hoping to effect this change without another military intervention. He succeeded and failed at the same time. On December 29, General Arsenio Martínez Campos issued a proclamation in Valencia demanding the restoration of the Bourbons, with Alfonso XII as Spain's constitutional monarch. The young king was in England at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, but he returned to Spain in early January 1875 to take up the role that his mother had failed to perform.
After the years of turmoil and uncertainty, most of the Spanish people accepted the Bourbon restoration with something resembling joy and gratitude. Republicans remained committed to the abolition of the monarchy, however, and the Carlist pretender continued the third war against the state. Alfonso's army defeated the Carlists in 1876, however, ending another phase in that ongoing struggle.
The second Bourbon restoration settled in quickly and smoothly, guided by the carefully crafted policies of Cánovas, who worked to create a consensus among Spain's fractious political classes. A new constitution in 1876 restated the highest ideals of the constitutional monarchy, enshrining the rule of law, civilian control of the government, and secular authority over education and culture, though respectful of Catholic believers – a program designed to appeal to the broadest cross-section of the population. Under the new constitution, the legislative parliament (Cortes) held most of the power in its two chambers: a Senate with 360 elected delegates, and a Congress with 409 delegates. In this parliamentary structure, the head of government held the office of president of the Council of Ministers and sat in the lower chamber (Congress). The king was head of state and had to countersign all legislation to enact it into law.
Early in 1878 the young king married his cousin María de las Mercedes, and the handsome royal couple basked in their popularity among the Spanish people. Tragically, María de las Mercedes died just six months after the wedding. Before the end of the year, a Spanish anarchist fired a shot at the king, a shocking reminder of the growing contingent of extremists in Europe and the United States, who justified extreme violence to achieve their ends. Those ends rarely included a practical program of reform, but merely aimed at assassinating leaders to destabilize the power structure and bring it down. The last half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth would see a rash of such assassinations.
Anxious to produce an heir, Alfonso XII married again late in 1879, this time to a distant cousin, the Archduchess María Cristina of Habsburg-Lorraine. As if to underscore the dangerous times in which they lived, the newly married couple survived an assassination attempt as they rode in their carriage in Madrid. Despite the unease that these violent episodes created, general economic prosperity served as a counterweight favoring stability. The European economy enjoyed an extraordinary surge of growth until around 1886, and Spanish prosperity continued until almost the end of the century.
Bolstered by the growing economy, the parliamentary structure functioned smoothly, with elections managed at the local level to make sure that the Liberals and Conservatives alternated in power and enjoyed a majority in the lower house when they controlled the government. Like his counterparts in the mid nineteenth century, Cánovas modeled his system on Great Britain's parliamentary monarchy; in fact, many dubbed the system “the English style” (el estilo inglés). Cynical though it was, Spain's system of alternation in power (el turno) aimed to keep all political factions under the umbrella of the official governing structure. As a measure of its success, Liberals and Conservatives as well as moderate republicans and even moderate Carlists saw more advantages in staying within the structure than moving outside.
Alfonso XII won the affection of Spaniards not only by his appealing personality, but also by his willingness to face danger; for example, he visited areas affected by a cholera outbreak in 1881 and traveled to comfort the victims of a devastating earthquake in 1885. He won the loyalty of the political classes by adhering strictly to his role as a constitutional monarch. Under the system, the king had little independent power, except to designate the president of the Council of Ministers – the head of government. Cánovas del Castillo tried to limit royal power further by a law in 1881 that would have set a term in office of eighteen months for the head of government, whether or not that official enjoyed the confidence of the king. Alfonso refused to sign it. In consequence, Cánovas resigned, and the king then called Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, the leader of the Liberals, to form a new cabinet. In other words, the king followed the principle of el turno even in the exercise of his independent power, giving control to those who favored more rapid change.
Sagasta instituted many changes in the government's approach, including allowing the labor movement to organize openly and to bargain collectively with employers. And, as of 1887, the Law of Associations established those rights in law. In 1888, socialist politicians under the leadership of Pablo Iglesias (1850–1925) formed both a political party, the Socialist Workers’ Party of Spain (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, or PSOE), and a labor union, the General Union of Workers (Unión General de Trabajadores, or UGT). Both the party and the union drew most of their strength from the mining and industrialized areas of northern Spain. The PSOE participated in national elections to the Cortes after the Law of Universal Suffrage took effect in 1890, but for several decades they lacked sufficient votes for anyone to be elected. Nonetheless, the party remained within the legal framework of the Spanish state and formed an integral part of the international socialist movement as well.
Alfonso XII and his second wife had two daughters, and Queen María Cristina was pregnant again in 1885 when Alfonso XII died of tuberculosis on November 25, three days before his twenty-eighth birthday. The widowed queen gave birth to a son on May 17, 1886, and the infant immediately became king as Alfonso XIII, displacing his two older sisters. María Cristina would act as regent for her son until he attained his majority at the age of seventeen in 1902. During the regency, the widowed queen and her adored son formed a sympathetic pair in the public image. By all accounts, María Cristina presided over the parliamentary system with skill and tact, without entering into the fray of electoral politics. This helped to insulate the monarchy from the contentious issues of the day and from the consequences of unpopular government policies.
One of the most divisive social issues concerned education. At the end of the nineteenth century, some 63 percent of the Spanish population remained unschooled. Only the state had the resources to expand and extend education, but debate centered on whether that education would be state-run and secular or run by the Catholic educational establishment, with subsidies and supervision by the state. In either case, a further issue concerned the curriculum and the values that formed its basis. Throughout the Western world at the time, similar questions arose, centered on the best way to educate individuals as law-abiding and productive citizens. The issues were particularly acute in Spain, however, because of the continued power and influence of the Catholic Church.
The education of Spain's future leaders held special importance as it continued its push to industrialize and modernize. Several important and rival movements to reform secondary schools and universities coincided with the Bourbon restoration. Within the Catholic fold, the Society of Jesus led the way in educational reform, after decades of difficult relations with the Spanish government since their reconstitution as an order in 1814. The Jesuits’ counterpart in the secular sphere was the private school movement known as the Free Institution of Teaching (Institución Libre de Enseñanza), founded in 1876. The guiding intellects behind the Institución Libre were Francisco Giner de los Ríos (1840–1915) and Manuel B. Cossió (1857–1935). In the public sphere, elite educational reform began in earnest in the first years of the twentieth century, with the Committee for the Expansion of Historical Studies and Scientific Research (Junta para Ampliación de los Estudios Históricos e Investigaciones Científicas). The Center for Historical Studies (Centro de Estudios Históricos), under the direction of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, was an early result of the reform movement, along with the Students’ Residence (Residencia de Estudiantes) for males and the Young Ladies’ Residence (Residencia de Señoritas). Each in its own way, the various avenues of elite educational reform produced generations of political and economic leaders, but their values and approaches to public policy were often at odds with one another.
The Spanish military establishment, so active politically through most of the nineteenth century, remained strangely quiet during the Bourbon restoration. In part, this was the product of an increased professionalization of military careers through the foundation of military academies. With economic prosperity, career officers could aspire to comfortable middle-class lives if they rose in rank. Ironically, however, Spain's economy benefited from continued peace, and there were few opportunities for military officers to advance their careers in peacetime. Intermittent rebellions in Cuba in 1866–79, 1883–4, and from 1895 on provided limited scope for battlefield glory, and the Spanish army failed to distinguish itself in that ongoing conflict.
The Cuban rebellion that began in 1895 coincided with a burst of belligerent nationalism in the United States, and irresponsible journalism on both sides of the Atlantic pandered to the taste for sensationalism in popular culture. The United States presented itself as the protector of an oppressed Cuba and accused Spain of brutality beyond measure. The strong anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States added to the mixture of mutual contempt. Spain and the United States went to war in April 1898, a war welcomed on both sides as an opportunity to win military glory.
Resigning his post as assistant secretary of the United States navy, Theodore Roosevelt joined a large voluntary expeditionary force, soon dubbed “the Rough Riders,” that went to Cuba to wrest control of the island from Spain. At the same time, the United States sent naval forces both to Cuba and to the Philippines, which, along with Puerto Rico, were among the last remnants of the Spanish Empire. The war was a disaster for Spain, with humiliating defeats in naval battles at both Santiago Bay in Cuba and Manila Bay in the Philippines. Due to Roosevelt's talent for self-promotion, he would emerge as the public face of the American victory, second only to Admiral George Dewey, the victor at Manila Bay. When the war ended on December 10, 1898, Spain lost what remained of its historic empire, and suffered a tremendous blow to its national self-image. The echoes of that defeat would reverberate well into the twentieth century.
In confronting the reality of the 1898 disaster, the Spanish elite of all political stripes felt an urgent need to reform Spain and bring the country up to date within the European context. Their definitions of the crisis, and their proposed remedies, differed greatly, however. In some ways the so-called “Generation of ’98” recalled the soul-searching of the arbitristas exactly three centuries earlier. Did Spain's problem lie in a lack of leadership at the highest levels of the government? Was the political system itself responsible for the crisis? Or was all of society to blame, with each group pushing its own agenda instead of working for the benefit of Spain as a whole? For the first three decades of the new century, Spain's intellectual elite threw itself into an anguished examination of the nation, defining its ills and arguing for profound changes in both public policy and private behavior.
The Generation of ’98 included a brilliant array of cultured individuals, unquestionably the largest and most energetic display of creativity since the Golden Century. That earlier movement had included not only reformers such as the arbitristas, but the poets, playwrights, novelists, and composers whose work still defines the cultural brilliance of the Habsburg centuries. The Generation of ’98 included writers such as the philosopher and novelist Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936); the poet Antonio Machado (1875–1939); and essayists such as Ramiro de Maeztu (1875–1936), Pio Baroja (1872–1967), and José Martínez Ruiz, known as Azorín (1873–1967). Together, and separately, they analyzed the failings of Spain, drawing the intellectual elite into an emotional debate about the very essence of the nation. Many countries, in the contemporary world as in the past, do not have the stomach for such critical introspection, viewing it as a kind of treason, but self-criticism has always been part of the Spanish character. In many ways, Spanish intellectuals from the sixteenth century on bear as much responsibility for the “Black Legend” of Spanish history as do her enemies.
The anguished critics did not represent all of the intellectual elite, however. Many educated Spaniards reacted to the dark view of their compatriots with a spirited defense of Spanish values, and with pride in the overall legacy of four centuries of Spanish imperial rule. On the surface, the critics generally favored more radical reform, and the defenders favored more gradual reform. It is fair to say, however, that they all knew that things could not remain the same, especially in the face of increasing demands from Spanish workers and peasants.
In the waning years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, militant labor movements gained strength all over the Western industrialized world. Governments had easily suppressed protests, strikes, and riots during the mid nineteenth century, and the general prosperity of the 1870s and 1880s had blunted the calls for radical change. At the end of the century, however, the economic downturn reminded workers that they were still not receiving their fair share of industrial profits, while factory owners and investors grew richer by the year.
In countries such as Spain that lagged behind the industrial leaders of Western Europe, the militancy could take extreme forms, not only in cities but also in rural areas among landless laborers and poor peasants. Anarchism had arrived in Spain in 1868 and gathered adherents among the most alienated peasants and workers. Anarchists favored direct action to bring about a total revolution, over better wages and working conditions. They planned the failed Alcoy uprising in 1873 as the start of that revolution. In subsequent decades, anarchism gained adherents, both during the period when labor movements were illegal (1874–81) and thereafter.
Anarchism was inherently hostile to central organization, and the movement suffered continually from factional disputes based on how far, how fast, and how violently to push for change. Nonetheless, anarchism flourished as Spain's slow pace of industrialization failed to absorb displaced peasants, landless laborers, and artisans, and successive governments moved cautiously to avoid threats to order and private property. Using the slow pace of change as a justification for violence, individual anarchists committed terrorist acts such as throwing bombs in public places in the 1880s and 1890s, which resulted in police repression and an identification of the whole anarchist movement with indiscriminate and uncontrolled violence.
A shocking example of that violence occurred in 1906, when an anarchist assassin attacked the wedding procession of Alfonso XIII and his bride Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg. Wedding preparations had been going on for at least a year, and the king's marriage to a granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria promised to make the occasion a celebration of the constitutional monarchy. The Palace Hotel, newly built near the Prado Museum, housed official wedding guests, who included many members of the European aristocracy. On May 31, with the streets filled with festive crowds hoping to catch a glimpse of the newly married couple on their way to the wedding reception, the Catalan anarchist Mateu Morral threw a bomb at the royal carriage. Although the newlyweds escaped harm, many members of the public died or sustained wounds in the attack, along with the horses pulling the carriage. The public outrage that followed the attack generated considerable sympathy for the monarchy, faced with growing challenges both inside and outside official circles.
At the start of the twentieth century, Spanish anarchism had grown and matured enough to attempt to form a national movement. The Federation of Workers’ Societies of the Spanish Region came into being between 1900 and 1905, bringing together groups that identified with anarchism as well as with traditional labor union movements, or syndicalism. In Barcelona, a parallel movement called Workers’ Solidarity, which shared anarcho-syndicalist values, began in 1907. These movements came together in 1910 as the National Federation of Work (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, or CNT) and held their first conference in 1911. The anarcho-syndicalists alarmed the government even more than the socialist labor movement, and the CNT was outlawed from 1912 to 1918.
Republicans remained committed to the abolition of the monarchy in the long term but worked within the constitutional framework in the short term, gaining support from both workers and segments of the middle class. Nonetheless, the various factions among the republicans continually squabbled among themselves, over both political issues and personal loyalties. The enigmatic Alejandro Lerroux led the older faction most identified with uncompromising republicanism. Melquíades Álvarez led the faction most identified with a more flexible approach to working within the constitutional monarchy. Sharing the leadership, but stymied by internal strife, the republicans did little to bring about the changes they espoused.
Outside the political system, Joaquín Costa articulated the disaffection with the government felt by segments of the middle class. The focus of his copious writings and mass rallies was on widespread opposition to government taxation – always a popular platform – but also on forward-looking proposals such as a nationwide irrigation system to aid agriculture. Despite his provocative stances, he stayed within the legal norms of political activity open to the citizenry and garnered much support for his positions. Nonetheless, because that support depended so much on Costa's own vision and energy, it inevitably faded as his health declined and never presented a serious challenge to the government.
Within the system, elected politicians from the Liberals and Conservatives made a concerted effort at reform. In part, they acted to blunt pressures from republicans within the system and from labor militancy outside it, but they also worked to make both government and the economy function more equitably and efficiently for the population as a whole. There is no reason to doubt their sincerity, even while recognizing the fear that motivated it. The driving force behind the reform movement was Antonio Maura y Montaner, a Mallorcan and former Liberal who shifted to the Conservatives and became that party's leader in 1903. Chosen as president of the Council of Ministers in 1907, he aimed to end the power of local bosses to control the political process (caciquismo) and thereby to increase confidence in the government on the part of the country's economic leaders in every party. With confidence restored and the constitutional monarchy strengthened, Maura's government hoped to address the demands for autonomy from Catalonia, the most dynamic region in Spain, where dreams of regional autonomy frustrated in the First Republic had grown along with the local economy.
Worker unrest in Catalonia erupted in rebellion in July 1909, aimed first at the military adventurism in Morocco and the power of industrial bosses, and then shifting to a violent outburst of anti-clericalism. Mobs in Barcelona attacked churches and monasteries and their inhabitants, burning buildings, desecrating cemeteries, and in the process outraging those who continued to value the role of the church in Spanish society, whatever their political beliefs. Although military units soon quashed the rebellion, the events of the “Tragic Week” had serious repercussions. The government arrested a firebrand orator, Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, as the instigator of the rebellion, hoping to thwart any thoughts of similar uprisings. Though Ferrer's trial could not tie him to any capital offenses, the court convicted him, and his execution provoked international outrage against Spain. In short, the government executed Ferrer for his ideas, not for his acts, and the fallout brought down Maura's government and his ambitous program of reform.
King Alfonso XIII made clear his dislike for Maura and did not reappoint him. Instead, he chose José Canalejas as the new president of the Council of Ministers in 1910. A scholar and academic, as well as the leader of the Liberal Party, Canalejas had no desire to push for changes that would further destabilize the country. Instead, through a series of compromises and agreements, he aimed to keep the lid on the explosive tensions in Spanish society. Responding to the violent anti-clericalism that had surfaced during the Tragic Week, he sponsored a law in 1910 that forbade the foundation of any new religious establishments until the government could negotiate a new Concordat with the Vatican. The church saw a sinister impulse behind this “padlock law,” in part because Canalejas was anti-clerical, but it is fair to say that he was not anti-religious; he was simply trying to defuse tensions by preventing provocative actions from either side of the religious divide.
In the international sphere, Canalejas negotiated an agreement with France over control of Morocco (Hispano-French Treaty, 1912), preserving a well-defined role for Spain. Domestically, he initiated talks to bring Maura back into the parliamentary system, despite the king's disapproval of the former head of the government. Canalejas continued Maura's firm stance regarding worker unrest, which meant that no compromise was possible. In 1911, his government suppressed a general strike, as well as a naval mutiny. In 1912, Canalejas responded to another general strike by drafting railroad workers into the army. From the point of view of the violent elements outside the parliamentary system, the government's stance justified direct and violent action against the state. In November 1912, Manuel Pardiñas, a twenty-six-year-old anarchist well known to the police on both sides of the Atlantic, shot Canalejas to death in the Puerta del Sol, as he paused outside a favorite bookshop.
For the next five years, the reform program came to a standstill, as successive governments merely kept the machinery going in support of the economic and social elite. The Cortes drifted into inaction, meeting for only a few months of each year and then only to pass legislation such as budget bills needed to keep the administration functioning. Both inside and outside government, Liberals and Conservatives continued to bicker amongst themselves and with one another, postponing any serious attempt to address the fractures in Spanish society. Remarkably, the Spanish governments and the country as a whole continued to function fairly well, buoyed by the economic prosperity that accompanied Spain's neutrality in the First World War. Spain, and influential Spaniards, earned large profits from selling agricultural and industrial production, and the government was able to reduce part of Spain's foreign debt.
King Alfonso and his English queen Victoria Eugenia, nicknamed Queen Ena, produced seven children in the first eight years of their marriage. Pictures of the royal family filled the popular press, providing a welcome distraction from the grim news emanating from the battle zones of the First World War. Queen Ena had brought a tragic genetic legacy into the marriage, however. Hemophilia afflicted two of her sons, including the first-born, Alfonso, just as it afflicted other royal descendants of Queen Victoria and her consort Albert, including the son of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. The second son of Alfonso XIII and Queen Ena, Jaime, also experienced a tragedy in childhood, becoming deaf because of a botched surgical operation. These very human tragedies no doubt gained sympathy for the royal family, even among critics of the monarchy. The king and queen had relatives on both sides of the First World War, making Spain's neutral stance an understandable choice during the conflict. The king used his international connections and the services of Spanish diplomats to intercede for the humane treatment of war captives on both sides of the carnage.
Despite prosperity and social stability, however, Spanish writers and intellectuals decried the self-serving hypocrisy of their elected leaders and the government's failure to enact true reform. Like diehard republicans, labor leaders, anarchists, religious leaders, and some military officers, Spain's intellectual elite saw a deep breach between the attitude of the government and the needs of the country as a whole. The essayist José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), one of the country's leading intellectuals, defined the breach as a split between “official Spain” and “vital Spain” and saw little hope for its resolution. The various interest groups in “vital Spain” had lost faith in the constitutional monarchy and the parliamentary system that administered it. Increasingly they treated the government as irrelevant and pursued their goals by direct action, outside the system. In Ortega's analysis, the country lacked a central core of values and programs that could unite all Spaniards in a common cause. Spain had become a body without a spine – “invertebrate” – with the vital forces outside the system tearing the body apart.
Although the anarchists were the most marginalized of the pressure groups alienated from the system, other groups were central to the country's future. In Catalonia, industrial leaders, middle-class lawyers, and workers had all suffered from the loss of Spain's last colonies in 1898. Their disaffection with the government coincided with a rising tide of regional pride that led to demands for more power to run their own affairs, and more respect for the rich history and literate culture of Catalonia.
Even the army, the bulwark of the restored Bourbon monarchy, began to move outside the system. Despite the greater sense of professionalism fostered by the service academies, the Spanish army had not performed well in the Cuban rebellions or the 1898 war with the United States. Humiliated and widely blamed for that defeat, army leaders at first relied on the protection of the Liberal Party and gained the right to bring charges of sedition against the press in 1907. In the absence of strong civilian leadership after 1912, army officers once again began to think of themselves as the best guarantors of the integrity of the state.
From about 1916 on, army leaders reverted to the traditions of the early nineteenth century, favoring direct action to put an errant state back on track. They found an ally in the king himself, who had lost faith in the constitutional monarchy as well, though he was supposed to be its best guarantor. Alfonso XIII cultivated friendships with army officers and took a personal interest in the army's activities in Morocco – the last major foreign outpost in which Spain had an official position. For that interest, the king acquired the nickname “the Africanist.”
The rebellion in Morocco quietened down during the First World War, but other problems continued to fester, despite the wartime prosperity of neutral Spain. Although the leaders of industry and banking profited handsomely during the war, along with some skilled workers, ordinary workers did not. Their wages stagnated, except in war-related industries such as coalmines and railroads, even as inflation eroded their standard of living. The middling ranks of army officers, as well as enlisted men, also saw their wages eroded by inflation. The government's decision to use wartime profits to pay off foreign debt, while laudable, lost the opportunity to modernize the economic infrastructure, and the country's economic leaders tended to spend their profits rather than investing in the future. Together, these characteristics meant that the Spanish economy was not well positioned to grow after the war.
The war also affected neutral Spain politically. The massive destruction elsewhere in Europe shattered whole populations, and traditional political structures and politicians had to bear the blame for the catastrophe. In that atmosphere of disillusion, the entry of the United States into the war in 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson's “Fourteen Points” for the reconstruction of Europe, opened a new range of possibilities for forces on the political left. In Spain, Wilson's support for “self-determination” encouraged Catalan separatists to renew their demands for autonomy. And the Russian Revolution of March 1917, which toppled Czar Nicholas II and put the republican Mensheviks in power, encouraged Spanish republicans to renew their push to oust Alfonso XIII.
Matters came to a head in the summer of 1917 as the war wound down and radical movements on the political left pushed for change all over Europe. In Spain, army officers in clandestine military unions (juntas de defensa) demanded government recognition to negotiate for better wages and rights, claiming to represent the nation much better than the traditional political parties did. The Liberal government could not mollify or quell the army's demands, and resigned. A large faction of the Conservatives, under Eduardo Dato, formed a new government more willing to compromise in order to retain army support, but unable to stop the erosion of central authority. With the Cortes out of session, republican politicians and business leaders in Catalonia organized support for an alternative legislative body, which met in Barcelona in mid-July, composed mostly of republicans and socialists, and denounced by Maura's Conservatives. Although the government declared the meeting illegal and disbanded the group, they vowed to meet again. In short, even duly elected political leaders had moved outside the official system, an ominous development for the future.
Labor leaders of both the UGT and the CNT chose the summer of 1917 to launch a “general strike,” less for wages and working conditions than for political purposes, as a prelude to revolution. Radical republicans and socialists began making plans for a provisional government that would take power after a successful strike, following the examples of Russia in March and ongoing strikes all over Europe during the summer. In the event, the Spanish plan failed. Railroad workers went on strike on August 10, before national leaders had fully prepared. During the subsequent general strike on August 13–17, the republicans and even the CNT failed to support the action, no doubt sensing disaster. The army put down the strike with little opposition, but the government itself was in such disarray that it is hard to speak of a government victory.
The system of alternating power between elected representatives of one political party or another, under a constitutional monarchy, had clearly broken down. Even worse, none of the governments formed under Alfonso XIII had been able to solve the corrosive problems that divided Spaniards or to find a new sense of national purpose that would unite them. In the six years after the revolutionary summer of 1917, the king would attempt to find a new combination of government officials and policies that would make the system work again. Dissolving the traditional parties, he appointed political leaders willing to work together in non-partisan coalitions, focused on addressing the two most pressing problems facing Spain: continuing labor unrest; and the renewal of the rebellion in Morocco. Although able men such as Antonio Maura would form a series of such governments, the problems continued to fester. Moreover, a series of well-organized interest groups continued to grow on the fringes of the official political system. Socialists, communists loyal to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, anarchists, regional separatists, and various republican groupings on the left, and Carlists and traditional Catholic groupings on the right, all distrusted the government.
The labor problem was worst in Barcelona, descending periodically into something resembling open warfare, as the various factions hired thugs and gunmen (pistoleros) to carry their grievances into the street. The strife involved not only management versus labor, but also a range of mutually hostile labor organizations. Company unions (sindicatos libres) and unions organized by the Catholic Church were the most conservative, working for better wages and working conditions but not for radical political change. Industrial unions (sindicatos únicos) organized by the CNT represented all the workers in a factory, rather than separating the workers by occupational specialty. They were the most radical of the groups, committed to anarchist goals.
The socialist union, the UGT, had much less presence in Catalonia, and was split – like its political wing, the PSOE – by the international blow-up between socialists and communists. With the Bolsheviks firmly in control in Russia, the Third or Communist International (Comintern) held its first gathering in March 1919. To join the Comintern, socialist parties had to accept a list of “Twenty-One Conditions” regarding their organization and goals, most notably to accept the leadership of Russia and to expel so-called “Social Democrats” who did not support the goal of communist revolution. In Spain, this would have meant the expulsion of iconic figures such as Pablo Iglesias, in many ways the father of Spanish socialism. When the PSOE majority rejected the “Twenty-One Conditions” in 1921, the minority split off and formed the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). In other countries – France, for example – the majority voted to accept the conditions, and the minority split off to form socialist parties. The net result of the debates centering on the Comintern led to a “red scare” that alarmed the middle classes everywhere and made them fear all labor agitation as revolutionary. Such an atmosphere heightened tensions surrounding negotiations for wages and working conditions. The Liberal politician Eduardo Dato fell to an assassin's bullet in March 1921 – a reminder of the persistence of violent direct action in the political sphere.
The renewal of rebellion in Morocco became a similarly intractable problem in the aftermath of the First World War. In 1919, the dynamic rebel leader Abd-el-Krim and his followers attacked Spanish presidios in Melilla and Ceuta, demanding independence from Spain and the formation of a republic. Even the new generation of Spanish officers found it difficult to overcome this new threat from the rebels, given the demoralization and anger among their own soldiers. Poorly paid conscripts complained about inferior rations and equipment, knowing that dishonest suppliers were getting rich at their expense. Young officers such as Francisco Franco y Bahamonde worked to remedy the defects and to recruit units of loyal Moroccans to Spanish service, at the same time imposing army discipline on the disgruntled conscripts. They had some success, but not enough.
Anxious to solve the Moroccan problem, General Manuel Fernández Silvestre led a huge Spanish force against Abd-el-Krim on July 21, 1921, at the battle of Anual. It was a complete disaster, with the deaths of 15,000 men. General Silvestre, closely linked to the king, died in the battle, which saved him from taking the blame. That honor fell to the military high commissioner, General Dámaso Berenguer, but the whole Spanish army felt the shame and humiliation of the catastrophic defeat.
For the next two years, politicians in the Cortes began to demand a full investigation of the disaster and to assess the responsibilities of everyone in charge, from army officers and government officials to the Prime Minister, even as the war in Morocco continued. The stain of defeat threatened to spread to the king himself, because of his close connections to the army high command and the Moroccan campaign. After acrimonious debate, the government finally appointed a “commission of responsibilities,” set to meet in the fall of 1923. Despite growing national revulsion at the continuing cost of the war, the Liberal coalition government at the time also announced a new Moroccan initiative and a new round of conscriptions into the army. In response, the socialists began to organize another general strike, also set for the fall of 1923. The upcoming confrontation over the Moroccan war lurched toward a crisis during the summer of 1923, even as violent labor confrontations continued in Barcelona.
With the king and the government still in the unofficial summer capital of San Sebastián in the north, General Miguel Primo de Rivera issued a proclamation in Barcelona on September 13, calling for a change of government. As the captain-general in Catalonia, General Primo had won the support of the Catalan business elite. After years of labor upheaval, they were in no mood for a fresh round of political turmoil. Moreover, a new tariff agreement in 1922 promised a return to the prosperity of the war years, as long as the government could keep the lid on unrest. General Primo seemed to offer a hope for stability, which the governments since 1917 had failed to deliver.
General Primo traveled from Barcelona to Madrid by train, and Alfonso XIII joined him there from San Sebastián. At their meeting, the king asked General Primo to form a government in the time-honored tradition of earlier nineteenth-century military proclamations. Instead of forming a new civilian government under the existing constitutional structure, however, General Primo suspended the Cortes and the constitution of 1876 and announced the formation of a military government to restore order. He announced that this would mean only a “brief parenthesis” in the history of the constitutional monarchy, but it was nonetheless Spain's first military dictatorship, and it had come to power under the auspices of the king. General Primo's takeover followed the precedent of Benito Mussolini's “march on Rome” in October 1922, which had left King Victor Emmanuel II on the throne of Italy. Alfonso XIII's acquiescence in Primo's dictatorship served a useful short-term goal from the point of view of the king and the army: it derailed the campaign to determine “responsibilities” that would surely have damaged both the army high command and the king. In the long term, however, the king's actions fatally undermined his position as a constitutional monarch.
None of that mattered in 1923, however. Weary of strikes, street warfare, bad news from Morocco, and sterile political haggling, most Spaniards greeted General Primo's takeover with overwhelming support. A military dictatorship governed Spain from September 1923 until December 1925, and, because Primo barred both the Liberals and the Conservatives from power, both parties collapsed. In their place, he organized a single party, the Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica) in April 1924 and had his military governors recruit civilian politicians to join it. Many of them did so, including supporters of Antonio Maura, some socialists, most Carlists, and bureaucrats of various political loyalties. They were more interested in helping to find a workable political system for Spain than in a principled rejection of the military takeover. Like the king, however, their acquiescence tied them inextricably to the regime.
Consciously following the example of Mussolini's Italy, Primo tackled the labor problem by separating demands for higher wages, better working conditions, and a voice in industrial organization from the more radical political demands favored by the extreme left of the labor movement. To address the non-political demands of the working classes, Primo worked with the socialist leaders of the PSOE and the UGT to form twenty-seven corporations that included representatives of workers, employers, and the government. Like Mussolini's corporate state, Primo's initiatives enjoyed moderate success among the more pragmatic of the working-class leaders. To isolate the radical labor leaders, he outlawed the CNT. It did not disappear, however, but instead went underground and moved toward even more extreme positions. In July 1927, a group called the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) emerged as an offshoot of the CNT, dedicated to violent direct action in the tradition of the bomb-throwing anarchists of several decades earlier. Primo's support among Catalan businessmen eroded slightly when he made clear that he would not support demands for regional autonomy. Nonetheless, as long as he could maintain stability, they had little reason to abandon the regime.
Primo's greatest achievement was the victorious end of the war in Morocco. Beginning in the summer of 1925, he worked with General Henri-Philippe Pétain of France to mount a joint Hispano-French expedition against Abd-el-Krim. Francisco Franco, rapidly rising through the army ranks, helped to organize it. The joint force landed in North Africa in early September 1925, and Abd-el-Krim surrendered to French forces in mid-June of the following year. Support for Primo and his government rose to its greatest height. On the strength of that support, Primo backed away from his promise of providing only a “brief parenthesis” in the history of the constitutional monarchy and moved to make his regime permanent.
The Patriotic Union and the industrial corporations were already in place as bases for a new political system. In addition, in December 1925, even before the victory in Morocco, Primo had appointed civilians to replace army officers in governing the state. The king authorized the change publicly, thus tying himself even closer to the regime. On the strength of the victory in Morocco, Primo held a plebiscite to ask citizens to approve a Civilian Directory to govern Spain, plus the formation of a national assembly to write a new constitution. The vote in September 1926 included the total adult population, both male and female, and gained the approval of nearly two-thirds of them. An appointed National Advisory Assembly then proceeded to write the new constitution, which the king and another plebiscite approved.
In the heady economic atmosphere of the late 1920s, the government invested heavily in public works such as railroads, irrigation schemes, and roads, finally paying attention to the modernization of the infrastructure that previous governments had neglected. Foreign investments helped to finance these ambitious programs, as did monopoly corporations such as CAMPSA, which controlled gasoline. Overall, the regime could boast that it had restored social and economic order and had drawn the middle ranks of labor into willing cooperation with the government. Politicians of various political stripes, but mostly from the center and right of the political spectrum, also participated willingly in Primo's regime, in part because it provided the only avenue of open participation in public life. That was both its strength and its weakness.
Despite the outward appearance of success, however, the regime had merely papered over some of the widest cracks in Spanish life. The various political groups outside official circles continued to meet quietly and organize support. Although the PSOE cooperated with the regime until 1929, various other socialist and republican groups remained in quiet opposition. More than a few disillusioned monarchists joined their ranks. Catalan nationalists, thwarted in their hopes for regional autonomy, also moved into opposition. Moreover, many Spaniards who had welcomed Primo's intervention as a “brief parenthesis,” would not accept a permanent corporate state. The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, initially in favor of the regime, resented its lack of support for Catholic trade unions. Many intellectual leaders, including members of university faculties and their students, disapproved of the regime on principle, inspired by the philosopher and novelist Miguel de Unamuno. The Scholarly University Federation (Federación Universitaria Escolar, or FUE), formed in 1927, provided a focus for their discontent.
Opposition to the regime also came from quarters closely allied to the dictatorship. In 1926, a remnant of the old Liberal Party staged an unsuccessful uprising (the “Sanjuanada”), and, in January 1929, José Sánchez Guerra led a rising of disgruntled Conservatives. The army put down both disturbances with little trouble, but the mere fact that they occurred put the regime on notice that it had failed to achieve a national consensus. Even the army, which had spawned Primo's regime, contained officers opposed to Primo, who were just biding their time, among them some who had lost confidence in the monarchy as well as in the dictatorship.
A student strike in January 1930 marked the beginning of the end, suggesting the breadth of opposition to the regime. When both the king and the army leaders signaled their withdrawal of support from Primo's government, he resigned, leaving behind a complicated legacy. Despite the pacification of Morocco and the restoration of social and economic order, Primo had deliberately destroyed the parliamentary basis of the constitutional monarchy. By shattering the Liberal and Conservative parties, and by drawing many of their leading figures into his government, he destroyed the center of the Spanish political spectrum. In opposition to his regime, radical groupings both to the left and to the right grew stronger and more resolute during the dictatorship. The attempt to create a national consensus, which Primo had worked so hard to achieve, had not only failed: it had left Spanish political life more polarized than ever.
Paper factory in Prat de Llobregat (Barcelona), in the early twentieth century, illustrating the industrial power of Catalonia.
Comida de bodas en Bergantiños, by Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor (1875–1960). Despite the changes in Spanish society with industrialization, local traditions remained strong, especially in rural areas. This wedding meal in the coastal town of Bergantiños (Galicia), dates from about 1900, but the scene and the people would have looked very much the same 300 years earlier.
