1. After Waterloo most legitimate rulers returned to their absolute, hereditary thrones. They sought to recover the orderly, tranquil structure they believed had existed before 1789, recognizing only where necessary the irreversible changes that had taken place in frontiers and legal institutions. As in Spain they relied heavily on their churches to oppose radical ideologies and revolutionary activities, the alliance of "the throne and the altar." Under the impetus of Alexander I of Russia most monarchs joined the Holy Alliance aimed at preserving the status quo. Louis XVIII, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, who returned to France behind the victorious allied armies, was almost alone in attempting to establish a moderate monarchy. He granted his people a charter that provided for a two-house legislature with a chamber of deputies elected by a restricted property franchise. In such an atmosphere defeated partisans of the Revolution were driven throughout Europe to plot secretly to upset the conservative restoration.

Ferdinand VII's quashing of the Constitution of 1812 left politically concerned Spaniards divided between the partisans of absolutism and constitutionalism, both sides now believing that they might be justified in using extralegal means. This was not the only serious problem facing the country. After the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars it was exhausted economically as well as emotionally. Requisitions and plunder by opposing armies had laid waste both its agricultural and industrial resources. Stimulated by the wartime disappearance of civil authority, banditry and smuggling became a plague in the next decades. Most harmful was the disruption of the colonial empire, for the [78] eighteenth-century economic expansion had rested largely on trade with the American colonies. After 1796, the British navy made such trade sporadic at best, and during the Napoleonic war, the French occupation of the manufacturing north and east cut them off from America. Peace might have brought recovery, except that the colonies were in revolt. They too had reacted to the collapse of legitimate government by setting up local juntas. Although the juntas remained nominally loyal to Ferdinand VII, their supporters disliked the unification with Spain imposed by the Constitution of 1812, partly because they felt it did not give the former colonies adequate representation in the Cortes. After the restoration of Ferdinand, some areas remained in revolt. The king sent armies to quell these rebellions, which spread rapidly after 1816 when Argentina declared its independence. As a result America now represented a drain on Spain rather than a resource. Not until after 1824, when the Creole armies dealt a final blow to Spanish hopes of recovering the colonies on the American mainland, was Spain freed from the millstone. The empire was reduced to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands, but in the next decades these proved to be valuable sources of income. Economic signs indicate that Spanish industry began to revive shortly thereafter, about 1827. However, civil war in the 1830's slowed the recovery, and prosperity did not return until the mid-1840's. Until then, Spain faced the task of adjusting to a vastly inferior economic and international position. In such a situation it was unlikely that any regime, whatever its merits, could win an enthusiastic following, but no government of real merit appeared.

When Ferdinand VII overthrew the constitution in May 1814, he promised to call legitimate cortes in the near future, and he talked of reinstating freedom of the press. He never carried out these promises. Instead he built his regime on the privileged groups that the juntas of 1808-1809 had represented: primarily the church and the landowing oligarchy. He also sought the support of the state creditors, reaffirming the guarantee of the vales redes. When the Pope reestablished the Jesuits in 1814, Ferdinand welcomed them in Spain. The Inquisition, brought back to life, hunted out the recent writings of Liberals and Jansenists, in 1817 prohibiting a list of four hundred publications of the war period. It tracked down the Spaniards who had joined Joseph Bonaparte's Masonic lodges and those who had been too vocal in support of the Cortes of Cadiz. But when the monasteries and churches in 1817 requested the return of their lands sold under Charles IV, Ferdinand refused to upset the new distribution of property, saying the sales had been legal. The purchasers of these properties were now part of the established order and belonged with those on whom the king rested his power.

2. [79] Ferdinand's attempt to revive the old regime lasted less than six years. From the outset leading army officers of the war against Napoleon opposed the restoration, and various of them conspired unsuccessfully to restore the constitution. Working with them were members of Masonic lodges which had secretly remained in existence, offering centers for liberal plotting. On January 1, 1820 Major Rafael Riego, who commanded part of an army being staged near Cadiz for transport to the colonial wars, brought out his men in favor of the Constitution of 1812. Riego's pronunciamiento, as military coups such as this came to be known, found support among other garrisons of the peninsula. Finding no one ready to fight for him, Ferdinand accepted the constitution in March, and Spain had experienced its first successful revolution. Liberal juntas sprang up in various cities to take over local government, on the pattern of 1808, until the Cortes met in July.

The Liberals virtually monopolized the new Cortes. They proceeded at once to attack the old order, putting into legislation the old enlightened and Jansenistic objectives. They expelled the Jesuits and again abolished the Inquisition. They ended señoríos, as in 1811, and now also the mayorazgos, the entail of properties of the aristocrats. Finally they put up church lands for sale to pay off the national debt. This move was aimed to win confidence among governments abroad as well as domestic bondholders. Now of vast proportions because of the nearly continuous wars since 1793, the national debt had become a diplomatic issue, for much was owed to citizens of Britain and other countries.

The parliamentary monarchy lasted only three years. Again the Liberals failed to win general acceptance for constitutional government, and the king behind their backs found the means to overthrow them. The ease of their triumph blinded the Liberals to the dangers they faced. Almost at once they split into two groups which embodied different generations and political philosophies. On one side were those who had been active at the time of the Cortes of Cadiz, called doceanistas ("men of the year '12") or, soon, Moderados. These men, although representing the authors of the constitution, had been disillusioned by the failure of the common people to rally to it in 1814 and were beginning to look for restraints on absolute popular sovereignty, such as England and France found in limited suffrage and an upper house to the legislature. Their leader was the Romantic playwright Francisco Martinez de la Rosa. On the other side were younger men, followers of Riego and army officers, who took credit for the successful revolution of 1820. They were labeled Exaltados or extremists [80] and believed in the democratic popular suffrage represented by the constitution. The Exaltados appealed to the urban lower classes by defending the abolition of the consumos or taxes on prime necessities, which the juntas had ended after the revolution and the Moderados sought to restore. Much of their strength was in provincial cities, where the radicals were becoming stronger than in Madrid. Control of these cities put them in a good position to influence the composition of the Cortes, for the constitution provided for locally chosen electors to gather in the capitals of the provinces to choose the deputies to the Cortes. The Exaltados and Moderados fell out not only in the Cortes but in the Masonic lodges that had grouped together the Liberals before the revolution and were now multiplying wildly. The Exaltados broke off to form a society known as the Comuneros, after the Castilian rebels of 1520.

The division became critical in 1822. In the biennial elections the Exaltados won a majority in the Cortes. Ferdinand chose to disregard their victory and named a ministry under Martinez de la Rosa, thus raising the issue, important in nineteenth-century European parliamentary evolution, of whether ministers were the servants of the majority in the legislature or of the king. The Moderados were prepared to let the ministry be responsible to the king, denying thereby the full sovereignty of the people. Furthermore, they wanted to revise the constitution to set up an upper house in the Cortes. The Exaltados defended the unicameral Cortes with supreme authority.

Events were not to allow the two parties to solve their differences. During these years the defenders of the established order had been seeking means to overturn the constitution. The clergy, especially the monks, saw their position threatened by the Liberal program, and they appealed to the common people. Rebel juntas raised guerrilla forces in the rural areas of the north, and a royalist regency was established near the Pyrenees, on the assumption that Ferdinand was not a free ruler. Meanwhile the king secretly negotiated with the powers of the Holy Alliance for help. Portugal and various Italian states had followed Spain with revolutions of their own in 1820, and the conservative rulers of Europe were eager to stamp out the new source of subversive doctrines. On their side, the Cortes could count on some loyal army commanders and the National Militia, which the constitution had established in each province and now served to put down local anticonstitutional movements. Here and there the army and militia shot reactionary priests and monks. Blood had now been shed in the constitutional struggle. Spain was rapidly degenerating into civil war when in April 1823 Louis XVIII of France, with encouragement from the rulers of Russia and Austria, sent an army across the Pyrenees to restore the absolute authority of Ferdinand. Organized Liberal resistance melted before these "Hundred Thousand Sons of [81] Saint Louis." They chased the Cortes to Cadiz and there forced them to surrender and free the king, on September 30.

These three Liberal years revealed more clearly than the Napoleonic period the disappearance of a commonly accepted authority. Distinct groups had reached the conclusion that they alone represented the true will of the nation, and that to establish this will they had the right not only to appeal to the king and to the public, but to intrigue, and if necessary to resort to force. Riego's pronunciamiento signified that army officers were assuming the obligation to modify the civil government if, in their eyes, it should become unworthy of governing. Similarly, the rising of the absolutists against the Cortes indicated that those tied to the old order, especially those who acted as spokesmen for a wounded church, would not rely on the vagaries of popular elections, where in the long run they could probably have controlled the majority, but felt justified also in taking up arms. Without a consensus on the nature of authority there could be no loyal opposition. Finally, foreign intervention revealed that Spain's divisions were depriving it of international respect. The nation that had withstood Napoleon was becoming the plaything of European politics, like the small Italian states.

3. This time Ferdinand took violent vengeance on those Liberal leaders who did not escape across the border, imprisoning and executing without mercy. He nullified the legislation passed since 1820, including the abolition of mayorazgos and señoríos and the sale of church lands. Only the opposition of the French commander prevented him from reviving the Inquisition. In Paris and London refugees kept alive Spanish liberalism, in contact with their foreign counterparts; but within the Spanish church the spirit of Jansenism, which had been active in 1820 as in 1812, was effectively stamped out. The ideological conflict nascent under Charles III and Charles IV had engulfed the nation, but within the clergy, which had first felt its ravages, the conservatives had at last succeeded in silencing the reformers.

Despite his severity, after 1823 Ferdinand was unable to satisfy the reactionaries. They were unhappy over his failure to revive the Inquisition and to incorporate the insurgents who had fought the Cortes into the regular army. Led by clergy and royalist guerrillas of 1823, these apostólicos began to group around Ferdinand's brother Carlos, who, since the king was childless, was heir to the throne. In 1827 Ferdinand crushed an apostólico revolt in the hills of Catalonia.

Besides this threat from the absolutists, the regime was faced with a desperate financial situation, due to the expenses of strife at home and in America and the depression of the economy. Ferdinand [82] had little alternative but to seek support among the mercantile interests of the north and east. To attract them, his ministers began to consider liberal reforms, and he even made contact with exiled Moderados. In October 1830 Ferdinand's fourth wife, his young niece Maria Cristina of Naples, gave him his first child to survive, a daughter christened Isabel. During the queen's pregnancy, the partisans of Don Carlos, anticipating the possibility of a female heir, pointed out with satisfaction that a law promulgated by Philip V at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht prohibited women from inheriting the throne. Ferdinand's ministers discovered, however, that Charles IV and the Cortes of Castile in 1789 had secretly abrogated the law. Ferdinand published the act of 1789 before the birth of Isabel, but Don Carlos denied its validity.

Another event of 1830 darkened the hopes of the Carlists, as the absolutists were now called. In July, a revolution in France overthrew Charles X, who had tried to disregard the charter of 1814. In place of the Bourbons, the revolution gave the throne to Louis Philippe of Orleans, who sided with those desirous of an effective constitutional monarchy. Louis Philippe's accession disrupted the Holy Alliance. Spain's absolutists could no longer expect help from the rulers of France.

4. Ferdinand died in September 1833. His will appointed Maria Cristina regent for their daughter Isabel II (1833-68). Don Carlos, who had fled to Portugal, refused to recognize the king's final dispositions. His partisans proclaimed him Charles V and raised his standard in the north, where the pretender soon appeared to lead his forces. Domestic dissension had at last brought Spain to open civil war. The Carlists claimed a scrupulous concern for the legality of the succession, but they had stronger motives. Most ardent Carlists were firm Catholics who feared for the safety of the church's authority and property. Clergy were prominent among them, and the Pope sanctioned their cause by refusing to recognize Isabel II. Although Carlist sympathizers could be found throughout Spain, their strength lay in the rural areas bordering the Pyrenees: the Basque lands, Navarre, and upper Catalonia. The Basques and Navarrese were apprehensive of the loss of the medieval fueros of their territories, which eighteenth-century Bourbon centralization had spared but the Constitution of 1812 abolished. But more than the periphery's distrust of Castile, Carlism represented an ingrained fear of the cities and modern ideas among the well-off peasants of the north, where independent small landowners dominated the countryside. The industrial and mercantile cities of these areas remained loyal to Isabel: Barcelona, Bilbao, San Sebastian. A rural [83] reaction against urban political and cultural progress appeared in the guise of religiosity and regionalism.

The Carlist War lasted seven years. It was pursued bitterly in the north and northeast, not with major engagements but with a series of skirmishes and futile Carlist sieges of the Liberal cities. To maintain order elsewhere, Maria Cristina's government in 1834 established an Urban Militia, similar to the National Militia of 1820. Although only those men who paid a certain level of taxes could enroll, the Urban Militia attracted politically committed residents of the cities like artisans and small shopkeepers, who tended to be radical in their outlook. Neither side gave quarter in the war, and both committed acts of savagery that shocked Europe. In 1837 a Carlist column got within sight of Madrid but did not attempt to attack it. The Carlists could hold out in the mountains, but they had no hope of conquering Spain without foreign support. In 1834, however, France and Britain signed an alliance with the government of Isabel, and the Carlists were diplomatically isolated. In Spain as in the rest of Western Europe, absolutism had become the romantic creed of a minority, able to disrupt national life but no longer able to take power.

During the war, the partisans of the regent Maria Cristina and young Isabel II sought a viable form of liberal monarchy to which they could rally all Spain. In 1834, under the advice of the Moderado leader Martinez de la Rosa, whom she had made first minister, Maria Cristina promulgated an Estatuto Real (Royal Statute) patterned on the French Charter of 1814. It provided for cortes but justified them by citing the ancient laws of Spain, thus avoiding the thorny problem of whether sovereignty belonged to the king or the people. It established a two-house Cortes: an Estate of Notables (Proceres) consisting of all bishops, archbishops, and grandees, and other leading Spaniards appointed by the crown; and an Estate of Procurators elected by a small proportion of citizens who paid a stipulated property tax. The Cortes voted taxes but could not initiate legislation without royal approval.

The Estatuto was Maria Cristina's concession to win Liberal support against the Carlists. It was a statement of classical nineteenth-century liberalism, which the Moderados had come to represent. It embodied the desire to limit royal absolutism through a parliament representative of the responsible elements of society, while at the same time providing by limited suffrage against the threat of rule by the uneducated, irresponsible masses, whom the Moderados believed too easily swayed by fanatical monks or raving radicals. The Estatuto did not recognize popular sovereignty, for moderate liberalism was not democracy. As in France and England, it might satisfy the established classes, but radicals could not accept it. In Spain these were the Exaltados, who remained loyal to the Constitution of 1812. Once again [84] their strength lay in provincial cities, where they gained control of the Urban Militia and hunted out suspect Carlists with zeal.

The question of the church was as vexed as the constitutional one. Since many clergy were Carlists, the church became an easy target for Liberals, who could blame the ills of the country on the secret machinations of men in black. In July 1834 an outbreak of cholera was killing hundreds of persons daily in Madrid. When rumors spread that monks were poisoning the wells to produce the epidemic, an angry crowd of common people led by members of the Urban Militia set upon and killed a suspect Jesuit and went on to attack several monasteries. An orgy of violence and murder ensued that left some seventy regular clergymen dead. The next summer similar riots in Barcelona, Zaragoza, and other cities killed more monks and friars. Surprisingly, priests were not harmed. Even radical Spaniards had not turned against their religion, only against the monastic orders, who they believed were fighting the will of the nation in order to preserve their privileged positions. Antimonasticism, limited in 1812 to advanced literate Spaniards, had been spread by the appeals of the Exaltados to the lower class of the cities.

The monastic orders suffered more permanently at the hands of the Liberal government. Martinez de la Rosa resigned in June 1835, discredited by the continuing war. A few months later Maria Cristina named as first minister Juan Alvarez Mendizabal, a liberal financier of Jewish origins from Cadiz, who had been a refugee in London since 1823. Having made a fortune in England, he had a reputation as a financial wizard. His task was to defeat the Carlists and at the same time conjure away the royal deficit, which was as always threatening disaster. His ideas were hardly new, however, except in the magnificence of their scope. In October 1835 he passed through the Cortes a decree which closed all male and female religious orders except several minor ones dedicated to charitable works. The orders were easy scapegoats for the ills of the country, and in truth the number of monks and nuns had been declining for a long time. When Mendizabal failed to raise a loan in London to carry on the war, he put up for sale the property of the extinct orders to pay the national debt, and he proposed to sell all secular church property as well, thereby winning the lasting reputation among good Catholics as the archenemy of the church. To complete the restructuring of land ownership, the Cortes in 1836 abolished señoríos and mayorazgos, this time for good. Aristocrats lost the income from señoríos, but they kept their lands, which as has been noted were extensive in New Castile and Andalusia. Without the entail of a mayorazgo, a spendthrift heir was free to dissipate the family estate, but in fact few aristocrats were so unwise. The following year the Cortes also abolished the tithe, the main financial support of the secular clergy.

[85] As in the days of Godoy, the hope was not only to bring solvency to the state but to build a body of small property owners who would be loyal to the new regime. The two aims were incompatible. Sales of church properties at auction were designed to obtain the maximum profit for the treasury, but they put the properties in the hands of the richest bidders. Although it took some time to implement the law, after 1840 ecclesiastical properties were auctioned off rapidly. Monastery buildings as well as lands were put on the block, with the result that some of Spain's finest architectural treasures fell into the hands of men who cared little for their artistic value and tore them down or used them as factories or farm buildings. Many were lost permanently; others were recovered by the monastic orders or the state in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often sadly spoiled.

For some time the Exaltados, who were now becoming known as the Progresistas, had instigated uprisings in the provincial cities against Moderado rule and the Estatuto Real. To their dismay, Maria Cristina dismissed Mendizabal in May 1836. In August military men of their persuasion inspired the sergeants of the queen's guard to present Maria Cristina with an ultimatum. Caught by surprise in her summer palace at La Granja, she was forced to convoke constituent cortes, elected under universal suffrage according to the Constitution of 1812. These Cortes produced a new constitution in 1837, which offered a reasonable compromise between that of 1812 and the Moderados' Estatuto. The leading figure in drawing it up was Agustín Arguelles, who had been the principal author of the Constitution of 1812. The Cortes remained a bicameral legislature. There was not universal suffrage, but the lower house, called the Congress of Deputies, was to be elected directly by a wider franchise than that of 1834. The upper house or Senate consisted of men appointed by the monarch from lists proposed by the voters in each province. The constitution reestablished the National Militia and municipal self-government. So well worked out was the compromise document that Moderados as well as Progresistas accepted it, and a Moderado government ruled under it from 1837 to 1840.

By 1839 the Carlists, discouraged, had become divided among themselves. Those who were fighting for their local privileges turned against the partisans of a theocratic society. Baldomero Espartero, the leading Isabeline general, mounted an offensive that forced the Carlist commander to sign an armistice at Vergara on August 29. With Don Carlos in flight across the Pyrenees, the Carlists recognized Isabel II as their queen. In return Espartero promised a guarantee of the Basque and Navarrese fueros.

The Carlists had abandoned the church in order to obtain their political objectives. The Liberals had closed most monastic orders and taken their property, and they had abolished the tithe on which priests relied for their livelihood. The laws promised pensions to the former [86] monks and nuns, but these were seldom paid, while priests had no assured income. The Pope had broken relations with Isabel, and half the sees in Spain lacked bishops as a result. Far from holding the nation in its powerful grip, as radical anticlericals accused it of doing, the church had become the prime victim of the advent of constitutional government.

With the Peace of Vergara, Spain seemed to have lived through the prolonged birth pangs of parliamentary government. It was the only major country on the continent besides France to have established a tradition of constitutional rule. The partisans of absolutism had surrendered, and the two Liberal factions had made up their differences behind a constitution that provided for parliamentary supremacy over both the crown and the clerical and radical extremists who appealed to the masses. The end of the Carlist War meant a lower budget and a chance to reestablish the royal finances. The government could attack the swarms of bandits and smugglers that hampered legitimate trade. Everything seemed to promise political peace and economic recovery.

Such hopes were at best precarious, however, for passions still ran high. Spaniards needed to recover a sense of loyalty to some symbol, such as the king had been before 1789, so that cooperation within an established framework would replace conflict and intransigence. Could the young Isabel or the Constitution of 1837 provide the needed symbol?