1. The Moderado order lasted from the 1840's to the First World War and even a few years beyond. It was based on an alliance of minorities that held power over the strongest economic and cultural forces in the country, manipulating a parliamentary monarchy to maintain their positions. When they were not under serious threat they quarreled among themselves, but they managed to draw together in the face of danger.

Although they enjoyed an entrenched position, opposition had not ceased. There were Carlists and fervent Catholics who had not accepted parliamentary rule. At the other extreme, beneath the class of manufacturers, bankers, and speculators who supported the new order, in the cities a middle class of professional men, storekeepers, and merchants continued to desire a more democratic legislature and local self-rule. Many of them were anticlerical, so that their opposition was both ideological and political. They were the backbone of the Progresista party, which was defeated but not eliminated. Farther down the social scale, industrial and agricultural workers gradually became politically conscious.

The seventy-year rule of the Moderado order can be divided into two periods. In the first the enemies of the order made use of the pronunciamiento, an uprising of part of the armed forces which counted on the support of the dissatisfied groups in the cities. It was marked by two successful uprisings in 1854 and 1868 and by an unsuccessful one in 1866. The revolution of 1868 put the opposition into control for six years, but it was unable to establish a stable government. The second[100] period began with the Restoration of 1875 and lasted until 1923. Defenders of the order tried more seriously to make parliamentary monarchy work successfully, but they did not end opposition. The army now became a reliable pillar of the system, so that pronunciamientos no longer took place. Opposition took other forms: regionalism, labor agitation, intellectual ferment, and appeal to voters.

In Europe the old order crumbled with the Revolution of 1848, which began in Paris and spread to central Europe, forcing German and Italian rulers to recognize revolutionary regimes and promise constitutions. Within a year the revolutionaries became divided and rulers regained power for themselves and the propertied classes. On the fringes of Europe, Russia did not succumb to the Revolution because the tsar was too strongly in control, nor did England because it already had representative government. Spain also avoided revolution, partly because it had a constitution and partly because Narvaez employed his usual harsh methods against the first sparks of revolt.

The first successful challenge to the Moderados came in 1854. By 1851 their sense of security had created divisions in the party. In that year Isabel dismissed Narvaez and replaced him by Juan Bravo Murillo, a civilian who believed in autocratic rule to enforce economic progress from above. Henceforth the government fell increasingly into the hands of a group allied to the financial world of Salamanca and Muñoz. The more liberal Moderados became estranged from their party and drew close to the more moderate Progresistas. At the same time the ministry's attempts to pare down the military budget in the interest of fiscal solvency angered many generals.

On June 28, 1854 several military leaders headed by General Leopoldo O'Donnell issued a pronunciamiento outside Madrid. Calling only for a new ministry, they failed to gain popular support. They were close to defeat and retreating southward when an astute young politician, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, convinced them to issue a manifesto at Manzanares on July 6 which appealed directly to the Progresistas. It proposed to call new cortes, liberalize the press and electoral laws, establish municipal autonomy, revive the national militia, and create temporary municipal juntas to support the revolution. By now the main cities were in revolt, expressing their own grievances. Popular uprisings in Barcelona, Valencia, and other cities established juntas, and in Madrid barricades went up. Thoroughly frightened, on July 20 Isabel called on the Progresista idol of the 1840's, General Espartero, to be head of government. He entered Madrid in triumph, welcomed by both the left and the right. Seeking to restore peace, Espartero joined forces with O'Donnell, who represented the disaffected Moderados, making him minister of war. Out of their collaboration grew an uneasy alliance of Progresistas and liberal Moderados known as the [101] Liberal Union. They agreed to call unicameral cortes to write a new constitution.

The new Cortes proceeded to legislate the Progresista ideals into existence. A new constitution, enacted in 1856, provided, as could be expected, for direct election to both houses of the Cortes by provinces rather than single districts, a National Militia, elected alcaldes, and a brand new article: no Spaniard could be prosecuted for his religious views as long as he did not manifest public opposition to the Catholic Church. This was the first attempt to institute religious toleration in Spain, and the article was in opposition to the Concordat of 1851. Since the 1830's missionaries of the British Foreign Bible Society had been proselytizing for Protestantism in Spain, with some success, especially in Andalusia. The article legalized the situation; besides embodying a growing belief of liberal Spaniards in religious freedom, it was aimed to curry favor among British public opinion against a hostile Europe. Reviving the Progresista policy of ending the entail of land, the Cortes voted on the proposal of the radical Barcelona lawyer, Pascual Madoz, to sell at auction not only the remaining properties of the church but also those of the crown and municipal lands that were not actually used in common by the townsmen. The proceeds, as usual, were to be applied to the national debt, in the hope of solving an acute fiscal crisis and gaining support among Spanish government bondholders at home and abroad.

Clearly many of these arrangements were unpalatable to the few Moderados who had been elected to the Cortes, but they went along with Espartero and O'Donnell. Carlists rose unsuccessfully in the north in defense of the church. The Progresistas soon lost power, however (before the constitution ever took effect), largely because the middle classes that normally supported them were frightened by the appearance of a new social force, the urban working class.

After the labor agitation in Barcelona under Espartero's regency, the Moderados had made workers' associations illegal. The movement did not die, however. Spanish writers who were familiar with European socialist thinkers like Robert Owen and Etienne Cabet provided the workers with knowledge of socialist and communist ideas. In March 1854 a weavers' strike in Barcelona inspired sympathy strikes by workers in other industries, leading to rioting and several deaths. Employees and manufacturers reached terms, but news of the June pronunciamiento led to renewed violence. Demanding the removal of new "self-acting" spinning machines, the workers burned factories and destroyed the machines. Order was reestablished at the end of July when responsible citizens of Barcelona took to the streets in armed patrols. A year later, in June 1855, the captain general of Catalonia banned all labor unions. Workers responded with a ten-day general strike of all industries. [102] Labor agitation spread to Valencia and then to central Spain. In Zaragoza, Valladolid, Burgos, and other places in Old Castile mobs attacked flour mills and other factories. Although the National Militia restored order, men of property were frightened.

In Madrid the working classes found leadership in a new party called the Democrats. It had been established during the European revolutions of 1848 by men who had become disenchanted with the Progresistas and looked back nostalgically at the Constitution of 1812. The party favored universal male suffrage and an end to conscription. Some Democrats without doubt wanted a republic, on the model of the Second French Republic, but they did not openly challenge the monarchy until 1854. At the time of the Revolution of 1854 their leading figures were Jose Maria de Orense, a marquis, and Francisco Pi y Margall, a young Catalan socialist and political theorist. These Democrats were close to the workers who manned the barricades, but they welcomed Espartero when he arrived and gave him their support. They elected a small vocal group of representatives to the Constituent Cortes, were suspected of complicity in the Barcelona riots, and to less radical Spaniards appeared to personify a grave social threat. Their existence cooled the enthusiasm for reform of many Progresistas.

Espartero felt his following slipping by 1856 as a result of continuing social disorder. In a dramatic gesture that he hoped would show how indispensable he was, he resigned in July. To his chagrin, Isabel accepted his resignation and named O'Donnell first minister. Sensing that Espar-tero's departure meant counterrevolution, the National Militia and workers revolted in Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, and elsewhere, but the army, whose officers disliked the militia and were firmly in the hands of O'Donnell, stifled the uprising. The revolutionary period proved to be over, and the experience only strengthened the established order. O'Donnell brought back the Constitution of 1845 and the other Moderado institutions. In France Napoleon III rejoiced at the news.

2.Of the Progresista legislation only the Madoz law had a permanent effect, even though O'Donnell rescinded it in September 1856. It had made possible a new wave of land sales, for this time municipal and national lands were added to ecclesiastical lands. It has been estimated that by 1854 about half of the church lands had been sold. Another quarter were sold in 1855-56. O'Donnell negotiated with the papacy to recognize the recent sales. Eventually in 1860 the state took over the remaining lands of the church, giving their former owners 3 percent bonds. The part of the Madoz law applying to municipal and national properties was revived in 1858. Many towns managed to defend much of [103] their property, especially the poorer land not fit for plowing, but the best land went into private hands in the next decades.

The process of disentail continued until the end of the century. In this way the vast extensions of church, crown, and municipal properties, which had been one of the characteristic features of the old regime, were at last liquidated. Little is known about this development. One suspects that municipal lands now passed legally into the hands of the local oligarchs who had controlled them anyway. There is evidence that speculators and entrepreneurs also invested part of their new wealth in land.⁽¹⁾ The final effect was to increase the concentration of landholding in a class of neo-latifundistas that was alienated economically and spiritually from the ragged hordes of braceros and jornaleros who labored in the fields, olive groves, and pastures. The hapless poor of southern Spain rose in protest sporadically in the decade after 1856, but the Civil Guard was there to meet such eventualities.

As before, the parliamentary conservatives compensated the church for its losses with other favors. Since the clergy was no longer financially independent, the state promised them a subsidy, although it was anything but munificent. Religious toleration disappeared along with the Constitution of 1856, and the government attacked Protestant converts. When in 1861 Austria accepted religious toleration, Spain became the only European state that enforced religious unity. In 1856 the clerical-minded minister Claudio Moyano fathered a law on education that was to remain in force until 1931. It called for state-supported primary education in towns of more than five hundred population, an article that was not fulfilled, and activated the article in the concordat which gave authority to the bishops to ensure that education in both public and private schools conform to Catholic doctrine. This part was carried out.

Narvaez replaced O'Donnell in October 1856, but O'Donnell returned in 1858 and was head of the government until 1863, making an effective party of the Liberal Union of moderate Progresistas and liberal Moderados. He initiated a policy of importance for the future: he turned the attention of Spain's military forces outside the peninsula. In 1859 Spain declared war on Morocco to avenge an insult to the Spanish flag, and O'Donnell personally took command of the troops. The Spanish army defeated the Moors, and there was an outburst of national enthusiasm. The hero, besides O'Donnell, was the Catalan general Juan Prim. Two years later O'Donnell sent a Spanish army under Prim to Mexico to join a French and British expedition dispatched to[104] force that country to honor its debts. Despite orders from Isabel, Prim refused to cooperate with the French in setting up Maximilian as emperor of Mexico, thus becoming a hero for those Spaniards who opposed the opportunism of the Liberal Union.

The years of Liberal Union rule were the apogee of the reign of Isabel II. The easy prosperity of rapid economic expansion produced an extravagant society in Madrid and other major cities. The life of the court contributed to the atmosphere of moral relaxation. Isabel's mother and stepfather Muñoz were widely believed to be manipulating ministries and profiting from government corruption. The queen's own private life also caused scandal. She was married in 1846 for reasons of state to an effeminate cousin whom she hated all her life. Beginning shortly after her marriage she won the reputation, evidently deserved, of taking lovers among the generals and handsome men of her court. At the same time she became almost superstitiously religious. Her confidante was Sor Patrocinio, a nun who claimed to have the stigmata. Liberals felt that Carlism had triumphed in the palace after losing in the field. Isabel was discredited with the people of Madrid before 1854 --many wanted her deposed during the revolution--but she remained popular in the provinces, and the birth of a male heir, Alfonso, in 1857 helped her reputation. Spaniards were torn between chivalrous loyalty to a woman ruler and disgust at her private life, which seemed even blacker than that of Godoy and Maria Luisa.

After 1863 Isabel's position deteriorated. Her reputation as a woman of easy virtue was spreading beyond Madrid, and her clerical camarilla dismayed the Liberal Union. In 1863 she named Narvaez first minister, the general she called on whenever she felt the need to discipline her subjects. He remained the leading figure in government until 1868 and gradually restricted constitutional liberties. In 1864 a professor at the University of Madrid, Emilio Castelar, published an attack on the queen in the journal of the Democratic party. Narvaez deprived him of his chair illegally, the faculty protested, students demonstrated, and the Civil Guard killed nine students and wounded a hundred in the center of Madrid. Narvaez thereupon required all professors to take an oath of loyalty to the monarchy and the Catholic religion. Several refused and lost their positions. The episode was significant, for it revealed a new source of political activity: university students and faculties.

An economic crisis that began in 1866 worsened the position of the regime. It was part of a general European depression set off by a shortage of raw cotton from the United States during the Civil War. Catalan cotton mills were idle, and the flow of foreign capital into Spain dried up, ending railway construction. Workers grew restless, and the Democrats gained support in Barcelona and among the agricultural poor of Andalusia, who resented the loss of their common lands.

General Prim had by now become the recognized head of those [105] progresistas who had remained aloof from the Liberal Union. In 1866 he attempted a pronunciamiento in Madrid, and when it was defeated, he fled abroad. In Belgium and Paris he negotiated with the leaders of the Democrats and Liberal Union generals also in exile. Meanwhile Narvaez tightened his grip, and the queen ignored protests by the Cortes. Rule according to a constitution gave way to personal dictatorship, which was not to the liking of the Liberal Union or anyone to the left of it.

3. O'Donnell died in exile in 1867, Narvaez while in office in April 1868, leaving Isabel without a strong general to defend her. Before the year was out, she became the victim of another military revolution. Prim, in alliance with one of Isabel's former lovers, the Liberal Unionist general Francisco Serrano, and Admiral Juan Bautista Topete, who controlled the navy, landed at Cadiz on September 18, 1868 and issued a pronunciamiento against the queen and in favor of "the reestablish-ment of constitutional monarchy." When Isabel discovered that the army would not respond to her appeal for support, she fled to France, while revolutionary juntas took over the cities. Reaching Madrid, Prim and Serrano found a junta in control that forced on them the Democrats' demand for constituent cortes elected by universal suffrage and the proclamation of freedom of religion and of the press. These events became known as the "glorious" September Revolution.

The strength of the different revolutionary forces was revealed in the electoral campaign for the Constituent Cortes. The major decision to be made was between a monarchy and a republic. Republican sentiment had spread among the Democrats in the last years of Isabel's reign, and now Orense, Castelar, Pi y Margall, and others broke away from the monarchist Democrats. Claiming that not just the "spurious race of Bourbons" but monarchy as a system was the cause of Spain's ills, they fought an active campaign in favor of a republic. The election was unusually fair. Sixty percent of the eligible voters went to the polls in a country where over two thirds of the adult males were illiterate. The largest group elected was 160 Progresistas. They fell almost squarely in the middle, for to the right of them were about 80 Liberal Unionists and 30 Carlists, and to the left 40 Democrats and 85 Republicans. The size of the Republican delegation surprised everyone. It came largely from the southern and eastern periphery and the provincial capitals of Castile, areas that had hitherto been Progresista strongholds.

The Cortes proceeded rapidly to draw up a new constitution. It was essentially a revival of the stillborn Constitution of 1856, a Progresista document, with a democratic flavor to satisfy the new left. Despite the vocal opposition of the Republicans, the monarchy was [106] maintained. There was a two-house legislature, with both houses elected by universal suffrage, similar to the system of the United States. While promising to maintain the Catholic clergy, the constitution proclaimed religious freedom and, for the first time, allowed non-Catholic religious observances in public. Additional laws provided for elected ayuntamientos and a militia, this time called the Citizens' Militia. The latter was dissolved in the fall of 1869, however, for aiding Republican risings in various cities.

The revolution had thus been molded into a Progresista triumph. Its leading figure was General Prim, the most attractive of the military men who ruled Spain in the nineteenth century. A strong-willed Catalan and a sincere idealist, he looked upon Lincoln (whom he vaguely resembled) as his model. Had Spain become a republic with him as president, perhaps he could have established a stable progressive order, but he was convinced that Spain needed a king to provide a symbol for national unity. With Serrano as regent and himself as first minister, he set out to find a substitute for the hated Bourbon line. The search proved difficult, for Spain now had a reputation as an unstable country, and few royal families wished to furnish a candidate to replace a deposed queen, even a queen who was a disgrace to the profession. A nephew of the king of Italy declined, as did the ex-king of Portugal. A Catholic branch of the Prussian house of Hohenzollern appeared interested, but Napoleon III of France, fearing a revival of the empire of Charles V, opposed the candidacy so strongly that he led France into war with Prussia in July 1870. While the Prussians were conquering France and a rising in Paris was proclaiming the Third French Republic, Amadeo, second son of the king of Italy, quietly accepted the Spanish crown. Since the kingdom of Italy was taking Rome away from the Pope at this moment, Prim's choice of Amadeo was a gauntlet thrown down to devout Spanish Catholics. The Carlists increased their appeal, and in 1872 another Carlist war broke out in the north and northeast. Now that Spain had repudiated the direct Bourbon line, the Carlists hoped to put a handsome young grandson of the original Don Carlos on the throne. They plagued the Madrid governments for the next four years.

The reign of Amadeo seemed doomed from the start. Prim was the only person who might have kept the revolutionary parties cooperating, but on December 27, 1870, just as the new king was about to reach Spain, six armed men assassinated him in his carriage in a dark snowy street in Madrid. Who shot him no one ever learned. Two stormy years later, on February 11, 1873, Amadeo abdicated. Aristocrats and generals had snubbed him repeatedly, and the Progresistas, who had called him to power, had broken into two warring factions. He explained in a letter to the Cortes that he had been unable to bring peace to Spain. "If the enemies of [Spain's] happiness were foreigners, I would take the lead against them at the head of our valiant and long-suffering soldiers. But [107] all those who, with their swords, their pens, or their words, aggravate and perpetuate the ills of the nation are Spaniards, all invoke the sweet name of our country. Among so many contradictory expressions of public opinion, it is impossible to decide which is right." Privately he said in Italian, "I don't understand anything; we are in a cage of madmen." ⁽²⁾

Left without a king, the Cortes at last took the logical alternative. On the day of the abdication, ignoring constitutional procedures, the Cortes declared Spain a republic. They had the example of France to inspire them, but the republic proved to be less stable even than the democratic monarchy. Less than a year after its inception, it had become a cloak for military rule, and at the end of 1874 generals successfully pronounced in favor of the restoration of the Bourbon line in the person of Isabel's son.

The six years from 1868 to 1874 posed the most serious challenge of the nineteenth century to the established order. Yet the forces that brought about the revolution so easily in 1868 were unable to create a workable alternative. In the end probably neither Prim nor anyone else could have avoided the ultimate collapse; for while the entrenched groups had become fairly stable, those that supported the revolution were in rapid evolution. New forms of opposition that were to be typical of the twentieth century were making their appearance. The instability of the revolutionary forces proved their own undoing.

During these years demands for political decentralization, which the Progresistas had always voiced in a modest way, became far more radical. The movement had various manifestations, but in all of them Catalonia played a central role. One aspect of it grew out of an apparently harmless interest in the Catalan language as a literary medium, known as the Renaixensa or rebirth. In the first half of the century throughout Europe Romantic authors of subject nationalities were eagerly reviving the literary use of their languages, and Catalans were among them. In 1834 Buenaventura Carlos Aribau wrote an "Ode to the Fatherland" in Catalan, which sang of the love of the Catalans for their native tongue. Other local poets followed and in 1859 an annual contest for the best poem in Catalan was inaugurated. It was called the Jochs Florals or Floral Games, after a medieval festival. When Victor Balaguer, a Catalan Progresista, began to publish a history of Catalonia in Catalan in 1860, the movement began to assume political connotations. In 1869 Catalans elected Republican deputies who, led by Pi y Margall, a Catalan, favored a federal republic with local self-government. Thus republicanism merged with literary regionalism to produce stronger movement than either was separately.

[108] During Prim's ministry, the Progresistas inadvertently strengthened the decentralist tendencies of Catalonia. Motivated by a doctrinaire acceptance of economic liberalism and a desire to encourage the national economy by furthering the export of foodstuffs and minerals, they reduced the tariff. They were following the rest of Europe, which had been moving toward free trade since 1846 and especially since 1860. The Figuerola Tariff of 1869 abolished import prohibitions and provided for duties to be lowered to a maximum of 15 percent on all objects, with gradual reductions from the present level to begin in 1876. Catalan manufacturers protested that their industries would be ruined. Since the loss of the American colonies on the mainland, they had found their fortune in a closed national market which included Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. They had sought to influence the central government to insure their protection, and had successfully fought the danger of lower tariffs in the 1840's. After the Figuerola Tariff, more and more of them began to consider the advantages of local autonomy.

The establishment of the Republic in February 1873 strengthened the revolt against central control in Catalonia and elsewhere. With great difficulty the first head of the Republican government, Esta-nislao Figueras, himself a Catalan federalist, prevented provincial officials from declaring Catalonia an independent state within a Republican confederation. Going in person to Barcelona, he urged the local leaders to await the convocation of constituent cortes. Since the monarchist parties boycotted the election, when the Cortes met in June 1873, the Republicans had an overwhelming majority. Their first acts were to proclaim a federal republic and replace Figueras with Pi y Margall, the leading proponent of federalism.

Very rapidly the move toward local self-government got out of control of the Republican leaders. In July a commission of the Cortes under Castelar presented a draft constitution for a federal republic. It divided Spain into thirteen peninsular and four overseas states, each to have its own constitution, legislature, and control over its public works, taxes, education, and the like. Beneath the states would be autonomous municipalities. Already, however, Cartagena, Valencia, Seville, Cadiz, Malaga, and city after city in southern and eastern Spain were declaring themselves independent municipalities or cantons ready to join in a confederation, but not in a federation such as that proposed in the draft constitution. Against Castelar's federalism of the United States type, the cantons stood for an alliance of independent municipalities on the model proposed for France by the Paris Commune of 1871. The cantonalists were extremist, or as they were called, "intransigent" Republicans, with their strength in the urban lower-middle class.

To add to the difficulties of the Republican government in Madrid, [109] the cantonalist movement coincided with an organized worker's movement in favor of social revolution. Throughout the sixties, workers' associations had grown in Catalonia, despite government persecution. When the revolution came in 1868, the Russian anarchist leader Michael Bakunin, who was struggling with Karl Marx for control of the International Workingmen's Association founded in London in 1864, sent a representative to Spain to proselytize among the Spanish proletariat. This man, Giuseppe Fanelli, convinced the Catalan workers' groups to join the International and send deputies to its congress at Basel in 1869. Other labor organizations were forming in eastern and southern Spain, and a congress of ninety representatives of these groups met in Barcelona in 1870. It founded a Spanish branch of the International called the Spanish Regional Federation and adopted the anarchist doctrine of Bakunin of boycotting elections and other legal political activities, a doctrine that was to remain the hallmark of Spanish anarchism.

Frightened by the Paris Commune, for which the International claimed credit, the Cortes outlawed the International in Spain in 1872, although its Spanish members were more interested in setting up an organization that could bargain effectively for better labor conditions than in staging a revolution. Under the Republic, the Regional Federation again came out in the open, demanding municipal autonomy. In some towns of Andalusia and Extremadura its followers seized private latifundia and divided them among the peasants. On June 26, 1873 the Federation of Barcelona momentarily set up a Committee of Public Safety, as the Paris Commune had done, to organize resistance to the Carlists, who were threatening Catalan cities. In Alcoy, a textile town south of Valencia, the International declared a general strike for shorter hours and higher wages, the Civil Guard provoked the workers into an armed uprising, and on July 9 the strikers set fire to a spinning factory and killed some civil guards and the alcalde. The press magnified the event with tales of murdered priests, the rape of young girls, and similar gruesome fictions. Horror swept through Spain, and the more moderate groups who had favored the Republic were frightened by the specter of social disintegration. The leaders of the Regional Federation did not favor the cantonalists, seeing in them only another group of capitalist exploiters, but in various cities organized workers fought for the cantons. The juxtaposition of the two movements in the public mind discredited the cantons. The government of the Republic had no choice but to take action against the cities in revolt.

The cantonalist movement proved fatal to the Republic. In eastern and southern Spain only Catalonia remained loyal to Madrid, for here Republicans had the sense to see the need for national unity. In the north the Carlists were making dangerous progress, while the southern cantons, following federal doctrines to their logical conclusion, abolished recruitment for the army and refused to collect taxes for the central [110] government. Pi resigned in July, and in September the Cortes took the drastic measure of voting full power to Emilio Castelar, who criticized the doctrinaire republicanism of his colleagues and proposed to use all possible measures to save the Republic. He saw the only hope in collaboration with the army, ignoring warnings that the generals would be disloyal. He ordered Generals Manuel Pavía and Arsenio Martinez Campos, who had command in Andalusia and Valencia, to crush the cantons so that the army would be free to turn on the Carlists. The move worked, for by the end of the year all the cantons except Cartagena were suppressed. However, the majority of the Republican deputies were outraged by Castelar's harsh use of the military against the cantonalists, whom they considered wayward brothers.

On January 2, 1874, the Cortes met for the first time in three months to review Castelar's accomplishments. They listened to him defend his acts, debated all night, and finally defeated a motion of confidence. Upon learning of Castelar's fall, General Pavía, who was in Madrid, invaded the Palace of the Cortes with his troops and disbanded the deputies. Pavía instituted a centralized republic, and when the Republicans refused to cooperate with him, he gave the presidency to Prim's collaborator in 1868, General Serrano. The Republic, now lacking committed defenders, limped on for a year, while Pavía and Serrano strove in vain to crush the Carlist rising. Few persons lamented the change when Martinez Campos, victor in Valencia over the cantons, pronounced in December 1874 in favor of the son of Isabel II, Alfonso XII, a seventeen-year-old lad who was studying in England. Other generals rapidly followed, and Serrano resigned. Spain's most valiant attempt of the nineteenth century to set up a democratic system freed from control of oligarchic groups had ended in failure.

4. The failure is not surprising, if one compares Spain with other Western European countries. The European revolutions of the mid-century, those of 1848, had also been defeated. By the end of the century, France, Germany, and Italy had conservative regimes representing the propertied classes (which included the peasants in France), but functioning under more or less democratic parliamentary systems. It is ironic but in historical perspective understandable that the doctrine of popular sovereignty introduced in Europe in 1789 had the effect for over a century of strengthening the political power of the upper classes. The Spanish revolutions of 1854 and 1868 have been compared to the European revolutions of 1848. In both cases the revolutions suffered and eventually fell partly because the groups supporting them were divided. The unforeseen appearance of radical extremists and workers [111] groups preaching doctrines that threatened property frightened off many middle-class moderates.

Spain was not, however, simply repeating 1848 with delayed timing. The revolutions of 1848 were the product of a spirit which tied bourgeois liberals together across national frontiers. They still embodied the humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Conflict between revolutionaries in different countries did not seem possible in 1793 or in 1848. Nevertheless, during the revolutions of 1848 liberals of different nationalities and language groups discovered that their territorial objectives were incompatible. They ended up opposing each other even as they became frightened by the socialistic demands of the urban workers. Nationalism destroyed the international revolutionary spirit in the middle class. Liberal revolutions henceforth became local affairs, like the French revolution of 1870-71, nationalistic, establishing the propertied classes in political power. Only socialist proletarian movements remained international.

Spain was different. It had never really formed part of the "Liberal International," even if Spanish refugees in Paris or London mixed with those from other countries. In 1808 most liberal Spaniards rejected the constitution imported by Joseph Bonaparte. They wrote instead their own Constitution of 1812, against the French invaders, not under their auspices. After their experiences in 1808 and 1823 Spanish liberals were not inclined to follow France. Unlike other European countries in the nineteenth century, Spain had its own constitutional tradition to inspire its revolutions and did not need to look to Paris. Madrid became an independent focus of revolution; in 1820 Europe took its cue from Spain, not France. Thus except for France and England, Spain was ahead of the rest of Europe. Although it received influences from abroad, as did France and England, at the very outset it achieved the national stage of liberal revolutions. It is the inability to recognize this political independence of Spain, which after the eighteenth century led it to mold its own transition into modernity side by side with France and Great Britain, that has led historians to describe Spanish history as an ineffectual imitation of European developments.

Spain's constitutional struggles also produced a peculiar alignment of the groups which disputed the political structure of the nation. In 1812 the constitutionalists had embodied the ideals of eighteenth century enlightened despotism: political centralization and an end to the hereditary power of the privileged orders. They instituted elective municipal councils to destroy local oligarchies. By 1860 the old oligarchy and its new recruits had taken over both constitutionalism and centralism. Under the Moderados, privileged groups discovered that a properly organized constitutional monarchy provided them with far more effective power than absolutism had permitted. They could now control the[112] court and the country both. In self-defense the intellectuls, professionals, and smaller merchants had to appeal to more popular groups. But an appeal to the people turned out to be an appeal to localism, for the artisans and shopkeepers who made up the strength of national militias and urban juntas had grown to suspect the influence of the crown in municipal government, and the workers and peasants had not been integrated by tradition or education into a unified Spanish state. It is hardly surprising that when Romantic writers revived visions of past glories of Catalonia, Catalan revolutionaries imagined themselves to be continuing the defense of Catalan independence against Castilian rule. In this way the opposition to the established order came to embody the old particularism against which the crown had struggled for centuries. The conflicts were still much as they had been in the eighteenth century, large landowners against peasants and reformers, clericalism against modern thought, with added tensions arising from the early stages of industrialization. In the eighteenth century the crown had favored peasants and modern thought. The king could be centralist because he felt no need to base his authority on an appeal to the groups whom he favored. With the disappearance of his prestige and authority, centralism became the weapon of the descendants of the enemies of the crown. The defenders of the interests which the crown had favored had to fall back on popular support and hence on particularism. For democracy and particularism to be allies was different from the pattern in most Western European countries and the United States. Spain's unique situation was already producing different political conflicts from those common to other Western countries.

1. See Francisco Quiros Linares, "La Desamortización, factor condicionante de la estructura de la propiedad agraria en el valle de Alcudia y Campo de Calatrava," Estudios Geográficos, XXV (1964), 367-407, esp. 396-402.

2. Quoted in Fernando Soldevila, Historia de España (2nd ed., Barcelona: Edi-ciones Ariel, 1963), VII, 398 and 400-401.