1. The restoration of the Bourbon line at the end of 1874 inaugurated a fifty-year period of relative political peace. Alfonso XII (1874-85), the most attractive ruler of Spain in the nineteenth century, died prematurely of tuberculosis in 1885 at the age of twenty-eight. He left two daughters and a pregnant widow, Maria Cristina of Habsburg Lorraine, who gave birth to a boy in May 1886, the next king of Spain, Alfonso XIII (1886-1931). For the second time in half a century the country had a regent named Maria Cristina, but unlike her predecessor this one ruled with decorum until her son was declared of age in 1902.

The defeat of Spain in the war with the United States in 1898 and the consequent loss of its last colonies in America and the Pacific was a blow to the regime from which it was never able fully to recover. The opposition no longer made revolutions, but it was growing stronger, fed by the development of the industrial areas and the growth of the cities. By the First World War political and social tensions were reaching a point where the parliamentary system could not cope with them. Although the system was to limp on for almost a decade, its days were numbered.

The architect of the Restoration was Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the man who had done most to popularize the idea of a return to the Bourbon line after 1868. After supporting O'Donnell in the Revolution of 1854, he had been one of the leaders of the Liberal Union, the party that had brought together moderates from both the Progresistas and the Moderados. Now he headed a party known as the Liberal Conservatives, or simply the Conservatives, which was heir to both the Moderados and [114] the Liberal Unionists. Cánovas established an ad hoc commission in 1875 which, without legal standing, drew up a new constitution. Meanwhile elections for new cortes, held at Cánovas' insistence with the universal suffrage of 1869 but carefully manipulated by the minister of gobernación, Francisco Romero Robledo, returned a docile body of deputies that ratified the new document in 1876.

Cánovas' objective was to create a workable parliamentary system that would appeal broadly to the major segments of society, putting an end to violent civil strife. This he hoped to do by obtaining the cooperation of the successors to the Progresistas, the Liberal Party, led by Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, who had been Prim's minister of gobernación in 1869. Instead of reestablishing the Moderado Constitution of 1845 as many of his followers demanded, Cánovas sought to compromise between their ideal and that of the Progresistas. The individual rights of 1869 were preserved, including individual freedom of religion and the right to celebrate non-Catholic services in private houses. This article brought forth a storm from intransigent Moderados and other Catholic deputies, but eventually Cánovas quieted them by his firm Stance and a promise to the church of continued state financial support and a monopoly of public religious functions. The few thousand converts to Protestantism would continue to exist legally.

On the other hand the constitution maintained the Moderado structure of 1845. In the bicameral legislature, the Senate would be made up of members by right such as grandees, archbishops, captains general, appointees of the crown, and members elected from specified categories of persons by official bodies and the highest taxpayers. The Congress of Deputies would once more be elected in single member constituencies. The suffrage was specified in a separate law and required the payment of a land tax of twenty-five pesestas (five dollars) per year or a tax on business activity of fifty pesetas per year (Cánovas considered peasant landowners more reliable than shopkeepers). In addition members of learned academies, generals and retired officers, priests, teachers, high bureaucrats, and members of similar groups received the vote. Property plus talent would rule the country, with emphasis on the former. With the experience of the Republic fresh in his mind, Cánovas would have no truck with democracy. He believed (as did many European liberals of his generation) that "universal suffrage means the dissolution of society.... It is the negation of the national will and the parliamentary regime."⁽¹⁾ To make doubly sure that the people would not dissolve society, the constitution gave considerable authority to the monarch: approval of legislation, command of the army and navy, the right to declare war and make peace.

The great achievement of Cánovas was to get the heirs of the [115] Progresistas to work within his parliamentary system. This was partly because of his wisdom in refusing to dictate a vindictive settlement, "a lo Fernando VII," partly because of the difficulty of finding generals willing to make a pronunciamiento; but to a great extent it was because Alfonso XII and Maria Cristina acted as impartial constitutional monarchs, exercising a self-discipline that was beyond either Isabel II before them or Alfonso XIII after them. Periodically, as the political situation became difficult, the party in power resigned, and the monarch appointed a ministry of the opposition and then dismissed the Cortes and called for new elections. Thus the new minister of gobernación could insure the electoral victory of his party, but, inspired by the example of Cánovas, he was careful to allow the leaders of the opposition to be reelected and not to infringe on the strongholds of the Carlists and Republicans. By seeing that the Liberals were treated fairly, Cánovas made them part of the established order. Until an anarchist assassinated him in 1897, the only two parties that had nationwide organizations cooperated in maintaining the parliamentary monarchy. The system, which was known aptly as the turno pacifico, reached its apogee in 1885 on the death of Alfonso XII. Cánovas, who was first minister, fearing Republican and Carlist agitation and wishing to insure the loyalty of the Liberals, recommended to Maria Cristina that she give power to Sagasta, which she did. (The event is known, somewhat misleadingly, as the Pact of the Pardo, after the palace where the king had died.) Sagasta and the Liberals held the government for five years, during which time they legislated the remaining objectives of 1868, including the right of free association (1887), civil marriage (1889), and universal suffrage (1890). The last act caused the moderate Republicans led by Castelar to accept the regime. Since many Carlists had joined the Conservative party, Spain at last appeared to be approaching a political consensus, Cánovas' dream. After a century Spaniards seemed to have found again a common loyalty, the political legitimacy that had once belonged to the absolute monarch.

Unfortunately the political underpinning of the Restoration monarchy belied its respectable surface. The turno pacifico depended on a refinement of the system of controlled elections which originated under Isabel II. In Spanish history the system is known as caciquismo, from the word cacique, meaning originally an Aztec chief and later a local political boss in Spain. Caciques could be found in all parts, but they were especially powerful in Galicia and in the rural areas of central and southern Spain. They existed in a variety of forms. They could be the local agents of the large landowners; alcaldes or other local officials; or independent political bosses who ran entire districts. When the Cortes were dissolved, the minister of gobernación gave instructions to the local jefe politico (civil governor of a province), who was his appointee, and the jefe politico worked with the caciques to produce the desired majority. After 1890 under universal suffrage peasants and [116] landless workers, many of them illiterate, voted when and for whom they were told to. There were many districts firmly in the hands of caciques where candidates ran unopposed. The elected deputies were often Madrid lawyers or bureaucrats who had no connection with the district they represented and little contact with life outside the capital. Since they supported the established groups, caciquismo allowed the parties to rotate without threatening the system. Democracy, as in many Western countries at the end of the century, including the United States in its larger cities, had become a travesty of its ideal and a way to keep an organized group in power. There was no true consensus, but the forces of discontent were powerless until after 1898.

2. Behind the political evolution of this period lay a transformation of the economy which had begun before 1850. Like the rest of Europe, Spain in the nineteenth century experienced a rapid demographic expansion. The population of the peninsula and the Balearic and Canary Islands went from 10.5 million in 1797 to 18.6 million in 1900, a rise of 76 percent. During the same century France's population grew 43 percent, England's 89, and Germany's 150. Spain's growth rate was behind that of the rapidly industrializing countries, but above France's. Within Spain the population of the periphery continued to expand more rapidly than in the center, as it had since the seventeenth century. If we divide the peninsula into four areas--north (Galicia, Asturias, Basque Provinces, and Navarre), east (Catalonia, Valencia, and Mur-cia), south (Andalusia), and center (Aragon, Leon, and Old and New Castile)----we find that the area of most rapid growth was the east, followed by the south, the north, and the center in that order. The central plateau continued its relative decline:

[117] Catalonia grew at a faster rate than any other area in the peninsula; 129 percent in the century. It went from 8.5 percent of the total peninsular population in 1797 to 11.0 percent in 1900. Part of this growth was the result of migration, as inhabitants of other areas of eastern Spain moved in to take advantage of the growing economy. The proportion of the population living in the northern provinces declined slightly, but the decline was mainly attributable to emigration to America in the last third of the century. Between 1882 and 1920 there was a net departure of 860,000 persons from Spain, and within the peninsula, the highest rate of emigration was from Galicia and Asturias. (The Canary Islands had an even higher rate.)

Urbanization was another feature of demographic growth. Throughout the West the expansion of cities in the nineteenth century herded vast numbers of people together in urban conditions. The population of Madrid rose from about 169,000 to 540,000 during the century, of Barcelona from 115,000 to 533,000. Rapid urban growth began in Spain only after 1860. At this date about 10 percent of Spaniards lived in cities above 20,000 in population, hardly more than in 1800. This proportion was slightly behind France (11 percent in 1851) and ahead of Italy (13 percent in 1881). By 1900 the proportion of Spaniards living in cities of over 20,000 had risen to 21 percent, which was somewhat behind both France (24 percent) and Italy (26 percent). Most of the seventy Spanish cities of this size in 1900 were scattered around the periphery; only eight were in the vast central region of the peninsula. The majority were not heavily industrial, since only ten were in Catalonia and the Basque Provinces while nineteen were in Andalusia, where urban agglomerations had always been large. But whatever the basis of the economy of the cities, this concentration of population brought people into contact with the world of modern civilization and politics. Inevitably it provided recruits for the opponents of the established order.

The completion of the railway system helped stimulate the expansion of the economy and the growth of cities. Prior to 1868 the trunk lines had been built. Between 1875 and 1900 branch lines were added, doubling the mileage and bringing all provincial capitals into the system. Where there were roads, stagecoach lines (diligencias) introduced early in the century carried passengers to points beyond the reach of the railroads. After spending the night in an inn by the station, the travelers would rise before dawn and set off behind four or six horses for a dusty ride over gravel roads. Most small towns, however, were still accessible only by mule path and relied as for centuries past on the mules and burros of the professional arrieros for a few outside supplies. Although their reach was limited, the railroads were the first means of transportation to cross Spain's rough mountain chains efficiently. Carrying people, mail, and agricultural and industrial products, they tied the country [118] together as an economic unit and began to break down the isolation of vast regions of the center.

The new transportation encouraged agricultural specialization for distant markets. Since the eighteenth century farmers of arid Spain had broken pastures for grain crops. Wheat farming reached its greatest extension about 1860. Thereafter, despite tariff protection, the production of wheat declined, as marginal lands recently put under the plow became exhausted, American wheat began to flood Europe, and landowners turned to more profitable crops. After 1877 Spain was, as in the eighteenth century, again dependent on the importation of foreign grain. Wheat fields began to give way to vineyards and, in the region south of Madrid, where the climate permitted, to olive groves. Fruit orchards also expanded, especially where irrigation existed from previous times, as in the vegas of Mediterranean Spain, or was now introduced, as in western Catalonia, where the newly constructed Canal of Urgel brought life to a large deserted area around Lérida. After the loss of Cuba in 1898, sugar beets became another important market crop, especially in the zone along the Pyrenees, in Granada, and to a lesser extent in the central plateau. Common wine, unrefined olive oil, and oranges were the major export crops. Spain was the world's largest exporter of wine at the end of the century. During the First World War wine replaced iron ore as the country's most valuable export, only to give way in about 1930 to the oranges of Valencia.

The effect of this specialization was to bring new sources of income to the owners of land. In arid Spain the people to benefit most were large landowners, for the typical small peasant remained nearly as isolated as before or else became a day laborer in the olive groves or wheat fields of the rich owners. The latter, the "señoritos," frequently moved to the cities, leaving their lands in charge of overseers and returning only occasionally for hunting or relaxation. In the periphery, on the other hand, agricultural specialization for export went back to the eighteenth century. The economic advantage often accrued to the well-to-do peasant who had a vineyard, an orchard, an orange grove, or an irrigated field of his own. The evolution of agriculture tended to increase the difference between center and periphery.

This was also a period of industrial growth, in which the established areas, Catalonia and the Basque Provinces, continued to lead the way. Catalonia's major industry, as traditionally, was weaving. Catalan manufacturers had been frightened by the prospect of the free trade tariff of 1869, which was to go into effect after 1876, and they were found among the partisans of the Bourbon Restoration. In return the new government postponed introducing the tariff, without, however, rescinding it. When Sagasta moved to enforce the tariff in the eighties, Cánovas came to the aid of the manufacturers, who were, after all, important members of the system. In 1891, Cánovas put through a [119] protective tariff, and thereafter Catalan textile manufacture advanced rapidly. However, the independence of Cuba was a severe blow to the cotton industry, which lost both a larger market than it had in Spain itself and its major source of raw material. After 1900 foreign raw cotton was far and away Spain's largest import.

The Basque Provinces were the center of iron and steel production. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, Spain had smelted little of its iron ore, but the demand for iron and steel for the railroads led to a rapid increase in domestic production. Fifty thousand tons of pig iron per year had been average before 1868. By 1900 production was 328,000 tons, and 422,000 in 1913. Steel production rose from 166,000 to 392,000 tons between 1900 and 1913. Still Spain, lacking abundant coal and capital, lagged behind the more industrialized countries in iron and steel production. It produced only 20 kilos per person per year at the turn of the century, while England produced 207, Germany 146, and France 62. Ninety percent of Spain's iron ore was still exported unrefined.

The need for fuel of the railroads, factories, blast furnaces, and growing cities stimulated the exploration of Spain's few coal deposits. Production of coal rose from 450,000 tons in 1865 to 2.7 million in 1900 and 4.3 million in 1913. The country's needs could not be met from domestic sources, however, and Spain imported about three quarters as much coal as it produced, mostly from England. Half of the domestic production came from Asturias, where coal had been mined in the valleys above Oviedo since the end of the eighteenth century. This now became a highly developed mining region, closely connected with the Basque industrial area.

Although Catalonia was the most industrialized part of Spain, the Basques were more rapid in adopting modern financial structures. Catalan manufacturing remained primarily a matter of family businesses, but the Basque iron-and-steel industry was organized in modern corporations, which attracted capital from Catalonia and Great Britain, as well as locally. In banking too the Catalans were backward. The future of banking lay in combining the role of deposit bank with promotion of investment in industrial and other corporations. Catalan banks continued to restrict their activities to handling deposits and transfers, with the result that they declined in importance.

The turn of the century saw the creation of the modern Spanish banking structure with the establishment of what became known as the "five great banks." Two of them were Basque, the others centered in Madrid. The first was the Banco de Bilbao, founded in 1857, which had already played a major role in financing Basque mining and smelting industries. The financial crisis following the Spanish-American War produced the next three. Capital repatriated from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines went into founding the Banco Hispano-Americano [120] in 1901. The Banco de Vizcaya, located in Bilbao, capital of the province of Vizcaya, appeared in the same year, and next year came the Banco Español de Crédito. The latter took the place of the Pereires' Crédito Mobiliario Español, which had been in trouble since the death of the last of the original Pereire brothers in 1880. Though it was incorporated in Madrid, the majority of its stock was owned by French and Belgian investors.⁽²⁾ The merger of various regional banks in 1919 produced the fifth great bank, the Banco Central. These banks became the main agents for floating stock, and they therefore encouraged the growth of corporations. Under their leadership, the financial and industrial structure of the country began to assume the aspects of corporate capitalism.

This was the case, for instance, with electricity. The turn of the century saw the beginning of production of electricity in Spain, a development which was to have as far-reaching results as the railroads. Basque banks and Basque capital lay behind four of the five major electrical power corporations established at this time: in the north, the Madrid area, the Guadalquivir valley, and the southeast. The fifth, in Catalonia, was in the hands of a Canadian company known familiarly as "la Canadiense," which drew its capital from investors of various nationalities. Because of Spain's shortage of coal and ubiquitous mountains, three quarters of its electrical productive capacity in 1930 was hydroelectric. Electricity freed Catalonia and other manufacturing zones from dependence on scarce Asturian coal and made possible the mechanization of small shops and extension of industry into new areas.

The First World War provided the Spanish economy with a windfall. Spain remained neutral and suddenly found the warring nations and those cut off from normal suppliers begging for its foodstuffs, minerals, and manufactured goods. The Catalan textile industry was swarmed with foreign orders and the price of coal and iron shot up. Production and the number of industrial workers increased rapidly. After peace in 1918, however, Spain was unable to keep these new customers, and its manufacturers had to fall back on the domestic market, which had its limits because of the large proportion of the population living at subsistence level in the countryside. The letdown caused violent tensions in the industrial areas after the war which were critical in bringing the end of the constitutional monarchy.

Wartime profits made possible the buying out of foreign investors in some areas, most notable being the railroads. Still, foreign capital did not disappear from Spain. Having gone earlier into mines and railroads, much of it went after 1900 into public utilities, as in the case of [121] Catalan electricity. In 1925 the Spanish government gave the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, a United States entity, a twenty-five-year franchise of the telephone services of the country. The company built Spain's first skyscraper, "la Telefonica," on the recently opened Gran Via in the center of Madrid. Figures are not available for the extent of foreign investment in Spain, but even after the First World War, it was considerable in mining, smelting, and utilities.

3. The expanding economy thus benefited the three vested interests on which the established order rested: landowners, manufacturers, and foreign investors. The Moderados had turned the church into another ally, but the Revolution of 1868 and its aftermath had severely shaken it. The proclamation of religious toleration, the church's loss of control over education, and the end of state financial support under the First Republic had driven many Catholics to side with the Carlists. Most clergy had preferred, however, a restoration of the legitimate Bourbon line to a Carlist victory. After 1875 the church recovered from its setback, aided actively by Alfonso XII and Maria Cristina. Although the Concordat of 1851 had provided for state support of only three religious orders, the church registered many others under the provisions of the Concordat. By 1900 Spain had 597 male religious communities and 2656 female communities, with 55,000 monks and nuns. This was little more than half the eighteenth-century figure, but their influence was great, for over half of their houses were dedicated to teaching. Primary and secondary education of upper- and middle-class children was solidly in the hands of the clergy. And the clergy, impressed by the anticlericalism of the Third French Republic and the Italian monarchy, remained firmly aligned against the dangers of liberalism and republicanism.

The religious orders also rebuilt the independent wealth which they had lost by the confiscation and sale of their lands. Most orders preferred now to place their investments in industry and commerce rather than in real estate. The amount of their wealth is undisclosed, but in 1912 the secretary of the Catalan textile manufacturers association, who should have been well-informed, declared, they "control without exaggeration one-third of the capital wealth of Spain."⁽³⁾

The result was that the clergy in general remained tied to the established order. They did little to help the immigrants drawn to the [122] industrial cities from the countryside. The alienation of the urban lower classes from the religious orders evident in the assaults on monasteries in 1834-35 was increasing, abetted after 1868 by the spread of socialism and anarchism. By 1900 the church was a symbol of an unjust social order to many of the lower classes, as it had been at the beginning of the century to liberals.

After its long history of political activism, the army turned into a reliable supporter of the entrenched groups. Just as the accession of Isabel II had coincided with the maturity of a generation of generals who would be active in politics, that of Alfonso XII saw their disappearance. O'Donnell, Narvaez, and Prim had died in the previous decade, and Espartero followed in 1879. Serrano remained to welcome the new king, but he rapidly disappeared from the political stage. The new figures, of whom Martinez Campos was the leader, had been shocked by the anarchy of the First Republic. They were committed to order, centralism, and the monarchy. Cánovas contributed to their loyalty by working to keep the army out of politics. Martinez Campos was sent to Cuba, where in 1878 he succeeded in pacifying a revolt in progress since 1868. At the same time the officer corps became more homogeneous, a career for members of the middle and upper classes. Officers were trained in select academies, promotion was strictly by seniority except in theaters of war. Gone were the days of rapid rise of men of modest origins like Espartero. High officers were still convinced of their mission to save the country, but they ceased to lead political movements.

Spain's defeat by the United States in 1898 and the loss of its remaining colonies turned the thoughts of the officers back to the political arena. Having suffered the ravages of tropical disease and guerrilla warfare in Cuba and the Philippines, the surviving soldiers and officers returned to Spain to discover their services unappreciated. After 1900 many young officers felt underpaid in relation to their social status, even though the army received half the national budget and most of this went into salaries. The officer corps was a kind of cancerous growth that resisted all surgery: 500 generals and 24,000 lower officers for an army of less than 50,000 soldiers on active duty! The government called on the army repeatedly after 1898 to put down labor agitation in Barcelona and elsewhere. The officers as a caste hated Catalan particularism and scorned and detested the working classes. After 1904, the army was engaged in intermittent warfare in Morocco, which again lacked popular support. Many politicians and writers attacked the military forces as a useless expense. The officers, stung by what they considered national ingratitude, became alienated from the parliamentary system. They needed only a leader to prepare them for a new kind of pronunciamiento. After 1902 such a figure appeared, the young Alfonso XIII, who prided himself on his constitutional position [123] as supreme commander of the armed forces, appeared regularly in military uniform, and looked on the army as his own property. Thusalthough the army had become a pillar of the social order, it posed a latent threat to the parliamentary regime. If the politicians should fail to maintain domestic peace, it was likely to step in. In the end, this is what occurred in 1923, because the forces of opposition eventually grew strong enough to threaten the system.

4. The collapse of the First Republic left the opposition groups disorganized and disheartened. Until the end of the century they were reorienting themselves, creating new institutions, and seeking new leaders. After the disaster of 1898 discredited the governing groups, the opponents of the regime were able to take the offensive, campaigning for political influence and resorting on occasion to violence.

Since the late eighteenth century, ideological conflict had never ceased to tear Spain apart. Although the persecutions of Ferdinand VII managed to stamp out the spirit of Jansenism among most of the clergy, the strict puritanical concept of devotion to the common good had lived on in other areas. Some of the societies of Amigos del País remained in existence, notably the society of Madrid, which had continued its activities during the dismal first half of the century and now found new life. Beside it there was the Ateneo de Madrid, a private association of intellectuals that had been founded in 1820, closed in 1824, and reopened in 1835. It presented courses of lectures to the public, bringing higher education out of the closed circle of the universities. After 1875 Cánovas befriended it and made it the leading center of intellectual life in Madrid, where members who opposed the regime were free to voice their criticisms.

The Restoration of 1875 saw the birth of a new center for educational reformers. It grew out of the revolt of university professors against the state system which began before 1868, highlighted by the violent reaction to Castelar's dismissal for insulting the queen. The inspiration for their revolt came partly from republicanism and at least as much from the teachings of Julian Sanz del Rio, a professor of philosophy of law at Madrid. After studying law at Granada, Sanz del Rio had gone abroad in 1843. Disappointed with the French rationalism he found in Paris, he moved on to Heidelberg. Here he became an admirer of a recently deceased disciple of Kant, Friedrich Krause. From Kant via Krause, Sanz adopted a philosophy which insisted on the primacy of morality in human relations but freed it, in the fashion of the European Enlightenment, from any particular religious faith. In 1854 Sanz obtained a chair at the University of Madrid, and in the last decade of Isabel II's reign many future republicans and other political [124] radicals, including Castelar and Salmerón, listened to his lectures and accepted the doctrines of "Krausismo." Its emphasis on morality and probity appealed to the spiritual heirs of the Jansenists and fortified their opposition to church control of education. Sanz's most remarkable student was Francisco Giner de los Ríos, who succeeded him in his chair in 1868.

One of the first pieces of legislation of the Restoration was a decree authored by the minister of education, the Marquis of Orovio, in February 1875. Orovio had been responsible for the oath of loyalty of 1867 which led to the dismissal of various professors. His new decree required that all textbooks in use be approved by the state and that all university professors clear their lectures with their rectors to see that they did not conflict with Catholic dogma and morality or the monarchic system. The decree was a sop thrown by Cánovas to the intransigent Catholics. It raised again the question of freedom to teach. Castelar resigned his chair, while Salmerón, another president of the Republic, and Giner de los Ríos publicly protested the decree. Cánovas deprived the latter of their professorships and had Giner arrested and exiled to Cadiz.

While in Cadiz Giner conceived the idea of a private educational institution which would be free from government and church control. Upon his release, he and his associates established a corporation entitled the Institution Libre de Enseñanza (Independent Institution of Education) to be supported by private stockholders and under private control. Originally Giner conceived of a free university, but when this proved impractical, he turned to a secondary school, soon adding primary education.

Though never large in numbers, the Institución marked Giner out as one of the great educators of all time. In it he attempted to put his ideals into practice. Partly these were Krausist, partly inherited from domestic reformers like Jovellanos. Giner also admired the education offered by English and American schools and colleges and German universities. Discarding all textbooks, the professors taught by lecture and student participation. Frequent excursions to the countryside and to historic and artistic monuments stressed the importance of seeing and doing, in contrast to the education by rote commonly practiced in church schools. Giner and his staff taught the children to appreciate the music and culture of the common people. One of the novel features of the Instituci6n was coeducation, with girls participating in activities, including outdoor sports, alongside boys. Teaching at the Institution or otherwise associated with Giner were many persons who had been active in the revolutionary period after 1868. Salmerón, Figuerola, and other reformers joined him, but Giner strove to keep the Institution out of politics, feeling, not unlike some army officers, that parliamentary strife was the ruin of Spain. A gentle man with sparkling eyes and a [125] white beard, Giner had a powerful effect on associates and students alike. His idealism and personal magnetism and the upright character of his fellow teachers turned the Institución pupils into young men and women who felt themselves a small band of missionaries dedicated to the improvement of their country. Many of Spain's leading teachers of this century have been "Institucionistas."

The spirit of educational reform inspired by the Institución Libre de Enseñanza leavened Spain in the twentieth century. Friends and associates of Giner were responsible for a series of new cultural and educational organizations. One of Spain's greatest modern intellectuals was Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who came out of rural Aragon to become an outstanding neurologist and Spain's first winner of the Nobel Prize in science. In 1907 he and Giner, convinced of the need for Spaniards to go abroad to study, founded the Junta para Ampliation de Estudios Históricos e Investigaciones Científicas (Committee for the Extension of Historical Studies and Scientific Research) to give fellowships for young Spaniards to go to foreign universities. To the consternation of conservatives the current Liberal government gave it official recognition and a subsidy. In 1910 Ramon Menendez Pidal, one of the leading figures of the Junta and Spain's greatest medievalist, was largely responsible for founding the Center of Historical Studies, in which was trained Americo Castro, among other leading Spanish historians. The Residencia de Estudiantes (Students' Residence) in Madrid, established in the same year, offered lodging to Spanish and foreign university students and became a center for intellectual exchange that has been remembered with great warmth by many Spanish intellectuals. Finally disciples of the Institution established secondary schools in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona. A direct challenge to the schools of the religious orders, they nevertheless received state support. Known as the Instituto Escuela in each locality, they fostered the same kind of camaraderie and sense of mission among their graduates as did the Institution. The bodies which grew directly or indirectly out of Giner's inspiration, although more academic than the eighteenth-century Amigos del Paíís, revived the latter's aim of reinvigorating Spanish society by working outside the established educational institutions. Once they proved their value, the royal government gave them encouragement and financial support, as it had to the Amigos.

In many areas intellectual activity was flowering by the turn of the century. The defeat of Spain by the United States in 1898 and the loss of its last colonies, in which the incompetence of the government and armed forces lay naked for all to observe, brought forth a flood of publications dedicated to analyzing the causes for Spain's disgrace among Western nations. Miguel de Unamuno, then professor of classics at Salamanca, had already begun the task in his En torno al casticismo of 1895, which cast the blame for Spain's decrepitude on the religious [126] fanaticism and chauvinism of its ruling classes. Essayists like Angel Ganivet, Azorin, and Ramiro de Maeztu, novelists like Ramon del Valle Inclan and Pío Baroja, the poet Antonio Machado, the painters Ignacio Zuloaga and Joaquín Sorolla sought to capture the nature of Spanishness. In general they agreed with foreigners that Spaniards were a people apart, as different in character as in geography from other Western European nations. These men thought Spaniards should recognize the qualities of their existence, their passion, their individuality, their religiosity, but that they should regenerate themselves by participating in Western culture, science, and political philosophy. Although these thinkers spoke of Spain, most of them found Spain embodied in Castile, as we have already observed.

The Generation of '98, the name applied loosely to this group of intellectuals, was widely read at home and abroad. It gave currency to the idea that Spanish government was inefficient, corrupt, and unstable, running the country in the interest of the privileged few. Although most were not primarily political in their outlook, their criticism had obvious political connotations and inspired desires for reform. One of the friends of Giner de los Ríos who gave them inspiration did, however, labor directly in this direction. This was Joaquín Costa, like Ramon y Cajal of poor Aragonese origin, a self-taught lawyer and historian. In 1902, under the auspices of the Ateneo de Madrid, he produced a stinging indictment of the evils of caciquismo. He called for a "surgeon of iron" who could cut out the cancerous growth and remake Spain in the interest of the common people. He denounced the sale of the public lands in the nineteenth century and preached a return to communal farming as the salvation of Spain's rural masses. Agrarian reform and irrigation he made the objectives of personal crusades. He died in 1911 at fifty-five, but not before he had set in motion many currents of thought that would mature later. Caciquismo never recovered from his expose.

5. Other protest movements were more directly involved in the collapse of caciquismo. The first to be effective was Catalan nationalism, the outgrowth of the Romantic cultural revival that had become a political force under the Republic. Until 1875 the Catalanist movement was politically radical, but the threat posed by the Figuerola tariff of 1869 made the industrialists of Catalonia susceptible to the appeal of regional autonomy. After 1880 they began to subsidize Catalanist newspapers and political parties, thus providing the regionalist intellectuals with bourgeois associates along with much-needed financial support. These same developments made Castilians suspicious of Catalan objectives. The enemies of the First Republic looked upon it [127] as a Catalan creation, since Catalans were most prominent among its leaders. And Castilians began to consider high tariffs a subterfuge for Catalan exploitation of the pockets of other Spaniards. The tariff question pitted agrarian interests against manufacturing, splitting the coalition on which the established order rested. Despite Cánovas' efforts to pacify Catalan interests, the basis was present for a serious political conflict.

In 1879 Valenti Almirall, a former follower of Pi y Margall who had turned away from the latter's socialist ideas, began to publish the Diari Catala, the first daily periodical to appear in Catalan since one of 1810, created by Joseph Bonaparte to woo Catalonia. Almirall soon headed a movement called the Catalan Center. Its objective was to group together all partisans of Catalan interests, and it urged Catalans to boycott both major parties, thus establishing Catalanism as a separate political movement. Soon a young law student, Enric Prat de la Riba, broke off and founded the Catalanist Union, with more directly political objectives. Representatives of the Union and other regionalist groups met at Manresa in 1892 and agreed on a three-point program: autonomy for Catalonia in all matters save defense, foreign relations, and interregional matters; a separate Catalan parliament which would rule the region according to its own laws, using its own language, and with only Catalans in local offices; and separate Catalan regiments in the army with their own officers and using their own language. The first two demands echoed the federalist position of 1873, but could also be presented as a revival of the fueros destroyed in 1714.

The war in Cuba and the Philippines served to strengthen the movement. The major market for Catalan textiles was in Cuba, and Catalan capitalists had invested heavily in Cuban sugar plantations. The loss of the colonies brought on a serious financial and industrial crisis in Catalonia, accompanied by labor agitation. Its bankers and manufacturers forgot Cánovas' recent favors and heaped blame on the ineptness and lack of political vision of the Madrid government, which they felt could not defend their markets in the world nor their interests as employers against the working classes.

In 1901 various Catalan parties united in a new common front called the Lliga Regionalista "to work by all legitimate means for the autonomy of the Catalan people within the Spanish state."⁽⁴⁾ In that year the Lliga elected four deputies to the Cortes. After 1904 it was headed by Francesc Cambo, a leader of the powerful Fomento del Trabajo Nacional, the Catalan textile manufacturers' association. His leadership symbolized the new alliance of Catalan regionalists and industrialists.

[128] In 1905 a group of military officers, who considered the regionalist movement subversive and were angered by a cartoon in a Barcelona periodical mocking the army's failures in Morocco, stormed the paper's office and smashed the presses. Catering to the demands of the army, the Cortes passed a "Law of Jurisdictions" which gave military tribunals jurisdiction over all offenses against the army and navy, including attacks in the press. Faced by this challenge, the regionalist movements from left to right regrouped themselves as the Solidaritat Catalana and won a resounding victory at the polls in April 1907. Catalans were thus the first to succeed in breaking control of elections from Madrid. The defection of the Catalan industrialists was a serious threat to the stability of the system.

The advances of Catalan regionalism found an echo among the Basques. The Basque Provinces and Navarre had been the only regions of Spain to preserve their fueros from the centralization of Philip V, and their support for the Carlists had been motivated to a considerable extent by fears that liberal centralism would destroy their local liberties. Navarre lost most of its privileges at the end of the Carlist War. After crushing the Carlist revolt of the 1870's, Cánovas took the opportunity at last to end Basque exemptions from military conscription and national taxes, but he permitted the Basques to keep a good amount of self-government. Nevertheless a regionalist movement arose to protest the loss of the fueros. Embodying the strongly clerical spirit of the Carlists, the Basque Nationalist Party, founded in 1894, aimed at preserving the Basque language and the local Catholic faith against the liberal centralism of Madrid. It was successful in electing a few deputies to the Cortes in succeeding decades.

6. Regionalist movements appealed to the upper and middle classes and to the peasants of the advanced areas. They had virtually no social program, and the urban proletariat developed its own independent organizations. The anarchist movement that took root after 1868 in association with the First International continued in existence despite the efforts of the Restoration governments to crush it. The anarchists became famous in Spain as elsewhere for spectacular individual acts of violence aimed at terrifying political leaders and the antirevolutionary public. In 1893 an anarchist bomb killed twenty people at the opening night of the Barcelona opera season. A Catalan anarchist threw a bomb at Alfonso XIII as he left his wedding ceremony with his bride in 1906, barely missing the couple and killing twenty-four others. Anarchist bullets killed Cánovas in 1897 and Jose Canalejas, the most capable Liberal leader, in 1912.

Anarchists also preached mass violence. In 1881 the clandestine [129] followers of the defunct First International founded the Workers' Federation of the Spanish Region. It gathered in the remnants of the labor movement of Andalusia, but it could achieve little except to excite occasional fierce attacks on well-to-do landowners by agricultural workers whose lives were marked by poverty and despair. To them the anarchist organizers offered a millenarian faith in a better world, independent of the hated church. The Civil Guard carried out vicious reprisals and kept the movement in hand.

The expansion of Catalan industries attracted immigrants to Barcelona and other cities of the region. After 1880 they came in larger and larger numbers from Aragon, Valencia, and Murcia, areas which did not speak Catalan. These new recruits were not susceptible to Catalan nationalism, which in any case was becoming a middle-class movement, but anarchism did appeal to them. In Catalonia anarchism had been associated from the start with labor organizations, which usually had to operate clandestinely. The First International had expired in 1876 and Bakunin had died in the same year. Foreign concepts of labor organization, especially French, affected the Catalan workers in the following decades, replacing their primitive anarchism with anarcho-syndicalism. The anarcho-syndicalists believed in organizing the workers into syndicates or labor unions capable of industrial strikes, for they saw the strike as the prime weapon to achieve social revolution. Their ultimate objective was the general (or universal) strike that would paralyze the economy, forcing concessions and eventually bringing about the overthrow of the state (that is, the centralized government, which they conceived to be devoted to defending the interests of the bourgeoisie).

The Law of Associations of 1887 legalized workers' syndicates. During the depression following the defeat of 1898, syndicalism spread rapidly in Catalonia. When the metallurgical workers of Barcelona struck at the end of 1901 for an eight-hour day, they won the support of other labor groups, who voted for a general strike in February 1902. Some 80,000 workers (in a city of 500,000) went out on strike. The Civil Guard and the army moved in to break the strike, and there was some fighting, which lasted a week before the workers were defeated. The syndicalist movement suffered from this setback, but the workers continued uncowed. In 1907, when the regionalists and manufacturers established the Solidaritat Catalana, the anarchists responded by establishing a union of workers' groups called the Solidaridad Obrera (Labor Solidarity).

Meanwhile, under the leadership of a fiery speaker, Alejandro Lerroux, part of the Catalan Republican movement, which had been kept alive by Salmerón, broke off from the Catalanists and appealed to the workers with calls for a social revolution. Lerroux named his party the Radical Republicans, or simply the Radicals. He directed his [130] strongest attacks against the church, which for him epitomized the evils of the existing economic system, and Catalan separatism.

By 1909 there was a high state of tension in Barcelona. Bombs had been thrown at leaders of the Lliga Regionalista; some claimed by anarchists, others by agents provocateurs of the industrialists or the Madrid government. An economic crisis and unemployment aggravated passions. In July 1909 the army decided to call up the military reserves to meet a critical situation in Morocco, and began with working-class men of Catalonia. Given the hatreds present among the workers of Barcelona, this announcement had disastrous consequences. The anarchists and Radicals joined in proclaiming a general strike, which began on July 26. Next day the army established martial law. The workers responded with barricades and, excited by agents of Lerroux's party, systematically set fire to churches and convents. Order was not reestablished for five days, by which time over fifty church buildings had been burned. The government, searching for a scapegoat, found him in the radical anticlerical Francisco Ferrer, a friend of Lerroux and a founder of a school associated with the anarchist movement, the Escuela Moderna. He was tried summarily and shot, causing an international scandal that blackened the name of Spain among liberals and workers throughout Europe.

The Tragic Week, as the event became known, added further discredit to the parliamentary system. Yet, like the nineteenth-century revolutions, it frightened the middle-class opponents of the established order into temporary quiescence, while the privileged classes drew back together. The Catalan industrialists and the Madrid government were ready to make peace. Solidaritat Catalana had collapsed, and Cambo's Lliga Regionalista pressed the ministry for home rule. In 1914 the king and ministry granted a common government for the four provinces that made up Catalonia, known as the Mancomunitat. It had authority over social services, communications, and education. Prat de la Riba was its first president. Dominated by the Lliga, it proved ready to cooperate with the central government against the proletariat of Catalonia.

The Catalan workers were disillusioned by the lack of success of the Tragic Week. Support for Lerroux declined among them. The Solidari-dad Obrera held a congress in 1910 and established the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labor) to coordinate anarchist activity in line with the French syndicalist doctrine of direct action and the general strike. The CNT was the first broad permanent institution established by Spanish anarchists, showing that the need to face the state in combat had forced them to give up the anarchist ideal of basing their activities on local organizations.

Anarchism was not the only revolutionary doctrine to take hold of the Spanish proletariat. In the First International Bakunin's party [131] had been opposed by the followers of Karl Marx. Before it dissolved in 1876 the organization expelled the anarchists and established Marxist socialism as its official doctrine. From this conflict Spanish labor leaders learned of Marxism. Fleeing France after the Paris Commune, Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, went to Spain in 1871 and there sought to win over the workers' associations from Bakunin. He failed, but he left effective converts behind. The most important of these was a young printer named Pablo Iglesias, who was to demonstrate great capacities as an organizer and administrator.

Having fallen out with the anarchists, in 1879 Iglesias founded a clandestine Socialist Workers' Party in Madrid, and in 1888 an association of labor unions, the Union General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workingmen). The UGT had little success in penetrating the anarchist stronghold of Catalonia, but it obtained followers among the craftsmen of Madrid and the Basque ironworkers. It conducted succesful strikes in Bilbao in the 1890's and the following decades. At the same time the Socialist party became active in the political sphere. Bilbao elected eight socialist municipal councilors in 1901, and Iglesias won a place on the ayuntamiento of Madrid in 1905. Four years later the Socialists joined the anarchists in the general strike of the Tragic Week in Barcelona, extending their appeal for support throughout the country. Shortly thereafter, through an alliance with the Republicans, the Socialists elected Iglesias to the Cortes, Spain's first proletarian deputy. By now the UGT was extending its membership among the workers of the north, Castile, and Andalusia, including miners of Asturias and the Sierra Morena, the copper miners of Rio Tinto, the railway workers, and other groups, many of them employees of foreign companies. A growing number of landowning peasants of Castile and Valencia also joined the Socialist unions.

Under the inspiration of Iglesias, the Socialist party and the UGT worked to educate the people for political democracy, believing that with the universal suffrage established in 1890 honest elections would ultimately bring reform and an end to capitalism. They established Casas del Pueblo in the cities and towns of central Spain, places where there were cafes and lending libraries and the Socialists could hold meetings and offer public lectures. By 1910 the Socialists found support among Madrid intellectuals, including Spain's greatest modern novelist, Benito Perez Galdos, who became a friend of Iglesias. In these ways the Socialists spread Marxist doctrines to a large sector of Spanish thinkers and workers.

The labor movement was thus divided between the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, who believed in violent direct action and no compromise with the employing classes, and the Socialists, who strove for limited gains and a gradual evolution toward socialism through legislation. Spain was not unique. By the turn of the century, many European [132] workers' movements had split into evolutionary and revolutionary wings. In most countries both wings were Marxist in their orientation. The Spanish anarchists never accepted the Marxist doctrine of the need of a dictatorship of the proletariat to establish the new society after the revolution, for they steadily opposed a centralized state in every form. Their rejection of political action meant that workers' parties had much less political strength in Spain than in other Western European countries.

Spanish socialism and anarchism developed in different geographic areas. The anarcho-syndicalist stronghold was Catalonia, and messianic anarchists found their followers among Andalusian peasants. The Socialists appealed to Castilian craftsmen and peasants, and to the miners and industrial workers of the north and Andalusia. The anarchist CNT and Socialist UGT rarely cooperated, but one instance was the Tragic Week, when the weak UGT of Barcelona feared for its following if it failed to participate in the insurrection. The division of Spain between the two doctrines was partly the result of historic accident, but there was also a deeper cause. Although Catalan anarcho-syndicalists and nationalists were bitter enemies, the one representing the working classes, the other the intellectuals and propertied classes, both movements opposed a strongly unified and centralized state organization. The same was true of the cantonalist movement and the First International in eastern and southern Spain during the First Republic. Socialist Marxism, on the other hand, which taught the need for tight political organization and a revolutionary dictatorship, appealed to the central region of Spain, accustomed for centuries to dominate the peninsula politically. The connection cannot be pushed too far, however, for the Socialists were strong among Basque workers, in an area which was traditionally regionalist.

Class divisions weakened the industrialized regions in their conflict with Madrid. Socialists and anarchists split the proletariat. Intellectuals could be found favoring most every form of opposition. After 1898 the order survived because its enemies were divided, but the existing parliamentary system was discredited and could find no way to reconcile its opponents. By 1914 Spain needed only a serious shock to disrupt the Moderado order.

1. Statement to editors of Figaro, 1883, quoted in Soldevila, Historia de Espafia, VIII, 156.

2. See Nicolas Sánchez Albornoz, "De los orígenes del capital financiero: la Sociedad General del Crédito Mobiliario Español, 1856-1902," Moneda y Crédito, No. 97 (June 1966), 29-67.

3. Joan C. Ullman, The Tragic Week, a Study in Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875-1912 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 35. This work provides a good discussion of the position of the church, pp. 27-47.

4. Quoted in E. Allison Peers, Catalonia Infelix. (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1937), p. 144.