The Old Regime in Spain ended with the reign of Carlos IV, which collapsed beneath the weight of French Napoleonic imperialism. Spain seemed a comparatively peaceful and progressive land when Carlos IV came to the throne in 1788. The order and decorum shown by the many thousands of Spaniards who crowded into Madrid for the official coronation the following year contrasted sharply with the revolution that was developing in France. The new king was about forty years old, good-hearted but weak and simple-minded. He hoped to continue the general policies of his father's reign and retained as chief minister the Murcian lawyer José Moñino, Conde de Floridablanca, a strong-minded regalist who had long served Carlos III capably.

The beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 drastically altered the policy of the Spanish crown. Floridablanca adopted a sharply hostile course and imposed censorship on all news from France. The atmosphere was even more tense after the attempted assassination of Floridablanca by a demented Frenchman in 1790 and a tax revolt by the overburdened Galician peasantry in 1790-1791. The nascent Spanish press was also subjected to severe censorship, and the progress of the Spanish enlightenment was brought to a near halt. Early [416] in 1792, Floridablanca's enemies, both personal and political, combined to force him from power. Carlos IV replaced him with the now elderly Conde de Aranda, who while no supporter of the French Revolution, was a liberal and a Francophile, convinced of the importance of the French alliance. He relaxed the censorship, allowing Spanish publicists and reformers to continue their proselytizing activities. Before the end of the year, however, Aranda was shoved out by palace intrigues, replaced as first secretary by a handsome, sturdy young guards' officer from Extremadura, Manuel Godoy, friend of the royal family and sometime social escort (cortejo) of the Italian queen, Maria Luisa di Parma. Carlos IV considered him a true friend, one of the few reliable counselors among a bevy of fops and intriguers, and made him Duque de Alcudia.

For most of fifteen years 1792-1808 Godoy was the real ruler of Spain. He was not a politician or administrator of great education or mental power, but considered himself a man of the new generation, a reformer and continuer of the policies of Carlos III. Throughout these years, the overriding concern of the Spanish crown was the challenge presented by revolutionary France and its successor, Napoleonic imperialism. Spain joined the alliance of legitimacy against the French revolutionary regime in 1793-1795 and scored some initial successes, occupying Hendaye and Perpignan. Despite a major effort by the French to inundate northeastern Spain with revolutionary propaganda, the anti-French struggle was quite popular among the Spanish people, whose religious and patriotic sentiments were fully aroused. This was most of all the case in Catalonia; there anti-French feeling was intense, popular volunteers were numerous, and the conflict was called la guerra gran. But the Anglo-Spanish fleets failed before Toulon, and the Spanish army lacked the cadres, equipment, training, or leadership to resist the new French military masses. The French briefly occupied San Sebastián and northern Catalonia. Peace was made in 1795 on the basis of the status quo ante, the French regime not pressing its terms, because of its interest in detaching Spain from the British antirevolutionary alliance.

The war against revolutionary France helped to open the first serious political fissures in the eighteenth-century Bourbon regime in Spain. Almost from the start, Godoy was resented as no minister of Carlos III had been because he was obviously a youthful favorite and his appointment was a throwback to the old system of validos which had always been unpopular. At a time of great stress, the vacillating and confused Carlos IV proved incapable of emulating his father, who had known how to choose professionally competent ministers and arbitrate among them himself. Libellous stories about Godoy and the queen brought the royal family under fire for the first time in a [417] century, and lowered respect for the crown. Resentment became more intense after the crown awarded its first secretary the unusually prestigious title of prince after he concluded peace in 1795. Nor did Godoy 's undeniably reformist measures win him support among the progressivist and critical-minded. He was still accused of being underhanded and too authoritarian in government. The reformist and progressivist currents of preceding decades all the while gathered force rapidly under the stimulus of the French example. While only a few small revolutionary cliques were formed in Spain, the scope of critical opinion among the upper and middle classes increased considerably.

Discontent first found public expression in mid-1794, after an increase in taxes and the apparent ineptitude of the Spanish army. In Madrid there were public demonstrations of sympathy for the French cause for the first time, and by the following year several small secret prorevolutionary juntas had been formed in Madrid and in the provinces. After peace was made, these were dissolved and some of the ringleaders arrested. In the meantime, the Inquisition had attempted a wartime crackdown on the dissemination of subversive ideas, decreeing in 1794 the abolition of all Spanish university chairs in public [418] and natural law. Such measures had little effect, however, for after 1795 restrictions on publications were relaxed once more, and after French pressure a Spanish edition of the Encyclopedia was allowed to be published. The crown resumed its encouragement of education, and in the last years of the eighteenth century reformist and progressivist ideas were circulating more widely than ever before. The beginning of a nucleus of political liberalism, questioning complete royal sovereignty--however enlightened--was starting to form. This trend toward the expression of critical political ideas brought a reimposition of censorship on books at the beginning of 1798.

Aside from its semiliberal policy on education and printing, the crown's principal attempt to continue and expand reform policies came in the fields of taxation and commerce. Royal finances were sufficiently strong to permit Spain to enter the war of 1793-1795 on a fairly sound footing--sounder than that of Prussia, for example--but after a year of full-scale war fiscal pressures mounted. Taxes on salaried officials and on the church were raised, and new issues of paper money were backed by special levies on landowners and on the church. For the first time, the aristocracy was brought directly under taxation, and this explains part of the opposition to the government in central Spain. In 1795, Godoy's government took the step of abolishing the special servicio tax on peasants that had first been levied in sixteenth-century Castile, making the burden somewhat less inequitable.

The economy took a turn for the worse after 1796, when the government allowed itself to be maneuvered by French pressure and its longstanding trans-Atlantic rivalry with the British into declaring war against the latter in October 1796, after signing an alliance with France. During the next few years, Spanish commerce suffered grievously as the fleet underwent major reverses. This necessitated drastic changes that portended far-reaching consequences, as in the case of two significant new decrees issued in 1797. One permitted foreign craftsmen of Christian religions other than Roman Catholic to enter Spain and open shops or factories with a guarantee of freedom of religion. The second recognized the effectiveness of the virtual British naval blockade by suspending commercial restrictions within the Spanish American empire, permitting all neutral nations to trade freely. This was a fateful step toward the ultimate independence of the colonies, for it admitted that at least for the time being Spain could not maintain its pretended monopoly.

Another important precedent was set in 1798, when the government decided to raise money by auctioning off surplus buildings owned by municipalities. This was the first time that entailed property was seized and auctioned by the state to pay for war expenses. In [419] 1798, the government also decreed the sale of the property of most church charitable foundations, as well as of all remaining unsold Jesuit property, and during the subsequent years further levies were agreed to by the church to meet military expenses. In 1799, a new property tax was levied on the wealthy. These measures roused the ire of aristocrats and the clergy, while discontent increased among the lower classes. As prices increased, real wages fell, and there were several minor riots in 1797-1798.

Godoy himself brought in a new group of liberal appointees at the end of 1797 but, because of French pressure, was forced to retire as first secretary in March 1798. He was replaced by the secretary of finance, Francisco de Saavedra, in turn succeeded a few months later by the anticlerical and regalist foreign minister, Mariano Luis de Urquijo. The financial situation continued to deteriorate, and the crown became increasingly confused by the pulling and hauling of factions. Conservatives among churchmen and aristocrats launched a counteroffensive against the new reform government of 1798-1800, bringing first the dismissal and imprisonment of Urquijo at the end of 1800, then that of the eminent progressivist and reformist minister of justice, Jovelianos, early in 1801. Thus within less than a decade the pressures of the French revolutionary wars had completely broken the unity of the Spanish polity.

After two years absence, Godoy returned to de facto control of Spanish government at the end of 1800 and held that influence until the whole Spanish regime was overthrown in the spring of 1808. During his second period in power he followed a more moderate line than before, since the luces--the critics and progressivists--remained his committed enemies. Yet Godoy successfully maintained a reform program in some areas and rejected a genuinely reactionary policy. One major reform was the partial abolition of the señorío eclesiástico in 1806. Papal permission was obtained to sell one-seventh of church properties in return for state bonds. This was the last great step of eighteenth-century regalist policy and opened the way to all-out disamortization of church lands by the succeeding liberal regime thirty years later.

Yet all domestic problems had become secondary to the irresistable pressure of French imperialism, whose military dominance of the western half of the continent had held Spain in satellite status since 1796. In 1799, Napoleon forced the cession of the vast Louisiana territory in North America that the Spanish crown had gained from Britain only sixteen years earlier. By 1801, Godoy had been maneuvered by France into the petty border "War of the Oranges" against pro-British Portugal. When peace was temporarily signed with Britain, Spain was able to keep the Extremaduran border district of [420] Olivença it had seized but lost the island of Trinidad to Britain. The peaceful years of 1802-1804 helped to revive the faltering economy briefly. A high volume of trade was momentarily regained with Spanish America, and the country's domestic production reached a new peak in 1805-1806. However, the resumption of war with Britain upon Napoleonic dictates marked the beginning of the end. The naval disaster of Trafalgar (1805) completed the virtual destruction of the Spanish navy, and the subsequent British domination of the Atlantic, coupled with the imposition of Napoleon's French-controlled economic "Continental System" the following year, threw the Spanish economy into profound depression. Commerce declined catastrophically, unemployment grew in the towns, inflation mounted, the government's financial situation became almost hopeless, and real wages for workers continued to decline.

This completed the discrediting of the government, and the unpopularity of Godoy increased year by year until he became the target of almost universal execration. Rumors about Godoy and the queen, coupled with the ineptitude of Carlos IV, dragged the prestige of the royal family in the mud. The regime drew the opposition alike of progressivists and of ultra-conservatives within the aristocracy and church. The latter found a rallying point in the heir to the throne, the prince D. Fernando, deeply jealous of Godoy and eager to succeed his father as soon as possible. Both the elite elements and the royal family itself had thus been divided by political rivalries. The conservative fernandista opposition began to intrigue with Napoleon to encourage removal of Godoy and of the king hiimself, who was hated for his weakness and for the reformist fiscal policies of his government. The Napoleonic vise grew all the tighter with the signing of the Treaty of Fontainebleau in October 1807 providing for the partition of Portugal and the entry of a sizable French army into the peninsula. A fernandista plot of vague dimensions was precipitated and aborted late in 1807, but French pressure forced Carlos IV to pardon his son almost immediately. Napoleon meanwhile had himself become eager to eliminate Godoy, who was trying to follow a double game in a futile attempt to free Spain of French domination.

Godoy's final effort was a desperate plan to remove the royal family to America, whence an independence struggle against French domination might be led just as the Portuguese crown was attempting to do from Rio de Janeiro. Before this scheme could be put into effect, Godoy was imprisoned by a riot at the winter palace of Aranjuez in March 1808 that had been encouraged by dissident fernandista aristocrats. Carlos IV was forced to abdicate. The resultant [421] breakdown of Spanish government, precipitated as it was by a suicidal feud in the royal family, provided Napoleon with the excuse to intervene directly, deport both Carlos IV and D. Fernando to France, and install his brother Joseph (José I) as king of Spain.
 

The transitory monarchy of Joseph Bonaparte achieved the climax of enlightened despotism in Spain, just as, according to a common argument, the Napoleonic empire in western Europe as a whole climaxed the entire era of eighteenth-century autocralic reformism. The regime of "Don José" was, however, an arbitrary imposition of French arms and broke inevitably with the Catholic legitimist spirit of the Bourbon monarchy. It was based on Napoleon's Bayonne Constitution of 1808, which stipulated for Spain a legislature composed of a lifetime appointive senate and a three-estate assembly--clergy, nobility, and commons--in part elected, in part chosen by town councils, in part appointed by the king. Once in power, the Bonapartist administration tried to enact the same reforms brought by French rule to other lands. The legal and administrative systems were reorganized, establishing greater uniformity and opportunity for the middle classes, the Inquisition was abolished, the church was brought under closer state regulation, and in 1809, most monasteries were abolished and their properties seized. Yet for much of the country these were mere paper reforms that could not be put into effect because of the warfare that raged throughout the brief years of French dominion.

Despite a conscientious effort by the new Corsican monarch, he was rejected by the great majority of Spaniards, who referred to him sneeringly as Pepe Botellas (Joe Bottles) because of his supposed fondness for drink. The only real support for the regime carne from a small minority of the afrancesado intelligentsia, supporters of Napoleonic-style enlightened despotism, who were no more than twelve thousand or so in a population of more than ten million. Some of the afrancesados were mere opportunists interested in positions. Others, however, were concerned patriots who chose to serve the new regime out of a desire to Hispanize it, reform the country along more modern lines, and above all save their homeland from the anarchy and destruction that threatened it in 1808. Yet the Bonapartist regime, imposed by force, remained always at the mercy of military events and never effectively controlled as much as half the country.
 

The reaction of the Spanish people to French domination was the great revolt of May 1808--the broadest popular uprising anywhere in Europe during that era. The rebellion started on May 2 in Madrid as the last member of the royal family was being hustled into French exile, and spread throughout the country within a few weeks, even before Napoleon had officially imposed a Bonaparte king. It was supported by all classes of the population (though the nobility were the most tepid), to save national independence and also to save the primacy of traditional religion. The whole experience was incomprehensible to Napoleon, for nothing of the sort had happened in any other area occupied by French troops. In Spain, however, even the upward-striving middle classes--among the elements that elsewhere seemed to have most to gain from Napoleonic reform--were part of the backbone of resistance.

By June 1808, the Spanish resistance fielded an army with a nominal strength of 130,000 men. The southern contingent under General Castaños scored the first clear-cut field victory over a Napoleonic army in Europe by defeating and capturing Dupont's corps of nearly 20,000 French troops at Bailén (north of Córdoba) in July 1808. That summer, the French army of occupation was nearly swept from the peninsula, and the Spanish forces were increased to more than 200,000. During the final two months of the year, however, Napoleon concentrated his attention on Spain, personally leading an invading force of 300,000 men from his best units. Madrid was seized, and during 1809 the French occupied most of the key points in the north, center, and northeast, moving into the south and east in 1810. The organized Spanish field forces dwindled to no more than 100,000 by the close of 1809 and were hard put to maintain that strength for the remainder of the war.

Britain immediately joined hands with the Spanish governing junta, and dispatched an expeditionary corps under Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) to establish a firm redoubt in Portugal. Wellesley proved a master of defensive tactics in holding his position against heavy odds for three years. On the other hand, Britain never committed more than 50,000 troops to the "peninsular war," as British commentators have termed it, and Wellesley's strategy proved cautious in the extreme, refusing opportunities to seize the strategic initiative after French forces had grown weaker. Britain's other main contribution was economic, providing money and many of the military supplies used by the Spanish and Portuguese forces.

The heart of the Spanish War of Independence of 1808-1813 lay [423] not in the maneuverings of the field armies but in the massive popular resistance of all classes. It became the first great people's war of modern history. Though the Spanish field forces were no match for the Napoleonic armies, the main burden of the war was carried by irregular forces waging a guerrilla (little war). This guerra de partidas (war of irregular partisan bands) was a spontaneous creation of the Spanish peasantry and may have involved 200,000 or more combattants. The French found themselves a beleaguered island in a hostile ocean, controlling no more than the main towns. The simplest communications became major problems of military logistics, and the French dared move through the countryside only in great force. Small detachments and stragglers were relentlessly cut down. In the long run, the bulk of the French army of occupation was limited to garrison and supply duties. Most French casualties--possibly as many as 180,000 over a five-year period--resulted from the work of the guerrilleros, who probably lost no more than 25,000 of their own activists.

The main suffering, and the main heroics, of the war belonged to the Spanish civilians. French occupation policy was harsh, and savage reprisals were exacted in cities that resisted or in areas closely associated with guerrilleros. Whole towns were sacked, riot and rape by the French soldiery were not uncommon, and thousands of civilians were shot merely as examples. In turn, the most vivid symbols of the Spanish will to resist were given by the populace as a whole, highlighted by the two spectacular sieges-to-the-death of Zaragoza in 1808 and 1809. Popular resistance in Spain served as an inspiring example to other peoples held subject under Napoleonic imperialism, most notably in Germany, where the post-1809 patriotic awakening was directly stimulated by the Spanish revolt.

The War of Independence was in the long run a struggle of attrition in which the French were ground down by constant harassment and, from 1812, by the commitment of Napoleon's main strength to eastern and central Europe. The depletion of French forces in that year made possible a strategic counteroffensive by the regular Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese field army, but Wellesley's overweening caution wasted the opportunity. The final victorious campaign of 1813 brought a steady retreat by the shrunken French forces, no longer able to contest major battles in the main part of the peninsula.

Though the final outcome was complete victory, the cost was heavy. To the destruction of the Spanish state was added the devastation of the peninsula's economy. No other country in Europe suffered so heavily from the francesada.
 

Collapse of the Spanish monarchy under the pressures of French imperialism opened the way for the first breakthrough of modern Spanish liberalism. This was not the product of French intervention, for the proponents of drastic reform and a more or less representative system of government had slowly been gathering strength for twenty years. Rather, the breakdown of the Spanish system under French dominion gave reformers the opportunity to put their ideas into practice.

When the royal family crossed into France to meet Napoleon in the spring of 1808, Spanish affairs were left in the hands of a small Regency Council that refused to recognize the abdication of the Spanish throne subsequently wrung from Carlos IV and his heir D. Fernando. Conversely, the Regency Council was unable to function as the government of Spain, for the popular revolt of May-June 1808 resulted in the formation of town and regional juntas in almost every major district. The juntas were composed of local notables, with the nobility predominant, but they also expressed the conviction of the middle- and upper-class elite in most of the country that government rested upon the sovereignty of the people as well as of the crown, and that after the collapse of monarchist government, representatives of the people had the duty to take charge of affairs. On the one hand there was concern to prevent the situation from degenerating into anarchy, and on the other, widespread expression among elite elements of the need for representative leadership to provide necessary reforms while guiding popular resistance. Representatives of the principal juntas in turn delegated authority to a national Junta Central in September 1808.

The scene of the greatest social ferment during the reign of Carlos IV had been Valencia, and in this region the most revolutionary outbursts of the War of Independence occurred. Within the span of a few years, Valencian political society moved from the traditional bread riots of the urban poor, an intermittent phenomenon since ancient times, to organized modern revolutionary conspiracies. Social revolutionary riots broke out in both town and countryside, and several revolutionary local juntas were formed before the authority of the captain general and the more moderate regional junta could be reimposed over the district.

The national Junta Central meanwhile fled south in 1808-1809 to escape the French advance, and found itself increasingly hard put to establish executive authority on the existing ad hoc basis. Reformist leaders in local juntas demanded throughout 1809 that a representative national Cortes assembly be summoned to reorganize the govern-[425] ment and restructure national institutions. At the end of January 1810, the Junta Central resigned its executive authority to the Regency Council but at the same time called for the selection of representatives to a new Cortes--a potentially revolutionary act of political representation.

This was not merely a spur-of-the-moment attempt to fill the gap left by captivity of the royal family in France, it was the result of the predevelopment of Spanish liberalism that had been taking shape during the reign of Carlos IV, based on political ideas derived from Locke, Montesquieu, and other theorists. It was a liberalism derived from a somewhat romanticized conception of Spanish history that tended to exaggerate the achievements of the medieval Cortes, positing a parliamentary "Spanish tradition of liberty" that had been cut short by the imposition of Habsburg despotism after the defeat of the comuneros in 1520-1521.

The seat of Spanish government during the greater part of the War of Independence was Cádiz, the country's leading Atlantic port, separated from the mainland by a narrow peninsula easily defended from French assault, protected and provisioned by the British and Spanish fleets. The liberal Cortes and its resulting constitution could probably have taken the shape they did only in Cádiz, the most liberal city in the peninsula at that time. Open to foreign influence, living off the American trade, led mostly by a middle class that had made its money from commerce and not landed dominion, the Cádiz environment gave a decisive thrust to constitutional reformism.

Deputies to the Cádiz Cortes were nominally to have been chosen by a system of indirect universal male suffrage in which the votes of twenty-five-year-old heads of households were channeled through district electoral councils. Since part of the country was under French occupation, it was impossible to carry out elections in a number of districts. These districts, as well as the American colonies, were represented by substitutes, suplentes, appointed from Cádiz by local authorities, giving disproportionate voice to Cádiz liberalism. Suplentes, however, accounted for only 53 out of 300 deputies. Priests numbered nearly twice as many--97--almost one-third of the total. The most striking thing about the social composition of the Cortes delegation was the overrepresentation of the clerical and lay intelligentsia, to the exclusion of representatives of concrete social and economic interests, a situation rather similar to that of the German assembly at Frankfurt nearly forty years later. Only 14 of the deputies were titled aristocrats. What had happened was that amid the civic breakdown and confusion of 1808-1810, activists among the intelligentsia had come to the fore and asserted themselves in a society in which most elements lacked explicit political consciousness. The regions most heavily represented were Galicia, Valencia, Catalonia, and Andalusia, while the conservative north-central part of the country, mostly under French occupation, was underrepresented.
 

The new constitution, completed in 1812, was based on the principle of national sovereignty rather than royal authority. It established a unicameral legislature with general control over legislation, leaving the crown only a suspensive veto. Electoral provisions for universal male suffrage by householders' votes on an indirect basis made this theoretically a more democratic constitution than that of either the United States or England. Local administration was placed under central control, but provision was made for provincial councils, half of whose members would be appointed and half elected, to deliberate on provincial affairs. Uniform regulations for municipalities were created and the archaic guild system abolished. Sweeping social reforms were established, as all aristocratic legal privileges, seigneurial [427] jurisdiction, and the right of entailment were abolished. In subsequent regulations of 1813, the highly uneven and indirect provincial tax structure was replaced with a series of direct taxes on business and property. Catholicism was recognized as the official religion of the state and of the people, but the Inquisition--in part an arm of the government--was officially abolished. Church censorship was still upheld, and heresy in religion remained a nominal crime.

The constitution contained 384 articles, nearly three times as many as any subsequent Spanish code of government, and represented an attempt to work out a thorough new liberal scheme of government and society in harmony, as much as possible, with traditional Spanish values. It was the most advanced document of its time in Europe, and, while drawing on both English and French ideas, it tried to form a uniquely Spanish synthesis of old beliefs with new rights and liberties. For the next quarter-century it stood as the classic document of constitutional liberalism in western continental Europe, and influenced liberal aspirations in Italy and Portugal particularly.

The constitution of 1812 was the work of the middle-class political intelligentsia, supported by most of the middle and part of the upper classes. The degree of support in the country at large is uncertain. Scarcely more than 10 percent of the population were literate at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the lower classes lacked political consciousness. On the other hand, it was clear enough that in a number of regions the peasants stood directly behind liberal reforms insofar as they brought the abolition of seigneurial exactions, against which there was increasing protest.

Conservatives were outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and outtalked at Cádiz. They had not expected an institutional revolution of such dimensions, but opposition to the new constitution grew rapidly. It was led by the officeholders of the government of the old regime, by aristocrats who feared the loss of seigneurial dominion, by senior members of the military hierarchy (who felt their authority was being undermined), and by most church leaders, opposed to loss of church seigneurial jurisdiction (abadengo), growth of state control, and the danger of renewed attacks on church property. In the electoral campaign for the first regular Cortes in 1813, most of the clergy swung into the ranks of the antiliberal opposition. In turn, advanced anticlerical liberals demanded that priests be excluded from sitting in Cortes. By the time the last French troops had deserted the peninsula, Spain was an arena of sharp political strife between supporters and opponents of the constitution.
 

The immediate future of the Spanish political system depended on the attitude of the heir to the throne, who returned from French exile in April 1814 to begin his reign as Fernando VII. He proved in many ways the basest king in Spanish history. Cowardly, selfish, grasping, suspicious, and vengeful, D. Fernando seemed almost incapable of any perception of the commonweal. He thought only in terms of his power and security and was unmoved by the enormous sacrifices of Spanish people to retain their independence and preserve his throne. At a time when other, more enlightened west European rulers strove to forget past grievances and come to terms with change, Fernando VII thought only of returning to the situation as it had been before 1808. Though originally required to swear loyalty to the constitution, he found as his triumphant homeward journey led him nearer Madrid that powerful forces in the army, society, church, and former bureaucracy would support a return to absolutism. Hence he gave his blessing to the first direct military intervention in modern Spanish government, the overthrow of the constitutional system by the army command in April 1814. The Madrid rabble was aroused to paroxysms of enthusiasm for its restored sovereign, giving vent to cries of "Long live the absolute king" and even a few of "Long live chains!"

Absolute monarchy was restored on the terms of 1808, and all the changes wrought by the Cádiz Cortes were swept away. A decree of 1814 restored seigneurial domain, although it withheld all juridical rights that had formerly been attached, recognizing only territorial and economic (but not judicial) jurisdiction. Thus absolute monarchy reached its height under Fernando VII between 1814 and 1820. The liberals were persecuted, and though executions were largely avoided, many were imprisoned or harried out of the country.

The regime was not at first bloody, but it was tyrannical, suspicious, and above all, administratively inefficient. Fernando VII's only trusted association was with a narrow and capricious court camarilla, and he regularly failed to back up his own government appointees. Between 1814 and 1820 the average length of tenure for cabinet ministers was approximately six months. The treasury lay in a state of total disarray and the debt increased steadily. There was one attempt at tax reorganization in 1817, when provision was made for a simplified single contribution on land by all classes, cutting across seigneurial dues and rents, but it was not effectively implemented. Absolute monarchy proved completely unable to meet its own obligations.

Meanwhile, during the decade 1810-1820, most of Spanish America was lost to the independence movements that had emerged in major areas throughout the colonies at a time when the Spanish [429] government was suffering virtual atrophy amid war and reactionary absolutism. The Cádiz Cortes had wanted to extend parliamentary representation to the colonies, but insisted on continued centralization of government and administration while refusing further de jure liberalization of trade. In most regions the Spanish-American independence movement was limited mainly to a Spanish creole or Spanish-mestizo minority of the landed upper classes and commercial elite who insisted upon the right to conduct their affairs independently. With certain exceptions, the lower classes in America tended to be neutral or even pro-Spanish. Only the collapse of the Spanish state under the weight of the French invasion had made it possible for the revolts to achieve success. After 1814, Fernando's corrupt and incoherent regime was incapable of a major effort to restore Spanish control. The empire was lost mainly by default. Just as the sixteenth-century conquest had been a largely private enterprise that received only marginal assistance from the royal government, so the nineteenth-century independence movements met only marginal opposition from the Spanish homeland. At one point even that was almost enough to thwart them, for the one notable expedition dispatched under General Pablo Morillo restored Spanish control over the northern part of South America, while an imperial viceroy held fast the Spanish bastion of the Andean regions. Their efforts eventually failed in a struggle of attrition that drew no further support from the mother country, whose government was exhausted by financial deficits and, after 1820, renewed political conflict. Despite the long association and the importance of the empire to national commerce in the eighteenth century, Spanish people were not actively identified with the empire. Most classes and regions had never had direct contact with America, and one of the more notable things about its loss was how little attention it attracted in Spain. After 1825, all that remained of the empire was Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the island possesions in the Pacific.
 

Between 1814 and 1820 the liberal opposition was limited mainly to the small middle-class intelligentsia of the provincial capitals. Active opposition, however, was led by a new element--dissident sectors of the army officer corps. This was a radically new development, for the eighteenth-century army had been a well disciplined if not always efficiently trained military force. It had, however, been swamped by the War of Independence, which brought in a whole new cadre of middle class officers, many of whom were demoted or left without [430] assignment when the old hierarchy was restored in 1814. Accustomed to great power and respect during the war, young officers could not resign themselves to secondary status and miserable pay, or none at all, under the ramshackle Fernandine regime. Their discontent was given an ideological and moral content by vague notions of liberalism and constitutionalism. Moreover, elements of the senior command had already set the example of political revolt by the overthrow of the constitutional regime in 1814. During the next six years a series of minor, abortive counter-revolts by nominally liberal officers in various provincial garrisons was finally climaxed by the rebellion of the major expeditionary corps that was painfully being assembled at military camps outside of Cádiz.

The success of this revolt, whose chief leader was Major Rafael del Riego, was due not to its own strength but to the general malaise that gripped Spain in 1820. There were several sources of this dissatisfaction: the postwar economic depression, the financial prostration of the government, a yellow fever epidemic in the south, and the dismay felt by a large part of the politically conscious over the capricious, inept rule of D. Fernando. At first, Riego's rebels received almost no support elsewhere--but neither was there any show of enthusiasm for the absolutist regime. As Riego led his detachments in a meandering march northward to rally backing, his forces slowly dwindled, but so did whatever support remained for the regime in Madrid. Several other provincial garrisons came out in revolt, and D. Fernando was finally left with no alternatives save to accede to rebel demands and restore the constitution of 1812.

The rebellion of January 1820 was the first to use the term pronunciamiento, and foreshadowed what became the standard tactic of military revolt in nineteenth-century Spain. The pronunciamiento did not rely on careful planning or the unified support of the army. More often than not it was the work of a comparatively small group of senior or middle-rank officers who did not attack the government in a direct coup but simply "pronounced" or raised the flag of revolt against existing government policy. The pronunciamiento then usually had to rely upon support from other quarters or the willingness of the government to compromise. The pronunciamiento of 1820 demanded a complete change of institutions from absolutism to constitutionalism, but subsequent pronunciamientos were often aimed at lesser changes of policy or simply a shift in personnel.

Restored constitutional government was at first placed in the hands of veteran doceañista (1812) liberals who had gained experience at Cádiz. They had profited from the events of the past decade, and proved moderate men eager to conciliate national interests. Indeed, many of the doceañistas were rather uncomfortable with their own [431] 1812 constitution and not unwilling to reform it in order to give the crown somewhat greater authority, add a second chamber to the legislature, and restrict the suffrage to the propertied elements. From the very beginning, however, D. Fernando refused to fully accept his role of constitutional monarch and would not cooperate in the building of a viable moderate liberal system.

The new liberal government repeated the social, institutional, and economic reforms of 1812-1813. Señoríos and abadengo dominion, together with the right of entail, were once more abolished. Separate ecclesiastical legal jurisdiction was done away with, the Inquisition abolished, state control over church orders established, many of the latter suppressed, and most monastic lands confiscated. The government soon began public sale of monastic lands, mostly to monied middle class interests. A beginning was made at monetary reform and the debt was reorganized, though no immediate solution was in sight for the government financial crisis. Finally, the territorial reorganization of Spain which the Cortes of Cádiz had begun was completed in 1821 by the redistricting of the country (including the Balearics and Canaries) into fifty-two administrative provinces.

These changes were accompanied by considerable agitation by the peasants of Valencia and several other regions against the remnants of seigneurial domain. Further plans to divide up village common lands, however, led to signs of hostility particularly among peasants in some southern districts, where loss of community property would deprive the rural lower classes of practically their only source of economic assistance. By 1821, the first violent labor protest broke out in the Levantine town of Alcoy, where unemployed textile workers and artisans engaged in a Luddite type of destruction of new machinery in textile factories.

The doceañistas soon found themselves challenged on both the left and the right. Within the ranks of liberalism, pressure came from the exaltado faction of radicals, who were especially strong in the provincial capitals among the middle class intelligentsia and some small businessmen. From the very beginning, their Jacobin style of politics did not scruple at terrorism, conspiracy, or riot. During the six years of the Fernandine reaction, underground liberals had become used to functioning by means of secret organization and conspiratorial societies. Local chapters of Spanish Masonry had become a common conspiratorial vehicle, and the practice of clandestine sectarian plotting was not given up after 1820. The sectors of the army led by exaltado officers were praised as a necessary pretorian guarantee of the liberal system, and exaltados insisted that such sectors be allowed to function almost as an independent institution.

The exaltados rallied support by playing on the local interests of [432] provincialism, reenforcing common hatred of military conscription (and the reluctance to fight the incomprehensible campaigns in America), demanding reduction or abolition of the depised consumos (excise taxes), and insisting on direct democratization of the suffrage. These claims formed the basis of the radical liberal program that tended to dominate the politics of many provincial towns (though not the countryside) for half a century, until 1874. A main factor in cementing the factional unity of the radical political intelligentsia itself was the intense desire for more government jobs, particularly on the local and provincial level. This was a major political motive for professional and white-collar elements in a society whose economy could not provide adequate employment. In Madrid, by contrast, the same social elements were less radical, perhaps because employment opportunities were greater, but there the mob could be mobilized on occasion, as the same lower class strata that had cheered D. Fernando were occasionally whipped up to riot for the exaltados.

After the 1822 elections, the exaltados gained control of the government and forced a more radical line, attacking the church issue head on. The Jesuit order was again dissolved in Spain, the other orders brought under strict regulation, and plans were drawn up for a general expropriation of church land. Throughout 1822, hostility between moderate and radical liberals increased, while supporters of absolutism rallied the northeastern countryside and prepared for civil war.
 

Spain had first captured the imagination of patriots and reformers in central Europe with the national rising against Napoleon. Subsequently, the 1812 constitution served as an inspiration to liberals in Italy and in Portugal, and Spain in fact led in the process of political democratization in western Europe until 1843. Conversely, the Fernandine reaction had some effect in inspiring Italian ultraconservatives during the postwar years.

The Spanish pattern of conspiracy and revolt by liberal army officers, in association with Masonic and other liberal secret societies, was emulated in both Portugal and Italy. In the wake of Riego's successful rebellion, the first and only pronunciamiento in Italian history was carried out by liberal officers in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Spanish-style military conspiracy also helped to inspire the beginning of the Russian revolutionary movement with the revolt of the Decembrist army officers in 1825. Italian liberalism in 1820-1821 relied on junior officers and the provincial middle classes, essen-[433] tially the same social base as in Spain. It even used a Hispanized political vocabulary, for it was led by giunte (juntas), appointed local capi politici (jefes políticos), used the terms of liberali and servili (emulating the Spanish word serviles applied to supporters of absolutism), and in the end talked of resisting by means of a guerrilla. For both Portuguese and Italian liberals of these years, the Spanish constitution of 1812 remained the standard document of reference. All of this was a spontaneous response to Spanish liberalism, for the government of 1820-1823 did nothing to intervene in the affairs of either country. Its own policy in Europe was purely and strictly defensive.
 

Violent reaction and reprisal as a response to political change was introduced into Spanish politics by Fernando VII in 1814. The doceañista moderates were willing to forgive and forget past excesses against themselves when they returned to power in 1820, but the exaltados demanded revenge and seemed determined to institutionalize a style of reprisal and atrocity in several spectacular political killings. This in turn stimulated the reaction of ultra-conservatives.

Opposition to liberalism during the triennium 1820-1823 was based on the same interests as it had been in 1812-1814. To these were added broad dissatisfaction with the continued economic depression, compounded by protraction of the state financial crisis under liberal rule. Of about equal importance were an increasing hostility in the foral regions of the northeast to political centralization in Madrid, and a broad sense of resentment in some areas against the primacy of urban economic interests. Parts of the countryside had been in a phase of social and economic disturbance since 1808, but direct opposition to liberalism was centered in the conservative north and more especially in the particularist northeast. Landed aristocrats usually resented abolition of seigneuries, while many peasants feared liberal curtailment of traditional peasant communal land rights in favor of middle class, private ownership. One historian has counted a total of 122 local revolts against the liberal regime in these years, and conservative royalist rebel juntas were set up at varying times in three different regions, culminating in a separate royalist "regency" in the hills of northern Catalonia in 1822. By that time the northeastern quarter of Spain was in a state of virtual civil war.

Religious sentiment played a major role in this opposition. The church was at first disposed to accept constitutional government in 1820, just as it had initially in 1810-1812. This transigent attitude was sharply reversed, however, by the abolition of ecclesiastical jurisdic-[434]

tion and the restrictions on orders and their property, with the beginning of the suppression of the monasteries. Exaltados came into power on a flood of anticlerical propaganda, and a number of priests were murdered by liberals in the civil strife of 1822-1823. Even in the elections of 1822 that were won by the exaltados, however, nearly 20 percent of the deputies chosen were clergy. A considerable proportion of these were supporters of moderate liberalism who subsequently had to go into exile, indicating that as late as 1822 the liberal clergy who had played a major role at Cádiz were still influential.

Almost from the start of the constitutional triennium, Fernando VII tried to encourage intervention by the conservative European powers of the Quadruple Alliance to save him from constitutional government. For the first two years there was little disposition on their part to do so. The Spanish king had lost prestige, even among conservative European leaders, by his blindly reactionary and vindictive course in 1814, which had contrased so sharply with that of the restored Bourbon crown in France. The doceañista cabinet of the first part of the triennium did not unduly alarm the conservative powers, and though Austrian troops intervened in Italy to suppress liberal government there in 1821, that was based on general recognition of a distinct Habsburg sphere of influence in the Italian peninsula. There was no similar determination by France to meddle in Spanish affairs. It was not until after the rise to power of the exaltados, attended by new extreme measures, and the outbreak of virtual civil war in Spain, that a French expeditionary force entered the peninsula in 1823. Indeed, it has been suspected that D. Fernando first agreed to appoint an exaltado ministry in Madrid in order to complete the polarization of Spanish politics and invite conservative intervention. At any rate, with the liberals divided among themselves there was little will to resist, and the forces of constitutionalism, beset by 100,000 French invaders and a smaller Spanish "army of faith" of right-wing peasant militia, soon collapsed. There was no resistance to the French in the Spanish countryside, where liberalism was more often than not viewed with hostility.

The reaction of 1823 far exceeded in scope and ferocity that of 1814. During the next two years the army officer corps was temporarily dissolved, thousands of liberals driven into exile, considerable property confiscated, many hundreds arrested, and scores of executions carried out. Fernando VII insisted that French military detachments remain in the country to protect him, yet his behavior embarrassed conservative French military and political leaders, who tried unsuccessfully to moderate the Spanish reaction. Fernando's only program at first was the complete restoration of absolutism, bringing the return of seigneuries, entailments, the ecclesiastical fuero, and [435] nearly all the laws and institutions that had been abolished, save the Inquisition.
 

The king's main concern was to preserve absolute authority for himself, yet he had to govern through ministers whom he was rarely disposed to trust and so continued to rely on personal favorites. Hence his alarm on discovering, after the restoration of absolutism, that a strong ultraroyalist faction of rural upper class and church leaders had emerged who insisted on stringent reorganization of government to suppress liberalism totally. They also wanted to place government completely in the hands of their own reactionary ministers. The apostólicos or negros, as the ultraroyalist reactionaries came to be called, also demanded restoration of the Inquisition as a check on public morality, anticlericalism, and political subversion. Local "Juntas de la fe" (Committees of the Faith) were organized in many districts, particularly in the northeastern regions of the country, and the force of "Royalist Volunteers" that had supplanted the army in 1823 was eventually expanded to 120,000 men. Fernando VII came more and more to fear becoming a prisoner of the negros and, in so doing, losing French military backing to sustain his government against the liberals. His reluctance to give complete control of affairs to the negros led to several ultrareactionary military revolts in 1824-1825.

More serious was the outbreak of the guerra dels malcontents in the western districts of the Catalan countryside in 1827. This revolt among poor peasants in the Catalan backlands, whose economy had been even more depressed than usual during the past twenty years, seems to have been instigated by a coterie of upper-class rural reactionaries and apostólico church leaders. The apostólico faction was absolutely doctrinaire with regard to its reactionary program; the capricious, personal, opportunist absolutism of Fernando VII seemed to them little more than the prelude to another round of liberal rule. Their aim was to spark a general rural insurrection that would demand absolute monarchist rule, nominally under Fernando VII but actually under complete control of the apostólicos, restoration of the Inquisition as a guarantee of true religion, and destruction of all remnants of liberalism. This somewhat artificial uprising never spread beyond rural Catalonia, and was suppressed after several months by the newly reorganized royal army. Nonetheless, the guerra dels malcontents gave voice to the first formal appeal by the negros for the [436] leadership of D. Fernando's younger brother and presumed heir, the pious, apostólico D. Carlos María Isidro. The formative elements of the subsequent Carlist movement were taking shape.

To avoid the clutches of the negros, D. Fernando relied on a small group of practical absolutists during the last nine years of his reign. This was not, as some have said, a reversion to enlightened despotism, but it did introduce into royal government a sense of the need for economic reform and some concern to conciliate the interests of the more moderate elements of Spanish society. Old state loans were largely repudiated, drying up Spanish credit in the international financial markets, but the government's own financial organization was somewhat improved. Efforts were made through publicity and propaganda to create a positive public attitude toward the royal regime. Domestic production was encouraged, increased tariff protection was provided for Catalan industry, and the first rudimentary stock exchange was set up.

Yet even in its final years, Fernandine absolutism made no genuine concessions to liberalism. This period was marked by the five-year reign of the sanguinary Conde de España as captain general of Barcelona (1827-1832). His repression of dissidents was so savage that it greatly encouraged a new growth of liberalism in the Catalan capital, which had earlier played a major role in the struggles of Spanish constitutionalism during the triennium 1820-1823. Minor border incursions by liberal exiles both from France in the north and Gibraltar in the south were meanwhile turned back with ease. The local security commissions organized by the reaction had internal affairs in most districts well under control.
 

The apostólico supporters of D. Carlos remained quiet after 1827 in part because it seemed that the succession of their candidate to the throne of the physically ailing, childless Fernando, three times a widower, was almost inevitable. The king's marriage to the young Maria Cristina of Naples did not alarm them, but the birth of a daughter to the royal couple was more disturbing. Carlists immediately emphasized the Salic Law of the Bourbon monarchy, supposedly brought to Spain with Felipe V, according to which the royal succession could not pass through the female line. The crown had revoked this in 1789, but failed to complete final ratification by the traditional Cortes. Fernando VII, not surprisingly, wanted to be succeeded by his own daughter rather than by a rival and antagonis-[437] tic brother, and repeated the revocation by royal decree. When he suddenly fell ill in 1832 and was virtually incapacitated, Carlist leaders seized the opportunity to force the royal government to cancel the revocation. Don Fernando, still not quite fifty years old, subsequently recovered and repromulgated the revocation, then early in 1833 forced his ambitious brother into Portuguese exile. The last cabinet appointed by Fernando VII worked to prepare for the succession of the infant princess Isabel by reducing the Royal Volunteers further and eliminating as much of the local administrative influence of the apostólicos as possible.

The death of Fernando VII at the close of 1833 left the throne to a three-year-old daughter under the protection of the youthful queen mother, María Cristina. This Neapolitan regent was a jolly, spontaneous, good-natured young princess lacking in special education or intelligence but determined to hold the throne for her daughter. To accomplish this and beat back the expected assault of the apostólicos, it would be necessary to renounce Fernandine extremes of absolutism and reach a compromise that would gain the support of moderates. At the beginning of 1834, the queen regent appointed a new ministry headed by the most prominent of the moderate doceañista liberals, José Martínez de la Rosa, who had served briefly as prime minister during the triennium.

This resulted in promulgation of the Royal Statute of 1834. The new Spanish document was not a copy of the French Charter of 1814, as has been alleged, nor was it a genuine constitution. It was an attempt by Martínez de la Rosa to replace the Cádiz constitution with a new charter founded on a juste milieu between traditionalism and liberalism. The statute was thus a compromise between a real constitution and the mere reform of traditional laws, and was also based in part on the study of the limited post-1815 constitutions of several west German principalities. It provided for a bicameral legislature, the lower house to be chosen by the indirect suffrage in two stages of some 18,000 electors (approximately .15 of 1 percent of the population), and the senate to be composed of grandes, church hierarchs, and royal appointees. The legislature would have little more than a consultative function, for the crown retained absolute veto powers and the government was responsible to it alone. No bill of rights was included and administration was centralized in Madrid, but regional fueros were still recognized.

The elections of 1834 were then "made" from Madrid, initiating what became a common nineteenth-century practice. One objective of government manipulation was to get more of the middle class interests of the country represented, as distinct from clerics, bureau-[438] crats, and the radical intelligentsia. This attempt was to some extent successful, as indicated by table 3.
 

 

Year of election	Business and professional	Government and military	Clergy
1820	45	69	35
1822	61	60	28
1834	130	53	5
1836	98	86	4

Source: Fermín Caballero, El Gobierno y las Cortes del Estatuto (Madrid, 1837), p. xxxiv.
 

Yet even under so restricted a suffrage, the deputies in the new Estamento de Procuradores, as the lower chamber was called, did not merely form a safe, progovernment bloc. The debates of an open chamber, full publicity, and freedom of the press were used to discuss issues extensively. By September 1834 the newly emerging Progressive faction, heirs of the exaltados of the triennium, counted 77 of the 188 votes in the lower house and brought up censure votes against the government. Moreover, they were given armed strength in many parts of the country by reorganization of the middle class Urban Militia first formed during the triennium. In most towns the Militia fell under Progressivist control.

Anticlerical violence reappeared almost immediately. In July 1834 several monasteries in Madrid were set afire and a number of monks were murdered by a mob. The rioters were inflamed by the outbreak of a cholera epidemic--apparently blamed on the religious--and by the armed depredations of clerical Carlists in the northern countryside. During the summer of 1835 similar outbursts appeared in Barcelona and several provincial cities.
 

Bands of guerrilleros were formed in the northeast in support of the cause of the exiled D. Carlos soon after receiving news of the death of Fernando VII and the planned Isabeline succession under María Cristina at the close of 1833. During 1834, the struggle took on the dimensions of civil war. The Carlist cause was strongest in the three Basque provinces and Navarre, in rural mountainous Catalonia, and in the more backward and rural areas of Aragón and the Levant.

[439] There was also a following in other parts of northern Spain. The common denominators of the movement were localism, religious and political traditionalism, and to some extent ruralism. It grouped the provincial elements that were most strongly opposed to liberalism, and its keynote was reaction, without a clearly and fully articulated program save return to absolute monarchy. The first Carlist contingents were based on former members of the Royal Volunteers and local patriots of the mountain areas. They were led by priests, gentry, and village notables. In the Basque provinces the regard for regional fueros, partially threatened by liberalism, was a major factor. In Navarre, religious zeal and respect for traditional leadership may have been even stronger in encouraging the movement. In some of the more backward rural areas of the northeast there was general resentment of the new urban-dominated economy and the interests fostered by liberalism. In parts of the Catalan countryside the rebellious propensities of peasants and gentry, resentful of the outside world and given to semi-anarchist outbursts of banditry in an earlier time, were once more revived.

In less than a year Carlist volunteers were formed into regular battalions in Navarre and the Basque country, their stronghold, and a small field army began to take shape. Yet the Carlists were unable to win over the cities, even in that region, and they were always considerably weaker in manpower and supplies than the government forces. Carlist units in Catalonia and the east were more loosely organized, and many of them operated as guerrilla forces. In the Basque core area, conscription was introduced and regular discipline built up. Fighting in or near their home region, their morale was usually better than that of government draftees of south and central Spain, and though they remained deficient in more sophisticated equipment, the bayonet charges of the Carlist infantry proved to be the most effective single tactic in the war. Yet the Carlist army was most successful on the defensive, relying partly on guerrilla units. It never developed much offensive strength, and the climactic expedition to the outskirts of Madrid in 1837 was unable to launch an assault on the capital. That the civil war lasted nearly seven years was due in large measure to the disarray of the nascent liberal regime, unable to generate the considerable resources of money, manpower, and material needed to fight campaigns of attrition against regional forces.

Don Carlos "V," the traditionalist leader, turned out to be destructive to his own cause. Irresolute and incompetent as a military chief, he also lacked political perception and was dominated by a narrow coterie of priests and apostólicos. There were a number of outstanding Carlist military leaders, the best of whom, the professional Guipuzcoan officer Zumalacarregui, was killed in 1835. In the end, as the [440] traditionalists were worn down by attrition and government forces closed in, a split developed between the fanatical apostólico elements and the more practical regional traditionalists. Rafael Maroto, a professional general commanding the main Carlist force, became involved in a death struggle with the clerical and civilian apostólico leaders, termed brutos by the professional Carlist officers, and in 1839 accepted a generous peace offer from the liberal General Espartero. The terms of this "Compromise of Vergara" pledged to eschew reprisals, incorporate Carlist officers in the regular army, and respect Basque privileges. The last fighting ended when Carlist forces in the east were run across the border in 1840.

Yet Carlism did not die after its military defeat. Though the dynastic issue of Salic male legitimacy remained the central Carlist claim, what really kept the movement alive was the strength of religious traditionalism and the insistence on regional identity and privileges. The so-called Second Carlist War of 1846-1849 was no more than a rising of the Catalan back country, not yet integrated into the liberal social and economic system. However, the frustration and relative failures of representative government during the middle decades of the century made it difficult to create real unity and overcome the tug of localism and cultural traditionalism. A more dynamic society than that of the Spanish middle classes might have been able to integrate the interests of various parts of the peninsula, but the halting development of the country left archaic interests intact. The liberal regime in Madrid tended to usurp local privileges without offering the advantages of a modern central government. The excesses of Spanish radicalism in a later generation also contributed to the revival of traditionalism after it had seemed to be losing much of its support. Though the Carlist movement lay largely dormant until after 1869, it kept much of its latent appeal in the conservative rural areas of the northeast.
 

By the mid-1830s, Spanish liberalism had become distinctly stronger than during the triennium. The beginning of economic recovery during the last years of Fernando VII, the spread of liberal ideas and a growing revulsion against Fernandine absolutism, which swung key regions such as the urban districts of Catalonia on the liberal side, all played a part in this. The need for allies to support the Isabeline succession had provided for a smooth governmental transition under the Statute of 1834, but during 1834 and 1835 the Carlist reaction [441] gathered strength in the Basque country and other northeastern regions.

The moderate government of Martínez de la Rosa soon found itself between two fires, just as its predecessor had during the triennium. A wave of radical revolts in many of the leading provincial towns broke out in July 1835, exceeding anything in 1822-1823, and the government had little choice but to strengthen itself by moving to the left. In September, the financier Juan Alvarez de Mendizábal replaced Martínez de la Rosa as prime minister, and his cabinet was charged with the task of amending the Statute in a more liberal direction. During the ensuing debate the split between Moderates and Progressives became clearer than ever. For new elections that were held in March 1836, qualifications were lowered so as to double the suffrage, raising it to between 30,000 and 50,000 electors. With the assistance of a degree of government manipulation from Madrid, the Moderate elements were almost completely eliminated and a strongly Progressive chamber was elected.

Meanwhile Mendizábal moved to solve two problems simultaneously: financing of the civil war against Carlism and the disposing of monastic properties (restored to the church by the Fernandine reaction). In March 1836 the government declared all monastic lands to be national property and began their sale immediately at public auction. During the following year plans were made for the confiscation and sale of all church lands, though so sweeping a measure was not immediately enacted into law. The aim of this broad disamortization of formerly entailed church property was not simply to dispossess the church and finance the civil war; it was meant to strengthen the middle classes economically, and it was hoped by some that it would create a stable, liberal, lower-middle-class, property-owning peasantry.

The beginning of the great disamortization of church land completed the total estrangement of the Spanish Catholic Church from liberalism. Though a few bishops supported the Moderates, most church leaders became completely committed to Carlism, and legal sanctions were taken against some groups in the clergy for political reasons. As a result of this tension between church and state, thirty-two of the sixty-two sees in Spain were vacant by 1840.

Though nearly all Spaniards remained nominal Catholics, and religious or spiritual anti-Catholicism, as distinct from political anti-clericalism, was almost unknown, the middle decades of the century marked the nadir of Spanish Catholicism's public position and influence on the elite. Middle class Catholic businessmen saw no spiritual contradiction in despoiling the church of its lands, and even the Moderates protested the way it was done more than the act of  [442] disamortization itself. Many monks and priests of uncertain vocation left the clergy, and it has been estimated that during the first decades of liberalism approximately one-third renounced their vows altogether.

The queen regent, Maria Cristina, who functioned as head of state, was a comparatively simple woman but by no means lacking in common sense. She realized that the Moderates were much more interested than the Progressives in preserving strong royal prerogatives in Spain. After more disorders and much intriguing by the Moderates, she dismissed Mendizábal in May 1836 and replaced him with a Moderate leader, Istúriz. For the elections to be held in July the suffrage was broadened by decree, lowering property qualifications to enfranchise approximately 50,000 of the wealthy and 15,000 educated men and officials qualified as capacidades (those who are specially qualified), of whom about 6,000 were army and national guard officers. This total of 65,000 amounted to .5 to .6 of 1 percent of the Spanish population, and was actually a greater proportion than were enfranchised at that time in France, which had no provision for capacidades. In the elections of July 1836 some government influence was no doubt employed, but the Moderate factions also relied on more effective organization, forming an alliance with nonradical Progressives. Approximately two-thirds of the new electorate made use of the ballot. In the first round of voting, the government alliance won about eighty seats, to fifty-six for the opposition, which carried most of the larger cities.

The radical sectors had no intention of being eliminated from power. Before the second round of voting could be held, the Progressives began a series of revolts in provincial capitals, starting at Málaga on July 25. These culminated in a pronunciamiento by noncommissioned officers at the royal summer palace of La Granja in August, forcing the queen to restore the Cádiz constitution of 1812. A Progressive ministry took power under José Maria Calatrava. It mobilized new military and financial resources for the civil war, and then held elections--the third in less than a year--in October 1836, on the basis of the 1812 system of universal male householders' suffrage in a three-stage indirect process. By that time the bulk of the public were growing weary of turmoil, and the more moderate elements of the Progressives gained control of the Cortes.

The year 1837 was a crucial one in the First Carlist War, as the government forces were nearly paralyzed by mutiny and the traditionalist army came close to seizing Madrid. At the same time, the Cortes was occupied with preparing a new constitution to supersede that of 1812. The resultant constitution of 1837 was a conciliatory and balanced document. Though the principle of national sovereignty [443] was restored, government authority was shared by crown and parliament, with the former retaining major powers. The new constitution stated that the crown could not rule without the parliament, but government ministers were to be summoned and dismissed by the crown alone. The legislature was made bicameral, with the senate to be appointed by the crown from among names proposed by wealthy electors. Finally, municipal governments were placed under local control through popular elections by a broad suffrage and were also given jurisdiction over local units of the reorganized National Militia,

The semidemocratic voting provisions of 1812 were dropped in favor of a censitary suffrage only slightly broader than that of 1836. Approximately 78,000 voters were enfranchised directly, but provision for capacidades was considerably reduced by comparison with the 1836 law. Yet the suffrage provisions in general were much broader, for there was also concern to enfranchise peasant smallholders who paid little in the way of direct taxes. Hence a secondary provision gave the vote to any peasant farmer who owned a yoke of cattle. In some provinces of the northwest this included many comparatively poor peasants, resulting in 22,000 qualified voters in Pontevedra and 18,000 in Asturias. Altogether, the suffrage list for the country as a whole was increased to 265,000 (2.1 percent of the population). This amounted to 1 voter for every 48 inhabitants, compared to 1 for every 200 under the 1831 electoral law in France.

The Moderates denounced the 1837 constitution as too radical. In the campaign for the next elections (September 1837), they developed the first approximation of a regular political organization in Spain by forming coordinated committees of journalists and other activists to promote their propaganda. Under the broader suffrage, there was only 56 percent participation. Moreover, radical Progressives abstained in many of the larger cities in protest against the government leadership of the more moderate Progressives, whose constitution they denounced as too conservative. The Moderates gained primary support from the larger landowners of central and southern Spain and benefited both from the radicals' abstention and from a general rightward swing among the middle and upper classes after the recent series of revolts and mutinies. They won 200 seats to the Progressives's 60 in one of the fairer elections to be held in nineteenth-century Spain.

The Moderates held power for nearly two years, but on increasingly poorer terms with the liberal leaders of the regular army. The latter finally brought the crown to dissolve the Cortes once more and hold new elections in 1839 that, coupled with the abstention of the Moderates, resulted in a radical Progressive victory. This coincided with the end of the primary phase of the civil war and the triumph for [444] the liberal cause, but brought new tension and drastic polarity to liberal politics. The Progressive Cortes was then in turn dissolved, and the Moderates organized a Central Commission to give them official leadership in new elections at the beginning of 1840. These may not have been so relatively free of governmental interference as the preceding contests of 1837 and 1839. At any rate, they resulted in a new victory for the Moderates, who then prepared to safeguard the triumph of moderate liberalism by new institutional changes that would eliminate the bases of Progressive strength.
 

It was during the First Carlist War that the basic pattern of military intervention and leadership in politics was established, a pattern that persisted for at least forty years. This intervention was expressed in a variety of forms, ranging from outright mutiny, particularly in 1837, through direct pronunciamientos in 1835 and 1836, to more indirect forms of suasion behind the scenes, begun in 1834 by moderate army liberals who became spokesmen for a more representative policy.

That military leaders played such crucial roles was due first of all to the institutional vacuum in which liberalism was reintroduced after the final decade of Fernandine absolutism, and to the poor organization of the liberal forces and the relative weakness of the interests on which they were established. The two main rival factions, the Moderates and Progressives, could not even agree upon rules of the game, and the Progressives, particularly, felt justified in summoning both civilian mobs and armed intervention by sympathetic military elements. Equally important was the fact that liberalism was being established during a major civil war in which the military leadership was of crucial significance and hence played a disproportionately influential role.

Most of the army and its officers remained aloof from politics, but of the minority who became involved, the greater number reinforced either Moderate or Progressive liberalism. This proliberal orientation can be explained by a number of factors. Most officers felt a patriotic responsibility to support the liberal cause with which the established national government was becoming identified. Most were of middle class background; they leaned toward liberalism because of its mystique of modernization and new opportunity. Thus they played the role of a modernizing middle class elite in a society in which the core of the middle classes were not yet ready to take full charge. More mundane factors were also involved, such as poor pay (and after the war, unemployment), personal rivalries, and the fact that the liberal [445] government was so ill organized during the war that commanding officers sometimes had to intervene in government administration simply to care for the needs of their troops.
 

The dominant figure in the Spanish army at the close of the First Carlist War was General Baldomero Espartero, who commanded the government forces in the north during the climactic campaign that concluded with the compromise peace of Vergara in 1839. He had become identified with Progressive interests in opposition to rivals in the military who supported the Moderates, and his influence was in large measure responsible for the dissolution of the Moderate Cortes and the brief return of the Progressives to power in 1839-1840.

The Moderate government that regained control in 1840 then passed legislation raising property qualifications for the vote, and moved to cut the base from under Progressive strength in the provincial towns. Though the principle of popular election of provincial assemblies and municipal councils was retained, a new law stipulated that the ministry of interior in Madrid would alone have the right to appoint mayors and other officials of provincial capitals from among all those local councilors elected, and that the appointive jefes políticos in charge of provinces would choose all officials for smaller towns from among those elected in them. These laws were in fact constitutional amendments, however, and could not be instituted simply by majority vote of parliament. Their imposition amounted to a civilian pronunciamiento, and the Progressives threatened revolt.

At this point the queen regent tried to gain the support of the commander-in-chief of the army, Espartero, who was in Barcelona. But Espartero was even more vehemently implored by the Progressives to be their savior, and he refused to sanction the new laws, while stressing his support of the queen regent and the young queen. Hence María Cristina offered to appoint Espartero prime minister as the only hope of finding a compromise that would support the throne. When she refused to sanction annulment of the municipalities law, however, the Progressives broke into two months of protracted street demonstrations and minor disorders in provincial capitals all over Spain. This forced appointment of Espartero as prime minister on the Progressives' own terms, and ultimately drove Maria Cristina to abdicate the regency.

Espartero then became interim regent in October 1840, and de facto head of state, the first and only time that a military figure held that position until 1936. New elections in 1841 naturally brought an [446] overwhelming Progressive victory and ratification by the new Cortes of Espartero as regent for life. The Progressive caudillo was the son of a Castilian wheelwright. He had little education and scant political understanding or talent, and was given to bouts of indolence alternating with periods of activity. He had not sought a political career but had been eagerly pressed into service by the Progressives as the only means of assuring their triumph. His political ideas were limited to vague notions about the current of the times and popular sovereignty, later expressed in his popular catchphrase "Let the national will be fulfilled"--a slogan without content adopted in lieu of a program. He was gratified to be hailed by Progressive crowds and enjoyed the status which politics had brought him, but he had little in the way of purposeful leadership to offer. The only significant initiative of the government in 1841 was to begin to put the lands of the secular clergy as well as monasteries on the market for private purchase.

The only way in which Spanish politics became more liberal under Espartero was in the suffrage. Thanks to the yuntero (cattle owner) clause of the 1837 constitution, the number of electors had risen to 343,000 in 1839 and 424,000 in 1840 (3.5 percent of the population). This amounted to 1 voter for every 13 inhabitants of Alava, l for every 14 in Guipuzcoa, 15 in Zamora, 16 in Orense, and 17 in Pontevedra--the broadest European suffrage of the period. By 1843, the voting lists had increased to 500,000 or more.

The response of one group of the Moderates to the Espartero regime was a counter-pronunciamiento by a handful of military and civilian figures in the Basque country in October 1841. This was easily quashed, for it drew no support from the temporarily exhausted Carlists. It did bring the elimination of Basque fueros. Provincial governments were established in place of the traditional juntas, Basque tariff privileges were abolished, and regular conscription was introduced.

Reaction to the attempted Moderate pronunciamiento served as catalyst in a new Progressive outburst in Barcelona. There a Junta de Vigilancia was set up to defend against the danger from the right, but within a month it had been converted into a Junta Popular that demolished the Ciudadela, Barcelona's fortress built by Felipe V as a symbol of centralist sovereignty in the Catalan capital. The Junta Popular represented a broad mobilization of elements of the middle and also the lower classes. Before it was forcibly suppressed, it demanded government protection for domestic industry and collaborated with the first significant efforts to organize trade unions in Spain.

One year later, in November 1842, the structure of government in Barcelona broke down altogether. The possessing classes were alien-[447] ated by Espartero's free-trade policy, while the workers were disgruntled over the quinta system of general military recruitment--a compulsory draft for certain elements of the poor--and over the high level of excises. Within forty-eight hours a tax riot of sorts had flamed into a broad popular revolt, and a new Junta Directiva Popular took over the government. When Espartero dispatched an army to reduce Barcelona by force, the more restrained middle class elements formed a Conciliation Junta to work out a compromise solution. After the government insisted on unconditional surrender, it was supplanted by a new radical junta of the lower classes. The rebels raised the first black flags of total defiance seen in Barcelona, as Espartero bombarded the city, then occupied it by military force and carried out a severe repression.

By this time Espartero's honeymoon with Progressive opinion had long since ended. Incapable of governing effectively himself, he was dominated by a clique of military associates (nicknamed Ayacuchos by their enemies, since some of them had been present at the final Spanish defeat of Ayacucho in South America in 1825). He paid little attention either to the Progressive Cortes or to the wants and demands of the provinces, and suppressed newspapers to protect himself from criticism. Spanish Progressivism had proved invertebrate and ineffective. Not strong enough or sufficiently united to govern through civilian politics, it had relied on a military strong man who was incapable of providing leadership. By 1843, many of the Progressives themselves were looking for an alternative solution.

The strongest opposition to Espartero was being coordinated by a group of Moderate senior officers in exile, led by General Ramón María Narváez. Their conspiracy drew support from the more moderate Carlists, from much of the clergy, and from the French government of Louis Philippe, which feared that affairs in Spain were getting out of hand. It was also supported by a significant number of the Progressives, who found themselves unemployed under the current scheme or out of favor with the ruling clique. Some of these Progressive conspirators did not necessarily want to overthrow Espartero, but they did want to force a change in policy and get rid of the Ayacucho group, whose hands were on the levers of power.

The Cortes elections of 1843 were won by a coalition of Moderates and "pure" Progressives (as the anti-Espartero sector of the Progressives called themselves). Finding himself unable to control the new assembly, Espartero dissolved it, but this merely served as the spark to touch off the joint Moderate-"pure" Progressive pronunciamiento that overthrew the regency. It was a snowballing revolt that started late in May in several of the Andalusian provincial capitals. After winning major military support in June, it was climaxed by a skirmish [448] outside Madrid between a rebel force and a few units still loyal to Espartero. By that time his power had melted away; he was defeated and forced into retirement, replaced by a temporary compromise ministry faced with the task of restructuring liberal government in Spain.

The last round of this conflict was fought by the radical left in Barcelona, where the popular militia refused to disband after the new government had been formed. The third popular revolt in Barcelona within two years occurred during September 1843, when the city was dominated by a new radical junta representing artisans, factory workers, and the unemployed. It lacked clear leadership or program but made demands for greater democratization and for social and economic concessions from both the government and property owners. The revolt acquired the slang name of the Jamancia, from the gypsy usage jamar meaning "to eat," indicating its identification with the lowest social strata. Like its predecessors, the Jamancia was suppressed by force (November 1843), but this time there were no fearful reprisals.
 

During the decade that preceded the War of Independence, Spain had sunk into the humiliating role of a Napoleonic satellite. The heroic resistance of the Spanish people preserved national independence, but the resulting economic prostration, the revolt in America, and the total ineptness of the Fernandine regime placed the country in a position of diplomatic impotence after 1814. Spanish representatives played no role at the Congress of Vienna and were almost completely ignored, nor did Spanish diplomacy fare better in subsequent years. The petty, vengeful, extraordinarily narrow-minded Fernando enjoyed no esteem even among other conservative rulers. The major effort which his government exerted in 1818 to elicit help from other European powers to repress the Spanish American revolt was a complete failure. In addition, the British government stood ready by 1823 to block any marshalling of support for the Spanish repression in America, and the United States adhered to this position in its Monroe Doctrine. The weakness and dependency of the first half of the Fernandine regime was then climaxed by reliance on French troops to restore absolute monarchy.

During Fernando's reign, Spain became a debtor nation for the first time in its history. This was the almost inevitable result of being deprived of the bulk of Spanish American resources and the trade and revenue accruing from them, especially at a time when the [449]

country was suffering from heavy war losses and the administrative system had fallen into decay. There was some improvement in the handling of the national debt during the second half of the reign, insofar as it was better administered and new loans were negotiated, but as a result of these loans the foreign debt doubled between 1824 and 1834.

After the death of Fernando VII, the Spanish government was able to enter a phase of more fruitful diplomatic relations. Between 1830 and 1834, France, Spain, and Portugal all joined the ranks of constitutional monarchy alongside Britain, and in the latter year the four powers signed a Quadruple Alliance. This was not an association of equals, however, and merely inaugurated a phase of British and French tutelage. Ambassadors of these two powers tried frequently to intervene in domestic affairs during the 1830s and 1840s, the British government leaning toward the less radical of the Progressives and the French toward the Moderates. The domestic division resulting from civil war and political stalemate was such that the principal effort to secure more humane treatment of prisoners during the First Carlist War was not arranged by Spaniards but was negotiated through British intermediaries in the Elliott Convention of 1835. Britain supplied much of the equipment and money for the government triumph, which also represented victory for the policy of the two main western powers and was viewed unfavorably by the conservative governments of central and eastern Europe. Though British influence seemed predominant for a time, French diplomacy assumed a stronger role after the overthrow of the Progressives in 1843, and government reliance on foreign loans accentuated this relative dependence.
 

The political cleavages and failures of the quarter-century that followed the War of Independence would undoubtedly have been much less severe had the period not been one of economic doldrums. The years 1814-1820 were a time of unrelieved postwar depression. A brief revival began during the liberal triennium, then was choked off by international depression. Revival of Catalan manufactures was hampered by the flow of French textile exports that undersold Catalan production inside Spain. General recovery in Spain did not get under way until 1827, and Catalan textile production increased markedly after about 1830. The general upswing owed comparatively little to government policy: the program of hard money and general deflation that was followed in 1814-1820 reenforced depression. This [450] financial policy was reversed during 1821-1823 but was restored under the second Fernandine reaction. Much of the money brought in by foreign loans between 1823 and 1827 was simply stolen by the court camarilla. Beginning in 1827, the state began to work in greater cooperation with private finance, achieving a higher level of honesty and coherence in its financial operations, and this assisted the importing of machinery for textile production. The policy of liberal government during the triennium and after 1834 also stressed bringing in money through foreign loans, but included a degree of monetary devaluation, which apparently stimulated production.

By 1834 those with social and economic power were in fair agreement on the desirability of liberal constitutionalism, but disagreed among themselves about the exact form. Large landholders and proto-industrialists favored the Moderates, while commercial interests and smaller entrepeneurs and shopkeepers supported Progressivism. Nevertheless, many of the rural districts of Spain still lived largely outside the orbit of the commerce and industry of a new and developing nineteenth-century economy. Self-contained regions of local artisan production were still almost more the rule than the exception in the geography of Spanish manufactures, and this was yet another factor that made the social and economic mobilization of a cohesive liberalism quite difficult. In turn, economic distress encouraged the drift of marginal elements to the towns, where they formed a subclass easily stirred up by Progressive agitation.

Seigneurial jurisdiction over rural properties was not definitively eliminated until after 1836, and the new settlement of property rights was at first not fully clear. Seigneurial territorial jurisdictions were often transferred into private property rights, an enormous boon to the landholding aristocracy, for they henceforth held in absolute title what had previously been restricted by a kind of condominial relationship. Nevertheless, property titles to small towns under former Seigneurial domain, and land from which only marginal dues were collected, remained bones of contention. Dues and rights had been confused ever since the start of the War of Independence and in some cases were not entirely settled until decades after the actual abolition of seigneuries in 1836. Though some aristocrats who formerly held extensive domains were recognized as private owners of these huge tracts, such ownership normally could not be extended over small towns, villages, and mountain areas. Some nobles lost the economic benefits of most of their seigneuries almost entirely. Lawsuits went on for years, and certain dispossessed lords were eventually awarded pensions or other compensations.
 

 

Years	Lands of secular clergy	Lands of regular clergy
1836-44	399,258,967	503,571,422
1845-54	45,380,906	22,465,745
1854-56	354,912,492	80,593,951
Total cost of church lands sold, 1836-56		1,406,183,483
Cost of common and wastelands sold, 1836-56		519,168,728
	Grand total	1,925,352,211

Source: L. Sánchez Agesta, Historia del constitucionalismo español (Madrid, 1955), p. 463.
 

The transfer and sale of church lands was not completed for several decades. All church properties were not thrown on the market until the new rulings by the Espartero regency in 1841, and the sale of the properties of the secular clergy was not fully consummated until the 1850s. The most valuable lands transferred to private ownership were in New Castile, Extremadura, and Andalusia, the regions of the great thirteenth-century endowments.

The disamortization was a comparative political success but a distinct economic failure. The first phase was carried out in 1836-1837 amid great haste to complete the first rounds of sales to Progressive supporters before the Moderates could intervene. Lands were sold at little more than 10 percent down, with ten years to pay. Rates were often well under the fair market value. Though the state gained the support of a new elite, its finances deteriorated. Concentration of landholdings accelerated after 1836. Land rents from peasants rose, while bracero wages remained stagnant. The heavily unbalanced agrarian structure of modern Spain, particularly in the center and south, had assumed its full dimensions by the 1840s.

Since the new liberal elite was fundamentally land-based, one of the first acts of restored constitutional government in 1820 had been to contradict its nominal doctrines of the free market by setting rigorous import restrictions on grain. This violated Spain's centuries-old tradition of cheap food imports, guaranteeing higher grain prices that lowered the standard of living but maintained the principal source of income for the new elite.
 
 

There was a romantic generation in Spanish literature and criticism as well, headed by the essayist Mariano José de Larra and linked with the liberal political movement in Madrid and the provincial capitals of the south. In Catalonia, on the other hand, the sense of romanticism was more conservative and was associated with historical themes and influenced by English and German writers, particularly Scott. A sense of the individuality of Catalan society was intensified.

The development of Hispanic romanticism had the effect of reviving regional languages and quickening their literary use; the hegemony of Castilian that had endured for three centuries was challenged. By mid-century there were also evidences of more popular cultural forms in the Catalan-speaking regions, with working class choral groups in Barcelona and popular theatricals in both Barcelona and Valencia. This reawakening of popular culture was reinforced by the costumbrista trend in the literature of the next generation, devoted to capturing regional styles and mores. The growth of regionalist culture did not at first challenge Spanish unity or the broader hegemony of Castilian Spanish culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it helped to inspire dissociative regionalism, compounding the difficulties of integrating a liberal system.
 
 

General study of nineteenth-century Spain should begin with Raymond Carr's Spain 1808-1939 (Oxford, 1966). Political history is supplemented by Diego Sevilla Andrés, Historia política de España (1800-1967) (Madrid, 1968). The best work on the quarter-century of Fernando VII is Miguel Artola, La España de Fernando VII (Madrid, 1968). Gabriel Lovett's Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, 2 vols. (New York, 1965), provides a descriptive account of Spain during the War of Independence. The classic Spanish narrative is the Conde de Toreno's Historia del levantamiento, guerra y revolución de España, 5 vols. (Madrid, 1835-37). Several key aspects of the struggle are studied in the symposium La Guerra de la Independencia española y los sitios de Zaragoza (Zaragoza, 1958), and V. Genovés Amorós, València contra Napoleó (Valencia, 1967), treats the conflict in the Levant. On the rise of Spanish liberalism during the war, see two works by Miguel Artola, Los orígenes de la España contemporánea (Madrid, 1959), and Los afrancesados (Madrid, 1953); Hans Juretschke, Los afrancesados en la Guerra de la Independencia (Madrid, 1962); Ramón Solis, El Cádiz de las Cortes (Madrid, 1958); the special volume devoted to the 1812 constitution by the Revista de Estudios Políticos, no. 126 (Nov.-Dec., 1963); and Manuel Ardit's booklet, Els valencians de les Corts de Cadis (Barcelona, 1968).

The conflict between traditionalism and liberalism has been reinterpreted by Frederico Suárez Verdaguer in La crisis política del Antiguo Régimen en [705] España (1800-1840) (Madrid, 1950). José Luis Cornelias has written two important works in the same vein: Los primeros pronunciamientos en España, 1814-1820 (Madrid, 1958), and Los realistas en el primer trienio constitucional, 1820-1823 (Pamplona, 1958). Luis Alonso Tejada, El ocaso de la Inquisición (Madrid, 1969), deals with the extreme right in the last decade of Fernando VII. Spanish Masonry can be approached through Vicente de la Fuente, Historia de las sociedades secretas antiguas y modernas, 2d ed. (Barcelona, 1933), and Iris M. Zavala, Masones, comuneros y carbonarios (Madrid, 1971).

There is no adequate history of Carlism, but see Román Oyarzun, Historia del Carlismo (Madrid, 1940), and Melchor Ferrer et al., eds., Historia del Tradicionalismo español, 30 vols. (Seville, 1930-1959). Edgar Holt, The Carlist Wars in Spain (London, 1967), is a brief descriptive account. Jesús Pabón, La otra legitimidad (Madrid, 1965), is a careful study of the claims of dynastic legitimacy. The revolt of 1826-1827 is studied by Jaime Torras Elias, La guerra de los Agraviados (Barcelona, 1967). R. Rodríguez Garraza, Navarra de Reino a provincia (1828-1841) (Pamplona, 1968), treats Navarrese politics in the 1830s.

A thorough study of the initial political structure of the Isabeline monarchy has been made by J. T. Villarroya, El sistema politico del Estatuto Real (1834-1836) (Madrid, 1968). Eric Christiansen, The Origins of Military Power in Spain, 1800-1854 (Oxford, 1967), is an excellent study of the Spanish Army and its political activities for those years. The best synthesis on any region of nineteenth-century Spain is Jaime Vicens Vives's Cataluña en el siglo XIX (Madrid, 1961). Salvador de Moxó, La disolución del régimen señorial en España (Madrid, 1965), is an able study.

E. Allison Peers, A History of the Romantic Movement in Spain (Liverpool, 1940), is a classic. See also Leon-François Hoffmann, Romantique Espagne: L'Image de l'Espagne en France entre 1800 et 1850 (Paris, 1961), and J. F. Montesinos, Costumbrismo y novela (Valencia, 1960).

The standard history of Spanish foreign relations in the nineteenth-century is Jerónimo Becker, Historia de las relaciones exteriores de España durante el siglo XIX, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1924-1926). On the emancipation of the mainland colonies, see Julio F. Guillén, Independencia de América, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1953). Jaime Delgado, España y Mexico en el siglo XIX, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1950-1953), deals mainly with the years 1820-1845. See also L. M. Enciso Recio, La opinión española y la independencia hispanoamericana, 1819-1820 (Valladolid, 1967). Giorgio Spini, Mito e realtà della Spagna nelle rivoluzioni italiani del 1820-1821 (Rome, 1950), shows the influence of early Spanish liberalism in Italy.